STARGARDEN THE COLLOQUY OF NEBULÆ or ROGUE BRAINWAVES Sometimes one hallucinates wildly. & when I say wildly I mean sometimes & when I say "sometimes" I mean (singing) "somewhere in this cool streaming video of me striding o'er these landscapes of curving grey my mega-legs moving in great lightcones© hundreds-of-meters-a-xox along the astral ways..." ...well, it wasn't astral literally, but rather pollen figuratively, as jöggy old Mögg had a futch about pollen. & in these pollen ƒtormƒ of Mögg, I was a lone ƒmudge of gold, ƒvelte & ƒpiffy in my IdgeCraft© Etherbuckler One©, latest incarnation of the surreal series of Idgecraft ampgard or spacegab or Oofdezoots™, designed to make the end-user into "a superbeing consisting of pearl within opalescent pearl of these irresistible shields, magniMAGNIFIED!fied megalimbs in the form of sensuously pulsating energy beams, ETC." shields consisting of all types of matter & all types of energy, also etheric shields & astral shields & mental shields (my favorite!) & shields of bliss (everybody else's favorite, but keep in mind I'm an omo zapienz or something like that, even the name of my species lost species lost species lost species lost). There I go again, God damn it. If only there were some way to control these things!  But language bends in distortion from universe to universe, as every schoolchild (back before the children all disappeared, of course) knows of course. Or knew.  I guess knew would be right... So I'm testing EeBee-One, changing my mind every ninisenox, which is like a nanosecond only much, much cooler!!!, theoretically invulnerable, invulnerable in mock-up, invulnerable in all but reality I hastntsay. & how not invulnerable, I ask of thee, surrounded as we are in this prose by hyperfields like row within row of poppy in the concentric gardens of words of metaphors of wells of those poppies where each poppy grows inside the poppy before the poppy before the poppy before the poppy before. I'm sorry I repeated that.  I'm sorry I repeated this, or almost repeated it.  I do things strange linguistic things, I know.  Nor is this my actual language I am beaming into you.  I mean mind-you-I-am-beaming-upto-you. Yea, I was a bit whacked.  I was in fact exceedingly well-whacked, whacked quite out of the zone, actually, which happened most of the time, if memory served (though memory did not serve (suggesting everything I'm experiencing may be false (suggesting I may be much much madder than I thought (than I thought). I was extending the experience, which was worth everything (when it wasn't akin to being tortured in the worst way your sleazy imagination can devise). I'll wait while you devise or do not devise such a torture...   Your Torture Here       All ready?  I was not letting on I was a goner, rationally speaking, but was nonetheless giving myself away to the Sticky Little Webs that were monitoring my face. You must forgive these faces I make.  I know I make more faces per square fuckin zetemiometer, which is like a millimeter, I think, only far less consistent, far less reliable, changing much more than our other measurements, which change fairly little, I promise you.  In any case you must extend the hand of forgiveness to a poor lone loony.  I have webs monitoring my face. They will see the look of glee on my puss.  That didn't sound right, did it?  Anyway through that & that & many another unholy means‑‑possibly up to & including clicking on my thoughts‑‑they will have a full awareness of what's up.  These cats can see right through me anytime. So will they pull me up? Well, they never have. Yea, I'm thinking maybe Masters Mot n Ol (not their real names; not their real bodies; not their real identities) up in the sky can click on my thoughts.  They seem pretty damned advanced to me, if somewhat creepy. My awareness of these things‑‑how shall I say‑‑fluctuates?  Nor could I hide that grin if I wanted to.  It was obviously an entity of pleasure wanting to take over, so I says Take over, so sure enough my mouth stretches out wider than my head beneath my liquid layers, & the gargoyle gleaming in the colorless vales must have been some grimacing, toothy devil of polished gold, like a mad Hindu god lost in a dismal fog. One's minds exist in fassing pragments, waving at one or at the mirror of one‑‑buckler:side:shield:effects‑‑& one lonely little particle knew I'd messed up again.  Except for the almighty euphoria of the suit, there was nothing to recommend this latest assignment.  I could write it off (later, when the Colloquy of Nebulæ that was my mind cogulated coldly, when the etherbuckler power shut off) as my Eighth Lousy Suss in a Row.  The eighth!  That tiny blue fragment of Cavv Tormor promised himself‑‑for the seventh time!‑‑he would never do suss work again, for I would apparently never learn to hear the fine print whispering in the caverns of my Dinkydanky Humanoid Brain, even when it was in one more or less functional piece. Suit affecting mind‑‑in a most deciduous manner.  I was supposed to retort to everything to MotinOll Control Control, but I wasn't going to let on about this.  In fact, within seconds of starting the test walk across the surface of Mögg 32, I was yzarc as a nool.  Inside all the layers, sweat tingled on my brow as I attempted to hide any rogue brainwaves that might give the game away. Fortunately, they never asked for verbal confirmation.  Neither of the supersims nodding to the tune of the little terminals in their little heads a thousand thoughtyears into the sky cared or whatever I said.  This was fortunate, as my voice would have come out in a euphoric gurgle & the game would have been up. But the suit made me so loopy I even enjoyed it when I slipped into one of Mögg's signature furrows of pollen‑‑a fatal event in all previous walks arox the moffy planet‑‑for the edge-tech Wufferbuffler, which was something like a Buick in many ways, say a '68 Buick,  would I say immediately hoist me out on exfoliating beams of light, plop me down on the endless grey deserts of pollen, & set me walking again. So on went I, moving like that perfectly sleazy dream you've been dreaming of having, feet sliding forward without lifting & bod zooming BOD ZOOMING! hundreds of feet per stride, as if I were pushing titanic skiis up & down those endlessly undulant pollen slopes.  I bit my lip fiercely to keep from emitting giggles.  I had to keep my big secret. Don't look up, I kept thinking, though I was having precious little by way of coherent thoughts by now.  But I knew if I looked upward I'd be instantly lost in the incandescent sky crammed with stars & starclusters.  I'd be enraptured & would lose track of the mission entirely. & I couldn't allow that. My overseers, Mot & Ol (not their real names: names taken from another novel: names taken from the subconscious: names taken from the Akashic Records: names taken from nowhere: names from Erstebe©, my sexy little Random Name Generator), M&O, I say, {subsistent balled icons} in the corner of my vision‑‑that is, they were tucked into a subliminal sphere in the fabric of my sight, unobtrusive unless they maximized themselves. They hadn't said much, & I suspected they weren't paying much attention to me.  Idgecraft tended to overtest their new devices, & I may have been the hundredth subject to walk on Mögg.  By the same token‑‑since my contractual employers held their cards close to the vest & often rather nonchalantly sent many subjects to their deaths‑‑none of the preceding hundred may have survived.  Mot & Ol probably expected me to disappear in a mogghole any minute now, & weren't investing a lot of attention monitoring another death which would undoubtedly be preserved electronically anyway‑‑down to the last, gasping detail. They checked in on me automatically every fifteen minutes or inutes, though, the sphere unfolding in a lovely, spirographic pattern & the image of the two eerily smiling technicians each within its incandescent cube of glass of glass, becoming the center of my visual consciousness & filling with rich color. But what dorks!  Motnol were both Lishon, I believe, or a product of Lisho, possessing dayglo yellow happyfaces with lipless mouths metropolitan & two solid ridges of bonelike stuff to serve for teeth.  Possessed of a desire to ingratiate themselves at odds with their profound indifference, they would press their heads(sdaeh(together)rehtegot)together & lean in toward the scanner which was beaming their image down to me.  These periodic check-ins therefore tended to stop me in my tracks. Mögg 32, arguably the asshole of the universe, required this latest gear to be effectively‑‑not to mention safely‑‑explored.  Up to now, instruments blue dun with moss within seconds, faceplates grruemurky inkstandly in the blöstering deserts & deserts & deserts of fucking pollen‑‑nothing but colorless, fungoid pollen everywhere‑‑& only the most Perfectly Sealed Equipment would work, & even then you couldn't see it.  In scientese, Mögg 32.  In plain Retigulese, it was too much a mess to bother with. MEANWHILE Back besides the stream of the stream of the streaming video, my hyperlink hypertext IdgeCraft twin just sniwts notched & wadded, wadded n watcht, & we were all wondering if (when?) my suit would spring a leak.  I, if not they, was further wondering if I could be rescued in that case.  I mean, rescued alive.  I know they'd vesh me out sooner or later‑‑but in the case of Mögg 32, "later" could easily mean five to twenty years or so. I was quite a vision, the suit flowing mirror-fashion around me, rippling contours of my body like a coat of mercury, & beyond that, the energy field glowing golden like an image of my astral body, with yet another, still larger, ghostly image of me, in an almost invisible purple.  No one told me what that was, but I figure it was an energy field for the energy field, IdgeCraft's patented method for keeping Mögg's micropollen from getting to me. This might be an historic moment, assuming crafty Mögg didn't find some way to slip by my shields, fog that mirror wobbling over my body, & clog my lungs in an instant.  Certainly the pep talks Ghelgy Pang & DiTritius Qo (or was it Qo DiTritius?) gave me emphasized the excitement of it all.  Even after eight lousy entraxx with different companies around Retigula, I still fell for it.  I'd certainly never been treated this way before.  Maybe my luck had turned round.  I even lay awake that night, sweating out some historic words to say, in the grand manner of groundbreaking explorers.  Next day, as they wrapped me in invisible mesh & fired up the suit, I found out I wouldn't be able to say anything to anyone.  So maybe I could come up with a good dance to mark my mission. Well, trenchant words or no, I, Cavv Cavv Tormor, aka Romrot, might be the first creature to negotiate this heretofore unexplored world.  But I soon saw it was another rum assignment, & that I'd once again proven my inability to suss the "fine print" of an suss. The guys upstairs were probably sucking on kalkalial needles or scooning on mellifluor, laughing their asses off & quite possibly taking interstellar bets on my survival.  Maybe the designers of the snazzy Idgecraft One were laying odds against me.  It's that kind of universe. But I trekked along, working very hard, if I do say so myself, humping‑‑I mean skiing‑‑along, sampling & inspecting & scanning, mapping & spectrolysing & collating, bustling across this most weird yet somehow most forgettable of worlds. I try to be optimistic about my life, though sometimes this requires completely inverting things.  My stint on Mögg 32, for example, looked like the depths of an endless pit, but I preferred to see it as a staggering zenith of failure, beyond which I could not possibly foul up any worse. Or could I?  Hey‑‑I was (I mean, I am) Cavv or Cavvcavv oror Tormorormor, up to my shins in the eerie, sliding mosses of Mögg, suavem, branched, bubble glowing in slog or sloughing imglough acroxx longix arx of <grey>, three months into my new job & wrestling with an attitude problem bigger than a tong-clawed Zoftrian gneptor‑‑yet if there were a worse suss to be signed, I would surely seek it out forthwith & sign it.  That's me‑‑always breaking new ground, always questing for the worst world in the galaxy. But even I‑‑for all my innate optimism‑‑would never have guessed that Mögg would hand me a break beyond my sweetest mellifluor dreams. Anyway, there I was, in the cosmic dun of Mögg high noon, & I was at least working hard, earning my keep with a mechanical sort of earnestness that seems built-in with me.  If I was ready to snap (which I certainly was), I didn't show it.  I was, if I do say so myself, humping along, sampling & inspecting & scanning, mapping & spectrolysing & collating, bustling across this most weird yet forgettable of worlds, sealed off from it in my spym, yet pillaging every molecule of the place.  It was all going into the expensive microbrain (an Idgecraft 997, no less) in my head.  A few more gigs like this & I'd pay the last installment on that thing, assuming I were still sane. Have I mentioned I'm omo zapus?  Quaint term, that, but please don't say you thought we were extinct.  You cannot possibly imagine how many times I've heard that.  I know everyone thinks we're extinct‑‑& God knows it looks like the women are extinct.  But I've met a few others, at various times.  We try (but generally fail) to keep in touch.  Anyway, I was at that time a very young, male human, working out my eighth bad suss in a row. THE IMPENDING STORY The impending story has been expanded greatly, on account of its reduction to a mere dot Here it is, safe within its encapsulating dop-plerentical-dotz: .(.).) & here it is again, this time "insulatin' kool" within its turquoise (imagine this as turquoise) imaginary potent ampules of I say ampules of amparaphringeical asterparadisques: *(.)*) & imploxium into realms of if not pure at least berry-neakly peer conditionalisks, such that any xellxaling routes you into one möbius I love that letter lööp within möbiusiltl lööp of influxion-roves or fluxxium-groves, down the azurescient leaves of which we walk like two sleepers caught in a (sh!) sleepers'-wish.  So one has to bullsh.t or b*llsh!t this th?ng a löt. Suffice it naught to say my little pals‑‑unadmittedly but operaeniously puxxled by my little uh "incident"‑‑did alac-together Etherbuckler Two & sent me down into the mounds of pollen, during which toggle-inkidenk they would fain (e'en whiletst contractually furboten) to have me try that devastating little trick those devastating little pricks of of sitting down again. Which I resolved not to do.  I looked around, but couldn't be sure.  I mean, the pollen-storms of Mögg o yea those pol en storms o' Mögg un-huh the-the-the PAH! lem Sturmz o' MÖGG mm-buoy seemed perhaps a mite less hallucinative than they I say than they had they before, but like I was relating like...I couldn'ta be sure. "Feeling a bit uncertain, are we?" came a voice less a voice than  a modulation of sand less a MoS than the thought of the reader's voice less the ToaRV than a toad sitting there in the all-hallucinative sand singing in the whimpsters of the whims there to me I say to me! UNAFFLECTED BY THE WEATHER Fraey Fraey Fraey Fraey! Fraey Fraey Fraey.  Yea, so here's where I meet Fraey, the hidden image of the icon, Fraey, the great illusory Fraey, galactic mogul, hoarder of the gardens of the stars, killer of star gardens, star-geneer.  This was Fraey, beamed through impossible collinations of pollen through me, & he came as a fucking human being, man!‑‑he looked technically perfect, man, like the real thing...you could almost smell him. He was smiling & waving, nodding his head with an idiotic friendliness, & I totally forgot myself & waded toward him, cranking my suit way past the point where my neurons could gauge, much less control the power that was flowing out of me, though I remember impressive gold coronas & solar flares.  I looked like an angry Bodorian god‑‑& their gods are always angry, always bristling with the energy of pain. But I wasn't fooled, man.  Here he was‑‑this small, balding, sandy-bearded man‑‑a human being!‑‑beaming at me from some sort of brightly-lit booth.  He & his snug little container seemed to have sprung from the desert, but unlike me, this fellow wore casual clothes (a rough-textured vest worn over a bare chest; a burgundy scarf & some optic jewelry around his neck; loose trousers, also of a dark, rough material, & tied by a tan-colored sash; sandals of some design).  It certainly looked comfy‑‑but altogether inappropriate for Mögg's demented weather.  From the style of his dud, I could place neither planet nor century‑‑not that there were many options for us homoze. He seemed utterly unafflected hence uninflected by the weather, so either the booth was shielded in a way even more high-tech than my Etherbuckler One or the entire image was a projection. "Come on into this booth," he grinned, & scattered in gold points of light, & there was ntrhing I mean nothing but black & the soft rasp of pollen against my suit.  When I followed him, walking right into the cube of the antimatter, I sank into some sorta vacuole pollen-pit. The man in the glass booth fingers his chin.  He knows I'm a goner, even in the E-One. ANOTHER OPTICAL-COMMON COMMOTION-EMOTIONAL EFFECT or I AM SIMPLY TRYING TO GET YOU THE FEELING OF THE SMOKE "Nice booth.  Can I really kill you?" & Mr. Fraey like tilts his head, compresses his lips like I was going to poke him, & moves his eyebrows (optical effect) in condescending waverings all over the motionless room‑‑the room temporarily filled with amusing kartoon kats. I'm rendered docile.  No one dies here; there's just a lot of humiliation, wipings, turning into toads, etc.  & as they say, "Nothing at all happens to the judicious rich." This Fraey fellow must be one of the judicious rich. "Hm," he snurtz.  Must be pretending to read my thoughts, I thank.  "Hph!" he fnebz in an artful falsetto or "afratlfsueltto faarltsfeutlto," as the lisping Umduptures would say.  Still pretending, I thought, & then he smacked me like a slut.  I mean, I was like a slut during the swinging of the snout. "Sorry, Cavv.  But please try to stop thinking for a minute & listen," he dedd, & it was the best please I'd ever felt. "You can't control your face," he thanithe.  "You were raised by Favvs.  They have no faces, so..." "They do so have faces!" "Easy, chum.  I've been trained.  I can read your thoughts in your liquid lips, Cavv." "I what?"  Here I was pointing toward the bright glowing asterisk my chest‑‑another optical-common commotion-emotional effect. "It's a common problem, with humans in the sector," he decter.  "I mean‑‑how are they going to learn to cover up?" I tried very hard to secure my face, & I tried not to think. Fraey was obviously trying not to laugh. I knew a hostile hallucination when in one.  My puppeteers were gone‑‑lost in a lavish static, so I got within close striking distance of the pseudo-humanoid dude‑‑none of this hurling thunderbolts for me, I was going for a direct blow, an enhanced roundhouse from hell‑‑& my suit froze up.  In fact, everything froze up, & I notice Seven Things.   Seven Things I Have Noticed by CavvCavv Tormororordor: 1.    a cube of space is forming around us 2.    it starts taking on time 3.    it develops a past 4.    it develops memories 5.    the memories start coming back, then cannot be stopped 6.    you've got lost in just one memory lost in a memory occluding all other memories (Shit!) 7.    I noticed the music in the bar disappeared, the dancers stopped moving, and the polyoptic light display utterly died away.       Suddenly, I was alone in a cube of silence lit by soft golden candle after soft golden candle with the bald dude right in front of me.  If I was within striking distance, he was within striking distance too. I may have the Bucklizarres© occurs to me occurs to me occurs to me occurs to me, just as I notice my thoughts are echoing oughts re choing. I considered smacking him upside the head.  That would start the old chimes chiming, if the head was real & unshielded that is, that is 1) Real & 2) Unshielded, as in not impervious to anything short of direct thermonuclear fucking attack. Yea, I considered jacking his jaws, frapping his mazzard, nailing his ass.  If this was either Fraey or someone clever enough to make like Fraey (but in any case, why bother me?), he should by now be in full knowledge of just what a psychotic series of thoughts I'd (I'd (I'd (I'd) just) had) there just had there, if you know what I mean. I mean even in this exsufflicately unhuman universe we have these Guy Things we do, one of which is to consider beating the shit out of just about any guy you see, unlikely as it may be.  Am I right, guys?  Would the Guy Reader please go over here? But Fraey or this cool simulacrum of Fraey (probably the Bucklizarres©, huh? just hallucinating like I said upfront, huh?) was showing anything but concern.  Vexing past fear was his continued coolness, continued friendliness, continued charm, continued sex-scene-deleted, continued alacrity & fucking animation.  I mean, he moved quite swiftly & fluidly.  The sucker stepped out of his weird shell, took a quick breath, & looked around at the suddenly-dead joint in the cube of space Fraey took awaey just aes quickly aes hae gaeve. Needless to say, he seemed well pleased, like a demented pixie. "Here," he said, "Here! Here! Here! Here! Here!" (what a silly man!) reaching toward my suit (reaching toward my suit) which existed now as a Sundae of loops, jags, & dollops of frozen energy.  The off-outingly friendly, diminutive guy began pulling at my outer stuff, a shell of dormant energy which was trapping me. Quick-witted bloke that I am, I noticed that I was breathing.  I shared in this little gremlin's ability to move.  And, though I certainly didn't want to perceive it, I could feel the panic of suffocation rising within me, & I began unbuckling the inner patterns of the suit, those like Energy Buttons!!! that once flowed so well beneath my fingertips, but which now reluctantly unlatched like massy ancient bolts. With the etherbuckler's AC now idle, I had only the thickest & most sweltering of air, & a superfluity of distracted adrenalin which only made my limbs shake as they struggled at this sudden tomb. Meantime, the bald man‑‑suddenly my only friend & potential savior‑‑was cheerfully separating my static energy field as if it were some sort of semi-solidified latex.  Grunting, his tongue peeping from the corner of his mouth, he revealed surprising‑‑& welcome‑‑strength as he laid bare the material portion of my suit. There really wasn't much more for him to do at this point, so he stood back & watched as, my face against the faceplate conveying a Psychotic Cascade of Expressions which I simply could not snuckerpushKRH, I grunque against my Pond'rous Locks, which opened in the manner of a Most Oppressive Dream, & raised up some repugnant steam, so that I emerged gasping & hysterical from the a rl ss m st rp  c . That's airless masterpiece.  Now back to our story. Now back to our story? What I'm saying is the man pulled me out of the timegap mess that almost suffocated me almost maternally, dragging me through the puckered poison, suit breach & hand-rent ripwrenched stasis fields that had once done so well for me.  He practically ripped off my skin.  The bald dude had manifestly augmented strength.  I'd better watch out for him, I grinned as he dusted strange white pollen off my huff! my Dozhe. I grinned because I was breathing again.  You should know as my mother should have known before I killed her (sort of accidentally; I'll fill you in the words of the days below) that I sometimes fill with giddy, spuming joy for no reason.  It's a flaw‑‑a form of epilepsy no rarer than my species, pandemically afflicted like a word afflix with febrile diacritix‑‑which sometimes comes un handy. The little bald man with the concentrated essence of the strength of the muscular stars in him duted off my knows with a clearly sexual verve, then drew back & lit a thin cigarette, black with golden filter, a Russian novelty cigarette he had obviously had someone less obviously gotten from the Profound Museum of the Novelties of the Idiosyncratic Fringe, & with a sithofa-sucting noise drew in a smoke all-purified beyond the burdens of air. Beyond the burdens of yen, beyond the bounds of karma, beyond the last giggling leap of a very silly child's imagination after quite a lot of hyperventilation, quite a lot of breathless repetition, quie loa buthfuh repegigum, I can explain all of this.  I am simply trying to get you the feeling of the smoke. You really need to get the feeling of the smoke.  You need to get the feeling of all the drugs we took in this sector.  The technology of drugs went well beyond infinity & into the realms of black magic fuckin googols of æons ago, man. Now what was I saying? The Smoke© made Fraey very happy, in the sense that existence was suddenly worthwhile, suddenly like a walk down one of those enchanted stargardens he kept more in the wine later, of which down cellar. & he continued to try to woo me, for not only was it clear he wanted or I mean to be liked, most particularly by me, who had absolutely not cracked even the fragment of a smile since the {timeframe} of our universe cracked int the glass of visions into the royal (milkwhite) glass of the frames of the "Etchings of a Lying Life" (from Hogarth's endless obsessive insular Life of Lies), but he was obsessed by my odd & ideciherable I mean indecipherable show of happiness, & so was trying way too hard to charm my pants off, possibly literally. So he was chattering. I was being nattered at, not with words, but with a sort of high-pitched, digital nonsense, & even if the man's speech had been sensible, I would have been far too distracted by the smoke coming from his mouth.  I was thrown back to my childhood, where the Akospombian attendroids seemed programmed to constant hostility.  I don't think the officials knew (& heaven knows they didn't want to know), but those gun-blue buggers projected all manner of bristling monstrosity‑‑insect, dragon, flaring attendroid‑‑for fun, to keep us shaped up, as an experiment, or simply through some insane glitch in their programming. So the only young man in town is psychotic, all right? Anyway, the man with the digital speech & the smoking mouth seemed quite like a monster to me, despite his tiny size.  He seemed distinctly scaled down, more like a child except for his adult proportions, but that only made this beaming, time-stopping stranger seem stranger. Then he repeated the act of smoking, this time stucking a thin blue cylinder into his mouth & sissing on it, sissing, sissing on it & sissing onit.  The device glowed at the tip; it must be the source of the smoke he was breathing.  He's not human after all, I thought.  He needs this substance to stay alive. PRETTY HUMAN STUFF "What's with the human get-up?" I drawled.  I was trying to be cool, if you wanderknough the troughth.  Another Guy Thing happening between us.  This was like the first Other Guy I'd ever met‑‑honest! "Why do you ask that, punk?" "Mocking human shape's a pet peeve of mine, man." Fraey gave a short snort, very close to derision.  "Yea man?  Well, c'mere. kid.  Move over here.  Come closer," he said, seizing me in a headlock which made my head glow & pulse like a vivisected heart. "Have a look, fuckface," he growls, real toughlike.  "I'm a man just like yourselflike." He showed me many things I can't divulge‑‑things, however, which proved beyond the ahdow of a doubt he was & is a man.   Deletion Box Hello.  I am Deletion Box. Begin speaking. Long sexual-slavery-to-Fraey deleted, partly for the sake of the children who may have gotten may sucked into gotten this dimension, but also because it turned out to be quite dull.  Except for the author's magnificent cock, of course.      Pay no attention to the boxes, especially those fucking deletion boxes!  They're crazy.  They make me laugh.  Hu! Anyway, after he let me go, after I regained consciousness, after I was able once again to remember who I was, form simple sentence, & recognize selected relatives & friends, & my face had regained its former color, my face having been rendered purple as a grape for some weeks, & I was able once again to make it back to the set to begin trying to refilm the fucking scene, I gave this invitation the slow & rather sullen response I thought it deserved, for there was no way in hell I believed Fraey was human.  The dubloh features made it clear he was a native Jodorian. I did come closer, but I'm afraid my nastiness grew as I did so.  Teeming aliens‑‑the Pexxems, Doqqs, & Ulalculott, especially‑‑were always challenging themselves to get the smells & textures right, but they could none of them handle the smells... Fraey, however, had gotten the smell right.  His textures kept looking better as I approached.  Were there even pores there? He made the spasms of laughing without the sounds. "You should see your eyes," he said.  "They're so big I might accuse you of being polymorphous yourself." I quickly became ridiculous, a cauldron of conflicting feelings, wanting at once to punch him out (that always made them lose their faces into shapes you cannot imagine) & to run my hands over what definitely appeared to be pored, textured, finely haired human arms. "Go ahead," he said, though I was not sure what he thought he might be giving me permission to do, nor did he elaborate.   Welcome to Deletion Box. Begin speaking. I saw something to which I can only allude.  It was another deleted scene, another extended sexual-slavery thing involving the author & his characters.  What a sicko! Yea, it's pretty sordid, though this one a lot better then the others‑‑but still not good for the kids downloading porn off the internet even as we speak.  Just kidding.      Or maybe he just forced me to watch all of his genome unravel, like he was doing a double-helix pole dance or something.  The point is the scene was at long last aloowed to continue.  The scene can now continue, in which figuereth a a brick. I shat a brick & shook my head. "Pretty good," I said.  This approach worked well in bringing down the defenses of the rather vain shape-changers of the universe, for they almost invariably cried "'Pretty good'?  It's great!"  thus tipping their hands. But Fraey only tightened his lips slightly & raised & lowered his eyebrows in an instant, conveying perfectly a disgust masked only by great patience. This was pretty human stuff. MIMETIC DODGING GESTURES He kept perching obscenely on things, & his well-crafted huan I mean human disguise was angering me.  Yes, I had reverted to the delusion he was not really human.  The sex was too good, for example‑‑way the hell too good. In addition, he was too bright, & he kept changing size.  I was either hallucinating from the etherbuckler lerbuckler erbuck aler or this was a projection of some unknown kind.  I licked my lips & pressed them together, as if I were gluing them... Besides, aren't I supposed to be testing out some kind of suit or something?  Am I lost?  Am I dead? "Lost," he hissed, his all-too-sprightly pie winced in cheery moue, placing his forefinger to his mouth & making a peculiar steamy sort of ulianiting sound. "Don't say much," he said, as if this advice would be the most gratifying in the world for me.  Then me thrust his forefinger toward the sky & prodded it dup a coupla timx.  "Don't want the nerds to know!" I swatted at him in the manner of a cat, but he just kept waffling into photoraves. He made mimetic dodging gestures, always with this insufferable glitter in his gilnistutfefreirnagbly eyes.  I wish he'd change shape, I thought.  Nexons hated shape, or should I shape it: Nexons hate shape, or shapehatingnexons. "I know what you're thinkingCavv thinkingCavv thinkingCavv thinkingCavv," he said, which caused me to reel back, which caused an entire aurocavern of pollenwind whimshapes to cast themselves in <flow <directional <revesever> directional> flow> of reverse dynamic tropical expressive clouds (as as up in their terminal, Motinol gnod off & on, mumberling, "Geek?"). "I have to report back.  Is this some kind of time-dilation thin g we have happening?" "O shut the fuck up," he kunks, pulling out a surging kal needle & (I think) moffingly prock'ring it to me.  "This is like some film-noir detective story in which I shove the ultimate job up your arse." I tried to escape but could not escape.  I can say no more about freedom.  Or escape. Which is to say I saddown, which cause the persistent equalizing pendumbruvial nonspecific gravity of the general periphrasis of the adumbras of my suit to, as they say, "bunch in," causing me to sink toward the center of the center of MöggwithinMöggwithinMögg, in turn causing the clouds of the complex pollen & the clogs of the intricate pollen & the expensive (snuffable) pollen of the drug-trade pollen (which, winkwink, whiz-watch this suss's all about, in't?) to xetrov in like some oenumbral zitz, causing gradually & in causal-lag in turn Motanowl to wake up & start to fleering at their dials, "Whawk?" & here I thought I'd taken the damn thing off... But we sunk we deep in the psychoactive pollenscape of Mögg.  The field of my suit I believe the field of my suit became a RELIGION in which I be LIEVE creates a present-tents cave of hollopollem© in which in free fall do we sit, like a lightless grey guru & his sucky little slave, & in this place there was neither light nor dark. "Whoops," he says in a voice inside the quotings of it self.  "You've fallen into polqlueincksand or quipcoklslaennd.  I don't think your friends can save you, Cavv." "How do you know my name?" "You sound scared, man!  I'm Fraey, by the way." "The Fraey?" He smirkth.  "I have total rights on the name," he said, natter-of-tactly looking round at the nothingness swirling a-roun dusust.  "So, yes, it's me.  