THE NEVITABLE TORI OF DEATH
or
HEMIDEMIGREMLIN POLYFIELDS

No temperature comes to mind, for example.  There is no weight for example.  The dust or whatever it was we were describing in the Last Life Cycle eschewed or floated haughtily above (the latter, I think) these Material Qualities...

But you really can think of it as snow in a photograph of snow taken by cold in a photograph of cold, in the sense of our world as a snow landscape.  Even though it's dust, taking no kinda photographs.

There were these balls of snow rising to your hip.  & when I say balls of snow, you understand I am meaning balls of dust.  Solid snowballs lying here & there, many dozens of them around the surreal curvy landshcapes, which looked like they had some special significance.  None of us were sensible enough to do anything about them, other than to kick at them a few times, which they seemed to ask for.

...and when our memories are melted & the ash is gone, when time flies again, we see that these balls are little red gremlins contained in hemidemigremlin polyfields, fierce & frightening sunbeasts, they looked like, like the hideous sun-demons or Crimson Dragons curled & reptilian, as of the laughable formoviosgot tenof youryore‑‑only these little things looked tough & hot & not so laugh a bull.

But they'd been contained within these fields see.  They couldn't be moved, it seemed, or else the warlocks or wizards who encapsule dem dere thought it well to leave dem dare (as cautionary scales? or just to make us jump, & therein & thereby lose our shapes?  or even to kill the flimsiest, palest-yellowest of us, disintegrate ingthem to the Nevitable Tori of Death?

& how'd they encapsulem?  & who were these guys, anyhwhay?
THE MANTIS FASHION

A slate guy had me cornered in one of our Great Dust Alleys in the Greydust regiums of our inner-inner nameless namegrey "town," & he was for some reason offering to sell me a packet of large yellowed symbolic poemographs.  He drew them oozing from his trenchcoat, & they were loose & liquid, the size & consistency of a wet sheet.  They seemed rather thick, too.  They were fat pomeographs.

"Fat & fleshy," he said, with a half-leer

the closest he could come to it with half a face; I noticed he had half a face, the other half just deep shadow deep as your brain alla time, no matter which way he faced the light

dangling the huge sheets in front of me.  The light from the street-lamp came through the photograph, & while neither the grain of the photo nor the light from the street light had color, the light passing through the soggy emulsion of this drenched matserpiece came into all sorts of color.

Masterpiece, masterpiece.

"Nice, enh?" he said, sidling closer to me, letting his own boney shadow slice a thin slit in silouette through the sheet he was holding up so high

much higher than his arms length would make possible; he must be extending his arms in the mantis fashion

& I could feel him feeling up the sheet.

"I can feel things in the sheet," I s1t2a3m4m5e6r7dead ammerdud.  I felt sick; he was holding the damn thing far too close; it was like a sickebing odor dee inside of me.

"Heyeyeye," he chuckled, patting the sheet so I coyld feel him patting me in the sheet.  "We all feel things in the sheet, my friend.  We all feel things in the sheet, my friend."

I heard a murmur of agreement, no doubt from the slatey legions just outside the shadows.  This is what I get for coming to the core of town, I thought.

Another murmur of assent.

"Yea & we can all hear things thought through the thickness of the sheet," he chirped, and

I realized Everything these guys think is a song.

"You mean Everything we THINK is a goddam SONG," they sang.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & taking his magnificent cock in hand‑‑it really was damp‑‑& trying to see it.

Did I say cock!?  My GAWD!  What you must be thinking!!!  Let's try that again.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & squeezing his magnificent cock & trying to deepthroat it.

No good.  Said cock again.  There may be some repressed sexuality interpfering with things here‑‑you know, throwing us out of the story as author gets big bonger.  That sort of thing.

Normally I would edit this out‑‑especially from such an amazingly long novel as Timestuff.  But the rules are you can't cut them out.

You can cut the sex scenes out, then talk about them whilst licking your lips repeatedly.  You can do that.  Now back to our story.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & taking his magnificent‑‑photograph, photograph of his massive cock in hand‑‑it really was damp‑‑& trying stretch my lips around it.

Just kidding.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & taking his photograph in hand‑‑it really was damp‑‑& trying stretch my lips around it.

"Knock it off!" he shrieked.  "What are you doing?"

"I dunno.  Someone was sending thoughts into my head I think.  Just forget everything you've read for the last five minutes.  Then you'll be all right.  Anyway (wiping his mouth) I don't think I can buy it under these circumstances."

Assent murmured they & murmured I this.

"Stop it!" he hawked back-atom. "Is everyone crazy here?  What page are we on, anyway?"

"I mean...there's not enough light."

But look," he whispered, pushing the cloth to my face while my face lost all resolution trying to make faces too horrid for the mere flesh-planes of a face.  "Look!"