Anyway, you'll notice you're dying.  That old prototype Etherbuckler of yours can't hack it.  You might be gonna die, friend.  I'd scan this suss if I were you, which I am." The suit suppressed my primal terror, but I knew it was there all right‑‑like that disengaged animation from the beginning of animated time begin animated time: MARK which approaches your face with an almost 3D burn, or that word your father kept blasting in your ear, as if he were a shotgun, or that wing of light slinging round the gravitational zot of someone's tipsy sun (just before it went nova in a twist of the ploque), or that ring of lime-qolor'd light imitating itself to the point (.) where you (u) keep on staring (*) till you blind ()‑‑& that my head would exfoliate as it war into a compressed gourd of hyperh!steria the instant they powered my deprexxurixatium.DOWN. My only wish (as the metaphoric blindfold folgues mineyes) is that I could watch dubs of Mottundöl wacking ballistic in the oddly tenebroux phoxphor of their brilliant terminex. In Your Honor short, I scanned the man's suss, even as we slagged to the center foteh pollemsw*mps. This Fraey was grinning, his grin flickering with static, white noise behind the grin, itself grinning, & then he widened his grin, proffering the suss, which in this death fantasy takes the form of a glistening ovoid--like a Kelumbrian kartoon klam, actually, slick, seductive, glistening; full of those opalescent subsenstient translucent promises; your mouth wavering I mean waltering & your revulsions of disgust frozen into revolved fragments of crystal nothingness, or ice-nothingness, or abfrags, or something like that. Same as always, so I pops it in my mouth.  It was very euphoric.  Susses are always euphoric for the likes of me, which is why I keep signing the god damned things... CULTS OF DESIRE "Say, fella, you must be cold, standing bare-naked there!" he sounded like he was starting everything over.  Maybe he was.  Maybe we were starting over, in one of his sevenfold cube things.  Then again, maybe had a vörtor, which is a device that glows in your brain & gives you all sorts of goofy things to say.  Some thing 11% of the Nexons‑‑the "Nexons on the line" as they call themselves‑‑eddy round crystalline tables where they exchange vört-induced bon mots so rich in wit they have spawned vast cults of desire, with amorphous groupies in glad-rags of sorts, by which I mean lightshows of a jagged-zört, but something too much of that, if saying something too much of that be not nor more of that, by which I mean what.  I say that just to impress you, but then that's writing, isn't it? Now somewhere along the line he commenced to standing there slapping me, & as always I dinna ken ongoing this long-howfor goingbeen, so he's like he's standing there slapping the shit out of me, & the spaces of existence say The Spaces of Existence form into cubes, suggesting Fraeze fuckin with my mind again, or I'm about to die in the hallucinations inside of this suit. Remember we are really in a suit.  We are in a suit all the time‑‑a suit perfectly protecting us from death even unto death.  That's my best theory. The cubes as I say "The Cubes" went through their hypnotic genuflections (God was having a thought‑‑just a little smile, there!) till it developed we'd been in my ship (you'll remember my ship (you will relax & visualize my ship (you will relax & go to sleep & dream yourself aboard my ship‑‑there's a good reader). An-don this ship was this guy Fraey, who was certainly a recurrent motif in this series of hallucinations proving I'm suffocating in a toxic pollenhollow on Mögg someplace. & this Fraey was slapping the shit out of me, & as he slapped & continued to slap me as if to snap me out of something I was irrevocably in, my ship that I had suddenly been in (was it even mine anymore, with this rich guy here?) flupped‑‑that's the only word, flupt into something more or less a room, albeit a room full of broken azure obrejets of long oblart, the limbs of your robot lawyers, their torn paper contracts fallen like snow on the dintly smiling faces of the dead, & whatever else during the chase scene that my lawyers made me said‑‑all pitifully bedewed with the droplets of my heart. He seemed to by physically present‑‑a near-impossibility in my ship, which gave me goose-bumps & a bad case of the well-nigh-creeps.  I mean, I could sense him...I could smell him, right through the xenon... "OK, fo," he fayf, hopping off the fhelf & the fhelf recef obediently into mift like that uh "m?mory" they leached from the chalk cluff of your croggy fell.  Well at least he was very small... "Name's Fraey," he say, as if we were indeed starting over (were we indeed starting over (are we indeed starting over (has this inded ever happened?), pwoffewing his hand in a Nebulously Aggwessive Gesture.  He by for the way the records held it there a while, then removed it ontologically, so that it had never been there, if you fing what I'm baying or fring what I'm-a-braying, seeming toove expected no response.  "And yes, I'm really here.  Go ahead‑‑feel." & here he's standing with no shirt on & totally disconcerting amounts of white hair on his 60-year-old torso, & here he's giving me the archetypal I'm-a-Strong-Old-Guy grin with the wildly gleaming eyes, patting his stomach as if I were supposed to cum on it or something. I'm sorry.  I mean to pat it or something.  I meant nothing offquuluur.  It just happened.  It's the software, moving between universes.  It's certainly not me... So the old goat standing on the beach pats his stomach, as if I were supposed to rub him there.  I dunno.  Once again, he went back & erased it, so it never happened, making everything I tell you a grey & des o late lie.  Damn. "No, go ahead, hit me as hard as you can," he said with a stupid proudness I couldn't help but think could only be human, but I shook my etheric face through a loophole of the thought, so we have a once a gain a nonexistence. There was a nonexistence silent more a moment out of time. "Your filters are useless on me," he said, with a cheerfulness ill-fitting his oppressive words.  He kept smiling, too, & it occurs to me I have never punched somebody who was not a shmoo. "Go ahead, punch me," he said peremptorily, pretending to be looking over my suit, which kept rearranging itself nervously & into nerves & figneirtvionugsly like a shelf of pink & sentient Tetvian books. "Yea, like you were saying back there before you back there before you you you forgot, I'm basically the richest sot in the sector, short of the luciprant aspirates," he boas, at which my hunger to take a swing at him eat me & I slug him a good one in the chest & knock him over & over. Yea well he tumbled down a great hall, curled like the snail of a Guggenhein, & there were indeed the most heart-piercingly beautiful works d'art (all blue, all broken, all hanging obliquely like the bones of your busted poets) expiring behind us down the right side, not scrolling to darkness, as it were, up the stations of history & on into the sweet ether of sweet ether of myth, no, but P*P!ing out like reminiscent flashbulbs as scene in the parched n painted backdrops of the Receding Ecedin Usée Musée, which made my guilt all the worse. I even thought, & this is just a curlied fancy taken from the pages of Dipple-Dexter'd Monster rendered back in earth's unfamous & inknowen "Stoned Victorian Era," there were lawyers in liquid black suits with their supple ties flying, breaking their bones trying to serve me with their papers of infinite culpability, for which I'd have to be wiped to a hundred lifetimes of tarry dearth & gloam. I had ev id entl y hit him way too hard.  Possibly my first contact with an FHB‑‑a fellow human being‑‑& I'd broken him.  & there was an suss in there somewhere {possibly already empacted to my brain!}, & I felt I might be chasing Pure Money Rolling, despite my racing tears, down the tiny spiracule. THE LAST WINTERNIGHT OF CHILDHOOD "You're an emotional guy," this Fraey says, after coughing up some blood, very real, very convincing, like this was reality or something, coughing & gradually healing up just as if nothing had happened, nodding pseudo-thoughtfully, the old bugger, good as new, & I register that this is his First Sincere Statement, write large in gorgeous Starray Circulature© & accompanied in all-too-perfect parallel with a gesture, analogous & equally sincere, making me so suspicious I grab his wrist, at which he seems almost sexually pleased. "It's OK," he says, nodding some more as if in echo of nodding some more, as if in.  "Sorry I busted in, man‑‑but the locks on your door are just miserable!  Just kidding!" But mirth there was none. Heechoes of nodding some more has himself a good long languorous lollicking laugh at that.  It would bother both me & you to tell you I was in a twisted way just starting to like the polyduplicitous dude. "Anyway, I was excited," he confessed, actually ripping his face off (a casual rich guy's special effect), causing me to faint & he to wave some sort of zeun-shapéd vial of essences over by doze, reviving me & slowing down the scene to the point where there is no oxygen. "I'll make this quick," he gasped, bold enough it seemed to use up precious poetic air with his airy lies.  "I got excited & came here myself.  I have Le Job pour vous!" "Excuse me‑‑are we doing everything twice?" He nodded, now very masculine, & I couldn't help but notice out of the side of my aurafield© his voice had lowers some octaves.  It's been corrected on the tapes, your echoes of his nodding & yet some more honormore. "But as I was saying, no more squatting on shitpiles of moss, my friend," he says. "Collecting pollen," I say in a voice which just doesn't come out, like it was Deliberately Sabotaged or the signal De ib rate y S bota ed! "The groint peing, friend Cavv, brother Cavv, dipshit Cavv, you & I are going out & find the human race.  There is a human race‑‑an extremely large human race, existing somewhere.  & you can kill me if this isn't true." "Kill you if what isn't true?" "What I just said, focksucker I mean cocksucker." "Well.  Thanks for correcting it, anyway." I think Fraey slapped me around some more.  Fraey had his way with me, did some foul things to me.  This is normal for my class: this is normal for this sector: this is normal for someone like Fraey, who obtains all sorts of easements & comforts & contentments from the law.  We don't have money as such, but it shouts at us, roars at us, just as muckin futch. His face was that of a very silly child, & he seemed to lose control of his body & clap his puerile palms together. For the first time in my life (unless I've been luumed, as the Epilusians of iospace'd say, & unless you count that life) I restrained myself.  Up to now I'd let my muscles do whatever they want. I'd buried my arm in countless blobs of flesh‑‑it felt good to them; they wanted to do me after that.  I had no mother, no nothing.  I was the most (amusingly) violent thing in Nexo, next to the Inglios, Bauns, Jaborigglios, & Kreefneffs, needless to say but too late to say, needless to say. SNOWY PHRASEOLOGY or DREAMS HAVE NO ADJECTIVES "There there!" his zunny voix was zaying.  The crazed geezer was starting over again!!!  Old people certainly do like to repeat things, don't they?  So with the cubes magnifying the hallucination times seven, etc. & so here he was, bright as the fireflies cumming, now in a very impressive suit, such as there are human suits in these here parts.  Don't get me started about the clothes we have to wear.  Just one word: baggy!  So I mean Fraey's lookin pretty well-tailored all of a sudden, pretty nifty, pretty cool.  He suddenly looks like this captain of commerce in the umbrage of his suss, selling it to me, zetzing in the spottle of a gold sun, the snow receding in unhinged concentric manias around him, & his pores so thick & vivid, his smarmy refinery this time defined by the gorgeous smolder of his ultra-maroon kimona, dragon-strewn in a veritable swoon of golden dragons ramping the air like vanity volutes, & an indolent feathered cap rakishly revealing the buff of his big bald head, as if it were something erotic. Well I gasped.  Let us in the usual way back Uckfaying up here for a moment.  Normally‑‑now This is normally I'm talking about, so STOP LAUGHING‑‑you sit besnowed in a slight Cezannean slant, your features uprucked in these Great & ipept brush strokes, in a great but Seated barenaked but night-enshroudéd shawl, Your superconductive nerves seeing themselves Jagged like the fragments of your most Meaninglessly beautiful ornament (you know: the One no mother lit like soft golden candle after Soft golden candle the last winternight of Childhood, the deer antlers snapping & the Snow lost in your hair & lost in its opacity and Lost in its snowy phraseology & your paraleel Laraleel selves dancing each through its own Cracked brokenhearted dream I can explain all This but not in words can I explain all this but in The vivid purple feelings you feel when the Psychic touch your wrist!!! bu-but enough of these Falx maimoiries), each through its own great Slam-bang thunderous dreams, only without Adjectives (shhh!‑‑dreams have no adjectives) and The ship with the touches of a beautiful mute Nurse bathing your numbness away, draining you Of urine ("odious human trait!" their untheem Voixes runagape) & whatnot (for one produceth Beaucoup denoughts in the tepid xenon Atmospherics here), pretty much unable to fulfilet A sentence as I (I!) seem unable to complete this Jigseeing dream, while the snow gets fervently Thicker, like the pale blue beliefs of Christ before His antediluvian father murdered him, making Him one fucked-up, holy kid... ...until, hopeably, comes a gig.  I mean, the snow forms to my coagulate crystalline ice-sculp promptress, shaped like a babe right out of your rooting aspirations or your tooting astral phantoms or a unniverse of parallel poets, each fatter, each greater than the last & hooting out his great fat lines or her great burgundy stanzas, doing it yet forgive me for diverging, sitting with her eyes I mean her legs crossed on my dash, the fluffy dice interchanging existences lynched from the rear-view mirror offering the mere-view rear behind of her, & in her last radiant puffages of frost says, "Opening." Which generally puzzles the general hell right out of genera-me, & she responds with patience, slapping me & insulting my nakedness, holding up sarcastic signs & sprigging me with expletives, synonyms, fragments of the possibly-morphemic wordthings the Favvs intercept in the endlessness of their "stareyed space-nets." "A job," say synthetic She.  "There's a job for you, Cavv.  Would you like spex empacted to your mesh?" "Yes please," I always say weakly, the ship melting in some sort of pugnant reparody of many implanted Michigan springs, such as I know them, & my old man's temporary arms tentatively plucking on some pretty tacky clothes. I have a gig.  I mean, if I sign the suss‑‑which like a fool, I always do.  "Never take a job when you're freshly thawed," they say, but I'm always too frosted to listen.  This is my life. I'M SORRY I CALLED YOUR SOUL A WORM I wake up in my ship, the Title, seriously doubting any of that ever happened. So like the Idgecraft General Binding Upyourass General Suss had had turned out to be like living amongst supermorphs in general‑‑like falling into a Nexx of Hysterixxa.  After the job, I was in the zone.  I was In The Zone & Being Followed, so to speak, & needed time alone. I'd become incredibly d I s s o c I a t e d ! I needed incredible amounts of drugs. I figured to call to Fraey to call to Fraey after time spent falling down the labyrinth of another universe.  I'd meet Fraey "on the other side of the great grey universe," & then see about his gig.  Assuming I was or ever had been at all sane again, of course. So I didn't contact anybody or log out on anything.  I didn't follow any procedure, but au contraire, didde diddle with Dame Procedure from stem to stern, sodospeak, zipping in a way I'm legally bound to keep inside to a place I'm tortically restrained from mentioning (which is why my face is always puffing gout or poughingought! at you), & just dropped out of everyone's screen at once, also out of everyone's ememory also out of all recordings on all sorts of media (we are crazy with media here: & you?) & all myth & fantasy & all poets' dreams & off of all comely maidens's smiles & off the Akashic Records altogether & out of this manuscript entirely & in short out of everything but the mind of God. & we don't do much with God in this sector I am writing from this xextor. So I'm on sabbatical all of a sudden, I'm free.  I could do anything, do anyone. I could kill anyone.  I could kill a whole series of people by some means too heinous entirely for literature, so I'd have to skip that part of the story. (Scene omitted. No one knows much about this scene.  We considered trying to retrieve it, but it's been deleted by the best.) So I'm cruisin the zone in my nifty darkblue unregistered ship, The Special Cocoon (& a childhood friend of a ship, my Special‑‑a ship of memory if of memory of there ever was!) lightzapping from one system to another, then easing the joystick this way & that, zooming round many a planet like a shopper in a weightless crystal mall, just looking, not landing.  It seemed most Nexors came from inordinately massy planets, anyway, so landing would not have been much fun, walking about in my compellation suit or compsuit, bobbing with each & every step & letting out those crazy pink clouds of megasteam that made me suffer, gliding like a sick mosquito through various inner galaxies of embarrassment‑‑& you'd sell major segments of your great wormy soul to avoid that action. I'm sorry I called your soul a worm. THE SPECIAL COCOON My pal Special was it up this morning with a handsome yet humble grin, a blue but pink-tinged, warm yet intelligently abstracted grin, a grin of movie porpousodistortions yet "somehow suited for TV" (Demarl Nidian), a huge yet cuddly, concave & yet embracing grin I had had had programmed for myself, or‑‑to squeak more accurately‑‑had caused to have been programmed by Waerance Füül, Oscar-winging director of My Wincing Dreams, A Grin of Soporofocness, A Grin of Control, a grin almost perfect but for one tiny antigrain© of bitterness back behind it cast from bitter universes destroyed by their own ne'er-existence cast behind it back & of control. I pressed the grin control & fell down a long, illusory glass tunnel during which my neural nets my neural nets my neural nets of my neural nets were peeled most temperately off of me & placed in their special cocoons (see Special Cocoons), & I landed finally like a xentient xnowflake, as it were, in a blizzard of space, a blizzrad of nothingness, a blixxrad of sweet relief & a bilxxrad of swoons & a blixxrad of a bl!xxrad of joyful, hale fellow-snowflakes with their homely bones broken in their own joy of their loss of the preposterous preposition of of  the Infamous "Blizzrabs of Control" & in a sort of "absence blixxard" of of empty space.  Also of rhythm.  I lay for one solitary unhappy adjectival mo mo in the confort of infinite space. But "cold & hot ran I this on," & after that humiliating gig‑‑the pay from which I felt not yet no joy, you'll excuse my frigging French‑‑I toggled my stupor'd thoughts as the stooped & stupid poet ought to've thought to the apposite control & and & and we cuddled humidly, me & my ship, the Grin or the Title or the Special Cocoon or the Special Control which I squöze like one of those Arcordiore synthetic, semisentient breasts, squöze hard as if to crustit so this ship glowed in the neons of obscene & was, man, ready to go, by which it means the allure of the songs of the phermoans of the outer stars had beeped it, & this baby was headed deep, cruising like a glintz Queen through the ethershavvs, knocking off wender fenders like some sort of spacey bait, getting in mix-ups in which mix-ups there was this gross, quickie interchange of raw data, bitter-apple knowledge from the dead & pollinated brains, interracial jujubes, impossible lincks in impossible linck positions, splits of the logistics of the impossible linck propositions all done in the light dome foaming amd the light dome foaming a-a-at jerk projections of the median of each ship involved in uh the, um, cominh unh "incident," & many a morsel was saved‑‑like drawn underwear off the tip of the conqueror's So Painefullye Endlesse Sworde‑‑& still my ruddy little shi- mixeed it in. Smart ship, the Special Cocoon.  Filters Felloll Travelers as Rather Fat Bees, innumerable, to be sure, but not murmuring very loudly if you must know through mouths kvetching-a-long their round outsides so they look like great stripey bee auctioneers whining through some tube of sweet etheric flowery science-fiction space at one another, & me smuggled in placidly like some sort of soporated papoose. That was the way I wanted this time.  I wanted cozy isolation No. 29062, & I also wanted the gripes of my fellow itinerants to the stars #392‑‑& when I say stars I mean things as different as the seventeen different tints of the Haiku Planets of Oroazaon or the eleventeen diffring cuts of the swiss-gnix of longlost longcut cutlost cutup Porrop, the flavory cannet-coup or "cannéd soup" flavory planet‑‑the better not to hear my own rather veinly self-critical cigar-pough-toruses of your or my half-assed thoughts.  You or rather I could still hear or rather feel one's remorse, chiming with the course of voyaces of course, which was all simply my simply technologic way of not much wanting to thing about it... The unfimished portion of myxelf I qoll my Rough Psyche appears in the form of a small-woman ice-sculpture with a <mission porting> of her skall smull, which leanded 'gainst me acetabulum & say‑‑in this daisy-flacey sort of jaded-andoghr-satiated smutter which just kill: "'here 'o, 'ap'n 'avv?" i.e., Where to, Capt'n Cavv?, except her poor ice mouth can but only just can but slide just only into words... ...Andxthen rollxher eyesxup forxreply.  She have no eyes.  I am still, throughout this little nick of a crescent universe, looking for eyes, as aren't we all? "Nowhere," I said, staring straight ahead & petting her blue begougéd bald ice skull like some paternalistic putz putting the moans his hegemonic cat each moan like a loose-lumped chessman, see, & the board rather off-the-line as well as on this unplumb'd flying plane of a deadgag board we do play (within parentheses of play (& play & (play) & play) & play), where "nowhere" indicates a "free orbit," which is really a sort of low-rent hanging out sort of thing which we workingnex do, avoiding the Scylla of the hoi-polloi with their tincancored dead-en-dung'd timelies of surmise & the Charybdis of the polylineated "marble ships of the gods" the Richies of Euphoria, cumming again & again in intenser lodes, their surfaces as white as the cum of the porcelain slabs baked endlessly in time-circles endlessly in time in circles endlessly of time-hottest time-circling inner (joy), such as The Hoot & the Holler all beshat through space with the speedy-linking teethies of the rich passing infinite times the instantly given test of the infinite rich, the so-called Euphoria Test you pass through by laughing through the marble steps of the test, falling laughing rich down the sumptuous hell-halls of decadence, though I bet it's Pretty Fun technical term (Pretty Fun (technical term (Pretty Fun (technical difficulty here (Pretty Fun not supposed to have be have like this (technical problem here (Pretty Fun begins to look the way we've always wanted) like death (Pretty Fun) who is saying death here? Prof. Fun, who they say invented the uninvented fabric as it were of Nexo in the firstisch (1stisch) place, would seem to've once again adumbrated his mainman mortmainic hubristic chutzpah love of his own funcucking name, thripping the two of us, Actual Eye (hi, there!) & Fictional Zip, into one of his lovely unfunctional aetheric tumble-clusters...a bit like turbulence in the pockets of your haunted air heh ih! ih! ih! ih! ih! ih! ih! ih! heh hep  heh hek eh ahem & heh. Yeawell anyway, fun or not, I couldn't afford nonadat, so it was one strung-out afternoon after another in dem Küchschippe für me, blohbling dub upon dub of old shows laughed with their shoulders, o so phunnye did they thank they thought, me needled like a kalucine a, ah, and, ah, reeling from the sticky little microwebs of that last suss and, my glowing horns dwarfed, cruising the lovewebs for another hope. MUSH LESSON SWELL Anyway, I cuffs the rough head of my ice-sculpt promp into beautiful fnicking fnmithereemz, my ffaceecaff bleeted with bleeds of brood in the ELECTRIC ZOOM right into my pores.  Yuk!  I reached back my hand to my neck for to stretch out syntactical Kinks of Symmetry, as the laughable physics text gloze, & look out my portal‑‑a blinkering great replicant (groan by my moron buddy Moady of Buddy Moady Moron Enterprise, Unc., more on Moady late) of the central crewman's eye of the Queen Mary, a class act much easier to replicate in genes than to follow as she sink into the concrete of her own great rotting grot‑‑& view the multitude of bees, like some recurrent metaphor from the depths of a monstrous alter. Yes, I say there, coozy & relapsed amongst these brokered azure ice filamentios as the minuscule Fnools© fool like faggy Hovers through the atmospheres, cleaning it up, dermatologist chips activated to place microbandaides on my scores o' nicks for, if you know, smashing prompts n' statues‑‑particularly the dicks of your ancient greek statues in your ancient ice-greek pure-sculpture sheer-icicle noble freon icicle "issi-ikkle dreams©"‑‑is a nervous tick or psychic release of mine which the monumental Ice-Sculptures of God ha' classified as one of my too-many psycho-hobbies & eye the many bees. I eye the fat, striped bodies of the bees, & I remember the earth I have never seen.  The earth implanted like smuttered filigree amongst the round microcosmos of my genes keeps casting forth translucent replicas like intrusive dreams‑‑a form of snitchophrenia my unseen ancestors bequeathed me these genes as wakean as our cancerous neologist, Joyce, & the unseen "word-deformation demons" in his brain (implanted in the ill-lit dais of Etherea, an infesting, beautiful, alien world) that made him do it so, have crassifiled as small madnesses or gentle fugues.  This keeps me out of the indescribable rings of the hospitals but keeps me scanning for these if I may say cheesy susses. I do whatever it is I do to call up cheesy susses ON WHATEVER IT IS I SCREAM.  I MEAN  on whatever passes for a screen, the thing that not so much embraces your head like a limp baloonoo nornor rings you like a bubble breathing rouns your limpid neck, much less anything that, you know, disgustingly inf*sts your bra!n, but scrolls to me any rotten jobs my shapely Nexon keepers I mean brethren might have... NO SUSSES (no jobs!). So...I...get...to...sit here, hallucinating bees, unto eternity?  I panic‑‑another personality trait you musnt't gnoe mush lesson swell‑‑& am pumped till I gutter with Retadray©, my torporic torporifical torproious "fume of hibernial choice," ah yes, my "gash on wish I gag of lethe-voix," a es, "me gogh o' langeur de func," a-a-an option just as free as "any" here in Nexozzznnn...herewith sleep... Anyway, as a black Kopajjian jellything palpates sans heart through the ice of its quantum galaxy, which is a very small galaxy, so would I wander thoughtless & lightless & breathless in U.S.S. UniverseSpaceShip Special Cocoon, my oversized goblet of a ship, complete with retrofitted overdrive & limitless light-spashing underdrive, not to mention such marvelush amenities as mass-deviators, tachyon ovenrings, & insanely entertaining infinite story-formers, with dimensional flexors & optional-nominal miniature solidity meters, this hefty Special!Cocoon! totally aireated like a glossy kite blissfully forgetting its meaning, much more its scary bearings, in the ultraviolet shimmers of a Candambrian aurorian dawn, & then I'd be beset with the opposite feeling‑‑a savage antipodal compulsion, an absolute sickness covering me with that weird & silvery sweat you get when you're chained to the visions aspect of the Koanundrium Flu, with its mind-swelling fever sending you laughing into various zones of etheric madness, & briefly covering me with symbolic platinum furlike unfur‑‑the unremitting need to be with people!, what though they trembled like globs of mercury in a levitation cube, even if you could see diverse distortions, not to mention mean parodies (deLIBerate parodies!!) of your face refashioning itself into perverted, wormy fractions of your back-reflected head in much the same way my redundant superemotions spatter themselves so deftly to infinitudes of romantic mirrors, as silly as the silent methods of murder we all dream about, like the joke-mirrors of merry Merydium, where you never go lest you be flushed down a foolhole, surfacing in ditzy cosmetics & that ill-fitting bunny-suit, so emblematic or dear, that would get you cobboted & electro-chainsawed in the wink of a New-York minute, or even a Dardelardian mystic minute‑‑& that's time that hurts! (Not really chainsawed, but it feels that way.) In short, I would put down with all the otsug of a zapped trög, the Cocoon adsorbed in the tissues of the ancient Vyryrial Snatcher‑‑a device as smooth as a singing spoon as perfect as a melancholy fork‑‑a most symbolic machine used without exception everywhere (except, of course, irrational-obdurate Oloquion). It made you very sleepy, like the essence of the avatar of the mother of the world of birth for those who had a world of birth who does not last. This fills you in with Grief Everlasting such that everyone freshly arrived from, O, absolutely anywhere... not to mention nowhere in the soi-disant & eerie Districts Unimaginable, that has & doggedly uses its own transpositional language, not to mention or even think about its sublanguages nestled like milky parasites in the clouds of the inner mind you know, the mind that only speaks to itself & cannot for the life of the inner mind understand itself, the messages getting scrambled in contusions of disjointed chance, so it only sense that it is swearing to itself, making it a most unhappy, diverticukate subworld indeed indeed ...everyone descending into this wavering Vyryrial nest, I say, walks about like they've had their hearts torn out.  We've gotten used to it‑‑& you will, too. & then the tougher, rhythmical task of wandering about their vapid rococo cities snailing into themselves like the polyfurcative fucking miracles of endlessly infolded Zirado, where no one can quite finish a sleepily receding receding echo of a thought exthought, much less a sentence, much less a life, & much much less than death (& so they never die), & trying, as they say, to relate to these contoured curiosities, pumping their snouts & thinking outlandishly & loud let me tell you LOUD that I that I was the queer one though I guess after all those variable lightsworded swashbuckling thrillseeking eggheaded crepuscular goddam adjective-clotted morons were right. It became a habit hardened into the very chromosomes of the genes of the nerves of the sad mental nets of my heady head that‑‑suffering the agonies of a sentient & much-scruzed washocloth©‑‑I would hie me instantly to one of those kal-needial, mellifluorical manifold saloons, where I'd fucking rape my veins like a stranger & puff up like a spiked blogatado transfishyoid on mellifluor, kalkalial needles, Zenibine©, Nailybritum©, searoid, & inikiaritak©, & even some of the heavier, antisocial drugs breeding corruption in starry waves through greater Nexo & beyond, though this would involve befriending some of the natives‑‑not easy to do with the polysyllabic punning side-effects of mixing The Unthinkable Things I passed in inner-dismal mentioning‑‑& thus bubbled up the Mirthless Universal Joke Whispered through the vacuums of silly infinitudes of my social life. Pequitym architecture eschewed any visible roof or walls.  Rather than a cozy barroom, the place seemed like some sort of some infinite tan desert swept with vertical, curvilinear ribbons of wind, floating baubles of color, & tall, distant forms pointing in unknown directions.  The roof had the appearance of a sky in which tapering luminous lines receded toward one another endlessly.  The room ran radically counter to the box or half-sphere design fairly ubiquitous in Retigula.  I suspected it was a style one would either love or hate‑‑except I felt consummately ambivalent about it.  It did make me quite dizzy, & it took me even longer than usual to get my bearings. BURNT CORRIDORS Immediately upon entering I am forcefed a powerful drug which forces me to reveal the manner of my birth when I was seventeen, I mean discovered at seventeen, while entering a bar some 20 years hence. My mother died hundreds of thousands of times before I came around.  I mean years before.  Did I say time? I laugh at myself... So nothing is known of my mother, or at least nothing was revealed.  What would be the point of keeping records of a human mother?  I mean, get real! So no one briefed me.  But this is a rich, buttery universe, & I was cared for by the most beautiful blue attendroids, who taught me the weirdly glottal lingo they speak here in Nexo Sector.  I always talked funny...and I still do.  I'm obsessed by the theory that I'm obsessed by the theory that my attendroids were cheap: old: pwogrammed wong: or actually having some fun with me, for they had a thoroughly twisted sense of play, which combined with the experiment of my birth to make me so unearthly. When I think of my mother, I actually think of the gutted eggship, its name ewave from the lavages of spaixe (not chewmention whatever blewzup around or insides of it!), & called by the Favvatchioids or Favvs who found me or Favvs OmO OnO, as if they were going to snag a fleet of these things.  