Yea, you could see it all right, when you held it up to your face & your face disintegrated.  When your face disintegrated in the wetness of the sheets, wellsir, then you could see right well.

"I...can...see...right well," I peeped through the grian of the scene of my wife.

"Quite a mouth, huh, friend?" he was whispering, & I had to agree that was quite amouth my wife had on her, in this photo here, in this time-locked time-stopped moment of a primal goddam photo I was breathing (choking in!) here.

Her mouth was much thicker & richer of lip, the lips much more moist‑‑hell, infinitely more moist‑‑than they had ever even dreamed of ebig  when she was with me, except possibly in the early (hench forgotten) eondays...

Her mouth looked like it could do anything.

Her mouth was also much hotter, in this photograph, & was quivering so much it almost destroyed the photograph.

"Yea, that happems, Hawk mutters.

Yea, all the Shadow-Hawks agree.

"Stop," he hished them, a finger almost reaching his lips but you'll recall it was half a finger & was half-a-lips.

"Sh," Hawk says in half alisp...

Quite a mouth.  You sensed great depths behind that mouth, as well‑‑great depth & love and, well, re cep ti I ty.

"Yea: RE cep TIV I TY," everyone chanted.

& they chanted it again & again, round some circular eons, which I refuse to quiote as I cannot wuote it linearly here.

Here: .     .     .     .     .

"Yea," says Hawk, plucking the phoro away & ending the rhythm & ending the circle of eternity & ending the goddam chantiong of the hawks & ending.

"That was my wife," I said like a humiliated GLINKing little BOY.

"Well," says Hawk, now looking down so he didn't even haf his half a face, just his Hawk Grey Hat© (which you can get today!) & his feet nimbly scuffing grey works of grey-art in the greyness down below the greyness down below the black.

"Well," he offers.  "It was."

"Well but this was just a fragment of the whole shot," I blurted (notice how everything I say in this scene is a blurt or a stammer or a blur? notice? notice?).

Hawk was walking away, milking the most from his purchase.

"I mean...how can I get the rest of this photograph?"  I hollered haltingly (hol lurd hal ting ly).

Pause.  Stop.  Echo-step of Hawk.  Eye.

"Can I like...have it enlarged?"

Tremendouche tremulusche tremooloos of unfound hawkhi larity!

"Good joke," was the sense of it.  Good joke.

"Friend," chuckled the Hawk Man, shuffling up to me again.  "Wasn't the mouth e nough?"

Well, I said nothing as I sheled out right there.  I said nothing, because I didnt want any of my thoughts going into this photograph‑‑thoughts which they would obviously hear in an eonminute, as they obviously had more copes of her mouth, more copies of the photograph revealing my wife's mouth in my absence as, say, O, say twice ther mouth that it had ever been.

So I bought the frag in silence & I bought the frag in si lence

but I thought, Hell no, her mouth was way too much...
THE FLYING WING

Yea, our memories come back like that, not that any of us who ever we may be wants to have our memories back.  I mean, this is no picnic here, but who the hell wants hisher goddam mem ries back?  Knowhateyemean?

Also, as the poet says, "Time be a Story being broken like the beating wing of a Bird flying through the panes of Time" & so & so the story start again, this me in love.  I was in relove with this Qalp‑‑flying creature, the most beautiful you could ever see.  Qalps are like butterflies; they are like birds.  This particular Qalp was also very much like a dream, because it flew into my troubled dreams (all dreams are troubled here) & brought light & color to the dreams, & I loved it for this‑‑even though the color & light just made the dreams more screamingly horrible than before, brought entire cascades of pain into the dreams & woke me up, my lungs too full even to gasp, & no sound coming out.

Well, she woke me up, which was all right.  & as far as I'm constnurned, "Even a live nightnmare is better than a dead dream," so I got up, shaking & sweating, amazed as we always are at the vague form of my body & its shakey movements.

& there she was!

The flying wing‑‑it was here, in the wake-up world.

Was this one of thise dream-within-dreamwhorls you have occasionally?  Now that was really frightening...

But I was stomping round & round, & nothing changed other than the dustcircles my feet were smushing.  I was awake, all right.

& she was there, fly-ying in front of me, more beautiful than ever!

So, sweet idiot that I was, & long before anyone was awake, I followed her...

She had wings that grew wider as we went, as if we were becoming acquainted & were growing bolder with one another.  & this caused me to lick my lips (uselessly) & look over my shoulder in case anyone's following me.

But no one was awake.  Generally we could not wake, & when we could, why bother?

She had this curved & colorful back, like an opalescence, too tiny & fine to touch but I ached to touch it.