My mother was the once-plumb, mother-shaped eggship which, as you've likely guessed, was full of frozen human eggs.  The preposterously analytic Favvatchioids tried various means to hatch the eggs‑‑which might be hundreds, thousands of years old.  Who knew? But they wouldn't hatch, partly because the Favvs hadn't a clue, partly because they wanted to hatch us in some totally experimental, utterly outlandish way.  Besides, they had no sperm.  They had no concept of sperm, so they figured what the hell, let's see what we can do. Nobody hatched but me, which should makes me proud in an unfocused way.  I later learned they had bombarded the egg‑‑my egg‑‑with vast torrents of some unimaginable energy.  I believe it was a somewhat metaphoric form of energy, which the Favvs can do‑‑electronic waveforms of stupendous complexity, whose intricately involuted waveforms had the structure & complexity of unspeakable, sophisticated languages,  They were energy waves speaking only to themselves, like brilliant mutes or senseless mutations, & I can only reckon they hatched me because they wanted someone to talk to.  They edited my chromosomes in ways even the Favvatchioids wouldn't do, I was born a criminal, or rather, as a prime piece of evidence of crime‑‑so of course I had to be hidden, for a very long time. Seventeen years, in fact, before I was more or less cut loose, to go where I pleased, without so much as an allowance.  (Yes, I consider going back & killing the Favvs everyday...but that's just me).  Just before they let me go, the implanted seeds in my brain hatched, as they were meant to do, & I was flooded with data, most of which I missed during the spate of insanity that gushed through me then (the Favvs had grossly overestimated my nervous system, or grotesquely underestimated its sensitivity, but I forgive them for this; I forgive them for this every single day; I have to), & which may exist in my strange brain even today, in the form of burnt corridors & fuzed conduits. But I found out where I'd come from, who had hatched me, & I retained a most pure & incandescent picture of the lovely & wounded eggship that hosted me for an unknown span of years, or centuries, or millennia. {...THE IDEA OF A BENT DREAD} OUT THERE The Despis'd Favvs formed the Designated Intercept Grid, assigned somehow by no one in particular‑‑assigned by the nature of things‑‑to screen the masses of Strange Detritus Streams pouring into Nexo.  It was regarded as 99% crap, in which case the Favvs chucked the stuff into the massrankers or shitsorters & reduced them to the smallest particle of essence, the smithereen, which is the particle that doesn't exist, the basis for all that exists, if you can dig it. Then came the 1%, which filled the avid Favvatchioids' mouths' linings' membranes' derma with dust, which was like you or I or the memory of earth watering at the so-called mouth.  Then they'd expel the dust violently.  An excited Favv spits the red dust (or the Crimson Radiation or the Ruby greem) constantly spits the red dust in a constant incessantly pereating spub of fear. The 1%, the so-called foam at the tip of the top or the cream or the dream of the crop of the lot, included anything with information on the rest of the universe.  Nexo was quite cut off, in the sense that there seemed to be no other stuff in the universe.  When they starred their makeshift spectacles into their avant-garde machines advanced they saw stuff only an equation could express.  The mind of my sad & baffled genius friend Moady begat a plu-extrapolation procedure which translated the formula into words, which I have in turn translated into these words which I hope you fucking realize are as close to your words as I can get, like staring into the virulent inferno representing the black cloud of the black cloud of yourpast: Only specks of dead {or jots of dead or dots of dread or the idea of a bent dread} out there! & it all seemed to be headed toward us.  We had to take incredible tests postcomposted by the familiar shroud or Amnesiac Bloab which determined how we'd react to this news, the emotion we would carry around (for there was a severe excess of emotion in Nexo, as if the unresolved feelings from the end of someone else's bloody time had fobbed toward us aughlzough, so like most everyone in Nexo had to carry many feeling around, feelings that had to do with something important that did not exist, so these were strong emotions I'm fubbing boute hier)‑‑mainly fear, concern, obsession, drained ego, apt humiliation, tiny hibernations, & the essential rage that blew you apart.  For it seemed that the tiny glass ball shooking snow in the face of our genes told us there was an *infinite*and*terribly*cool*universe!* out there‑‑stars spreading in infinite gardens, impoverished families of dragons in the form of supergalaxies, a supergalaxy being in fact a superfamily of dragons, etc.‑‑but there was no such stuff.  The rest of the universe was dead, had died, had perhaps imploded, judging from the grotesque star gardens or zeuns that floated in our unfound ken. Dead & with particles coming our way.  Hence the Favvs & the doing for the SDS.  Now come back the 1%.  Now come back that:that was me, by which I meem that would be me:me. I realize I wrote that kind of funny.  Anything telling a story or even just bullshitting to tell a story re the deadness we knew1 but didn't know2 would have to be in a funny language, don't you think?  I mean dontchyathink growing up in a race that absorbs other races, Borgstyle or like the boa that had swallowed the head of a man I saw in the jungle one time, words & sentences & images & entities & the fucking story itself would change shape like cartoon characters croncaatr ccahratroaocnt ccahratroaocnters.  That's just the way it goes, all right? But I'm a very cool, accepting guy.  I'm a stout kapha, very dependable, very reliable, very fair, very level-headed.  I can eat the emotional, the ethical, the karmic, the etheric, the Vedic consequences of this absorbing other personalities as the exhausted dissociative picks his exhausted alters up at the end of the day, just before night & becoming invisible, & of letting the language get away from me like that, let us just forget & blissfully "moment a foredream," as they say... ...what with floating seeds of sleeping aliens, for example, such as me, or crushed instances of the conditional has-not been‑‑like the star-zeun-garden-zeums, or some big & flapping book or Moste Ancient Brainbrowseres or dust with suspicious shape‑‑all were collected & studied & in general messed with by the Favvs. EPIC JOY So the Favvs spread round the Nexo perimeter & stretched out their arms & legs, so to speak, ready to catch this wafting detritus.  Favvs were thus far befewtween & few befar feen, which come to my dad. My dad the Favv.  Yea‑‑my dad's a Favv!  Wanna make something outofit? Ha?  Ha?  Ha? The fellow who hatched me, or the charming bombardier-beetle sorta thang that hatched my ass, for your Favvs were among those rare rare rare finely rare & finally raer Nexonians who eschewexcuse me'd the silver blob look of the rest of those naked & labile forms.  They were fond of their gorgeously systematic, manically integrated, opalescently braided exoskeletons‑‑more beautiful, they would say especially if not asked (& they were never asked), than some trigeognoginomical form ad-libbed at the comedic moment, or coerced by the minor madnesses of fashion, of which I must on everyone's behalf admit, there was aplenty there. Their many arms were soft & rather pretty.  They had these cool big abdomens which seem sexy to me, but don't I have my reasons?  Don't I?  Ha?  Ha?  Ha? His handsome face‑‑all rustcolor & sand & with the odd odd pearl‑‑was the Tall & Faceted Shape of an Easter Island {statue-synonym here} which were these whineyisles they had on earth afloat amongst arocking continents abumping shoulders with one another like delinquent boys in delinquent, empty joy, by wish I meem epic joy, these islands, I say, with these great faceted faces expressing the power of no thought, no emotion, no life, & no categories.  That was Favv's loose translation big old face.  The face of the guy who zapped me, sparked my seed, upstarted me.  I imprinted on him immediately, which in my understandingdong's what humans do. Anyway, I did it.  Like every other Favv, Favv was a scientist, working deep in his hive of hyperactive attendroids, so seemed so iffy to me‑‑little glinting versions of their pop‑‑but who pleased Favv well enough, & who like multiple mothers raised me & somehow kept me from going mad.  I think. Favv was at the peak of his career, by the way.  He'd found so much cool stuff & brought so much fragged-out data into the nexosphere, he was actually at the peak of several other careers as well, & he loved to tell me‑‑placing his warm hand (boasting more fingers than I could ever care, not that I count) on my shoulder, that I phenomenonemal (they'd dup their words sometimes, though I come never to saw think another of Favv it)‑‑that I was his second-greatest find. He never told me the first, but I've gone into trés dangeroux pour les hommes intramix neuronic confusium (INC) & boned brightly up to the sky on him.  I was terribly depressed & erribly ubsheshed with Favv for a long long long long time, till they swabbed all that caring quite aut-o-me. But like I found out the greatest catch of this vringe vesherman, this stoneheaded big-butted sonofagung, my red-faced, unbroken dad, this Favv Fajj‑‑it was obvious from the inspired, chattery dublohs, the authors' flexive brains kindled to a terrific roar of fever.  Favv's most fabulous find (voted intercep of the year for a hundred years) was the Vuor Reducer‑‑a fictional device built so well by the imaginary race, the Vuor, that its simulated software interfesched well with universe of intensely solid if greatly dumb artifacts floxxing their muscles here right in the tiny porcelain crawlways of your ancient ears. TERMINAL ATTITUDINAL DESPAIR or PSEUDO-HUMANOID DUDE This big planet, Nexo the Gnexus of Gnoledge© or wherever we was, for example, was not without its charms‑‑the incandescent sky, crammed with stars & star-clusters all day long, for example, or the surreal formations of pollen, rising up like some curling, spectral being.  They looked like opium dreams heading toward you from the horizon, though they never reached you, dispersing like fog as they approached. Cavv'd call those contorted shapes Daliesque, had the poor bastard known of the ancient, human artist (but this epoch knew next to nothing of mankind. "We've GOT YA, Cavv-109!" chorused the boys up the escalant silver stairs of the gold-refractice stares of the iridescent favorite word scales of the translucent wings of the dragonfly of love of the clever field these clever bastard boys had whooved deround me.  I started to croak, but they were merely rescuing me, after all, so I was unable to kill them killing being not to much illegal as impossible in Nexo, Nexo being not so much a legal as a living zone & not so much a life as a living-dead-zone, the zone being highly refined & hyperanimated, with its xeonon & altruistic shapeshifting genohpomes & its utter pure legality & all as with friendly gorgeous cries did they cries did they beam me up to hell beam my ass up to a living PANICKED hell & a dry spot in my mouth where the sussud been. I always went into madness on these missions, & it is no big deal.  I came out of the whole thing not too much the worser & not so much the richer.  I disbelieved everything that had happened other than Fraey.  Fraey had obviously been real, if only because of all the Guy Stuff I felt with him.  Surely no alien, no device of whatever Alexandrine sophistication, would think to trigger the guy stuff in me, would it, would they? The point being after these latest Bucklizarres!!!© we took careful stock of my "sussual hallucination" as the bright, bulbfaced clare-fasced nerdicke idiottes erected to qoll it, & decided it was some sort of relatively arbitrary, wholly human "fearfulfillment fantasia," at which the twins shaped themselves unto the image of these lovely liquid screwdrivers french-curve pearly-scurling through their own limpid livinly shwill, aiming to fix this glitch in the Etherbuckler, sans taking even time to report this glitch to the smithereens, I mean the astral emplloyers back home. & because it's part of youyour average suss to "eat the beliefs of the sussohners," I came to believe it was all someone else's dream, someone else's insanity.  I forgot about it, except for the usual generalized anaestheticizeable pang, & they put me on this slab of this smoking ice & I slept for the dreamless perfection of the Etherbuckler as they came to call it Too. NOTHING IS EARTH AROUND HERE Mögg subsists like a dream on the Nexon rim.  It has only a spikey white star as a sun.  It was an "unnexonated" world‑‑unassimilated, with no photoprosthetics, no metaphoric overlays, or tiers of simulated sentience.  It was, as we might say were we allowed to talk about such things, a savage old mudball of a worthless planet, with no symbolic feeds‑‑no meaning, in short. Mögg made no sense.  It even rotated, making you puke, like some random ball in the savages of urspace, & had this utterly unutilitarian night (!), during which the pollen guttered uttelly unto unempathic apathy. It was not earth.  Nothing is earth around here, all right? So now night comes, & the exploration has to stop.  "Pulling you up, pal," chorus the Olmotnolic Twins©, as that savagely pastel, rather starrayed sun slips down, & all those gigs of pollen curl up, like so many plaster dunes in cerulean shadows. Am I still in that suit?  Hello? Time starts over again, like the system we are living on is crashing over &over again!!!  The wind dies, & entire smudged luminors‑‑which is what we have for galaxies‑‑make themselves almost microscopic star by start clear, like brilliant children who've been waiting for you, chuckling with their genius across the idiot centuries, the seeons being nothing less than your own, of course, adult idiocy... "Close your mouth and...sleep," mumbles MotorOll, his blue head mincing deeper into triangle, snaketale, gwob, his colors paling in to those of sleep.  His comrade OllorMot‑‑either the same species or some godawful, sycophantic twin‑‑is already zonked.  He or she stretches his or her transpicuous limbs or pobs, giving or evoking forth foggy or effervescent parodies or cartoons of my-o-my owne Gruntes of Sleep, & shmoos all over the console and...sleeps! You must understand how painful this all is, how on Nexo we never sleep unless sussually obliged, so how very much like dying this was. We sleep.  Mögg (shh!) sleeps.  The pollen drawxin all light & energy & {like = the ship becomes - very cold}.  There are, of course, never any dreams‑‑not for free, anyway‑‑except for this irritating, recurrent one in which the bald guy occurs.  He seems to be sweating much more than a friggin' dream... U O yea, I forgot. That Fraey, that Fraey wants me, I thought, then stifled the rest of the thought because I disapprove the doves of it. W    e! I the  ght. I disapproved of the doves I was freeing for The Svelte Little Lizard of the Atmosphere, but what I was going on to phink before I phrottled the little phing, the phought being the white little vision you see me phrottling, a Luminous Ectoplasmic Doll I can now be seen on special Kirlian photographs riffled into a Severely Rhythmic Movement of its little quotational "head," as spermlike spakkles of light come flinging off like sweat or some unwanted excretion or other aqueous bodily offshoot even though this is a pure astrole sort of spirit embodying as it were the most limpid emotions in the whole great swirleddying & ultimately adjectival world you live in world I live in world the unknown god or God who forces you through the forces of desire to spell his name capital U. I know I talk too much.  I know about this.  I am under treatment.  I am under very powerful medication‑‑very powerful! Ask me about my meds sometime.  Get baked, then ask me... Now back to our story.  The guy wanted me, & in his own covert way was indicating this might ardently charge up the fading nodes of my crystal account, which is our way of saying it might make some serious money. Hey‑‑I was zlit do my great green pumpkin seed of a surreal ship before the supple denizens of Läävvöönium could erupt into happy sparks at the incandescent dream of my erstwhile presence there. OPERATIC BECAUSE PINK The capital of Pequitym‑‑Läävvöönium, faggy name‑‑was a pink city, a soft & constantly luminous city, & therefore a sleepless city, a hyperpolyploid plexus of lights & of lights within lights & lights that rippled down the avenue, gently goosing you, lights leading you into the determination of various meanings, not so much stories nor even hallucinations. I stomped along the clear & luminous pavements, the multi-shaped & many-shaven streets with their costly liminescent rhythm, their hyperpolyploid divigations of lights not to mention the parenthetical (lights) rippling up & down the avenue & signaling you like faithful yet devious friends, coming up behint you & giving off some form of photonic breath I swear, gently goosing you like a great pink, idiotically psychedelic dog having found you at the edge of the world you were about to forget & wander off, the dog that saves you from blackness & the dog that saveth you from blindness & in your dreams the white dogs of ages & mythic hound, but in reality this pink little mutant fulsomely overingratianting itself the infamous lights of Bleeg which would, if allowed (& after a time everyone allowed) lead one into the determinations of various meaning-structures & establishment of various fundamental orders of reality comprising some very urgfently needed worlds not to mention (worlds)‑‑all of them pink‑‑& down the effluorescent path I say, not so much into stories nor foolish hallucinations nor the multistoried foolycinations of dementedly cheerful, insanely inspired & indelible children's cartoons as overstructured crystalline lattice feversystems, highly charged & costing an arm & a hundred legs, off the egde of their own dim fringes‑‑& all of this in a Spectral Universe of the most variegated shades & variations an daleatory aspirations of pink I declare here & now I am not averse to pink, but these lights gave off or should I say came on with an overeager, filsome friendliness as of an unstable salesman, who has to sell you himself at any cost. But mostly I was mad.  I mean I was angry‑‑which a thousand galactic onlookers among whomb I not-so-proudly try to count myself as nearly one could attest, watching me kick a crystal bush into fascinating component goddam smithereens. Even sans lights, I find Läävvöönium slick & ugly.  Everything is made of glass.  Everything loops & french-curves & bifurcates.  The Läävvöönians‑‑not to mention their star-flung visitors‑‑love their little gravity fields, & just about everyone but me was barefoot, so the gleaming smoothes & rollercoaster up-and-aroundness of the streets suit them fine. & with all those eyes, who wouldn't love lights? & my stubbled face collapsed into an ugly frown as I watched the hoards move around.  I deny being a xenophobe.  I ahve been tested & cleansed & retorfittend countles times, mostly on account of my innumerable jobs. All the shapeless aliens flowed in gregarious euphoria upanddown these looping & loop-de-loinging slidewalks & walkawaze & picturesque phunnels & crystalline gunnels.  They loved it‑‑& my ill-trained eyes could tell the trivial wonders of "wonderful Läävvöönium" were causing their minds & moods to change with labile intensity.  This I could tell because they changed shape constantly‑‑faster than I'd ever seen, except as stunts or in them forbidden contourosity bars‑‑& lo, how they dazzled into great ameboid mirrors insome sort of mutual laughter taking the form of utter iridescense, & hollowed out to loony toruses & rolled like idiots in barberpole swisiwrlsirls around the barberpole swisiwrlsirls through curvacious tubes like giant sentient experiments in a child's manEYEack lab, or formed themselvun unto the most godawful, grandiloquent eyes the better to "sink within the timeless folds of the (pink) enfolding windows gorging with goods," or grow into big fat fatty-boombalatty extroverts spoolin' down the soft down sidewalks or downwalks or downsides of die Zöftwalken a-and following the cavalcades of lights into immediate densities or intermediate immensities or vast paranoic systems of myth acted out in the form if gigantic, operatic (pink) lights‑‑pink because operatoc ad operatic because pink. I'm a human being.  I may even be the human being.  No one fucks with my germ plasm. ONN I thought I found I thought I peace at the Prumitaichior Inn, or Onn as they liked to call it, twisting words out of shape even as they transformed their bodies, I was trying to forget everything, concentrating on amnesiac fluids like ruby sharto & Beeq© & chochovush & Kypsoolicol©.  Those & more.  It was at least fifteen, but of course I forgot the rest, after one or the other of them kicked in like a plaqq-torus zapping your ass with its slaphappy frolicsome silver tendrils, & I found myself in this unknown place, left with only those short-order memory circuits interested only in the movement of your numb paws or shapeless limbs (what were those things anyway?  seemed like I could brandish them OK...), & the capability to talk in wide-winging words with nothing behind them & so little to transcend.  I'd forgotten everything‑‑an effect I suspect I go after many times, but... What was I saying?  Do I know you?  Did somebody say something about knowing?  I beg your pardon?  Huh? I still felt signally lonely, & was, of all things, trying to gather my wits to order maybe some trappora suppositories or deadly gorogit silatory capsule-photographs or qeep or frinafreg or kamkovine©, "good for loneliness & accidental suicide," as the gnitaolf:floating sucsinem:meniscus say except I could remember none of them. So there I bobbed with my butt in a very sad white energy net of some kind, lonely & increasingly scared, & ghosts of lonely numbness intervening in the nexus of my energy field with a beautiful white puffy cloud of a question mark filling the inverted cavern of my probably topologically overturned boat of a blinking brain, or niarb, thinking in fact that my name just might be Niarb, though I couldn't prove it, as I had no idea what proofs where or were for or the structures of nonentity anythings dancing cross the hot convolution ridges steaming with silly balloonlike versions of your erstwhile silver selves, complete with hypercondensations of your proudest utterances & elegant utterances of the people who left you here, so ugly & so sick, & as I said, detached in a Frenchcurve down to something something you uh forgot must have led you to, but th'hast nor will nor equipment to be sure. "Sure you want more?" said‑‑well, a rather unfocused surge of curtains looking out an the most beautiful purple nothingness of the Feminine Nothingness of Naught I had uh ah er... "Sure?" I said. "Here, I'll take that," e aid, swarming to a galactic sort of nucleus of sort-of-crystal beesseeb in my face of beesseeb with ridiculous smiles on their stingless fasces.  At least I thought they were ridiculous, so I uh laughed a hell of a lot. "There are easier ways to forget.  What are you?" Boy, was I not ready for that question.  It sounded boundlessly existential, whereas she was simply inquiring as to my species. "What are you?" I queried, fancying myself so clever I almost bounced out of my net with my rhythmical primping. She condensed into the strangest real woman I had ever seen. SYMMETRICAL & MAD or DINGY SNIGNITY "You're weird," I said immediately.  My inhibitions were working on something else at that time. She was silent, gently holding the huge vial of Uphodoria© I'd apparently been about to press to my eye.  She evinced no reaction to my foolish insult, but her make-up made it impossible to tell if she were smiling kindly like the great glowing Mother at the core of everybody's heart or gazing at me in wry askance, with perhaps a cryptic eyebrow arched in aloof contempt, or something else I would be helpless to calculate even at my most lucid. It has taken me years to crystallize this thought, but I now think that, human or not, she was so beautiful she had to very methodically deconstruct it into something daintily unbearable, symmetrical & mad.  She shone with those ultraburnished tinctures known as Botiludan make-up‑‑if such deftly sustained rainbows of ethereal light, cascading the contours of her face into augmenting envelopes of geometric wings (& wings within wings, wings flying in the space of other wings, wings circling galaxies of denser wings, wings playing stunned variations on the living air of her face, somewhere inscrutable within) can be Fairly Calléd make-up. I emitted a goofy snort meant to be the soigné laughter of the ultimate connoisseur, she laughed in return, at which one discovered she had added some sort of sound reactors adding rococo variations to her contralto‑‑always this need, it seemed, to magnify herself into a resplendent dance, always keeping herself hid. She proffered the Uphodoria© vial, which produced its own emerald miracles & which, I confess, much tempted me.  But I refused it.  I'd drawn back from my initial, befuddled thought that she was a human woman, but she may well have been one.  She was doing her utmost to make it hard to tell, as if the essence of her shape needed to be dandied up, so she seemed a polymorph, like everybody else, save the occasional bony bloke like me.  In any case, I wanted earnestly to do the right thing, whatever that might be.  I was thrown into paroxyms of regret over the black monolith of amnesia I'd so painstakingly wrapped myself in. "I don't have much time," the intangible variations on her voice said suddenly.  "How about some Neurejuve?"  & she held forth a needle, an almost invisible, inconsequential pin. "Some what?" I said, evidently determined to say only moronic things to the possible encounter of a lifetime.  I repelled the ramping urge to shout "Never touch the stuff!"  even thought I had never heard of Neurejuve nor seen such a mystic pin.  But I cleared my throat thoughtfully instead‑‑an act of viral will I was proud as a toddler of. "It'll clear your head, friend," with distant Mozartian symphonies rippling pleats around the cushion of her voice. I took the pin, suddenly very interested in this ill-thought concept of "a clear head." She leaned back, no doubt enjoying this walking-wounded case trying to make up his mind, which dripped from me suave as a globule of mercury. "Whawhawhawha-What do I do with it?" She effervesced into manifold visionary shapes of blue, forming many a symbol, mislaid in the fevered involutions of the fleshy brain. "Just stick it, boy!" her voice imparting the words most sternly yet while dreaming this lacy lather of fugues, only the sweeping ghost of which I can remember.  Too many notes, you know. So you can bet I stuck it‑‑whereupon, to my fused exultation & dismay, my mind became more perspicuous than the Invisible Crystal of Tarzarel if you can believe it you can believe it you can believe it you can believe it. "There, you see?" she said. "Ing," I said, suddenly remembering her name, like the Neurepin'd crystallized my memory to an access instantly. "Right! Now I'm going to count to 2 & snap my fingers," she said as if speaking to a child who'd just wet himself, "and when I do you'll be back to reality back to reality back to reality back to reality." "II? hearhear? anechoenecco??" Whereupon she smacked me upside the head, inducing lights all over the place, & then "2!" she cried & like snapped her fingers right there before my doze... Whereupon I sdeezed, whereupon one of those cubes of time formed, this time for two of us, & went through its little cube-of-time dance, with the seven concentric "sheathes of hallucination," as Fraey likes to say when he's braggin on his Fraeywaere©, which is, like, always.  Anyway, bodabim-bodaboom & we're assdeep in the phosphorescent silt of the ghost of the memory of the image of the photograph of the drizzly planet Mögg© Fraey had stolen and/or chosen for his fancy citadel, & sure enough, the acid rain etched & the acrid rain eatched & the azzix reign did blech the chops of the cats of the giant gargoyles overface, constantly, even as we watched (though I am given to believe time was a bit speeded up then, still, due not so much to the timespeeding effervescient drug drug drugs as to the field Fraey kept kompulsively going ging ing ing ong... At least I think this was Mögg.  Have I mentioned my inability to know where I am, assuming one is anywhere?  It doesn't affect me much, as I have devices to tell me where I am, or more formally, implant my ever-forgetful mind with the suave n debonair certainty that I bloodywell knew where the hell I am at all times, what though my very knowledge of this is virtual, hence artificial, hence nonexistent, hence impossible to speak about hence impossible to think about, I suppose, hence I spoze proving this paragraph does not exist. Ignore the preceding paragraph.  It does not exist, as I dreamt that it proved itself.* *It proved itself!  It was like an episode of Perry Mason!!! Not only that but to dressed to the pines to offashion inside the Great Fraey's Corpus itself (I'd like to say I expect this (I'd like to say I knew‑‑which I did) that everyone conducted to this mythical Promethean mansion) was drugged‑‑not so much, in my opinion, to protect Fraey bodily as to elaborate the mythos of his dingy snignity, which he had to keep rebuilding like the grey & somehow evermetling facade of his great & gargoyled ha ha house, which we stood before at Just About The Time I...Came...1... So my mind was clear (or so sez the drug, right?) & I'm inside this magnified image of Fraey's surprisingly, even before enhancement, big heart with Our Lady of the Fraey, this Ing moll who as you'll please be so kind to not recall as to not to recall, drugged & kidnaped me at this bar, when here I thought I was finally going to get laid.  I mean, the women would be as out of their heads as the men living in this universe, yes? I think Yes.  If you would be so kind as to think along with me YES. & so, getting back to the story, we went in & toweled off, & they gave me coffee & a lovely mint drink & several severely good slaps on the face & some more very big pills© they said would bring me to my senses, at which everything was scanned into a very sharp blackandwhite, but a most perfectly reliable sort of artificial sanity, i.e., a perfectly reliable wahbintledack... Fraey's Fantabuloux Manxion was a part of everybody's memory banks, but everything I saw there was a surprise. He was studying my face, as always.  "I want you to share this house.  Think of it as the control center for the recreation of humans." "I beg your pardon?" "This way, Cavv.  You know, the retrieval of the human race.  This is where we start." "Certainly." I was trying to layer my words with sarcasm, but it just didn't happen that way.  We were waltzing down a sunlit board upon which Fraey took all the turns, moved all the pieces, made up the goals & ruins.  I wasn't really there, despite or because of his fulsome efforts to embrace me. We went down curving halls, halls looping downward into nothingness & yet never ending, in which Fraey seemed to have collected all manner of luminous things.  He handed me some goggles which reduced the light & yet made everything more intense.  My God, but these were beautiful. They must be beautiful works of art‑‑works of perfect genius, the geometric introjection of fantastically pure & perfect thoughtforms. No, they must be prants, possibry interrigent prants, prants that absorutery sent out the vibe they wanted you to touch them, which exprains why Fraey kept us moving somehow at a bristering pace, as if, within these lustrous corridors, we had to move at the speed of light.  Certainly the very idea of getting one's bearings was lost amongst the floating phosphorescent statues or the endlessly complex, geometric flowers of light, or the lifeforms of the sun, or whatever they were. There were vast toruses of gold with magnetic interiors almost drawing your molecules in & certainly sucking in your thoughts, & great opalescent eggs that remind me of spaceships from the edge of time (surely illegal‑‑all of it must surely be grossly illegal) & Deep Crimson Hieroglyphs posturing & reshaping themselves as if restlessly changing their minds, trying to get through to you, trying to change your shape, & there were vacuous dark star shapes with the gnarly tendons of exploding stars, so dark they had their own incandescence‑‑possibly ultraviolet or even deeper shades, possibly gorgeous bluish tapestries a human couldn't see.  They made me want to tear my goggles off, but I had the distinct impression & the distinctly rankling thought (an angry, eager thought tearing off shirt after shirt, only to reveal the same thought within the tearing of each tear) I would be blinded if I did so. We passed next through a corridor of sounds, in which Fraey took our goggles & very neatly tucked them away in a fluid shelf that opened & followed us along, then closed into silent nothingness.  We put on little filter-phones over our ears.  They were kind of cute, actually, for they felt like wings over our ears, & I don't know if they dampened the sounds or pulled them directly into one's brain, for certainly the sounds in the soundless gallery of sounds occurred directly in the center of one's head, or in various geometric patterns within the rather swollen spaces of one's head, & it seemed like intensely accelerated swatched of music that might kill you if it or you slowed down, & voices rapping out symmetrical syllables that seemed too perfect to really mean anything, & many a hush & swishing, as of wind across a great memory prairie, & the gentle clearing of the throat of a gentle clearing god, & the voice of the mother, & the rabid squeals of madness touching on the deepest memory cells, flooding them, deliciously destroying them, with Fraey always signaling me to hurry, as if to confound his need to impress. MEMORIES OF SEAMS "Come in here, we'll calm down," he says, though my body has very little more adrenalin to give.  I keep wanting to kick him in the butt, to see if he yelps like a human, but then I've only kicked the butts of some very sophisticated Favvian mock-ups of humans‑‑the least human things of all, I suspect. He takes me sweating to a room of the most luxuriantly, absorptive black‑‑a sort of anti-lightshow to counter the lightshow he's been taking me through.  No lights, no walls, only the absolute muffle of sound.  It's familiarly Nexon, & I do in fact calm down. He makes a strange shoveling gesture with his hand.  "Sit down," the hand says, or he says, having the sound transferred through ultraviolet impressions to the purple-glovéd hand (nice touch: in nuanced nicetouch© I can feel that hand strooking me, stroooking down the nonexistent sybillant etheric fury-furr...). There's a cup of sorts to sit in‑‑rather more nuanced to a bony human butt, I must say, "Rather more nuanced to a bony humanoid butt than your average Nexon chair"‑‑but he would have fucking thought of that. He woulda thoughta that. Nestling himself in, plucking up his seamless trousers (symbolically?  what are seams?  a-a-and how did he know I'd have memories of "seams"? "My, but you are skeptical," he said tranquilly.  I could tell his things‑‑his furnishings, machinations, traps & creatures & stuff‑‑were caressed right yup yes they were was ess-esst right up! to the sable tingent wafers of that perfect orvib mantle of raven-mörbic black.  & sure enough, he pours me what he terms tea from the tail of a ferocious creature.  He crosses his legs, it seems to me, faraway too many times, then takes me on the first of a series of row up on row of the tours of the gardens. DISMALLY COMICAL WAYS I think Fraey lived to discompose others, & now he caused quite a look to sweep across my eyes‑‑these suddenly filling the widest cinemascoopic screen your screen of dreams had ne'er desired, & a waves golden prairie grass wavin' prairie grass waving wildly, if sadly, wildly & yet sadly to itself as it wove with incredible length & delicacy across the screen, igniting it with the sad light which, once faded, proved to be nothing but my eyes, which were nothing, & which finally reduced to something like normal,‑‑even beady‑‑eyes as Fraey's body decomposed into its own dream field of pixels, took on a silvery tornado shape, & dithered utterly from view. Just to make his little trick spookier or tirck spooklier, he placed his most intimate voice, creamy with modulations, next to my ear. "So then, what are you really doing in Nexo, Cavv?" he said, casually continuing the wormy monstrosity of his conversation. But I had my answer, & I more or less had control over my breath again, enough to say, with a certain gasping informality, "What makes you say this is Nexo?" "Why Cavv," he replied without so much as blinking one of his billions of billions of eye-within-eye-within-eye.  "Because it is Nexo, you asshole." Or words to that effect. So I said, trying not to quaver & whimper but still nicked & whimpering in the most hellishly humiliating goddamned way.  So I'm like "To find other people." "Ah," said the voice, frisking through one ear, it seemed, & out the other.  My eyes crossed for a millisecond there, & I was sure he would have it all taped for his future (if he had a future & hadn't already arranged to have every day of his life rolled into one big bolus he could have his servants carry along like luxuriantly necessary baggage, fondling it on his lap during times of temperance, & so on) delectation. "If you found another human‑‑a reasonable group of them, let's say," he went on, the tiny, perfect, digital decibels of his voice forming a vortex so his words were pulled away from my ear even as he said them, even as I heard them.  It caused me to stretch my neck out sideways in dismally comical ways.  "...would you try to procreate?" "Can you hear yourself say 'Procreate'"!?" I spad.  "How did you get to be such a proper old man?" "Fuck you, kid.  You just never know when the younger ones are going to be offended.  It's so easy to offend the younger generations, friend Cavv.  The younger generations are a delicate bunch of bastards, I'll tell ya!" The word Procreate had taken hideous shape in the air, like one of the visible farts (which are works of art) of the Dittitigula, I think it is.  I better check that though.  I'd like to indicate that Ditts may well not produce such silly phenomena. "'ProCreate!!!'" I even flickered my tongue & snatched at it with my fingers, as if removing some dottle of dander from my mouth.  I thought about it as I gazed around Fraey's infinite, eyefilling, eye-fooling garden.  "Na.  Fucking's the furthest thing from my mind." You shoulda heard that fuckingecho uckingcho ckingho!!! There was no voice at my ear, no other presence.  I was most emphatically not being watched, all of a sudden, as if a child God had lost unterest in me, forgetting even to put me to the sleep of nonexistence.  I had the feeling‑‑I could tell, you might say‑‑I would spend the rest of my life in this garden. FAMOUS FORE Fraey had stopped moving, stopped breathing, become a statue, stopped.  I had often noticed this phenomenon & had chalked it up to one of his endless system crashes.  Digitally speaking, Fraey was fried, man!  Fraey's system just kept crashing & crashing into itself, like Fraey (Fraey (Fraey (Fraey (Fraey).  Can you believe it? Anyway Fraey now fired up again, aware of nothing weird about himself, one presumes but can never be the master of one's presumption, Fraey I say bursts into a cataclysmic, clonic, clown's laugh, with make-up spreading into rays & waves & icky quanta all over me, & by the time he disadopplered into nothingness sappeared I was alone in the garden, & made The Usual Hesitant Movements, the Usual Tentative Gestures toward the sun (however laughing) overhead (forever laughing), which I of course Was Taking to be Him, & I even shouted out his name ("Comedic genius!" the rhytix said!), but he'd pulled one of the practical jokes he was in vamous circles vamous-vour.  But I 'd ne'er e'en nicked the lip of an infamous ellipse, much less the movement of the Famous Spheres, so I hadn't quite (consciously) expected (this) it.  This... Time moved quickly.  Let me ray that phrase down redepruct it: Fraey caused time for me to move very very quickly, expect that it wasn't really time, in the sense that time on the our side of the garden...oh, never mind... Something disgustingly close to time moved quickly enough so that my clothes renigged to tatters in the warm flow of a gold afternoon.  I'd affixed some piton in my veins, a long golden arm drowsed I say uh drowsed in the poppies of a fumy afternoon.  Did I say "afternoon," or was that, saying "afternoon," one of the large golden bees, except they were flies, except they flew at the sun like a buncha goddam sungkraz'd moths? "Afternoon," the monarch butterfly seng. "Afternoon," I replied.  I wondered how long I'd been here, stuck in Fraey's sleazy joke (except that it was a grand joke, a great joke, a fucking glorious joke, what with these fine & sturdy plants‑‑virtually worthily virtualworthy to be tree, their robust pozzles of pollen blasting the weatherwise, the mocky great yellowy hollicks & rills & holls playing their various variegated rolls, the lusty insexts tipping their hats to you, the gold afternoon fix did I say I then spent an eternity, unless I had spent etc., in tatters, staggering at a rock, & fleeing the music, always the peppy Nexon pepynexn popmuzicke pursuing me, Fraey's sleek sliverly music through what proved to be some sort of natural microlabyrinth. He was evidently endlessly amused by this, I assume, taping my actions, watching me through lenses sleep in amused & lenseless sleeps, observing while I grew slowly madeyed, with protracted beard below the gangles of my crotch, mingling with various denizens, like the friends you made during your stay at the sanitarium, who, the friends, who, who who, whom youm maym havem madem ump, because they melted afterwards as quickly as your clothes, which is only one of 336 reasons why I will not now discuss these friends.  I made them, engineered them out of various genetic good I...but no more of them... THE GARDENS & then the liquid gardens... Seems he has liquid or viscous gardens, gardens having no shape, gardens existing within gardens rather than next to one another, topologically arranged "so that no two gardens exist in the same universe as any other garden, strictly speaking," as Fraey rather stuffily sez to me. Okso the entities inside gardens holding lesser gardens in their hands, shaking them, watching them snow. That's why snow falls upwards, by the way. Each garden in a bottle a different lumescence, each a different tincture of a shade, made up of micro-stars & kept in the great hepatic Voluminous Room, or Star Garden or Chamber of Stars, or whatever.  I mean, we was sittin' roun' makin' up names for these places, as this was Fraey his passion, or as he likened to put it, "My positioning of millions," this "positioning of his millions" being the incremental & well-naught constant augmentation of value of each of these collections of lost or "distraught" botanies (this was his term, "botanies," used with permission of the Estate of Fraey's Epiphanies©), such that it was sorta like Fraey was always Fraey was always on some sort of incrementally time-releasing pills (light oink I mean pink oills I mean rill with light lavender spottles of the time's release all over their tomes).  So then would come these incredible diaphanous tours... THE GNO SCENARIO or FAUX MEMORIES OF EARTH Uh...did I say "tours"?  Did someone somewhere just say something somewhen? Don't ask me.  I do not remember the following er scene, buriéd in the vapors of oblivium.  This might mean I fainted.  I remember‑‑but remember: I have these parallels, these analogues, these polysynchronous reelings‑‑Fraey slapping my face & waving scented flower after flower under by doze, then perfum'd censors smoking up bi-doaz, & then redolent smelly stems right up my dostrils, during which tibe I woked up, watched the diverse bobbins of reality peal out in the watches of thunder & of course... ...but we wore larger helmets oer the primary helmeants, which made the dream stronger, which made us smaller, which made Fraey chatter more if chattermore be poxxible, which made the essences of pomes flow through, by wish I mean we entered his realm of the tiny flowers, his realm of the tiny flowers, where his helium-induced trance of a favorite face prattled. "All spores," Fraey, "seed-snagged by the Favv," thudding me on the back.  What the fuck was he talking about? We looked like stupid bipedal flowers in the grainy photographs of the day, for the stunted puniness or runty pettiness, if I may, of our fractionated deproportions, if you will, made the entire fabric of the software fail... "Just think," Yaey, "one of these multiple flowers might be an earth flower, might induce the memory of an earth.  You have memories of earth, no?" This was awkward.  My memories of earth were more private, more vulnerable to me, than the amplitude of my goddam nads.  But in which reality was I holding it in? "Uh...do you have earth memories?" I said, with no idea what filter'd purification of my meanings strained its way out.  "I mean, er‑‑how could we have...?" In one possible scenario‑‑a scenario I like to know as the Gno Scenario‑‑Fraey shaketh his head & shakthth hiss headed a-and makes the sucking sound of the tch-tch-tch, his helmet mrohping I mean morphing into the Grande Face of Pitye, compleat with flower udder da dööz. In another dwiosrslodc Iia tleidve in, he changes the subject. "Look at these tiny flowers!  Smell them!  Each one, my friend, an expensive, genetically chic ship-in-a-bottle of a chi-chi flower.  This..." & for effect he submerse my face in the frictionless colored rainbows of dew known as dew known as the "skipping record files" or the parallel universe files or the flower files or the Scenario of Your Naked Doom or the little sweet microscopic flowers‑‑their self-esteem so low as to be full-blooméd empathaths‑‑known as snoze. "Mm‑‑yes," I say, but no one but the flowers hears. "You see," then in one sphere of seeming realness Fhreaseayy, "I have such curiosity.  I collect things."  He dramatically shakes me by the shoulders according to the script commandment Fraey shakes his shoulders bad.  "I canna be Nexion (or Nexon, Moste Noble of Gasses)‑‑you know how incurious they are." I made one possible subtly changing face, an actor's face, a changing face as of Cavv REACTS, his face the vapors of an evasive blur. Fraey is waving flowers in my face.  I am naked & Sans Helmet, as they say. "You OK?" I smile wanly, a weak an unsophisticated face of gratitude‑‑a face I made in some reality & forever hate & unendingly lament. "Anyway, as I was saying, you have these memories of earth or faux memories of earth."  Fraey pulls back from me, dropping my head which is somewhere ever-falling.  "I don't remember fucking earth," he says in a throatworthy I-am-about-to-fuck-you-up-the-ass ash-voix.  "How come you have memories of earth?" "They were implanted, I guess," I guess I confexx. MORE SNOW They edit-ed-out all curiosity.  Then they lost the backup file, virtually deliberately, I feel, & then they didn't care anymore, as you might imagine, as you must imagine, then they lost all interest in maintaining their shape, & then... In this pallid universe, Fraey I saey Fraey waeves flowers through my haed.  I maen, thaey go right through, & he seem hysterical, his helmet off & his blouse fairly undone, his pants unzip't & half his face hanging bloodily oodily auf, & he saeyz: "Here these will clear your head." I jij my hands at the flowers, sending them snowing, first up, then down, then slowing down, then more fragments of meaning, & then...more snow. "Don't mess with my brain." "What brain?" he in italics "jokes."  "Here they'll clean out your memory-systems." "I don't bloody want my 'memory-systems' whatever-they-are cleaned out!" He waves them through my head again.  He waves them through my head again. "They'll here clear out your beliefs," he says, & sleepily I cannaught tell if he is uh 1) lying or ah 2) joking, but this is how it always is hot it always how it always it always is with Fraey, now isn't it? Anyway, clean memory means no belief systems means no faith to trouble you, what with flowers gliding over your face.  He's crazy, but I love the guy... Sure, I talked with my real friends, scattered around Nexo, if I was in fact in Nexo (remember the implant) Nexo (remember the implant) Nexo (remember the implant) Nexo (remember the implant). Suddenly, I remember Nexo! I lowered the "black-crab dampers" (which would give horrible cancers to their images & ate them up within seconds) & actually let the images of my <in friends Nexo aforementioned> even though the images of my tiny friends (tiny the friends, not their images; nay‑‑most of my friends were dangerously microscopic & always tooter on the voorge of skidding into the tissues of my lungs & being "corroded into monsters or 'corrupted into cockatrices' there"‑‑so their images were digitally enhanced to the point of technical termornamental imbecilitymret lacinhcet. "Eroded monsters?" you say?  Yea‑‑Nexo used to be filled with monsters, I am told‑‑rusted like my pink little friends (did I say they were pink, & with tsetse wings?  If so, I lied & am conditionally speaking lying speaking again) would if I inhaled them be. But I never inhale my friends. They were mostly busy, my friends that day, mostly on the small magnipogs© in the bars (i.e., getting breathlessly shtonked to the nuance of a desperate whisper & making foolish fnools o demselves twirled in the tubes of kal needles, up to their gnarly arses in some uh vuored version of good old green mellifluor), on jobs (e.e., introjected intro your various "diseaséd zeuns" of which more disease zed dunes succeedingly to map them out in our crazy four-dimensional way, then to spray the inhabitants, killing them in horrible ways, though‑‑having no government‑‑the government never admits to these genocidal atrocities.  These are my friends, these little gals n guys n sexless glauys), or else joyriding (e.e., in these wee & vicious impeacible packs in their semantic ships, running on the bregs of cast-augh xuse-me metaphors, or more oeraccurately, half metaphors gledged from derivative detrital "swamps of cliché" on the edge of the shagged-white greeting-card of time) throughaught the Nexovuerk, the trickily-curvd spacetimes of "The Nexovuerpe," the neuxvuerx as our <deleted> educations make us say, so I made contact with only a dozen or two. But there are power-limits, even here, where the use of power increases power to the power-point you have to just get off those steroids or your'll pump up your whole dinky, obviously-ersatz universe till it floats in the grande Parade of Laughs the gods are thought to have been said to always haff; life-limits, e'en h're, where medical science‑‑known to no one‑‑remains stagnant & bububafaafflededed by the Mystery of Death, & how we can't seem to kill anybody, though I intend to have contradicted this in the Pluperfect Later; strict time-limits, even here where time writes in a flashy, elaborated curve, surely curve meant curve to be somebody's NAME‑‑so after you've done playing with the holograms of your imaginary friends the willful ship keeps obdurately projecting into me, after you've compared crystal lozenges of your latest astralocities (for there are no!thing but atrocities here), the party is b rok e  n  u  p with snow... ME SQUINTING & THE SQUINTING SNOW I slept through the snowy centuries.  It looks like snow,...but it's this gradual exponential slowing down stuff, a very strong, complicated three-D gnaught! of a molecule some unreasonably godlike unreasonably euphoric scientist‑‑a friend of mine, see below, undearneath the skirts of the flowiling passage‑‑cooked up his big kiln in order to slow us down.  This is because we Nexons have nothing to do.  We want to work; work is all we want to do, but there is nothing to do but shop, & shop depresses all but the worst I mean richest of us; so I can at this numb point in the anaesthetic story tell you ZIP! about what we Nexons do. Although I am authorized to give a clue, you freuothy sleuth, you: it involves much milling about.  Not standing in line, mind you‑‑for standing in line would be against the laws of physics here (more below the panties of the skirt below)‑‑just...standing about in an unprotected way, with no guards up other than our glistening integuments (& when I say glistening integuments I mean their once-rough, polymorphously glistenin' sking: that's what I mean).  That's all. But wait!  That snow falling painfully around me‑‑just a bit blue, both snow squinting & the squinting me‑‑was the autognomic snow they flough to slow you down.  If it snows long enough‑‑if no jobs come along‑‑you stop, & are toed by the great footling beams of the substructure of the Nexon Mind Here to this indescribably, sort of "milling ant" sector of the sector.  I mean subsector of the sector, or sector of the megasector, not what I mean. So I sat there, my posture pore, a ghostly cap of blue forming on my head & my friends gone WAY! t!oo !fa!st !fo!r m!e, alone & coldly lingering... I called it the judgmental snow, because‑‑for me at least‑‑in addition to the bitter feeling was this extraordinarily tall judge passing himself all over me, in the form of flakes of the bitterest pain, guiltflakes I called them, unlike anybody else.  The judge couldn't understand this, so he kept pounding away on something numb‑‑maybe me, quite possibly me‑‑making me icier & icier in these these inescapable phase-changes of of antarctican guilt.  Threw I forth words for the rhythms there & there, note note.  Anyway, this was another tough winter to endure, & I thought (slowly) Maybe I'm different; maybe I can die; I hope I can die; I pray to our forgotten Neoxn gog to die & I pray to the forgotten gogs of earth to die, or go back to the egg. But a rather laughing incarnation of the gog in the form of the laughing clown of the greasepaink't judge just tossed me sardonically round in an increasingly vivid crystal storm‑‑just crumpled me up & flung me into the basket...waiting...there... "Plant-spöres of the galaxies," he said dramatically, sweeping back wan curtain after wan curtain, with a kind of flourish of wincing lights.  He said "spöres" like that, too, bending his lips inward to the inhuman pinch of a curtain, using his lips.  My heart beat pallidly as the thick curtains parted, & I wished I had one of those wands of jest my father had had had, wands which sprinkle the victim which the wand which sprickles the victim telling you his exact species of origin‑‑a number imprinted by law on the genes & missing only in the case of polycontorted criminals, all of whom were so mad they glowed an incandescent white, & so moved like irradiant amoebas through the cities, free to move, no need for imprisonment, known in the arctic moment as The White Et Ceteras. Humans by were the the way number 40777.  Damn but I'd wished I'd'd had that wand! Anyway, descend a little chute into Fraey's moaning Zeun of the Galaxies, down a finer, littler chute built as a model by the hyperscripted hands of the dream-anemic child of the more petit denizens of the Sector Nexo Sector Memory, mini-genes built as the models of a hyperchild, complete with mini-whitegenitals et cetera, where Fraey an I‑‑absurdly small by now (& I pause absurdly here within parentheses to laugh (...) & laugh within ellipses of parentheses) & attended by one physician after another, smiling & bowing in Exact Same Way No. 299. At least they looked like physicians, but physicians never bow, & these were probably Fraey's microbotanists.  They were organic but none of them were alive.  Preceding pair of sentences reconstructed by Fraey's constant little signals‑‑microwavers of the hair, for example, or near-thythmic tewitches of his finer fingernails, etc.  He gave off so many signals that he knew I would compulsively knew I would compulsively read that I knew he was lying.  But I pass them on anyway, so many a fine hour have I spend gluing them together like grey models of the superglue. OK anyway, Fraey takes me to his greenhouse, attended by these doctor dudes, by who the by way the way spoke in rat-a-atats of numbers like the air of flying tatoos. "Here," he pointed, sweeping the smiling doctor aside like nothing so nothing-much as an inanimate protiere of flesh, as it warr.  He points to a plant resembling an emerald bansai oak tree warped by the flesh of infinite gravity. "Oerelius stoaticus," he says proudly, as if this name (he must have made up, right?) would send forth frothing vegases of metamaterializing light all over the absent vast marrow of my <imaginary> bones.  "Drifted in four hundred thousand thousand spans ago‑‑the first bit of seed from space."  He looks at me so closely I get this tremendously exhilarating ZOOM & he adds, "the first known spore, that is." "Ah," I say, suddenly the infinite sleepiness surrounding my green fascination like a vacillating electronic cocoon not to be mistaken for my special cocoon... "Ah!" he charps, cupping in a palm pried unto immensities by the indiscernible oval of a common Mappalangian "muscular magnifying glass" a tiny ivory plant like the chip of the tip of a needle of broken snow, all nestled in a common clay pot I guess suggested for the name of the show. "Tymilarius himsiculo," he says, moving his muscular features under the glass, I think to "prove" his humanity. It only proves he has a human face, I thought, forgetting this rich bugger, this yuppie piece of shit, this high-class ivory moron, this phantasmagoric simulacrive string-faced marionette of the Very Very Riche, has one of those digitalizer things‑‑was it some kind of half-assed torus...p'raps a G-Quvenchian Atomizer...do I recall?‑‑what pricks out a formulaic, somewhat affectless, & if I may say cliché-ribbon "cliché-ribbon," version of your thoughts...close enough let us say "close enough" to arc one of his eyebrows with a positive medallion of light, a side-effect of the light of the incandescent ovoid of the on-tunneling rigorous adjectival polyphasic light of the afore-embellished enhancement mapp de glaxx, if not to absolutely (you know, literally) "read" if I may say "'read' my thoughts." THE TRUNKS OF WHATEVER Yea, I have had to ch p this scene o t from the blue ice of boredom, suppressed, palette-humping yawns jarring skull like self-referential seashouldering whales winking at one another as they surf through the Dead Bodies of Faeraettios. "Here three tiers of Sebena möachia," he gushed, certified© nerve damage on the tenderflesh of my tibula (settlement pending), waving his hands at the dizzy trellaces, glass structures formed of recessive mirrors, BDO within BDO & God as the big Dumb Object laughing in haikus at you. Fraey stops to a dizzying XOOM! of the off-life on-line out-rigg'd camera dublovias‑‑themselves quite wild night ride of a darkling variety of plant, based on the sentient carbo-silicone-THC dreambased "plomps" of the hypercritical, machine-ingested Wemm with which I Wemm I will never Menn again.  He rachets in the gravel facing me again, no doubt letting me get a load of his pheromones, but in the mist of my boredom uh I must admit he doth thith thwell... "Three hundred & two varieties," he says.  At first I think he has lowered his voice too much, stopped the parade a little too abrup'.  Then I cancel the thought, because everything stops.  Then everything stops within the stoppage(s) of everything stop(p'd!)?  Then I spit out the thought & coolly (at least Italicized I thought it cool)ly wipe my mouth off, like in the ill-rendered movie by naught-name, & think, No‑‑he's good at this.  He wants me to believe he's just some sort of enhancéd human being.  He will die...we will all die if I don't believe." Lights of course maneuvered in, making me believe... "Known, as I'm certain you've known," he grins, "as the 'fear plant,' from the fear planet, Ovidobeiom."  He laughs & shakes his head in the blur of the very same grin.  "Those folks have got the biggest eyes!" Le tour d'ennui continued, this time with my exoahembotanical friendmeha assuming the "goggles of the commoner," which I think‑‑though the helmet myxxed myme memorie‑‑made his collection of micro- & invisigibule- plants visible, so we walked amongst tethered parallels of crystal leaves, or the trunks of whatever, not so much reflecting as reflexing .BAK some distracted fugue based on one's face as seen in the light of a past since long long since in the Palindrome of Lies marred to the White Ice of Tedious Fugging Sleep. And, yawning, sand filling the urhollow ungeplugdt sockets of my eyes, I think we were dwarved or Vuored or fugued down in some way, because we were these small & smiley, smarm'd & tiny white figures looking disastrously cute in our helmets, which were way too big, & resembled im Schweiz ob nicht auf Zhape incandescent ping-pong balls päthed in their bathetic light. UNTITLED or NOTIONS OF AN EVENING Fraey's notion of an evening at home (& I am quoting the self-referential self-quoting Encyclopedia des Fraeys, in his section on "In His Section on 'Notions of an Evening'" was) was to gather up some of his alien possession games & Vuor us all down into down into one of his microgardens. We'd squat amongst, say, gold seigh-leives, & with exquisitely-crafted zoom-bugs strafing us with a lasied, supersonic shock, I mean shriek, & we'd spill the chianti oer the chequered tablecloth, dinking oer the wine bottles with our elbows as they flail to say, ducking these oerarcing artifax (built i'tis b'lieved by "the beleepless Phoegg," as the concept of their minimal DNA be inferred to schuaeigh), while Fray or is it Fraey & who is Fraey anywaey passes pulth ofter pulth of these green, gamtic reedy thangs, smoking like nothing so much as plump, gigantic joints from Joënetheator, self-styled "Planet of the Pursey Joints"... ...only these were living things we were smoking, its genes engineered to a pure confection of hermeneutic intoxicality or hermenalic empoxeneumnity, & like shipped in-all-illegality out (though if it happened our "government" must have "wanted" it to "'happen,'" see), & that sumbitch just kept 'em coming, such that Isk (O Isk!  O Human Woman!) morphed into many an implicative theoretical shape dyed dead with unintelligible theological colors (see colors (more at c*l*rs) & Fraey, his conceptual poem, "Passions of an Evening") hiding behind a jolly rotund sun sunging his buffoon-blues, & I nodded & chattered ong about pretty much anything, my voice vinging in the vaguum & ringing in the raguum & zinging in the zaguum & qinging in the qaquum & in general pooping ought the many-tenigue'd polyconcentric filtration system which, in essence, kept us stoned & small. It was during these strange sessions‑‑some Nexon yuppy's conception-guppy of fun, hunhun‑‑that these two humans or humans poseurs or whautmeavners got their delicate psychic leverage anchored into me. Our drugs were perfect, by the way.  Our drugs were perfect‑‑taking no toll etc.‑‑but them there APGs were something else, filed as Something Else Filed As Something Else Filed in the watery Zyxlopoedic files (in which luminous vesh live (sentient, luminous billowy vesh in the shapes of 1) eyes, 2) symmetrical pick-up trucks, 3) golden intuitions of sighs size seighs (Each one wondering Hey‑‑am I the only sentient willowy wisp of a silent vesh?  Am I the one being punished?  Am I the consciousness regarding this all...am I?  am I?  am I? (with which trifoliar repetition of the Primary Name of God causeth our sudden-friend-vesh here, veshere F!SH*RE!, to sneeze (at which unconscious moment hushed in the story like a puppy in a box or a pupa in a boit dazhews the mind‑‑transfurred.ed .BAK to Metacessive Terminal Sector, Etheric Clean Zone Zero, thinks, ...now what's the meaning of this vesh motif, thus veshy business, this soft oracular smell of the eye-shaped moiexcuse me-fisch...aye-eee, what's the essence of diss? The vesh are what you see in these ultrarecessive, metarecursive fucking alien possession games, OK?  I mean, they dazed you & they salved you, as it whirr, with the Visions of Vesh, the Visions of Vesh, the Visions of Vesh, & the Visions of Vesh, at the ichthyrhisch of sweeming gepavicious or of sleeming epiguscious.  These words come to me & THROTTLE ME.  What can I say?  What can I do?  As follows, & to wit: ...and with a QED, the cute & sweeping little qodfisch the eternality of life within illusion, their self-consciousness the helpless consciousness of illusion, as with Ein Lucid Dräme, their helplessness part of the torture of illusion, the torture of illusion being what this andoar any oertheor noevoel is excuse meabouët. & there you have it.  Fraey giggles at the suave cadence of the cube, by which I mean the subtle, externally-viewed "light-wïmps" of the fuse of the gleam of the outer rim of the shell of the soaul-culled notions-of-an-evening APG. ASLEEP IN THE PERFECTIONS OF TIME or VIRTUALLY.AS.GLOBULAR.AS.CAN.BE. I mean: dew dripped from the stars that Night, in a cumely wight.  Vermilliowrings Inwinged at sixty-hundred grääms, which is ä Meääsurement we hääve, causing us to flinch (the Measurement, the grääm, which is causing us in Internal circumstance to fl*nch!), the sharp little Sun, more of a harsh star, really, focused on the Backs of the heaving leaves, the really leaves, Causing them to snort...I mean broil...I mean Roast heroically, & down the long brown trouls Of smog (but this was a sweet smog‑‑not like a Fart; not at all; not like your fart-smog, not at all) You heard clever mincings of some sort of Volatile Blue Liquid they have down here‑‑not Dissimilar to aforementionéd due; dew didde drippe Yes it didde from the tweaks of the tweaky bwanches Up above, prodded out like micro-bottle-mouths From the splits in the stubby trees, & yea, did These selfswame self-referential "self-bedewed" Drops keetle eer & ever lalargerger as they Fell, so that their annihiliation (in the veined Metaphringers of the eloquent but rather creepy Ground) took the form of interminable clips Dealing with your father's opium fantasies of World War I (or was it II?  or LSD? or RUM?) In which the circuits, as I recall it, of the uh Corporate Human Brain (a holly oehnd subsyllogy Of CoporRealRoach Comsiderations, Inconsolerate, which, as I enterstem-dit, "'ran' Earth") were mölt together in unhealable un Inheliumble turtured dissociation from "reality" (in Which TDFR the same lacing explosion in the Same goddam War decurs over & over again, or I should say None shannaught neseigh under and Under negain, melting as of some sort of Expalusive dew, which is a dew exploding Slowly, which is really as we PAN FUCKING BACK to PANFUCKING.BAK of a BACKPAN.FUCK of FUCK of of .FUCK ofofof The severe way the dew here, as witnessed HEREFUCKINGIN under drugs, spritz as Sie Fickennin volz von der Erde, such are the dangers Of putting up Danger Signs! around the alien Possession games I am playing with you, aren't I?), which I happen to enjoy, there being also (also) to enjoy (ignore subsequent Parentheses (pay no attention to these languages Hee) dis re guard pre seed ling Pareighntheigh-sighs) a luxty smattering of Stars‑‑all infrared & of the xeonon variety, our Stars being if you must know rather big‑‑nay, very big, almost "blague-whoughlisch," as the Frozen kids would say (more later (less earlier) Lelsasteearrmloireer)‑‑& shaped like cosmic Contact lenses, soft contacts, soft-boiled eggs of The contact lenses as of God, or Jimi Hendrix, or Prometheus, assuming that great 500-parsec EyE Eye craved some sort of supernal focus, as Fraey N' Isk n' I (& whoever else was round‑‑drug Dealers, gangsta rappas, rastafarian gods and Godlettes, dredlocked apotheosesesI can explain this one*, Crack-dealing coke smuffers, hackers, Meganurds, Trekkies, fuckheads, assholes, Dipshits, lipschmitz, hip-hoppers, hep-hopers, Hyp-hypers, crackers, kooks, kunques, and Quoonkz...all virtually.as.globular.as.can.be.) Focused on the locust gatherings of the lactal Siftings of the smarmy Nexoey stars. *dredlocked apotheoses‑‑like that Melted watch asleep in the perfections of time, Some guy too stoned to find his premise amongst The Ashes of Disrhyme. APPROXIMATELY SANE Then there was the long afternoons spent cruising the nexus for zeuns.  Let's put it this way: I cruised round, smiling like a sip which is not to say a simp into timed-hallucination, zitzing in & out of existence, while at Fraey at Fraey at Fraey just sent along this image© of himself (as in "Hi, I'm Fraey©!  I'm not the real Fraey.  I'm just an image!!!"), inside this is like huge fat lensething he was projected into.  Yuck!  He follow me along, look not like Fraey as like some large Sperm in a fetching disguise‑‑mirrory mirror terrible-miroir'd self-quotational shades, light-purple fedora, cape, longue moustachouaeugh‑‑where we would hie to the Lesser Sectors & thence to the Lezzer Vextors of the Lextor Sekkorz, to any lumix dwelling which was a type of dwelling which gloughed & which gave off vectored bubbles in the husky atmosphere that had, say, little pieces of "zeun or zeunlike material" as the manual Fraey had prepared prepadded for me sheigh. Nothing came of this till we hear the echo tell of beautiful Tuquurquium, a cratered turquoise curiosity turquoist quuriositie nestled along the nectors of the whims of the thingiest skims along the centric reels of the Oontiontric Clood.  Clööd.  Cloud. "That's awfully...far away," I say, the spermicke image of Fraey almost blotted in the center of the lense.  I shook the lense, but only little bubbles floumerdoubt. "'S OK," he said, but I was extrapolating every other syllable. "I don't think you're image will hold up I said," but he made me go anyway... {DISCON TINUITYITY} I'm not sure how we finally get here.  Is it your move?  Who just moved this clear glass piece of this clear glass piece containing me? Tuquurquium (stupid name) hadn't even bothered to get a number, much less a name.  It was only visible on those cheap, "pornographic" maps which were freckled with false planets & hallucinative zoids, whatever those are, & it consisted of dewy, overlapping tissues, Fraey very anxious‑‑since he didn't have to smell the fucking smell the fucking smell the fucking smell‑‑to have me pull up one or flaps in one of the cities & go into the Lower Forms, where he was wont to say: "We're looking for...er-irretrievable zuens," Fraey signaled to the radio-creature at the end of every tunnel. We were talking to a sort of radio-signal entity thing at the end of a billion mirrored tunnels, but you might prefer to think we were talking to a cute little shopkeeper.  We don't have any of those here.  We have these radio-tunnel-to-infinity things.  Don't get me started... Fraey was talking to the guy all right, but his visuo-spero-signuole© kept breaking up so he danced in air like some greenish-tinted vermiform spermthing‑‑a change of shape & color of no consequence to these folks, but involving an apparent change of magnitude which in this most flighty of worlds drew an admiring cloud, themselves trying to duplicate the trick, mostly by turning transparent, which mostly they could do, but no one could maintain translucence long You cannot maintian translucence long, as the rulebook chatters, what with all the rules books & guides & "promptors" they have infecting your impossible head(s) since (time)s immeemorial here much less leave a colored core to the core of their transparency (there was apparently not even a rule for this), so Fraey was regarded as some sort of Transpositional Genius, & I jopp't & waller'd at his frustration putting on a show like that & lacking the inability to stop, wanting to draw no attention to himself, yet instantly becoming nothing the WONDER of the BOULEVARD! & his voice come out a of a pugnos'd PUW Psychotically Urgent Whisper well beyond the human kearing ange, though the radio thing with his great head & yellow skin heard it all right, the bristles that served him for ears at this juncture doing a mad boogaloo in the always excessive, always effervescent, always evansescent light of KINDLE, the stimulated boulevard. I pulled like a shadow over myself & the little shopwave radiokeeper & said, in an intense whisper meant to situate itself somewhere between Fraey's unhinged whisper & something approximately sane, intense-whispered, "irretrievable zeuns.  Broken, melted, burnt ones‑‑you know." The shopkeeper went in & out of timetune severaltimes tunetime severaltunes timestune several times & said "What the hell's an 'er-irretrievable zeun'?," & then something so dismissively rational that it appeared as a golden pattern of dots igniting the head, soehting that is something like this: {PATTERN OF DOTS‑‑GOLD IF IMPOSSIBLE} But WHOA he polyped out an enormous zuccini-like thumbloid thang & arced it gracefully toward the image of a seaport glimming faintly in the tinges of the night.  I mean room.  Did I say night? Room.  I mean door.  Did I say room? Door.  Or portal.  Or slash.  Or slice. I tried to get Fraey zattention, but just as his signal was fading from us here in the packed & zeeming shitty, so he was losing his touch with us, & I wondered (losing his touch with us (& I wondered (& I wondered (his touch with us (& I wondered (losing my way as so often in parentheses) just what sort of in-between nether area he was lost in when these breaks & caesuras & discontinuities & stoppages of stoppages occured) & recoccurred) & deoccurred) again. & by the way Fraey kept blaming me for the fum xignal or the vum s?ngal or the d m X!gnal or whatever it was, the point being he kept like swatting me upsides the head till I had had had had quite a number of these here heads, curios things, & I kept hitting him back, with results more useless than ever, more frivolous than the silliest billiest drug...except they made him blurst into the blubbles at the blursting blusom of a great matronly champagne blottle from the middle ages, if you catch the flight of my drifting flight of my drift, yethir. INTERROGATION SMURK But he finally got the point, & he said, beaming just as proudly as you can (but still trying to act casual, so as not to blow the deal), "OK, I'll take the zeuns for a thousand.  The zeuns please." "Got no zeuns here, man." "Access, then.  Access to the zeuns at the places of the zeuns." "Right." So Fraey uncoils several bright, clear megalupes of most pure & potent lemp (you could tell by the smile on its face & by the Obvious Orgasms the people all around were having), a slowly enlarging, molten head of sperm proffering money to an almost equally polymorphous dude all decked in purple, though of clorse his clothes dropped off in an instant as his body gang-d'electrical with the melting feel of the ice, like palmfuls of some lissful & fulfilling ice, no doubt the most real an potent & uncut & uncuttable money the guy had ever seen, his wonted amplomb tested to its aplomombic core. "How many?" "All." "All?" in the most comlex aerial ratatat display of digital worbphorms I lying on the pavement creaming my jeans had ever redreaming seen.  He cleared his throat‑‑itself a majestic flutter of ocular dot syllables‑‑then said, "You'll have to get them out yourself." "Out of what?" said Fraey as something like feet reached in painterly eddies for the floor, staining & painting the floor. "Out..." stammered the shopkeeper, his composure gone.  He even screwed back to his racial shape, a sort of turquise lobster teeming with intelligent limbs.  Fraey had really got to him, piling all that lucid cash into the great white bowl he'd made of his palm.  "Out of the dark fissure there." And, quickly striving to regain his frolicsome gelosity, he crooked a rather mesomorphic rather-thumb toward the secret out of which room we'd just Winnowed our Wormy Way, or out which we'd Willowed our Vermin Wayof, or out of which 'd we funneled our singular channels way. "Oh," said Fraey, a doughy version of himself by now, nodding coolly & even casting me a quick glance, as if to make sure he was impressing me.  "We'll take the whole thing." The shopkeeper formed a lovely flurry of digital insects taking the shape of a sleeping galatic interrogation murk, as his faces joined like a chorus of rotting boys to formulate precise dimensions of an interrogation smurk or smurque or smerk. "I have a Vuor Reducer," Fraey said coolly, which caused almost everyone watching in this Gawky Metopolos of Watching Gawkers to disperse like a scatteration of illusory berbs.  For my part, I was shushing & fussing & fanning my hands dramatically at this foolishly fearless Fraey. He watched me in amusement for a time.  I could tell I had fulfilled some desire of his, something I hated to do & hated ten times as much the racked realization of. "You're trying to pronounce the word 'illegal,' are you Fraey?" he said, whipping the field generator like a fractionation gun & wielding it like an exsufflicate polymorphic dick.  "You worry too much." I thought maybe Fraey didn't know the nature of the penalties imposed for having‑‑much less using‑‑a reducer, not to mention the unthinkable penalties for possessing-much-less-buying a perverted zeunmuch-less a roomful of zeuns, but he had uncoiled another pulley of elation-lemp to further placate the shopkeeper, so all I could do was groan. I SAID "DISREGARD," ASSHOLE So the evening light would start buzzing like a million moths against a flattered bulb & a special saffron smell Fraey arranged would fill the air & one would eventually notice Fraey had disappeared & one was sitting alone, with only an occasional gold ball buzzing through the room, asking me how I were, I would slowly get up & walk around, eventually finding Fraey in his study which seemed to have no fixed location. I would come up behind Fraey with his doze plugged up sboking sobethig at his desk beneath his lamp inside the Vuor Reducer Vuor Reducer Vuor Reducer!!! ...inside the Golden Ray, forsooth, & become one tiny as a bug working on ones ones ones ones plan, or so I trusted, but now & then something would come over me I would just come up & stare down at him running like a bug in the crystal cube of the plan he was working on his plan, & I'd sometimes squish him !BAM! sometimes just shout HEY!, causing Fraey to hop into pieces like a dreambug, hop back into his seat, get big again, groan with some kind of orgasmic pain he'd built into the software of the process of the process of the process. He'd gump amusingingly in his seat causing the queer little glasses he to jump off his nose he too affected, whilst the little icons grew momentarily gruesome like a face in a rippling pool, & Isk just cartwheeled into a corner.  For maybe the third or fourth time in my life, I regretted my absence of social judgment.  I never felt remorse but when there were humans involved, & this suggested that one or the other of my companions was in fact human.  Isk flung a spheric incubator light right at me, then returned to Fraey, who was sending me these exaggerated rueful looks.  He even shook his head as he gathered his pad & his lumiquill back. Isk came back into the light, & quite took my breath away.  This business of cohabiting a space with (possibly) real women was almost totally new to me, & her pale, phosphorescent clothes played silk variations on her body & her skin, in many respects creating an effect better than her naked skin probly woulda.  Not that I you know. She responded to my twinging look of desire by breaking into Glassy Symmetrical Patterns‑‑an easy enough trick which I was getting tired of.  She might conceivably be as infantile as I in matters of sex.  You never could tell.  This time, my irritation knew no bounds; I was suddenly in a great rage, & could think of nothing other than punishing them both‑‑torturing them both, forever, till we all died. "We're kind of busy here," Fraey had been saying, but I heard it only on the tapes of memory, for I'd been utterly distracted with the double wash of feelings I'd had. Now I felt like a pestilent child being justly punished.  I felt as small & as awful as a squashed bug.  I wasn't sure I could get my question out now, nor that Fraey & Isk really wanted me to. I had to suppress the urge to ask them what they were ding, or even nose my way into that pretty cloud of turquoise & rosy figures the two of them were causing to dance so delicately.  I swallowed, then said, "The zeuns keep imploding on me.  I...I lose them.  I can't find them anywhere." They looked at one another & sighed simultaneouslike, & I become aware of how maniacally jealous I am  Stunned by the thought, I almost mist Fraey's reply with this special turquoise mist I have to use for misting thaeys replies. "{Sighing again}  Defuse the light aspect of your spigot." "But..." "Just do it, Cavv.  The zeuns are decoding from this space, but we can retrieve them.  It's bloody hard, so do without the lights for a while.  You'll have a harder time, but we won't lose anymore for the nonce." He turned back to his work, as if to duck away from any possible response of mine.  I'd been told to go.  Isk reformed from butterfly to woman, just to make it harder, I assume, & I began decubing my way out of the den. So two things were happening at once, like a double exposure.  Fraey was working in his cube den, & Isk was helping him, & I felt distinctly jealous.  She kept denying she was human, which I prayed was a kind of flirtation I dared not adore. RAIN TOWARD THE METAPHOR OF EARTH Thus guardedly admitting that concealed adoration, I can also secretly to YOU my FRIEND say that sometimes thought that they really felt or one might say ickily palpated the fast vapors of the vast fabres of my heart, that they creally ried (well, it could have been like tears--unlikely Prince Rupert's Drops of tears within PRDoTears within tiny liquid cryxtal tears inside of them could be seen, falling like heart-shaped turquoise rain toward the rain toward the metaphor of earth.  Certainly he was crying, the big ludden azure sonfoalug!  Certainly I was crying in my heart, though externally, so to spreeque, one had not been taught to cry.  "Crying is an earth thing," as the Book of Rare Sayings doesn't go) roo-da-boo hoo! Anyway, methought mefanci'd that these bluminous creatores like really dug or grug or drung or grunge this cute little "earth-myth" or meyatrth or emayrth, y'know, & that their patting their pads on the vacancy next to them on one of Fraey's Fleary decouchs© was a sincere invitation, come from some etheric unshapeable heart in there within there within there‑‑a feeling I could happily souse myself (albeit with many un needle de kal plein de mellifluor to hoppily swinch meself alongue) in eddying belief systems as these nexen muld their mueld with me. But it was sheets of rather tawdry, flexible metal pounded into sheets & rolled into rolls of the role of rolls.  Twas scim, twaddle, the most superciliously superevisuole druvel of what turned out to be hoilypoily rich kids skimming their own savage manners in the fucking quvetch for klincks, I mean crest for klipps.  It's in there thereabouts abousswear swearsome somewhere whereupon uponword wordquest questquvetch quvetchdrear dreardrore droeadore adorefactory factorydrivel drivelswivel swivellife lifeadore adoreadore adorelife lifeswivel swiveldruv druvgub gubbum bummer meragore, that NEGATORY WORD I'm a-lookin' frore. I mean they were stroking me like some kind of inane & velvet chicken, if I may.  I mean, they thought nothing of me (at least my study of their records of the records of their recordead thoughts has yelt me nutting), but felt good O! so briefly taking my shape & then (with a O? sigh?) letting it out, & then...sort of...murkilily merphing wit-me... The RDZ zapped Fraey instantly Fraey zapped RDZ zap to the size shape color & approximate attitude of a Voquelian sperm (!), so the quivering basterd shimmered above my right shoulder sending off the most exquisitely awful, the famous  "pink vibratos of love," so I kept wanting alternately wanting to wanting to cuff him cuff upside the upside head & head swive the living the dying daylights out of him bubbling sperm blubbering sperm blustering sperm buzzsperm. DISTALLY DISTALLY DISTALLY DISTALLY I could tell Fraey was trying to bust out of his sperm disguise, or blurt through his coerced influenza of sperm, or reconfigure his bulbous contours unto something a lot more perquisite to his personless personality, with its indents, subdepressions, incavities & voiceless black holes of long-encrusted depravity, but the milieu of the ingrown & putrefied zeuns didde keepe him in the shape it wished, which was something I'll bet he never counted on, seeing as how I was noticing as how Fraey as fucking how never counted on anything, the betrayed white little dried up splatter of sperm, the miserable lonely encrustation of Moste Anciente Cumme, the spurned haploid diplomat of the crazed euphoric Kingdom of Jysm, so he was stuck there in this image forced on him‑‑at least, that's the way I looked at it, as I, looking at in that way, compulsively & gradually adverbally incessantly gan to swatting him even more the more he gan him even more to twixting & twormering in distinctly Disgusating Spermlike Sputum way, at which he would simply break up into a chorus of smaller sperm, a veritable minigalaxy of the strangely impotent little spilt little splittly thangs, which would form a sound field round themselves bloody well remonstrate with me, at which I'd hey swishe 'em some more, only to be clouded & firmly pinned down & spreadeagled & insensately inseminated by Fraey (uck!), who would remonstrate with me & my timeless clear little baby, born dead as a bay of course, but still cute as a bug's big ear, taking after his dead father, dead you know. "Stop remonstrating with me." "Stop throwing those pots around.  Your're breaking them." "They're worthless crap, Fraey.  They're not pots.  They're not even metaphors, god damn it!  Andplus I don't think they're breaking.  They're just disappearing into the floor or that black net down there serving our Illusions as Floor, or something." "Your Illusions of Floor, bud.  I have no Delusions of Fluur.  Anyway, what you're doing‑‑what happend when you, say, throw these things against a wall as you just threw your dead baby (see below) against the imaginary Wall of Despair of wall of despair of the wall of most blue & deep hopeless fucking despair as of the despair of the Father of the Stillborn Baby, or the Stillborn Despair of the Dead Father of the Baby Smashed unto Little Babies on the Wall of His Own Despair which eh inhabited I mean inherited from his Dead Father, Despair‑‑is you're making everything way the hell too small, dad!!!" We laugh madly for several minutes, hyperventilaitng those small minutes into Mighty Hours, hyping themthere Hours unto little Eternities (that glow in the dark if you hold them up to the light for a while prior to priortizing the light you little fucker). Then, throwing my voice across the universe, I say "Er...small?" "Very very, friend.  This means you're going to have to crawl around on the floor‑‑whether it speaks to you as a floor or not‑‑with naked tweezers picking up the zeuns you'd made microscopic." "Naaa!" "Yea." "Naa‑‑why would, let's say, I go & do that?" "Proximally, because I'll pay you.  Medially, because it's in your suss (you really should have read that thing more carefully, you putz).  & distally distally distally distally because any one of those bloody nodes you reduced to bloody motes might contain the entire Family of Humankind‑‑our brothers & sisters, Cavv.  All of them.  Living in there." Like a ranting child I broke three more of them‑‑or shrunk them, I guess. "Actually, minimized them one magnitude of dimensionality," at this pointe doth * interpose with his obsequiously subservient yet somehow supercilious spermoid fascia into the most intimate tissues of the narrative, the Bucking Flighter: "Dwindledem & dwundeldumb unto mere icons of their former selves." I cursed.  May I say here that I cursed?  Yes, it's OK.  But what it is that is that which is what I may not do is actually quote me own curses.  I dast not quite quote mine owne curses in this wise, as the curses & sweaty swearwords & animadversions & the like like like have undergone considerable technical development in the time or the waves of drooling quanta or whatever the ha ha "fuck" has passed between my writing this & my downloading this into the most initmate tissues of your memory of the past, by which I mean my memroy stat of your memray stot of the past, which to say the manifestation of the phantasmic book that quotes itself like your own dead baby smashed & squalling in your smashtandsqualling arms, so to quote even one of our lessa cusses‑‑say...well, I can't, can I? Anyway, as I'm working out the logic of this thing here, before we pick up our GIANT TWEEZERS TWEEZERS FROM HELL here here, one malediction would inturn your poor sliced dimensions into a sort of self-eating inner autointoxicating worm of yourself, at which point, if your personality is big enough‑‑say, as Class A or B type classification as of Classification of Peronsality Mass, first volume, third edition, appendectomy zero complete with deadly adhesions anyway, with, say, twenty to thirty fairly well-formed, vaguely massive alters, complete, at least, say, five to seven say of them say say, & each with his or her own rather nice glorious daffodiliac yellow duds purchased at some garage sale in the Spheric Garages of Zalle) you might ill turn into a festering * in your own throng wight.  This is what I'm told see.  This is what the lyin, cussin, blasphemin goddam scientists from hell with their tweezers squeeging out the last blasts of your squishing kid, tell me, though it sounds at least as much like braggadocchio as it do no doubts seemeth to you. "No one's ever gotten into a zeun," drawled the woman (& I thought, is she changing her voices, too?). Fraey sort of half-looked back at her, then told me, "Actually, a party of suicidal Favvs got into one." "But they never got out," said Isk, moving toward me.  She was smoking one of Fraey's blue cylindars.  The energy field of the smoke made her eyes as vivid as embers, unless my head was just spinning with visions again. Their banter seemed a bit too meticulously worked out, & my face began to glisten just a little bit.  I had, as we all do, stoped time & was furiously burrowing through my heart, looking for the fear.  These two were obviously mad‑‑but I wasn't hyperventilating through the liquid corridors, I was nodding solemnly. They must have sedate dedme. This thought did calm me. "We're going to try vesh machines to send you in!" said Fraey with a vague smile that looked too crooked to be anything but human. "I beg your pardon?" "Neflicuan liquid-magnetics," said Fraey, & I was seriously dizzy now.  "You won't be trapped in the zeuns because you won't b really in the zeuns." "Though you might get wiped," said Isk with a brittle cheerity, her face as still as a nonexistent pool‑‑but I'm sure she enjoyed my reactions. SUBJUNCTIVE ITHICAL I decided--on the red jag of the compulsive instant--that this heretofore apparently circuitiously devious Vucking Vraey was totally transparent, like one of those mindful dolls I fashioned up to think & deceive for me.  My thoughts were uh "obviously being" ah "controlled" by some sort of field or something sort of something here.  He used the earthword I say the EARTHWORD "vesh" so as to connect with me, man to man, human to human, vesh to vesh, prey to prey to prey. But it wasn't going to fool me, I thought in with a thought in the thoughtform of steel indirect Leebray, approaching this most suave & beaueous machine. Well...vesh were earth creatures, our slides most primitive & jumbled.  They had rolled through our etheric nexes, you see, gathering up all dimsla microchord of miseriochorius feelings, & we few walking humans-never shifting to a more comfortable commodious opulent opulescient shape, never feeling beyond the shields from one another, possibly dissociated by clever protective runaway`machines of staetcahnology of our own as they sheen de VIZE ying, etc.--were uncertain if they had been real or mythical, or even some yet more subjunctive iffical less even reall yet even than than the thoughts in the mind of the eshadow of the snake projected on the lightcave cave-receding wall the image of the rope that was the snake projected itself in the mind of a false god within within. In our memories, vesh sounded fantastic--flying, breathing water, moving without limbs, etc., & with the zofting faces right out of a Ruebens wet cartoom.  They were quite hypnotic, quite beautiful, controlled by forces of a quantity of water yong-hour--kem, like this gorgeous machine here here... BLOOD-ELECTRONS So, "vesh-machines" it was, with me enveloped like a nephew in their wide-stemming mudvesh eyes.  It was all unhorribly alien & indethinkably writhe, what with the slimp-devices cosynchornously 1) licking me, 2) looking-at me, & 3) diarizing, in their subsumed-to-be-pulpished Porous & Most Initmate Contacts With {Me!} and with the Nef's how-shall-we-say, >negative concept< of privacy, much less intimate intervals...but, y'see, the RET-242, as she wa' swoingly lome could project my energy in the form of an ash-grey drop, falling initially through cherry-colored clouds or cloudlike things or "cloudrud phenomena," as Ret called it, breathing easily down the longs of the peins of the skins of my dormatissimus then through some neat electric smudges, then through a sort of a, well, chestnut fluster of leaves waving their unsettling heads if they was heads as if leaving in time & then "encrimsoned shadows of {one's} own blood-electrons‑‑torn electrons" (that's what she said, at's at he id) as we was practicin blood-electronix, & then through various stale yet vivid pinknessesesses, highlighting for me the Opulent Embarrass Ments-It-All, then more hoary leaves or something exactly like leaves only these were like light-leaves,  on a plane of existence wheihc felt‑‑from you understand our projective form of vu‑‑magnanamitubes larger than ours, which brings to l!ght the generally neon cast l!ght for a long long t!me... AEIGHRWHOAEGHLES I worked on the broken halos, I mean imploded zeuns... (always read imploded zeuns for broken halos) for an eternity through many a bitter ultaviolet night each night an implant in my brain (you can tell a) by the purple tinge of the neuron & b) the neuron's incomprehensible, almost tapevermiform, length c) the tiny runes scattered all across the neuron like the tattoos the naked woman saw glowing from her very own fresh & sultry flesh as she turned, obsessively, round & round amid the obsessive turning of the incomprehensible, toroid mirror, & d) you cannot tell) ...which was, wouldn't you fucking know, part of the suss I had, true to form, failed, in halting phrase, to read, or assimilate, or break the bloody halo of by which I go back to the meaning of the lie that started the events of this long story mimploded I am trying to snap out of NOW, while that bastard Fraey or possibly just an automatic image of that Fraey, hovered over me, having apparently seen advantages to that floating-sperm-in-the-brokered-halo-sky thing that had happened like a seaweed-covered thing or a gaunt thing with Slime n' Seaweed© oer his ex-ex-"face," at least within the scope of the context of the Hurling Galactoid LIE of hovering by my shoulder bugging me for‑‑back home having did I say bought absolutely the whole fucking absolute lot of hazy halos of death, as I like but am not allowed to to callem, & in any wise able to take Whatte Phorme Hee Didde Wishe‑‑he now kept his image in a somewhat arachnoid cast, so gorgeously perfect this Arachnoid Disguise the royal best amongst Fraey's Innumerabo Fameusioso Disguisiosios within the great flowing halls within halls of his Arachnoid Disguisery and so with the flowing images of a million phosphorescent, disturbing tattoos, including of course microtattoos of arachnoid scope within the metamegauniverse of the arachnoid simulacrum he, uh, kept himself in‑‑at least while was, as the kids in the hood say, motherfucking bugging me... So perfect was it, I say or was saying & am in a sense either trying yet again to say or am starting afresh like the woman's sultry flesh you WILL RECALL, that I took it (him) for a real spider floating there, an actual if hallucinatory-I-will-work-on-the-ontology-of-that beautiful great lusty spider floating in the usual Hallucinatory Ribbons of Color olor olor there just always over the leftish of my leftward shoulder, see, breathing through his arachnid aeighrwhoaeghles (excuse me) onto my flesh, the which flesh or Whichflesh had been rendered‑‑tinctured, actually‑‑hypersensitive as per that bloody suss I'm naught taughking abaought. This didn't help, but I worked away, following the technique for human detection I am sussed not to mention neurally implanted to shut my yap re the Technoid Detailery Of, on stinking zeun after zeun‑‑& often as not zeun within zeun‑‑looking for humans. It was, or twas, like looking for diamonds within turds, but of course I'd signed the suss somewhere along the long lost line of lies within the great flowing Linery of Lies so I just nosed my way on in, that gigantic jeweler's spigot literally fuzéd to Mine Eye & the hum of the ultraviolence & the violence of the distant whispering sirens & the silence of the dead zeuns, all dead, no life anywhere, nothing but dead after dead, & generally dead within dead, along the Infinite Lines of Eternity my Poor Implicated Neurons put me through through the Variegated Eternities of these Endless Purple Nights™. With a hum & adust in the air, & my tiny jewels I mean tools‑‑my tiny tewels clickering, clickering click ur Ing... THE NHITZ-THOUGHT There are no humans in the zeuns, I thought & thought.  I thought that thought whilst roaming veshlike through the disgusting, deviant, fetishistic, pervoWorlds of the zeuns, retching, raunching & rheuming, disgusted beyond the very repulsif voltage of gusdustedness.  & the aforeaverréd thought (No Humans In the Zeuns) grew fat enough & massynough to start ahavn' its own damned thoughts‑‑which happens here‑‑& Fraeyz just humiliating me, the NHITZ-thought thought, like making me eat vast quantities of shit, etc. The thought got xo xolid I the Old Reliable Narrator of Stargarden made a vast illuminated tri=trimentinal tsign saying {There Are NO HUMANS in the Zeuns} that floated oer the guts of the desolate, ultra-ignominous, eviscerated, & completely unhumaniatated buxtup extozeuns.  I wore shirts with the thought emblazoned, as we say, upon it, such that several artephobes didde lose their Sighte upon viewing it, & I quickly became a paraih round the house, in my vesh-costume which I never neer tookough, muttering The Thought to myself, mad, humiliated, utterly addicted to that sweet flow of lemp melting into the insensible metastatements of my account. Whunch unchpong I felt a Great Black Bite right out of my stash, & I fell for several long & urping hours on the floor, with its manifuolgue exlimpoid zeuniosch stenches I was forc'd‑‑by this sudden, legal withdrawal by my Unhappy Emplyer (Fraey!)‑‑to nuzzle my cum-spooting schnozz right inzz zz zzz... (Yuck, huh?) So, thus darkened & depressed, I had to change clothes, you know‑‑clean up a bit, dontchyanough...and present myself, as summoned, to the Boss.  The house sniffed haughtily, ass-wash-it-swont, as I shuffled in, to the big guy's orifice I mean awfulips I mean... Well, Fraey was in some sort of Bruce Springsteen head or face or mask.  I'm not sure if it was virtual or organic, nor did I try to touch it.  I think it was a mask, because he still sounded like Fraey & moved just like Fraey.  I guess it was Fraey wearing the sort of perfect illusion mask they have only in science fiction & dreams. So Bruce looked unhappy, let us say.  Let me dephrase that‑‑unhappy is only the gry off the fingernail of What Fraey Looked. Then he pulled off his silly mask & pulled me from the little drillpore of the zeun I'd been "in" before my molecules had dried out & come to their senses, their little molecular senses, so I stretched like a dripping wet rag, only it was in quurled veins like a wringéd cloth, only the cloth was a great bundle of germs, I mean nerves, perhaps dripping with germic pus, at the rusk of gisdusting you, only I just kept stretching like a long soliloquy, only it was a piece of gum, only it was a long grandiloquent Period of Disgust ol' Fraey was achewin' at me, only it was a thought stretched to the breaking point, only it was a bubble brast to the blink of the word unhappy. "You're not finding anything," he said, low, not shouting, but with commas of doubt indicating quantities of rage penetrating every rave of the everywave.  "You're just goofing off, just having fun down there." What could I, having no mouth, say?  I felt undervalued & bewildered.  I noticed he sputtered into incomprehensible rages, almost per les wwetched wwatchets of a cwockvewk'd cwock, so he might be some sort of Defective SimuHuman™.  I wondered if the plaanlaxx had any data on that. Later, when I'd put myself together & some clothes had been glued to me, later I said, "We just don't have the right zeuns," trying to say it just like he'd just done. For he'd had one of his reversals of mood (prerogative of the rich man!) & apologized, & stroked & patted me till I just about busted him.  But I didn't (bustim); I was making good money...I could feel it. "I wanted to think I had all the zeuns," he sort of wailed, only he was speaking calmly & ludicdly‑‑except, as spun along the lightrails of a kal-pang'd dream, there was wailing somewhere in there. ZOOM IN on the FACE of a FRIGHTENING FRAEY. FRAEY: There must be...more zeuns somewhere. SWISH-PAN to ME. ME: But...where? We had a good long cry, I'll tell you that‑‑me & Fraey & Isk & all the charming, dwarvesh artephobes they'd thrown together to assist me.  We sat holding our heads in that slaughtered lab, with the sap & the microscopic corpuses flowing just below our ankles across the floor, Fraey too broken up even to flip whatever antique switch he used or antigue light wavebells or swingbeacons or thought-clappers he must have had to neaten the place up instantly. FIVE IRONIC THINGS We had overworked hysterically, reached out only to clutch a ZeroCup containing {absolute vacuum @ minus zero}.  Now we were forced by the laws of psychorepurcission to remember Five Ironic Things. 1) I remember Isk raising delicate handfuls of goo to the arching overhead lights, letting it slide most enticingly down the mirrored limits of her projected arms. 2) I recall Fray crawling on hands & knees, looking like the comic book of the dead man's face melting to the all-knowing noncaring faces of death we saw in the Detail One having dipped his face into the zeuny pudding, howling like an overripening queen, thrust forthwith to her death, screaming at halfspeed in the rush of her denial her demise. 3)  I remember Quodof the artephobe beating his breast, crushing out his aretephonic breath, crunching the beautiful husk of his chest & smoking out amongst elaborately & beautifully eviscerated star gardens, each one a universe, each one the title of a book, each title the same, StarGarden, yatta-yatta, but each & every one & all dying & buried in & around & about a different & spectacular grossy way & mean mean way. 4) I caught little Yeb as she hurled herself at me. 5) I did even more spectacular things, but they are not currently available, they are locked in the storehouse of time, they are hung too high to see dans le Lovely Louvre des Metaphors Mixé, they are being cleaned.  My memories are being cleaned.  We do that here. Big deal, huh?  Nothing ironic aboutem, right?  What the fuck, right? "126 out of 183 goddam zeuns, caught in the ancient net of zeuns, & no humans in them!" wailed a gurgling, disgusting, barenaked Fraey on his back all beetled in the fray, only he said it in one oer-packed super-Nexo word. My memories came back in the mail today, all cleaned except for the fingerprints of God all over them, so it was that it was bright, refreshed memories in the form of 18-year-old girls that made Fraey sparkle as he protracted up from the goop in his favorite form, the wise old man still potent enough to kick your ass, only he was really stretching it now.  You could see through him, like a window into a past too beautiful to see without that window carried in front of you as you walk through the garden in ever-dwindling wanes of the introjected flying window planes. OK.  Fraey likes to do this‑‑snap himself into some alien mode while you struggle with the bag against what's left of against what's left of the squeaky-cleean memory of your face.  He strode to the sleeping eye which in this version of the branches of time time time served as a door.  The opened & he turned (not easy, not spontaneously, of course. Enter his director, Bob, dressed like a klutzy rock star in some ridiculously white sort of ill-fitting jumpsuit thing, had to take that move again & again, while we stood mute with our brains not functioning, in the stillness of flesh between moments of consciousness, unable to heave the big sighs we felt breaking our fucking hearts inside nor roll our closéd eyes like the black woman born in disguises of white surprise.  It took 52 takes, & then Bob runs him down another 52, back to the first one‑‑you know, so he could GET it on the FIRST uh TAKE, & said: "You all disgust me," & moved through the irised out iris of the rhyming eye of a door. "Shape-changers disgust me," I murmured, which was not the thing to say in the Nexo sector.  They'll do you a formaxxe involuntiare for that.  & I'd forgot Fraey had an Unforgettable Self-Referential MurmurGarner© & heard it with the same lucid crystilization my memories had for a minute after they'd been hung up once again, to high to perceive. "It is your job, Mr. Emptore‑‑like that's a real name‑‑to find those zeuns stat." It IS SO a real name I thought, forgetting Fraey's PenseVigilator©. But he said nothing & I stopped thinking & we were cried out, & thus endeth the Scene. THE SCRYING OF DESCRAY I began feeling less than nervous less nervous around Fraey (half my nerves I later learned from the placement of my nerves in a jar next to my bed having been removed in my exsufflicance of sleep©), & then my feelings zizzed down the black spiral staircase, known for hitting you with stuff you never rexpected (& I say ne'er espected with ultragrading care in the increasingly gnitty picking out of phrases so right that they rightly wiped out the existence of any Phrases of Memory that ‑‑like the clear membraineoush <Tischschues of Bemberayeaitae>‑‑ had the falling-out & the falling-gout gall to try to faintly phaze their little magic temeority, not to mention the obscene twern "similarity" (which I by the by say with the sane insane impugnity I say the phrase I am out side the glass to attempt-ying to describe yingying the scrying of descay), which is a phrase I would take but Bending-Over Money to say (which is the money you take to bend over-but & gaspingly "say," i.e., the trying of to say), & anyway, as I was in the predigestment singals of rebought to saigh, & I began not only being calm around Fraey, no longer in my great zitz of pain about this Fraey, but to even not get up when he came into the room, & turned the turned the complications down omplication ow mplicato plicat lica ic-ic so it was was like we were living in this creator-clear crystal cave of our vaguely-manifextes maginary ancestors, which is a thing have I said that Fray would dew, I would not even get up, not even step out of my cliothes into underwear I MEAN INTO MY CLOTHES FROM MY UNDERWEAR, the slm-stept down not even take my fingers from the waistband of my tight sub-bikini'd suntanned well-tannéd cheeky briefs & farting with my legs langed this or either way oe-that, and then even in essence to take thesence & the essent-presence of this Frayey Dude to take this "Fraey" for granted, to the point of gnaught even noticing him, & having to be but blared righteous into mine ear to take my notice ofhim, so grey he had become. Donning my capillariously bluffed red spex of respectroshé, I can perhaps now say this bothered him, & was not the relationship he orignall planned.  But, pulling of thoses complicated past-enahcning-the-punkt-of-burning insanity devices from my eyes along with my putty-be-falling ears, I cannot say. SHAPELESS SYNDICATES IN TIME or LADIES OF CONSUMMATE IMAGERY I turned the controls down to simplicity, because I was tired of creaming my jeans oer the UNH! sexual imagery & going off into flights of fantasy with Ladies of Consummate Imagery swaddled round my neck & reeking of fear for the scarey stuff‑‑which Fraey most unbecoming lyliked‑‑& the lying stuff, & the stuff that manipulated not only my perceptions but my genes, & also because I was sick & tired of describing the stuff.  I mean, I could never get from A to B, what with B obtaining forms of psychic purity down incircling snailshell spirals of introversion, etc.  Words were wounding me here, & I had reports to write. See, I never hired out to just one glistening globbet of sentient mercury at a time, nor to only one shapeless syndicates in time, when I could hire usually three, or sometimes more, & get a much larger bundle to fundle my own hom-procurment proposition, which involved cloning women of gene-variant mutations hie & huffenoughable to allow me to single-penidally fuck a good restart for the species (what though they might, just outside the kleing lights of imagination, be abounding something teemable) & then some males with genes reamed quite asunder from mine, to solve the old Inbreeding Symdrome Problems so oft beweeviling attempts by survivors lone & dying to rebuffet oer buffet their species lame & gone. This would take more cash than I was even suffered to dream about, much less establish as they say "a drool of credit," so I worked these jobs against one another. I was, for example, writing a study & an expose‑‑a scientific report on Fraey by the Econobiometrical Matrix of the Sun & a sleazy expose in endoscripmt form for the Nexo Daily Undeamt Sundreament & gathering evidence for a group of lawyers who preffered as lawyers to to be both unnamed & nothing but these vaguely beaming coils of grey who had some vast legal connivance underway which would change a lot "the way the wealth war bailed," as they ac-tu-ly did say, despite my attempts to kill them, which would have blown my other deal by the Committee Central of Assassins to kill these lawyers soon as I was through & the truth was underway (& say‑‑that'llbe the day!), as well as a number of mumbling under scrimpts wonderweigh. Somewhere in there, I was probably the fantabulous rich me hiring myself in the nexus of the poor past selves to be all these subliminal facts of the crystalline future mae. DIED BETIDE I believe that, while I wore torch-blue purple tights fit neatly roung my roundisch caves & cavisch oer the bright globo-cavvo of my head, complete with hypersilken mipermilpencape & the famous superheroes' Boots of Truth too many have died for to descry or mayhap many may hap to've died betide, when I eased that mercurical dial around or ardouinald which means I am NOT a word! I was probably hoping behind the curtain of my lines more fragile than the poplin oer my butt that turning down the now-cowed Fraey's conspicuous celusion or denlipicuous conswoozion not to mention Allround Aesthetic Diffusion would turn down the complexity of emotions, which were as it were bouncing it were from one baffled mirror to the nextitwhirr, but to no avail. Looked like it sordid quash Isk's multifarious hollow enigmas of costumery‑‑she possibly felt it inprapos to be a hundred-dimensional swangruned pulabusserfly plying after all the ruins of the once-magnificent house, which now looked like nothing other than a flat looking between the flat you just moved out of & the afterflat you want to move out of. "You could turn it back up anytime," she said, approaching me as a loompid Parallean Plaenallel Jaen, "but no one here has the will." I nodded, pursing my lips like my dad's (don't quusch my ornamental bubble, please; it took all the drugs of Nexo to construct this manly guy, rife with prerivatives of every one of my) assconfident holeface. "You might say that," my dad & I chorused in a respectable perfection of lips. Isk.  Now Isk.  The real image of Isk, which was more than I'd dared surmise, was not very pretty, guys‑‑not well built from the view on tumid testosterone hill, not particularly nor even remotely symmetrical by the hone-dead deathcone Standards of Symmetrico developed in life & applied geometric chromozomery over swiftly counted millennia (they go so fast, which mean we having fun but) no, & a bit short & with a Questionable Complexion (the lights may have been a legally applied injunction of some lost court in the elderly immortal yellow-paper depths of law or deaths of la), wearing what I bet were her self-cleaning, flumsy, comfory clothes. But complications remained.  No one had turned their bloody knob douwndown.  I felt like mountingher & worshipping her (right afterwards) on the spot.  I was every bit as much the cluck as ere. But may that as it maybe war, she was right.  Soon after entering the mogul's millifractory demoan, I'd inserted implants donated from me by the strange polyharmonic organization of Dovry, Prilz, & Gnash (legal?  some sort of Nexiomaniac gang?  Dunno...) in their so-called "Flowers of the Apresmidi of Tea," which had as we had seen gradually had rehaduced their wills had wills to those of a child.  A six year old child.  Make that a three-year-old child.  Do I hear two-year-old child?  Do I hear two-and-a-half irrelevant the Texts of Child?  Three-year old child dying one, dying twice, SOLD! to the grandmaster flash cashing in the dry-shredded infancies of his life.  I was paid handsomely for this act, & would likely be able to "remove" (as the Kiss-faces of DP&G like to said or red) all the lovely swoing zeuns from the house in this flip of the slow-flipping cards of the flipping house. Isk knew that.  She was as usual trying to mold me, & having more success than the woman qua woman could gream sa bream.  I gathered, my heart apump with my gathering love or my love gathering its essences for storm, she wanted in on one of the deals.  I smiled, with my hard-one fatherly confidence agun. "This is my star garden," Fraey said, sounding suddenly like an overamplified tour guide.  I must remember to ask him how he does those things with his voice "You're{copulatives inserted} so consummate!"  Fraey would braey, extending his generally his tiny bride's arms to me from a Generally Absurdly Great Distance, as if I were his sweet bride in my ectoplasmic white white negligee rising to the pressure pint of my groin as I ran‑‑not in reality which we reality we left behind relity some long long time ago nut in this little metamythic phantasmagoria for two I am trying for your understanding of our responsibility & perhaps inexactly but at least inexactly tell you why I came at his call not to mention taking his bloody jobs‑‑to weave for you here. "You are the impeccable image of man," Fraey would say, which I assure you was nothing unusual for him to say.  It was well knowm, not to metion well-established, not to mention pinned impositionally into the tissues of the woundedwounded once-enclavéd earth, that Freaydeayleayeans had gone craxy on the brainspace for dedicated verbal bytes, & the phrase brainspace for dedicated verbal bytes is not phrase I just throw ow toss around, as I do, sa,y, with the phrases "hollowed out to loony toruses" or "a staggering zenith of failure" or "entranced with the wonders of my cool suit," which I have throttled to death as I do my throughts & dreams (that's wh yand this, too, is why dead thoughts & dead dreams lie scattered behind me,w which is another phrase I never try to kill but just let him lie there, once used & utterly vital, like the eternal ghost of that parasote who goes with you down the white swirls at the end of time. We talk about the end of time round here, but we know nothing of it, time travel being a felony in the law sof physics round these broken dead & wounded parts right here. Anyway, I don't know if Fraey was trying to manipulate me in some fulsome, alien way, or if he really thought I was the greatest thing in the world.  He would take me for walks no his estate and‑‑even if the bent turquoise lighting of his endless gardens didn't do the job‑‑blind me with praise. MEAN TRICKS WITH MICROTIME Yea, there were these others there, but I could like tell they existed on a subordinate level, in the same way you can tell‑‑I can tell anyway‑‑half the creatures of your dreams my dreams anyway exist onet cetera, & I had to keep explaining to these little critters, foolish & simple & insipid and, often as not, dressed in bright green little tights, that beyond the reflective firmament was this bastard Fraey's living room, where even as I spake he might in slow motion be showing someone his star garden, with us prisoners unable to hold still long enough to be seen.  Bloody mean tricks with microtime. They didn't listen to me, but rather chased me awound in the manner of demented childrien, perverted childrien‑‑the kind who would force you to commit acts of ecstasy.   I remember trying to climb some glazy sort of tree, with the kids‑‑whose small bodies gave me a perpetual & agonizing boner‑‑ringing the tree & hacking at its base with some srot of light tool, & I knew when I fell 1) my back would snap, & 2) they would chomp at me.  My flesh would be eaten in this dithering wilderness leaving only this sentient & impotent skull‑‑the kiddies having long since carried off the bones to join with their silver singing sand‑‑& I panicked, reaching a huge leg down & kicking off the face of Ainsk, that most lovely of the children, the little female, the svelte piece of unripe fruit that was, let's face it, giving me that boner all the time. Her face flew away like the tock of a leveraged watch, & the rest of her head shattered‑‑smoothly, with obvciously digital calculation...disgustingly, whereupon I was myself again, crouching in Fraey's dark living room, with a lot of popping & pulsing, as of a guttering bulb, sparping from the zeun. Through simple murder, I'd made myself large again (except for my heart, forever in its unholy husk of noteless measureless unreemembered guilt).  Fraey was afluor in the arching beaocns of his chair, & I made myself quite huge, marching to Fraey & lifting his little artse wholly & archfully up. More shtick ensues.  He begins to change shapes, becoming first one bristling monster then another, sweeping transfiguring form, color, even heat, so I find myself holding a wriggling ant, a cobra, a crimson butterfly, a sort of snaggle-toothed dinosaur thing, & a mucoid slug, as if he hoped to trick me into letting him go. Trying to sound grave, I offer to kill him. "Hey, Cavv‑‑little joke," he chatters, & if he isn't truly terrified, he be the bextox axtor in the Nex.  "Little initiation into the club, pal.  You p-p-pa-pa-as-as-ss-ss-se-se-ed-ed, good buddy!  You're uh one of us now!" Really, my only hate in the warm light of the room‑‑which seemed so comfy & hypercivized‑‑was just how quickly those pseudo-years fade.  I put him down. "I'm gonna skin you alive," I said, but in tones of the archives of plonkingly. "Bu-but I know where all the people are!" he said, becoming more or less like me, but with a wide, yellow, stretched-out, idiotically grinning face. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NERDY UNIVERSE Fraey's little velvet curtain‑‑too insanely detailed to describe & too beautiful to touch‑‑parted to a great vortexian flush of horrendous operatic spires, highly symbolic, & all beprigged as they say "Alle Be Prig'd" with its own outstanding dissimilar gatecurtain epoch crashing self-importance to reveal...a tiny collection of fuzzy lights, like a three-dimensional wash of uncertain (& definitely unfinished) brushstrokes stroking themselves in the vaguely brave, underdone stillborn sfumato waver off the top of the head of the imspertim aertis I mean uncertain artist of an illborn Chrixmyx twee.  They floated...maybe like mishy galaxies?...with a definite relationship to one another that no one could possibly understand. "What the hell's that?" I say, though I already know. "Those are the two things you feel about the Vuor Reducer," replies Fraey in his freayey fey waey, "You say, 'What's that?,' or dwerbs to that enfleck, but you know that you know already know what it is, & you know you that they're set up in wonderous ways no one could possibly understand." It was a Vuor Reducer‑‑a machine that, at least in the presence of the machine, albeit not in casual conversations by the quiet, quite metallic, metallicly liquid liquidly trickling trickling deathpools trickling liquidly metallic quite quietly ascare in the sunless megastarr'd rimescarred outer endocrafts of the Nexo superband of sparsludded galaxies, needs know endoduction, as it perforce supplies re id the swame. So Isk & I got to exchange a glance, which, given the powerfully vectored woman's professional facade that had me so painfully caught up‑‑passion-skinned if you will, or if you won't, passionskimm'd, turned my heart into scudding shards of butter spreading its carbuncular skiddles riddling their nerdy way across a huge but, let's face it, virtually infinite universe. You must remember I said none of this. Anyway, we got to exchange a Divine Knowing Glance, in which she was whiter than she'd ever been, except when I was flt out in that bar, or that night she came qua succubus & hunder'd me, & other times when somebody possible (possibly Nobody, (Nobody, a legitimate (legitimate character) character) character in this play) play stopped timea n  y   w    a     y     !.  & the glance said, It Shrinks Things.  It Shrinks Everything.  Impossible Machine Built By The Vuor. "Who are the Vuor?" we choruised, & I am working on the lethal dubloh dubloh dublohplay which will express the swimmingly neuronlike acid dacne we did do when that great gobly chorus cum cum cum. Fraey of course he fraeyacourshee shruds.  "A distant, impossible race," he reiply, & I can see the Forever Record's on, so he thinks this is important, biographical material that someday (soon) schoolswoonchildren'll beforce reforced to immerse-un too, as a portion of their divine education re the lives of the unregarding great grade Men from Hell.  Such as Fraey here. "Anyway, Cavv‑‑this will get you into those old toxic zeuns." "No pox!  I'd die in there!" Fraey raises a finger he almost never raises‑‑in fact, he never raised it, even in this emotive momentive in the story, which has been erased, or rather not-ised, or rather {bracketed} unto never-was. "We have a suit," he said. I become a very large child, a V.L. six-year0old child, a V.L.S.Y.O.C. clapping him hambs & gymping roun whiff gleay. "A suit?" I cry (& Isk goes black on me, disgusted I daresay, this being the dark dublohplay I would never dare to play or write nor conceive nor tell you about in this {brackedead} moanmeant he!re). Fraey now knows he's got me with such intensity that he doesn't even need to smile.  He doesn't need to do anything.  Out comes the monstrous suit‑‑& even our haughty * dinna can help but at least trn grey, a little bit lighter, to see this jemwammy thang... EQUIPPED FOR INDULGENCE My friend Moady filled the egg-refraction light to kaleidoscopic fur or green clouds or steam headed right for your eyes (those were his favorites), & we exchanged greetings in a nimber or numbous of complicated ways Nexo had developed (or been forced into by the panels of black we call the government), & we enjoyed these immensely, for Moady truly was my friend, one of the Lone Aliens from Afar, in the same band as myself for many years, till he broke with the band to develop creative projects of his own‑‑such as this fancy Lab of the Cutting Edge, though in his pinkness & wooliness he war afar from human from afar.  We had been tested for two years to propel us into "citizenzip in the Nexor," as they proudly called it as they caused verious tight beakers of a scriptious sort of glass to form around us & had little light feelers enter our guts (which tickled you to the point of death) & blew up our brains into gigantic holographs, at which they took notes on their Woody Anachronistic Notepads, taking notes & glaring purposefully about right in my brain (& I could feel them in there, so we know don't we no that this was one of those two-way holographs only the government had (the government indulging if it was equipped for indulgence in the hoarding of technology, hurling unlucky inventors into unlucky zazzers of torment for a time, after which there was no memory of the work, much less inclination to pursue the work, much much less the abilitoes to 1) dilate their pupils, 2) love their daughter, & 3) laugh at the multiply redundant exasperations forever piquing & irking & pirking & iquing their unquoted lives) & doing many a cruel thing, in the vast stone forms of the bearded mythic *s of extraction & implantation, making us over with featsome radical diligence, wherein we were even given choices once in a while, with responses that could not possibly have been any other waythan the superordinate respnse we gave, which they in subordinate spaces of their minds, if that's how they operateknew quite well), so we knew the government was doing this & that the creatures working on us had not a clue (for we'd both in subsequence of goddamned dawn vivisected many of them & found not the flutter of awareness as in life's ghostly moth flying out your nose & into someone else's brain assuming there were someone else other than else your brain), & after Moady n' I'd pleasured ourselves (with Isk claved firmly to my shoulder in the form of a blue-headed doudoubleble Tanfazhian quern & sighing interxaspermitently), I put back on my clothes & got back into action. Here I could do things like wince & turn my head, so I "did the duo" as the kids in Nowherelan say, as digits formed in me acutely awful images of a deal falling through‑‑through betrayal, I might add, which was rare, since I always arrange to arrange to have call in a favor & have someone torture them, or do it myself, time & wheels permitted I mean ing, & Moady just laughed, since he had advanced set-ups here the best since this side of the government collapsed into the world I have been verblessly rehearsing here. Moady's busy, but one of his many armthings points sternly to the sign saying NO VERBLESS REHEARSING HERE so I stopped the writing of this novel till reality shifted around, which it never did yet ever does... And, deal done, Moady breaks nowe the Egge, oute of whiche doth Lighte below, as the succulent pudding of an Egge indeede doth indeed doff flowe, & out doth ooze ande oozeth doth the many & sundri'd Ministrations of Defraction having proved for our secrecy, secrecy itself being a moste well-knowne Thinge in this Nexo Sector. & with the pull of the cape & a whiffle timewarp, we stood in the endless glass dodge endlessly diminishing de chirrico light of the mirrors of the lights of this infamous yet somehow ill-lit Labactory, the tunnels of concentric selves going on forever like a hopleles roundel toon except for the bulbush of occasional eggs (in which as here, moste secret "discussions" wander on, some of them in quickie-time, the young scientists coming out white as your erstwhile teeth quoting themselves, as teeth will will, but gedding it rong, doddering, toothy ol' Fooles...)... Moady's tiny glance at Isk indicated (only to me, only after hundreds of careful replay & digital enhancements, only after quite a number of swinges upside me head, only then & only after then...) he wanted just me around. "C'mere," he whispered, creating a cloak the microcosm of the coak of the world of the laboratory at surrounded us.  "In here, Cavv.  Excuse us, Ms. Isk," & in we went, but I already figure this dame had slipped her own way in.  That version of her perched upon the counter, cross-legged in its blue knits, was sitting suspiciously still, let me tell you.  Suspiciously still.  She's probably a microbe,  in here with us now," I thought‑‑but, & here's the important part, I didn't care. "I'm about to tap into some money," he said, his breath changing the atmosphere of the place, figging in pointless pointilistic enfact the whole delusion of the secret lil cocoon.  "Big, big money.  More than you can ever believe." "You're hacking in to someone's money supply?" "Close, Cavv.  Close enough.  & I have a job for you.  I mean, now that I can pay you."  & he looked my sheepish Moady for a while.  Then he faded to this pink dude taking himself very seriously indeed. "I'll pay you ten times what Fraey's apaying you." I couldn't believe he said apaying.  He must really be on to something... "I'm listening," I said.  But how could anyone pay me that much?  Then it hit me.  I jumped up & down, rustling the bag of the space of the air of the bag, pointing delightedly at him. "You've tapped in to Fraey's stash!  You're hiring me away from Fraey on the basis of his own purloined paey!" Moady blinked or rather blinged in his own cat way, but he had only ghosts of expression. "Yes & no‑‑I'll give you that much," he drawled.  "But mostly no.  Anyway, I want you to..." & he muttered his plan into my ear, even though the human ear is generally if not universally regarded as the most godawful ugly thang in the worlds by your great Nexonians, your Nexonian moyen sensuelle, if you will (though it is though quite sexy by the grimacing little fleshy wrinkwroeughs, who will so help me mount your ear as quick as anything;  even muffs don't help‑‑our ears give off some sort of pheromones; I stay very clear of Wrinkwroeugh, though they are known sometimes to chase me through the Ant Zones with their ships).  He really wanted it to be secret.  So close did his ploady little lips come, so hished wash hish whishper, that I cannot even now include his plan in the narrative of the plan of the narrative of the narrative of the (upcoming) plan. This makes me reasonably sure that Isk, if she were there, could not hear, though one never knew about Isk, who smiled noncomitally at my wet ear, as Moadied foamed forth a great froth of childhood memories, most of them even horsier chimeras than your "normal" childhood delusium. He also handed me a weapon {a vildevidier‑‑in between {so she couldn't (you know) see it} paragraphs‑‑so I could peel down the tycoon's many shields}, which weapon, heretoafter to be known as the vildevidier to be whipped out below. "Well, it's settled then," ahemoademhemmed.  "We'll see you in Xenebriffe.  Ask your lady along too.  We'll do a few inhalations of Zenibine & watch the sprinset there."  Then he made a squelched squawking sound with his mouth, which was a species thing.  Isk & I nodded & made equally peculiar fist pokes in the air.  In my case this was a human-gene-thene, in her case, mere mockery. Moady kept a zazz up, a zaxx & chap & a natter, obviously quite full of the money he was about to steal. THE QUOTES AROUND "MURDER" The little fellow must be quite confident of himself, I thought, only half trying to fool my impostrious consort.  The penalty for theft was, I was certain, twenty years of torture & then sever wiping‑‑or was it twenty sever wipes & a year of torture?  Something so bad none of us could think about it. As for "murdering" Fraey, which was the way I read my little friend's calculations‑‑seven wipes & seven sequential lives of poverty, i.e., depression.  Seven endless Nexon lifetimes filled with blackness & lying about in the shape of the black curvestones, losingh consciousness, wondering why, losing consciousness again‑‑again & again.  Then a wipe, spectered youth & the same poor cycle, then again, etc. But I was going to do it.  I like to think I was foolhardy, swahsbucking, whatever...but really, Fraey had affected me that way.  I wanted to "murder" & dissect Fraey, is what I wanted.  They said you couldn't "murder" anyone, at least without the quotes, which is why they had the quotes around "murder," but I was going to try.  I glanced a hooded slit of a sidelong glance of a hooded slit at the girl beside me, walking along calmly, blue but without disguise.  Maybe I would murder her too‑‑for no reason. That oughta get me wiped forever! WIPED FOREVER He knew something was up the instant we returned.  There was the slightest pause‑‑quite voluntary, I'm sure, so sure am I sure this sureguy was of himself asself assure sured‑‑as he adjusted the three small suns he had stationed round his prize star garden, le zeun des fleurs. "Ah!" he said, wiping the tips of the fingers of the sunproof gloves he was wearing.  "Your little friend was full of ideas, I suppose?" Now I knew he knew.  He had spies everywhere.  For Fraey, the very airs were spies, & I glanced (involuntarily, I assure you) at Isk, who was smirking now like a lady in blue shoulderpads, lighting one cigarette after another with ritualistic ferver, then causing them to hitch off the edge of consciousness, perched on Fraey's moldy laptype desktop obelisque or alienlike Mayan crystal skull or whatgnaught. Her rule was simple: if you needed help, she was not there.  Kind of like my implanted family back on earth. Kind of like heartbreak.  Kind of like nothing. "Yea‑‑he was all right," I said, my voice with the inane, moribund echo I realized then they'd gave to me.  "He was...fine." Fraey pulled off his sungluz‑‑dig it: Fraey pulls off his sung gluvs!‑‑& plopped them down next to that zeun of the exotic flowers.  Just the microscompic glean of those romantic little thangs all but drove us all insane, & I uh noticed, as it were (metaphorically "noticed, 'as it "were"'") that he didn't chuck the hood over zeun n suns. He wanted this scene to be mad. Without glancing toward Isk, he says, "Did you enjoy your little jaunt, my little dear?" at which Isk‑‑not so prone nas eye to falling into Fraey his labile traps of asininity‑‑simply hithth more on her thigarette, or whatever it wath. "My star garden is in full delirium," he said.  "I suggest we all shrink down & have dinner there." Isk's hissing stopped stop.  It was time for my "move" stop.  Fraey had set me up in his usual prime fashion stop fashion stop stop.  Words stop stopped.  I hesitated pause then fumbled for the vildevidier pause while all pauses stop. "I wouldn't...try anything, if I were you," cautioned Fraey, not so much waggling as sashaying his forefinger side to side to side. "Your moronic friend has mutant ideas about his competence.  Believe me, Cavv, I've had the little foundling checked out thoroughly, & he absolutely does NOT measure UP." I had my paw on the vildevidier now. Fraey shakes his head sadly, sad at the tenses of the shifts all the timeless time. "Besides, he's not a fucking HUMAN," he went on in his (expensive) stately emphaseif.  "Your vil-thing won't work‑‑I'm way too shielded up‑‑& you've got to stick with the program...stick with me, Cavv." "That was very moving," I said, with less irony than you can ooze into the oil-nip of a Slandorian sluglet.  I fired. Well, you could see that Moady's unit (Moady's unit!) undid shields, per the ads floating through the preconscious limitations of one's owne translucient Browe.  But, by the same unspoken token, you could see Fraey had many a many shield, shields within shields, shield without end, amen, as it wore...  THE GARDEN OF THE CONCEPTION OF THE FINDING OF ESSENFICTIONS But it was too late to back off.  Besides, methought I smelt Isk her pheromoans hissing whiffme in the blackgrund, so with Tumid Process did I presse me on.  It is a long & ugly story, the story of how we...all right, how I...peeled my boss apart, buffer by buffer & screen upon screen, to his barenaked vulnerable humanness.  It took in fact ten geometrically sophisticated, exponentially expensive vildevidier before we could get past Fraey's shields even to the point of inducing a little twitch.  But that twitch spread buby through his boddly, till he was a mere mash of froth from one to dither, more specifically, for me to thither.  I felt my money go up, & I became the very sweet & pink gentleman, fashioned by all the paper ladies in the circulating so revolving show. So it was that I rather gently, & with shocking tears in my eyes, spool-dupt his remains & placed one corner of them in the bocamaw of the Vuor Reducer, & here is where we find out if it was just another trick my thoughts besmother, completely interrupting the sentence & the texture of the mise en scene, disgusting words. Reduced all right it did, till the once-haughty tangume was a circumfrential peel of a microcogmic orange piled neatlessly at the side of the very green stream in the great garden of blue he'd placed me in.  I'd had to use mignotweers to do it‑‑you know, those tweezers with a photognic lense & a set of teezers-10 at the end, with a lense-10 & a pair of tweezers-100 at the end of those, & so on, so definitively did the Vuor Reducer reduce, & with barely a sable sigh. I turned down time as much as I could in the garden, so Fraey's inevitable recovery (he had back-up Fraeys, known as FRAEY.BAKs, & a billion little macros qurled like wurms which would put his spoils kcab rehtegot niaga) would be postponadead to cut me as much slaggy schlack as poggible, even then, one of our Nexo signature "Purple Tears of Dwurm," e.e., dripping-drop-concerum, formed in delicious contradrospoa across the third eye of my magnificent brow, complete with chicy splendifluous little yin-yang sihns in golad aligned with the purples & the green of those stones so precious they did not even exist within Nonexistence, THAT'S how jealous God and/or AntiGods was arewore of these materials workable only by the mythic hands of Guor, possibler mimick relicamps of the very digital Dwarves of Tuor what fathered, mainly, the very Vuor themselves dimslves mslvs. So, casting Fray's own hizone "peripheral curtain" over the garden, so as to possibly slow The Garden of The Conception of The Finding of EssenFictions down The Garden of The Conception of The Finding of EssenFictions a bit The Garden of The Conception of The Finding of EssenFictions more The Garden of The Conception of The Finding of EssenFictions (but without The Garden of The Conception of The Finding of EssenFictions hope, of course), I veriformed to the forming door. Only some net slices me up, wounding me mortally, & I die, necessitating a complex procedure of healing, birth, rebirth. reinitialization of the conceptualizations of the firmifications of my system again, leaving me bleeding at the other end of the wound & wounding web of *, with Isk standing, her legs apparently spread in a perfect apparency of stomach-cluntching lust, ahead. THE RIDDLE OF EXISTENT SOUND Even squished as he was like a shriveled as he was like a scruzed like he was like a thoroughly & I mean thor-eau-li charismally flared or drudically dried or jizzily juiced gnogmelon of some kind, he was still twice as tall as the little Jarrites or Zeunsters. I mean, those powerful little brutes boast "the mass of a Great Blarn'd Star" to their little chunks, & they'd been working out during the centuries Fraey had centuries kept 'em down there knocking down certain uncertain trees without so much as the riddle of existent sound, ripping your vareious billows apart, annihiliating ectoplasms (anencithoiplliaastmis eacntnoiphlialsimas) & ripping apart hillocks with the great oiled bombastical spread of their groibospud pecs, & constantly (even in the ri sleep!) rasslin' with one another‑‑sometimes with rules, sometimes in gangs. They had nothing other to do with the rage the charming little galradsesnedin ("glass'd'in gar'd'n") squinched forever & without relief inside them, so they just as it were kept pumping it up inside them. Enter Fraey‑‑drugged (by me), disconcerted by the betrayal of me, which cerebrical tranxcriptions tranzdixruptions transdismaluptiums, as published in The Ontological Record in a three-part tripartype serialization in issues iv, viii, & xvcvii, hurt him more than anything‑‑that plus the fact that that plus the that fact the plus fact plus fact the that what he couldn't get out & torture me in ways he went mad devising. So‑‑relatively weak, betrayed by hurt & hurt by his stinging betyarayal not to mention, unless I have mentioned or am now mentionining, the impotating awareness of having been oopsmarted by a dumbshit or dsuhmibt like me, if not actually me‑‑as, I think I should reveal now, "early in the mourninoun," during these Distracting Early Cramps‑‑the better y'all should forget by the time it  works its way back into the gumbaall machinations of this bounteously bounding rezplot tolper‑‑there...you see? and very much the, how shall we say, "emotive prey" of these great-horn'd prisoners of his own if I do say so-my-self endless feckless fendless eckless engeneration, Frae got pretty much nothing but beat up & buggered, buttered & egged up, bleaguered & bucked up, for the entire pwreeltlt-ynigh innumerably-huming time he was time he was he was was stuck in there. I will tell you later I) whether he ever got out, & A) if so, how, if 1) they ever tell me, & a) if you & I are still around ifandwhen Fraey gets out. & I don't think there's no doubt‑‑do you knot? Anyway, the powerful little trolls cudgeled & battered Fraey poor Fraey‑‑his money no more than useless to him here, etc.‑‑while I scooob dupt my Vuorian booty & (pausing only to turn the damned mirror light down in this dadgummed place) & quickly bustled about with my plan. But she‑‑Isk‑‑'d increased her mass enough to eased r ass ugh to I mean uff to cause me to bounce off like an offaly losing his poor lonely nonexistent green little (thought) of an eye against her mountain invincibleless, & while I may have in another analogue thought this was another way to impress me, I was so redensced & edacted unto gauffomeleff right about now, by which I mean when, this thought was not allowed to me, though the flithers of passion came they forth firthwidth. The nonreducible Vuor Reducer I stuffed into the velvet, Vuor-reducer-tailored pouch I had in my belly, & sealed it closed & shared with myself a strangely virtuous orgasm of self-satisfaction, quite messy there in the room slowly I might add repopulating itself with your plant-infested zeuns & your bottle-zeuns & French rareified winezeums from years so fabulously good in their crops within crop upon crops of zeuns they had to remain unfathomably mythical years, i.e., false years, i.e., phoney years, i.e., years stretchable & covered with the soft green make-up favored by the Felemineriins, who were also partial to green-painted illusory years & years (like the ones my double lived in his onanistic black little eggshell of torture & love & sympathy & parenthical horrorgore!)! So the place becoming complicated was again, what with the intricate Crystal Lace Traceries & expensive white-sailed filigrees & volute-ribbled touch-piercing volumetric incandescent sinuosities, not to mention your acid-phantasies forming their own liquid felinities, remote & final felinities, swift-flowing Rhythm Stream'd felinities, felinities of color & of patterns dancing & of very tight squinting light, & I figures I'll have to get out. So, pregnant with my bootie, I made a movement‑‑a mere tribble of symbolic subgesturey, you understand, toward what I understood to be the door. She bestraddled the door, her arms high, girding her spreadeagled flesh across the entrance which I could barely wink-wink iris wide. & listen guys‑‑she was completely naked.  What my ancestral children used to call barenaked, with her armpits & nipples & omphalos & knees, but with moste prudent blurs across the groin, for the court hath noveled there be no groins in my stipulations, er... But, psst, gals‑‑check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out.  Check this out: to wit, it was not a sexual nudity nor aesthetic sort of thing, nor I think was it the brainlock caused always by one's discrepant plethora of things tro where‑‑the paradoozical surfeit glutting one's mind until, in the modst of the rags of plenty, one has nothing to wear. No, ladies & gentlement, it was more your Warrior Nakedness, another inversion of logic here, e.g., by placing something smelling awfully close to the fine femme fur on her flesh into the open airs of toothy vulnerability she seems all the more invulnerable, strong, defiant and the entire list of One Hundred Sacred words describing the eternal Female Warrior, the wounded warrior, the lustful warrior, the hungry warrior, the childless killing warrior, the golden warrior, etc., & I won't admit I was pretty cowed.  I just won't admit it. No.  I won't admit it.  I deny it completely... (What was it I was denying completely, or was I admitting the whole thing in this parenthico produced by the marks of whiteness on black, this being the other me the me outside the blackness doesn't know can't know denies completely denieth knowing O) It is useless to speculate. I thought suddenly, My little trip's over.  I'll lose the wealth of my entire egg getting my as out of this one.  I'll have to think & think, italicize all my funds, bury my heart deep in the folds of italized, hence invigible golben flesch... & she said.  "You're getting me out of here." Yes maam, I either thought or said, or one of my little mechnaical servitors‑‑whom I you'll not notice seldom do not fail not to unmention & whom no one can stand the radiation of the soi-disant fact that appariximitations of my million servitors‑‑OK, that's right: a million servitors!‑‑but rarely individualize themselvs out of their ***H*A*P*P*Y**E*T*H*E*R*S*!*!*! to do anything, which they apparently (as they gnot shoers they thought's with me) regard as rude and, well, u?n?h?a?p?p?yp?y‑‑projected the feeling unto her, which I rather suspect I rather suspect I rather suspect I rather suspect I rather suspect. No more known repetitions.  We promise. My silver reflexes, however, had me caressing the extreme right lowerback knob du reduceur pouchée which successfully shrunx the huge & baleful babe downto own o wn n the size of a small, senseless, senselessly beautiful, beautifully detailed, detailedly twirping bird, the which resembled she nothing other than. Damn! "~HAPPENING" So off I took, like that essential tyger ramping through the boiling woods.  My plan, whatever it might be, was working furiously, I mean perfectly, which hotlance just how out of control I was.  You could tell by the uneven size of my neyes as we burst & bursted & bursteded through the troughs of the fat meniscus of the strange misshapen leaves, which seemed to relish breaking up into contorted parodies of themselves & the whole filmy universe they thought they were a part of. For 1) thing, I wondered why Isk kept her shape.  She made a ravishing bird.  Maybe she was stuck.  Maybe the reducer stuck her there, I mean stuck her that way.  She was perhaps half-stuck in maybe, making a flutterlike posing of her natural wings, maintaining her blue shape as if in cruelty, even as I bashed myself busying with a bustle of a humpbached dustle through The Wettest Florist Yet, waiting to get to my incredible ship of creditable particulars, the Detail One, I definitely felt‑‑with the force of that giant six-year-old who has been eating up entire night-portions of your improportionate lives with his saintly fucking wanderings or his fucking saintly waterings or his mucky faintly watterlings in his pliantly plucky plunderyings‑‑that she was doing this out of cruelty. Closer to the truth to the truth to truth to say the truth more closerly she was anxious to get out of there, having been as one gathers the floss off the gossmaer mosses of one's faintly remembered homeworld sheened through the curtains of a thousand or so so-reformaxxsingsso-so cultivated in the cellular style by the relatively younger Master Fraey, then kept in the queasy lunarbin of that quaintly hallucinating cellular-modal house, "quaint" in the sense of circulating its eddies of old hallucinations, scratchy withtheir colors dithering in the Spanish modal dithering half-cell intrabode. "In," I said, so out of breath I am still repaying that xenon debt (we have have I mentioned all been refittind for xenon, Nexo being a hell of a Xenon sector in your great gas of gashes. Isk fluttered Iskfluttered in, an intricate blue vision making sounds I could swear and have in attached affidavit, hereby submitted to the court, where COMES NOW Cavv Emptoriomb in his self-remitted tomb, wherein Cavv Emptoriomb, henceforth & hereafter to be referred to as the Plaintiff's Expert Plaintiff, realleges the enitre great womring planetoid of old redacted allegor-allegations were meant to slice my brain in the holy compresséd air. The Detail One hove shut with the gold orgasmic sigh I'd fitted it whiff. "Neix, you'd think you'd made Fraey bigger.  He's stuck in that bottle forever." "Ahh‑‑quiet!" I mewled, feeling pain with her every articulation, articulating its beating way into the most convoluted with diease outlets & harbors of the great 3D map that was & is my mater grise. Her silence was heartless. "So go," I go go the ship, & we do not exist except in the temporary files of the ship's systemic (~temporary) circuits.  Hard enough to make sense when this is "~happening," but hey, I assay. "Fraey have a lot-o-tricks, called anstint trex©," I shay. "I shee," she swaze. KRAZED KONFIGURATIONS OF WORLDS We zammed through the shimmer of this most crowded Nexo subsector, this fabulous neighborhood Krux, in which planets‑‑surely from everywhere from surely everywhere surely‑‑had been motorvated & moved & otherwise reconfigured to form the most complex & perplexively moving dottles of a great speckled space megahedron of stars one had ever imagined at one's most sickest dreams & most dreamest zicks, krazed konfigurations of worlds as loony as that sweet bopped kat in the tearfil racial'd memory that only a plaan beefed up to its utmost enormity could hope to figure out, so no being of whatnoever "shape" could tell or know what was coming up or by or passing through next. A crammy neighborhood, forsooth, & yet nothing never nit noffing & the flow did go, & everyone was everyone was was fitte wiff adequate light & such, & they each had their beautiful "ray blanket," not to be mispaken as a "flesh blanket" which we have none of here nor naught the idea of butcept for my homo genius spekaing to me in the limpid tongues of my white rayfever litefevrile he*ar, so rather than the surfaces of (ugh) "planets" you had glorious geometric glimmers & phased-contract electro-nikkers of polyluminosity (sometime to the pingkt of fulsomluminosity!) & spimt bespimming qubes & big ol' burrs & the occasional giant monochromatic ditheration so the place was even more packed with the Spacships of the Dumb & the Apaceships of the Gnumb & the Acheships of the Swarming Gumb, come to catch a glimpse of something they could view in an even greater richness through the magic of technologies I am injuncted naught descry butte wille laterdescrive ANYWAY, as through a big dubloh over the mubloas of your "head," with a load of loverly mellifluor manufacuring acids of the brain of the vat of the acid brains to make it all the more intense over more the allintense‑‑but shapechangers lose their logic with the loff of their r!g!d!t!y, now don't they now gno? I can tell you no one believe Knux was stuxxed by the not-government in their black cubes of eternity.  We couldn't believe they could do that, which of course proves they can do that‑‑which however does not prove they did that, raising the question to the optiliminal skies: Then Who? Well, I was not altogether smiling as I joyspricked my little ship, which looked I am supposing like one of the great blue nether "issi-ikkles" of the Gawanian Zomes, an icicle with ripples & rivets over it, a clear & see-through icile in which to drive bare-naked, as they (the "government"? someone tougher, pray?) couldn't get this material to take opacity.  It was like, opacity warn't in their nature. "Can I change shape?" Isk asked, reminding me of a great deal of thentofore Missing Reality. "Uh...stay a bird for a while, could you?" I said with a faintly fawning sycophantic blubbiness which made me unearthly sick for the nexious of Mine Dayes.  I pretended we needed room.  In ahem reality I was falling in love with the bird. I was like a child falling in love with the brief fluid image of a fluid image of an eye image of the eye of a bird.  I was seriously dumb. My financial governor was conveying to me that I could not afford to keep Fraey under domination© much longer.  He did this in the which we (they) have devised which would make us famous if anyone knew about us for our sense of money, our savoir faire, if you will, in matters of fiscal niglizance.  It was simply done.  MOney did not exist, & yet the more money you had, the better you felt, & the less money you had the more schizophrenically suicidally depressed you became.  MOney took the inner electronic form of good feeling. So I could feel I was running out of time, before Fraey set some sort of turbo-dogs after me.  I was feeling a descending feeling of expense indeed. FILES OF FLIES I should send her into Intershink Deduction," I think I think, still in halfashed ~subsistence in the Detail's orderheath d'ordeurfields. No you shouldn't she think, which convinx or voncinch me to shrnk her at least a LITTLE more (see below). Which I believe I did.  I mean, I believe I did the paragraph before.  I mean I did that which the paragraph said, or rather, what you read, I mean, what you read it as seeing, I mean saying. More properly, I should say I did what your reading of the now-second-preceding paragraph (hereafter to be know as The Paragraph From HELL) Hell indicated I should do.  Not that what you think or read now, where now is understood as the time you are reading this, or rather, the time you read TPFH above, whilst thinking in the sense of reading what you read as a thought qua thougth, determines what I did back then.  I mean, that would be laughable.  Or implausible. Anyway, she emerged from the trip in which we rode like whipples along the unconstructed subdeterminate conduits, if you will, of the ship's anticircuits, you if-will, the size of a Most Articulated Butterfly, which suggests I did the impossible which is God, God being the Impossible suggesting my existence, is or was or never was. So we broke from the Neverwas of the ship's cruise through the Vertex of Nothingness in a sector best translated as the Ant Sector, which was the aforementioned area where the most beautful orbits‑‑if youst canst callst the workings of the stellar growth of an infinite flower an orbitha‑‑circulated as at a great widening gyro of a partyo through the most ornamental planets, planetoids, rocks, & even sometimes dust. I mean even the dust in Ant was tarted up.  & it was here I believe that the lexors‑‑curdling damned losers of the Nexor, came to gro the seen & die. So the space here was clustered with the dead in their dead ships clustered like flies.  Don't ask me why Ant when flies persist.   Ask not or I'll kill you. I have ways of emerging from the page, or remerging radiation from the page sufficent to cast the incandescent left-handed gauntlet onto the page where you will out-&-out die, just like that, & the doctors will sigh Died & there will be nothing more today‑‑certainly nothing re why it called the Ant sector when I(I!)'ve just averred to flies. Author Threatens Reader‑‑A Sad Pass for Fantasy Just so: the place was clustered with "flies," where flies or ants if you will it to be ants implies billions of cute little hollowed out pinpricks of blackness or of the black cow's blood the psychic surgeon pinched off your hand before he outdrew the actual clusters of your indubitable goddam guts.  They were buzzless to be sure. By the time we emerged into AAM (Actual Accumulated Matter) again, we were mere apostrophes.  So like we emerged from the Detail's guts in this spacious planetary flow of a raveyard, which & the knowledge of which deemd only to draw the others more, like flies to the dead of flies within the God-codified files of flies. Perhaps the planets were occupied by flies.  Or something like flies, or those great immeasurable files of flies I reported above.  That must be it, it having always been something like flies to me, with the strange white flies like vapor in myneyes. MISTAKEN IONS or OBJECTS FLYING INSTEAD OF BEAMS, ETC. As in lustrous wonder didde we eye alle these metaphoric Flyes, Isk turned finally back into herself...and everything became Uninspired (the ship's air turned grey, light formed in dustbunny clusters on objects instead of objects flying instead of beams, etc.), as she sat with such amazingly awkward bones in her seat, which was several feet below me so I felt like a false god dumbfounded by his own inability to say (not to mention by the germinating False Plant of Love, with the love i.e., sap inside being more than real but the plant, the plant!, being utterly false, a false metaphor or metaphor of falseness or an absolute metaphor of myheart's own lying utter uninspiréd falseness in the form of a plant with a hood, a blind plant, etc.) or an adored sex gog whipping out his shlong & prying her with false procedures where false proceudres are complex introcedures.  It was like that‑‑dull & quiet.  I wondered how she felt giving up her illusions, & that nagging adolescent like a charming otrrent in me wondering like this meant she was in LOVE, though I kept within me moaning No. "So how did you get here?" I said, in a mostly molestingly modicum of moderate sor-da-vox, except the letters were flattened from top to bottom like units of life trying to pry through the ether capillaries of a freshly-hung guy etc. guy.  "I mean, you know‑‑what's your story?" She nodded, still able to to tremendsous things with de mis lib time erate ing.  She appeared not so much to be thiking as reshaping the truth, & it finally occurred to me (I having caught up with you after all with my dragging through these exodets cluxtears if wuords as in gords) that this just might just be just another merely damn facade. Naaaa! Anyway, she says, does     sk, "My story's famous, Cavv.  I'm shocked you haven't heard it." This messed me up like swoons of plyo-paint skirred in a sudden dirgle, as it were, but I says, "Yea, well, I've been set to forget things I've heard too many times." She kindly let that go.  "I was the sole cell from ExRet One." "I beg your pardon?" She sighed & rolled her eyes, which I by decided stopping had time no less than thirteen interpremisttakions, known round here as Mistaken Ions, naught to be misstoken ab Misspoken Eons, the main sundries of whiche were that she was feeling her own virgin of the Great Rising Furred Adolescent Two or that I, despite my utter peel'd-fruit whack of real power (depitzing & derazing EVERYTHIN)g'scurse me, was having some sort of dirorienting effect on her or (three) that she was having trouble holding her shape, which as you but not I nose the basis vo everything, this Third of the Thirteen Theories spread within the medium of the theory this was just another fake shape. "This is my real shape you know," she said, at which point I once agin exit entirely from the story. "You must have been raised in a bottle," she sais, then giggles quite fuiously & for quite a senctilious while at her own Labyrinthine Library of the Self-Bemusements.  "ExRet One (you can look it up, my little clown {Did she say little clown? I scree from Dimension Zero as recorded in the book Screams from Dimension Zero}) was another of our Government's {How can she know that?} insane experiments, & by far the worst.  They sent a gorgeously deisinged little slip-ship, with time not merely stoped but going ever-so-sligtly backward, so the crew would arrive feeling fresh {she has destroyed me...}, off to Death Galaxy 807.61, which apparently very much interested them.  YOu know how they are about the Death Galaxies!" I most certnainly did not, but by now as I stared at the flowing form of light which was my flowing story bedight, my lips had stitched into the smarm of a smiley scarierkrouaugh with its boca knit up WAY A-too tight.  How did she know this stuff‑‑i mena    , stuff about the government stuff?, unless... But ever since I met her she has interrupted my every thought, which I like, so here she continueth: "The ship come back a couple minutes before, & it was black, no longer with that circular-embossed dull-grey sort of proper shine had to do, & maybe three-quarters its former size, & smoking like a diesel, or weasel, & completely gutten out & dead, with fume-sprinx of Your Greatest Shtinque rising in inked indications out the hatch they had to most cruelly po-po-po-pop, excuse me, but telling this old tale is so boring to me {the witchious vicshgorgeous word! she knew I was being stretched further & further out of my <doom'd omphalos> here!}. "Yeawell, anyway, the crew was fried, the inside of the little ship reamed out into a state of disgusted filth, like they'd been turned into shit, & they did one of their Blue Techical Scans© of the interior, very expensive scan, to check for life, & they found one naseated cell of so-called life, which they droned up to me.  Now your story, please." "Whu?"  Sucked back into the story, I was for a moment that dizzy & reeling cell, swaying in my O-So-Supeiror eat, uncertain of my shape, with her usual dreaded surreal edded de-fect on my 1) spine, 2) diaphragm, & 3) not-to-mention vocal cords, so I delayed my answer, unable even now to wonder if I was having some incompaverdatent deffect reher. AN EXACT DOLL'S-HOUSE VERSION OF THE LAUGH THEY'D HAD BEFORE "I say," said the azure butterfly still much more powerful than I as she measured the air at my side.  "I see nothing but the dead."  She was tapping or tugging on my shoulder, & I almost brushed her off.  I have only seen a few insects‑‑on formal occasions, with everyone wearing their white tuxedos sodexut & carting their wimpy little canes‑‑so that brushing reaction must be genetic.  ("Yes, genetic waste matter," Favv drawls in that condescendingly swirling Favvatchioid accent.  "We leftit when we found you you would lose your chape." ("I'm fill of 'genetic waste matter'?" ("Phaueugh!  Cram-packed with it, boy!  Oh now, don't look so repulsed by yourself‑‑a trait we also had to leave in, I'm afriad I'm afraid {Isk always said that twice} I'm afriad I'm afraid {Isk always said that twice}." ("Or I'd be like them," I thought in quites, & sure enough "the thought" buzzed in beautiful white italics out the orabord * wore on his big gold Elvis belt, & Isk winced as my thought‑‑having certainly a silvery-lily sort of momentilly for a thought, not doubtless that the thought was thus processed & playbacked & monitored, giving this sort of momentumary z!zz as they z?y‑‑went on to think, thought z?zz, z*y. (* tuned the tuner & the lower lip of the thought came out in a strange, forboding tune, They genetically edite themselces into glorified, psychedelic amoebas. (We all had a good laugh at that, I can tell you, with the others laughing in a form of earnest with me laughing that wimpling little sailsnell of a laugh that turns you into nothing more than that face of weeping water & a face of wimpling waters in the midsts of this mirth rippling like the outward circles of the stone God threw down into the stone God threw down into forgotten rimpling pools of the old lost but nast-forgopten earth. (Favv like amplified that thought, too, apparently able to tune into e'en to my future prose, & they all laughed at that. ("Not at all son," he said deeply, placing the beaitufl ad when I say the beautoiful I mean a beautiful shimmering pod on my stiff pseudoshoulderer.  "I left it in so you could walk." ("Walk?" ("He did thing which is a long story but which translates poorly as a gnod, which translates throghly as one of my implanted earth uh ah memories.  "We had to leave that waste in or you'd falterdown like a great cloddy cloud of pakcing material." (& they had another laugh, an exact if not en excapt doll's-house version of the laugh they'd had before.) "That's light," I said, moving my purséd lips over the present that was now between my lips mobing back & forth all the way across my face, which is something I do when coming out of apostrophical space, or deAAMinating, as they swAAMy.  "Light‑‑falling on the dead." "So lets go in," she chirped.  It was killing me she was not beggign to have her shape changed back.  Force-enshaped shapechanger beg to have their shapes turned back.  It's an outmoded but fun way of torturing them. Wait'll I tell you about the new modes of torturing them.  It's make you pout... "You are going to stash the reducer in there, yes?" she said.  "Leaving it for Moady, yes?" "Stop saying yes," thought, & Favv runed that in too, & every one back there in that room lost in the nexus of neurons lost themselves like liquid in a neural passed gelaught zich auf dem Arse. Well, she was right‑‑she was certainly right, & this brings up just how staggeringly off the beam my actions were. "Then you'll give me back your shape, yes," she said hypnotically, with a jolly bloom of hypnotism wrenching the genetic trash right out of me. "You mean your shape," I said like one of those pale, clock-faced trigger-creatures that time you & remind you of things, so ubiquitous & contant I had them edited out of this trash manuscript by means of what your father or my father would call a virus. ("That's a virus," son," one's father said.  "We all have them, everywhere.") "I knew you'd say that," she said that.  "I mean my shape.  That's why I said your shape." "Yea, sure," I said, nodding at her with my face in the shape of a great dubious cave the size of your suspicious God we do not have by the way. More on God later on God. A FEW SLICK FLITCHES It was such a clumsy lie she all but believed it but didn't all believe, as I set about killing her. A sad thought, killing my first femme, no?  Finally meet a human being, rows of fine files in my brain colorfully & permanently not to mention purposefully damaged, obsession, waking dreams striding across full rooms & smiting me‑‑all the signs of love waving wildly from dis comfort of my genes. Finally a relationship where I couldn't have it both ways (name any two opposite ways here in Nex & with a few slick flitches as told by the blue sick bitches I'd have them both.  So I had this Real Thing here, & e'en fostered-by-monsters as-I-thought-myself I, Cavv the othercalléd Alien-Raised (which everyone including your mother meant in two ways when they said it, so I would set them in arreas tantamount to eternal tears) or Alien-Razed Cavvioque Temptore knew it was real. I can at least plead in a cute little mew that it was a spur of the moment thought, your Honor.  Your Honor?  Your there?  Do you exist, your Honor? Options: squish her between my singular clapping hands; set her in nul-circuit forever (one can't imagine how many souls are lost in the circuits that keep us all alive; it is the number that balks you as you balk, it is the One Number, sometimes known as 10dreadth but never known or wanted to be known or thought as known...except by children, of course, who can know anything) anyway, more options coming up; my Captain Tenndreath Plasmanic© Plastic© Blaster©, too completely protected under the Toy Laws the the Toy Laws the the Toy Laws the the Toy Laws the the Toy Laws to use; having her gurged, which is this cool thing where they like wipe your memories (that calms you down‑‑generally) which is considered a miniform of genocide; sending her into eternal Vuor Reuction (which at the time sounded like too much fun)d at which point of consideration (there were 322 more options to consider on this long, french-curving spur of the Spear of Action I was Action I was spinning in in) I felt a distinct & sickening (that's distinct & SICK ening, my friends, nothing like now in any way tangential nor continguous to the so-called vagueness of health) & I lost my nerves. All of them.  She fluttered there before me, awaiting instructions. "Dead nexans in there?" she said, with the distinct tremolo temor of someone prompting someone someone prompting someone someone prompting no one. "Well, I said, my voice having whispered itself into the nexus of other free voices in the universe, thus forming a rumor that was passed hoarsely round the rollicking horsey of the universe & coming back in my other ear re the utmost parody.  "Yes & no.  There are no bodies, exactly, in here." "How many creatures died here?" "It is impossible to say.  They were friends o' mine." "I question your logic." "These were suicidal friends, dissociate pals who broke apart more & more‑‑till they made this ship, or stole it, sort of." "Will it kill us?" "Not exactly?" "WILL YOU GIVE ME A STRAIGHT ANSWER?" "OK.  No then.  No, in the sense that we'll come out.  Yes in the sense that it will in fact kill us." She bit me many times, an experience of exstasy so smashingly fall apart I come back to it no matter where I go. Swollen as an infested melon, I continued.  "You lose the structure of your body inside, & you can't see." She kicked me, which of course I never felt, & only found out about through the mechanism of those same circulating gossips spread round the universe or whatever. "You're trying to keep me from going in." Hey!  She was right!  I hadn't realized what I was ding. I suddenly made a killing.  I mean, I doubled my account for reasons to be dreeped into my sliping brain next night, so I felt twice as good. "Not at all, I chuckled, with a big requisite grin, "let's proceed." "'Proceed,' he says," she mutters as I take the handle of the bag I put the legendary Vuor Reducer in andclench it in my teeth. THE DEAD SHIPS AT ANT Of course she laughed a lot, & I realized that each individual chirp of her laugh‑‑the point at which the wave she generating sound of the disrespectful unmanning goddam laugh spikes down to the zero point, producing a square wave, a painful square, a sawtoothlike despair I mean square, & somehow my brain despite al those cleanings presents me as being slowy flayed, so I push us out the sexy bubble of the Detail's dreamy eyeshaped portal of a subtle blue andthrough the mensicus of the Detail, this dead ship we're entering with one last mysterious laugh, different from the rest, this single kind, healing soft curving laugh as this ship's old gurgy meniscus dissolved our flesh... My flesh, at least. The ship existed like all the dead ships at Ant had left her fields on, which kept everyone inside from existing, from ever having existed, except as a highly repressed, densely pressurized sort of blackthought of time & history which history & time deny.  After an unmeasurable because embarrassingly unknown length of time these ex-folks would pass out like fainting grey feys from the frame of existence so long they couldn't be inwoven in again‑‑a magnificent form of suicide we have all been oftly tempted to try. This old field had condensed, so it couldn't uncreate us, but undid or did undo most of one's flesh, so one becomes just a brain & a dangling spinal cord.  & teeth.  I mean, you have your brain & your spnal column‑‑sort of‑‑& your teeth.  I say "sort of" not only for the pleasure these two words together have been hyperfeighted whiff here just apparently for apparent kicks but because that spine you be in the decadent field of the fin de siecle kind of ship‑‑a ship beyond death, if you will (& if you don't, you know someone will)‑‑feels unduly & reprehensibly long, & seems to bubble off at the tip of your spinal tail, as in "tiny white bubbles of bone rippling off behind the end of your ass." Of course I had a pressex field around me (but not around the fair Isk because I wanted to suffer infinitely, as I had too many times done & then redone) to make it perfect, it pushed against the odorously decaying d'ordeurfield as hard as a metaphor could.  It was The Little Metaphor That Could, huffing up the red mountains of madness & at heartrending expense‑‑very very depressing expense I might add & in fact have.  Added, I mean.  It gave me a touching phorphorescence of vision enough to scare the inner child in you enough he do explode enough like you're swimming through grey water with a long light here & there in the apparent vision of the Unswimming Nonpool or the Nonswimming Unpool orsomesuch shit like that. What I saw was mostly stretched-out skulls Boschean deathfaces pressing inward against a derma of stretched-out rubber, like the long-gone passengers still making that last convulsive glutch at their own, no-longer-existence, but I didn't take this vision too seriously. Did I mention teeth?  Upper teeth anyway, that did not seem to connect with anything.  But Moady & I who spent many a happy year in archilistash (moved like castles into permanent childmodemööd) roaming the Ant Zone & the AntZone reservoir & AntZone!© the theme park & the other subones of living here discovered you could clutch things in these teeth, & we thought we had the perfect hiding-spot we'd never known we had been dreaming of since like forever. CAVV MADE WRONG AGAIN!!! wushed the headlimes, these great chartreuse spheres in everybody's face loaded with everything that was happening, which naturally no one wants to unnaturally no. See, I expected Isk to be quite mad by now.  It's perfectly normal there.  Instead I saw her as the perfectly intact butterfly-from the end of time‑‑electrifiblingly blue, same size, etc. Now I know she's not human," I think or say (no difference here), & she say Yes I am, which I still believe might have been my own thought, the most powerful thought I have ever perpetrated or propounded or sagginglyly wasted.  Might, not was. I was expecting a naked brain, so it was my turn to go mad.  & I chased her, friends.  NOT part of the plan (& you can bet this shows up burning in the afteropticimage of the headlimnes running up to you like the crazed euphoric child you never found within).  So that's the origin of the famous scene: a naked brain with its bubbling possum-tail spine chasing a small blue butterfly. LEAVE OFF, someone says, & I know who it is.  The bag swings below my gnashing pleasureless teeth. THE NOTHINGS: AN ALLEGORY also THE HUMAN BEING THEORY There have been many a many-pag'd dubloh thought about the old man who keeps saying he killed his children, the old man (a human being! Like an amazing human being! this proves something (I think (but don't read this) it means we live in a rich star garden created by human beings (& we are rare, see, because only putzes like me somehow slipped through the cracks of being & fell in, or wanted in, or say sent an egg of themselves in, for future dissection & research purposes (which I must say disturbs me a bit), but no more of that) which is neither here nor there) proving the nothings which disprove everything) which is not an allegory NOV nor an image nor a "gathered imind," but some head the size of the rock rolling over the blind girl & killing her killing her killing her "killing" as nebulous as a crushed face seen through the rubber overstretched like the Fist of God thanking Larry‑‑which one must vomit throws unto cautious doubt the Human Being Theory which were always in the Lunar Doubt Earthscape Anyway‑‑with fieldline or forcefiles or‑‑strings pulsesprings or my favorite ejection spiderwebs splaying in a sort of goofy sadness far beyond the event horizon of God which mathematicians have proven to their hearts' contents are indeed the exact spanlines of God, proving this guy is God, which tends to disprove everything, as he is simply a penitent old man serving out this eternity, mad as hell & telling me how he killed his children, was imprisoned "in the dark imprisioned dark" & then let out ("You can't do that forever, you know"), who fancies him dreadself the spirit of the ship or the ship's brains or something.  The same alt man or Mouldmann inhabits every shucked ship in the Sector of Eternal Ants (official title, the usual four-way palindrome they use absolutely to deaf & tell you about till you're blind as the squish of the dead little girl on the squish of the dead little girl on the squish of the dead little girl on the squish of the dead little "girl").  It's all a big mystery no one quite cares about & everyone fears to be dissolved, I mean solved, in the earth lingo I used to the mirror long ago. Anyway, though he seems to know me, the monumental face of that confidence man tortured in his bed for one year to the day tells his awful story.  He tells me how he murdered his kids (the word splinter is rumored to have not been never been heard) & tries anyway to describe the utter absence of reason, except possibly the utter absence of love (which may but does not explain the feeling of love buoying this ship; but it never was here before; it must be that hiding butterfly!) & the vacuum for the axe (chainsaw? wood chipper?  always such ancient devices?  Human Being Theory, anyone? Then how the passengers locked in something far worse than sleep are his children, which doesn't make sense, & he is covered with rime, a white giant's head of a sere mouldmann, very chalky endlessly. I AM NOTHING BUT TEETH I am wondering‑‑I mean right now Wondering‑‑wondering where the fucking butterfly Is, until she says. "He's great!  Did you hide him in here?  Can we Take him home?" To make me bloody jealous, right‑‑if only that she Can talk, while I am nothing but teeth? I ask you. YO, MOLECULAR CONTOURS It'd'd been'd'd my plan to betray my little Isk in the private polymer hell of the Detail One, but I could see that she could, sans field, see, & blinding her would take some sort of fine pin I couldn't handle with these mere teeth sculpted by the way by a botchy child & and & it was only through the grace of NexoGod & my field & poetic license that I could see anything, & to me I have not mentioned 'cause I hadn't made it like up everything resembled a face pressed against the clustered metal rods producing a Nice Molecular Contour of a nice molecular contour of one's particulate face as seen through the Politic Filters of Noon. NO DROIDS! or SCENES OF BETRAYAL Q: I beg your pardon?  What the fucker you talking about? A: A rude person, this Q with hisorher meddling metaquestions!  But in reply: the Politic Filters of Noon is a metaphor to describe a face as seen through one of those lattices of tiny metal spikes‑‑very blunted at the ends, I hastntadd‑‑into which you press your face, or better yet someone else presses herorhis face, so you can see the droid that results.  I'm thikning these nails or spikes filter out the organic quality, leaving the perfect face of the droid.  I'm imagining that, even though there are to the best of my knowledge & belief no droids I say No Droids!!! in the sector where I currently am trapped & so write, even though, I say, there are no such things (unless they're being very very very well (or unless like everyone else but me knows‑‑which means that you, Gentle Kpaha Reader, know!  You!‑‑which sounds like my f!cking karma all right all r!ght) done, goddam it), yet though ~, we find that we all instantly recognize the face of the droid, the voice of the droid, the attitude of the fucking droid, no matter what kind of style the droid affeceth. A droid's a droid, or as they say in the 643rd Century: A Doridza!  (grinning wider than that bigassed monitor that finally that monitor that finally that Monitor That Finally swallered yer head!!! So anyway, the face (remember, you asked) in the nails is a metaphorical f!cking object being described by the metaphor of politic filters, suggesting these are very subtle, very sophisticated filters, filtering out a pollutant that is not always easy to filter out by any manner of manner nor manner of meems, if you will will you if, filtering out the soul, which is what machines actually do (Cavv's personal theory no. 1.) The point being that Cavv's being that point intenteding that Cavv's intending to betray Isk in another scene of betrayal amongst all my thousands & thousnads of scenes of betrayal, yall.  Stargarden's all about betrayal, everybody, all about!  But the intention to deceive & betray & hurt is made by our special omo zapiinz, at which point everything is seen as the face is seen to be seen in the memory of the dream of the thought of the aftermath of the bugs crawling underneath a soggy log of those nailthings taking the shape of the sleeping face, the droidface we all know, even though there are no droids. Now back to the story. YO, MOLECULAR CONTOURS It'd'd been'd'd my plan, as I just said, to destroy this frisky Isk babe in the private polymer hell of the Dental One, which is this kind of dental universe... ...but I could see that she could, sans field, see, & blinding her‑‑not literally, of course.  I may be a rare species, but that didn't stop the Medical Eclipse from coming over me, to try a starry metaphor for once.  It would in any case, metaphorically speaking, take some sort of fine pin I couldn't handle with these mere tweezers sculpted by the god of a botchy child & and & it was only to see through the grace of a NeoNexoGod© that I could see anything, not that I could see anything, & I need to mention how everything at this critical juncture© resemble: a face: pressed against the clustered metal: rods: producing a Nice Molecular Contour of a nice molecular contour of one's particulate face as seen through the Pollalla Feeler Azuun. *Just making sounds with language.  Just keep moving though the cartoon, ladies & gentlemen... Itdud beened myey plan'd, as the * was Moadynize special hiding place.  I was on what they'd've call duh stubblebung had they but made it up back then when this story first ascend to the contours of the lumnourious filtered tube, purifying everything but the pain of thought. Or the cough of thought. OK so I thought, I'll have her ejected from my ship or else implanted in my flesh when I drop in *** to have my stomach replaced.  That second option was pretty irrational, I'll admit, & I so candidly admitting this to bring down your walls of distrust so I can hop like a perfect rabbit into your yard & rack your bloody guts.  Now to fetch those other zeuns... BUBBLE PICTURES See, I couldn't think it, but it happened I knew where the other zeuns were. Uh‑‑all but one, that is.  I was hoping the count was wrong, but in Nexo first thing you learn when you pick up your first tiny bag of drugs is the count is wrong. Moady had them.  They filled his living room, in his infamous Caƒtlebriouƒ Houƒe, its glass spires reach to the sporosphere or spherospore or sterosphere or sporeostere, sometimes ripping the guts from ships & these little planes they have with not a soul within them just for the sake of vapor trails‑‑known as The Moad House© With The Electronic Moat Built Round It & the Gravdraw Bridging the Moat & the Password Hiding the Face of the House & the House Holding its Normally Swaggering Breath & Not Thinking. Yea like & in the innards of his house (it was full of glistening organs (like that house that came to life (as a vivid image of your (perfect (poetic                        (shame) shame) shame) projected porcelain face) & then died in your arms) probably from that most ancient orbital Kingdom of Holyewode) existing like thought as a bubble-pcture of my interjected insular face) nosy with this green smoke compacted thicker than your peaswoop, which was either Mad's sectret atmosphere or some sort of dorty snug he kept in the air, through which you could see nothing but the gnut of 1) Moady's Strangely Blinking Neonic Feral Eyes or 2) the abhorrent monsters themselves, which were in turn 2) them zeuns or 1) unnumbered monstrous snaillike critters kept 2) improbably or 3) probably as pets or else 2) a by-product of Moad's Infamous Bouquet© or 1) an end-product of his body, which teemed with 0) invisible amenals, much as your ancient earthling bodies festered with tiny pink & altogether unstriped canyoudigit? bees drinking too much coffe & fucking -1) incontinently or -2) intercontinentally much as Moady's house was divided -1) not unto rooms, but 0) unto continents. The point being he had them right there, & this was just Moady after all, so I'm thinking this'll be the easiest ease of my extortionate career, like some sort of warp, some sort of warp drive into another dimension where, despite a plethora of eerie discomforts, I well worth it to save you a billennium or two, which is a lot of expensive Concoses©, which is this stuff that induces deeper layers of unconsciousness that you could ever fathom.  There's Consosis 1, Conscicious 2, no one knows how far it goes.  It depends on how much money you have, not that we have money.  I'm just using money as a metaphor, god damn it.  If you would just stop interrupting, cocksucker... I'm sorry.  I apologize.  I wasn;t myself.  Someone took over my body & made me say these things.  I'm not sure what this is about.  I'm not sure of anything.  One moment... (Pause while Cavv switch personalities, just pulling off one rubber cavvsuit & pulling on another.  We get to see him barenaked.  There he is, show not tell, as my editor says: Cavv Naked All right, then.  I can ge to plucking these here zeuns into my bag, had I my bag.  The point being when I do get my back & come back here, I will be cashing in so fast I'll be like the children of our universe on that slide so fast all the kids achieve lightspeed at once & are never ever seen again, end of story, though we're sure they're all right, which is really what happens by the way when the Children of Anarchy achieve lightspeed, they being the only ones etc., e.g., robbing my exbest friend's exhouse! I was excited & excited & excited & excited by that, pulling on pale polymer glovesjust a genetic ritual & stretching my limbs which had a tendency in the mucky goddam lab to telescope into themselves, as my ancestors swore they had no limbs & still sare within the hurt blotchy child of my child of my parentheical mind.  Little souvenir of Death! there friends. THE FOG SCHTOO FRICK TO Z An earthcat is a huge, ferocious creature with wings that lived amongst the limpid branches of the ferms that grew there everywhere, & Moady in his loving room was like an earthcat, only small‑‑very small‑‑& without the wings.  But he was ultracomfortably curled around & round himself, happy in his evidential thoughts, plumed up on his big pump pillow. I knew just how virescent that green pillow could be (& he...methinks He is seriously involved with that pillow, in an unrequited, not to mention not to mention unconsummated love), but Moadyed turnd the color off, so we sifted through labyrinthine volutes of noble grey, unless it was arrogant grey, with Moady not so regal as he would have so me so drabbaly see, but putting up just this high-falutin trunk funk spunk grunk tunk or fornicating frump. "You've come to take my zeuns," he guk, with a calm that was almost formally perfect, but which I in a sudden streak of focus I zooming in on the colorful sheet out rolling I perceiving the erratic polytones hung like biased juries just over & behind & all around like a big dream too his voices, for he spoke in voices, like a man. "Uh...yes I have," I ave, & despite my appearance here as the Sallow Hunter, my voice wobbled like a thirteen-year-old trying to sing to the line of hooded men with their monstrous prongs bobbing toward the gimp of his gapeous face. "You thought this was going to be easy," he went on.  I suddenly realized that someone had removed my ability to think whenever I tried to think ahead to this job.  It therefore remained decidedly ahead, even now, when it was happening.  I mean that even now, "whe ni twa zapng," so to speak, it lay in the future, in which I was helpless as the tiny lambzedotes the earthcats munched as the sun set eternally like the eyes of the faceless friends of the child falling forever from his sleeping tree.  I was no match for Moady, who roosted like the Mad Rooster of the Empty Rays smack-dab in the middle of the Now. The little fucker!  Damn but I loved that damned guy!  I take back the agitated damn of that guy & damn myself instead, thus damning but never loving me. I think he gives me this beautiful smile, but the fog schtoo frick to Z, & I dinna sure. Besides, where are the zeuns? I cleared my throat like a medical dog.  "Where are the zeuns, Moady?" He pauseth for to pare his nails, the cat guise sliding off like the false steps of water or viscous denigrations of oplaquisch plaints. "Well, friend," he said, drawling1 (1in some sort of accent based on drugs of the Accent-Inducing class, I would imagine), drawlin n shiftin n seemin truly cool now, cool, if not quite happy.  "Somebody stole them."  & then he giggled uproariously. You should have seen me collapse!  When Moady talks I sop in the resonations of his words, so I knew it was true. "Oh NO!" I whined, writhing round & round on the goddam floor!  & Moady turned up the color to a triple high lever & turned off the music none but he could hear! THE SAMADHI GLASS or KNIFING ORGANIC CRITTERS All the crap that'd fill'd'd the air formed salt on our faces, & then I could see that Moady was feeling no pain!  Moady was not a happy being, no more than I or any of the ridiculous perpetual foundlings that kept straying like the dust from the synergistic explosion of a billion scandheads throughout the Fruitful Galaxies the Painful Galaxies the Obtuse Galaxies the Fretted Galaxies the Faceted Face-Cut Galaxies hanging round like hoods in a crystal gang knifing organic critters everywhere & thus spreading the sping-swinging star-flung far-slung pieces of the intelligence of their (dead) bodies into the superstellar winds that evidently blow straight through Nexo plus plus plus.  But now he was exstatic beyond Vimktom's Ecstazic Covalion Scale, & it was all he could do to cling to his pillow, his little toes wriggling in the air. "What's wrong with you?" I ƒnot, sitting cross-legged on the span of the fluor of the extent of the media of the hyperbole of the flight of the low-slung wide-hipped calypygous big-busted floor in the cup of a shape, or more antly accuraty, in the boom of the eternal chalice of a cupped and vominous wok. Which was the precise sound of the laugh he made.  His system integer integrators he's set up with great Mother Macros more complex than the most complex split personality s l t p r o a I y s l prnly sipsat ientt is and/or slit peonalidy running intricate civilizations of internal macros doing the Great Mother's budding, so the space surrounding us world, par adsamplu, cover with gridfill fulsome lines & wok apart variorously.  Moady the Happy Toady love to mess with space, so there was absolutely no perversion I mean inversion I meant tranquility of space. That's it‑‑that's the mot justabout‑‑there was no tranquility of space, like at a funeral too potent to taste. OK, he kept laughing, & he said something like "Whaddaya think?" as if to ply me with games as games like gamelike gams in the old As Days we shared as consummate fucking (& you should have seen us GO!!!) superpseudofriends. I walked toward him, suppressing all yawns there being a macro for yawns making anyspan intraversible in the anyspan intraverse, with the smokey bouquets of sleeping gas & laughing gas & samadhi gas filled like nothing so much as a Missing Zeun with Mixxin Xuin-whiffchildrentheir faze prusht against the strict samadhi glass magnifying everything but the pain behind my words beyond my words {your preposition HERE!} my words {God as preposition HERE} my words, with the intention of thranging a gilderpass upside his head, racking his bloody mazzard & swingeing he him participially thoroughly. But then I like figured it. "Well," I said, knowing noddingly, "so who paid you so well for them you'd sell your fucking soul?" Which rather splunt my friend ballistically.  Whoever-d-took the zooms ztehuens 'd packed a lochness of muddy into the craw of my pal's account.  I sat in Indian again & sat there envyim.  Wish my account had that much cash, where cash is a metaphor for all the nothingness we have all right? THE DUCE I believe we either took or were given Permaduce© to relieve the situation.  Permaduce or permaduce or The Duce. This is the law.  Permaduce could pop you out of any situation.  You could stop time, step out of the cube of time you're in, which has a door toward the lower-left-front corner of the cube of the screen of the fererant I mean referant of the lost word of the found word of the word pattern of the wordgame of of of the universe you're in, if one may scramble syntax to scramble the mind, if this isn;t a form of brainwashing (brainwahsing (brainwahsing (brainwashing). All right.  The fantasy induced has you stepping into something called the Corridor of Eternity, so you are tehcnically outside of time, as time as been stopped, in a patended process by the most paternal PermaDrempt© Corporation.  You can walk along the corridor where one timecube after another sits.  You can go into them & walk around the people like statues or actors in an episode of The Twilight Zone which was a series of nightmares we had in the sixties, a series of nightmares we had in the 60s. So we were not about to kill one another, obviously.  We'd been statutorially drugged, after all. But things might be still thought to be be to thought still be thought to be nothing if not tense.  I mean still things still tense still thought, after all.  Here are the few things permaduce did not feel or do, except when I say not within this clear field of thought, like a Rumpus Cube playing with the jolly space inside herself, I mean the fall I've got to call it a fall‑‑a strangely inward fall in which everything became incessantly & overwhelminly more & more important touched on these qualities, but one finds its essence infinitely far away from them. It did not feel like falling, nor being upside down on a vast descending bungee cord into greater & greater detail, nor shrinking, nor becoming less important, nor finding one's erstwhile thought flapping like some perspcuous canvass all over one, now too big to know, nor like fear, nor like that terrible lucid sleep I slept the times they medicated me so as to remove & vamp my heart & move revamp meheart nor reheart mevamp demove, nor like falling into the moss bouquet of a Stonehenge of walking werbs. But it did feel like laughter‑‑& in this thoughtcube I mean to say feel means the feeling wasn't youknow quite there, but more split into invisible micropersonalities surrounded by their yawning cloaks of forgetfuness asleep in their pain-nests of forgetful...what?...and ferreting my dad like an emerald sliver in the folds of fair Flossie's mélange of beautiful old clothes, & it did indeed feel rather notlike peering to the distance for someone on a snarl of multiple horizon lines My heart a viscous cat thrubbing in my throat, I jumped the gun.  I had my hopes up, so I up & jumped the gun, which is where you give yourself the gun, which is where you get ahead of yoursef & have to stop time & wait for yourself, until you find out you're ahead of yourself, so you like then speed up time so's to catch up within yourself, until you see yourself coming if not vomiting up on yourself, & you get scared & flee back in time, chasing yourselves bup bust buxt back in time, as they say, till you throb before your birth & burst into liquid cats all o'er the lava vents o'ef nonexistence, all ober you skin so wet with cats & green & laughing lava cats laughing at your owne & mine owen slopping phantasmagoria of time rising to your ankles just when you seeks to exist, & start looking for your dad too soon, with your throat throbbing round your all-excited cat I mean heart & whatnaught. Like I see a great plane off the tiniest, finiest moss like the moss you see when your puny ship limps into the face of the memorial earth, & like I see a golden sliver in this moss, & I say with soofoopid hoarseness,  "Izzat you dad?" fingering & poking the sliver, which like the moss grow apace, the moss quickly becoming some mighty wicked trees & the sliver becoming a great dead ledge of unwritten pumice & then the leaves & then one singular unleaving leave surrounding you, & then a glint in a chance vacuole of the cell rushing over you looks like dad & I being incapable of thought I mean outloud speech, what with the sounds growing up too large around me to take even a glinch of my guff, whisper "Is dat you, dad?" At which the glint roars into the eye of some snazzy new paerrticle, some fancy particle, some knbeknownst confidence particle of the great race of the table of the razes of confidence particles‑‑the ones what perpetually through a thin sneeries of disguises prevents you from fnding them, what though you bubble chamberem & acceleratem & lance em like great minusious boils & formulate 'em, etc., etc, to the tenth to the negamumpteenth power‑‑& the eye whumps into a whole new starryuniverse, but this universe more focused even in its irrelative vastness, its stars more silver, less chalky, more pnpointpinprix withint the lupid accelerated eye of the giant confidipartculae (SEE PARTICULE). AMENALS FROM THE HELL OF THE AMENAL HELL or THE ANAESTHETIC TOY OF DEATH But I had it easy.  My duce halucinations were jolly & entertaining, it seemed to me. Twas poor McMoady with those silver bolts in his head bloating up or bloading up or bloaghghadighng-ggup his Hiccupping Eyes™ such that his Phearful Phur rung out & hud itself behind the tissues of the Red Horror Rock or RHR for short or what did you think a RHR was for? the pelt-of-afuckin-butterfly ectomodal axiocable thinning his consciousness to an absurd point as he sweats it out back there, in the leaning land of the infinitely huge I one inbided. Those people, the glint off the vexion of the sweat from their universes a cut little massy niverse or two, living in a space that tilts, a continuum what tilts, that winces as it tilts, & it is the declension of the pattern of that tilt or refiguring of the paradigm of the idea of that imperfect cube that enabled the ancient & patiently forgotten, now invisible & instanceless, Vuor-ior-ior to send things fnneling down to nothingness. We think the Vuor just fixed the tilt in space.  They made a better universe, one with a rudimentary & vitalistically key rightness that our one canna have, so it be stuck so big & can't collapse sweetly in ponggon itshelf like a long series of parentheses (not to mention quotiatiums & embediments like these ones sufferones) haunting my wet writing deconfigurated dreams, conflicting layers of my psychoplasm kindling one another to combustible tinder of my infinite rage, which has you see the same tilt as this Frowsty Old World, so to sear my face into Fearful Amenal Ersions of my face, which are really‑‑you know, technically speaking‑‑tiny Amenals from the Hell of the Amenal Hell or one of the varioux Snaninels Hells that shit like parahedral viruses balencing their tips in the goo of one's tissues, speaking on the micro level speaks of course he speaks to me all the time, a shouting that comes within the ear & tells me impossibly to im pos sib ly sheats to exhiss, & paraconsciously mess up the features of my in-collapsing-face-collapsing-face my lapsing face my singing face glared in the oraing horror of its own mad dream‑‑those infinite series of nucleating prentheses by which I express the infinite regressive disappearance of the propser universe. I realized this, the crystals of my blood imploding like unlit suction bulbs into my uh head, watching the Very Idea (this the "Very Idea" y'ou ve'hea 'rds 'o mu 'cha 'bou 't) become the blatant screen new & muschmusch finer thoughts are beamed up ong. But always with my friend's distorted face up there.  It was, er, hard to kee up the hunt.  Why this was impossible: 1) dad had a dadsize head start on me, what with time itself doing some pretty weird moves onto God's ruby nose lit in his own bloody Christmas light light, what with time versional varianques of Le Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction or LnFzanco keeping him permanently a head.  2) Even swiping #1 above #1 above the imaginary now-gone #1 from the "ymer of the beam" as the dead kids say & their parents‑‑wanting nothing but to die but with five large Gods the perfect duplicates of the One God dupla-implicat Himself playing keepaway with the anaesthetic toy of death death death‑‑sing breathless lessly sing, I'd all but certainly miss him & be nosing the infinitesimal mosses crocked arond my porcelain have I said this ears I have said this ears have said said ears whie my dad was the lost thought of a transmagoric mist fading to the universe beyond me, as they say, & 3) this must kill you, right? But I found him... Why it happened: THE FUNDS OF REALITY As told in the words of one's Favvian Father.  "Ahem.  In random order: 3) Moady was a genius, with the mote-detector by which he spotted my disappearacne vapor tracer path, with the transactual cable slung behind those mammoth feet of yours (we figured earth for a mighty big plug somewhere upwhere in the galaxies.  We speculated even that the conjectural but soon reified fatness of earth might have been the pink butt plugging up the works that kept the also hypotheised but then hypostatized bathwater or greywater or coriolis marwhapplewasser of the universe from draining out, thus suffocating your drowdning oonyverse right in the umpteenth stanza‑‑you know, the perspicuous Keatsean stanza that rhymed so perfectly with everything the stanza cannot be found, nor can it properly be called what it is properly called, e.g., the Lost Stanza or the Lost Glass Stanza of Keats or the Young Poet's last Cought-Up Stanza of Such Limnal Clarity or What (I dare call her Clare)‑‑of its silver cycles of the moon much less golden sequestatons of the big bige rage or the bik bike rake or the bip bipe rape or the .bak .baak .rape.  Yea, we pinned the murder of existence on earth, all because of your big feet, Caavy Boy. "Don't call me Cavvy-boy." Don't interrupt my brekfasthrough untoto the silling surfascia wawas of the texty proez.  Like the man with his head lopped off I resume: Moady genius mote-detector lying machine plurabilus inventions by the score (those pansy-assed Nexos SOOO confuddlin' glad to have this fluffball clearly from the postulated thenceforth appropriated unto the funky Funds of Reality Smart Sector, where we sorta thoughteveryone was