But I wanted more to know what she was leading me to.
EMBEDDED EXISTENCE C

It wasn't easy following.  The dawn papers were tattered like snow.  I mean there was this snow everywhere.  I mean there were these papers

shreds of paper, infinite & endless strips & fragments & waddings & sheathings & shreds of it everywhere

confettilike blazions of it flickering in the air

weightless constellations gleaming moonlike in the moonless sun

coils of it wrapped into strings wrapped into robes wrapped into cables wrapped around the sleeping machinery of this place we're in

multifarious packs of the stuff ganging up on ankles in alleys & coating surfaces already multicoated with dried remnants of the guff

somewhere high in one of our forgotten layers of atmosphere vast planes of wafery paper blown on sumptuous breezes, paper continents covered, they say (in their sleep they say!) with meaningful images

images that would solve this puzzle of our meaning, & when I say meaning I am meaning our existence meaning

so what I said back there meant something like me meaning solve this puzzle of our existence (existence (existence (existence ({endlessly embedding} meaning).

So, suffice it to say I was fighting some Pretty Fierce Papers following this dream-bug, dream-bird, goddam dream-love of mine.  And, given the time of day, the papers were at their worst.  I mean, their attitude was at its worst.  O, this wasn't just me being crazy.  This was absolutely everybody being crazy.  It was a very solid form of crazy in which you could clearly perceive the attitude of the goddam papers.

You could tell the papers felt they knew something...possibly knew everything...certainly, you could sense the papers thinking, if they could just be put together again they would contain all of meaning, pupossibly all of time, or some interpretation of something infinitely & wonderfully significantly meaningful etc. (the papers were always saying "etc."‑‑you know, without literally "saying" it...just that's what they were always meaning to "say you say, I ean see (embedded existence C (which is the existence we don't live in but which these endless sheets of paper point us tweird‑‑it is the existence just beyond the scope of all these goddam shreds...EXISTENCE SEE)..."etc." is the papers' way, I believe, of saying

"If we were but all put together, you would C."

See...

Anyway, at dawn, or just before it, the papers were at their height of arrogance & paper-fancied power.  Hmph.  Hmph!  So I was fighting my way‑‑& rather more violently, I may say, in fact much more violently than is usual with our tattered race (example of our tatteredness: we do not even know the race of our name; did I say?), & in fact I fought the obfuscating, niggling, mocking, tormenting, floundering and, as the poets say "flap-fluttering" paper leaves paper leaves in a manner utterly inconsistent & confiusedly (to the papers--ha!) uncharacteristic way.

So I was messing twith them that day.

As I followed my bug-love far away...

She leads me to something very densely wrapped in paper‑‑in big, densely-condensed, heavily-printed especially-signfiicant brpad sheets of the stuff...something, you might suspect if you suspected, the papers wanted wrapped up very badly.

& so that's what they had done.  They had wrapped this object up very badly.

It was, in point of fact, a mountain of wrappage.  It was mountain-sized.

My lovely little bug, touching my nose with a gleam of joy, tells me I have to dig into this.

"Why?" I coo drunkenly.

"To find the object inside.  The thing wrapped up.  L'objet trouvé."

"OK," I sing with mine eyes closed.

& start to digging in.

Yea, this goes on for a very long time.  But consider this:

There is nothing but time but time nothing is there but.

OK?  OK.
I WAS, AFTER ALL, THE WORMLIKE ONE
oer
ALL INSANE SLASH-SLASH

We decided, see, my butterfly-partners & me of Butterfly Partners & Me., Inc., that this was some sort of planetoid.  We ur decided it was a moon obiting I mean orbiting at an Extremely Low Altitude (two & a half feet, to be approximately exact) with a rotational velocity, I don't have to say, pretty much the same as the sureface of the planet.

What butterlypartners?, you ask, is what I'm saying.

What butterfly asking after my partners? You pray which is what I’m asking.

What asking after partners doth this butterly froth? We bray, which is naught worth hasking.

& what boots the mariposa shifting off her longlost cloths like the moonlit hoar of a flossy sloth unto the wordvoid the WORDVOID of frosty monitors, ponder the sleeping, watching eyes or the wtaching sleeless eyes or the clear gel forming the dreamo of the space taken up by the gleam of the froshing eyes?

But to shuffle off these coils of immortality, these rills of hyperpoetry, these foam condensations of moste crystalline poetry & return to the cycliung story-o-i-o, we assumed we were we on a planet, we & / the planet had a surface / we were on the surface / the surface was rotating / we were not, at least in these assumptions, at all insane, or all insane slash-slash.

& lo, was it further decided‑‑based not quite so severely in this case on spatial mechanics or our pooled gnoweldge of interplanetary fol-de-rol as on Fiouaeour's bright dream (see, we have these BRIGHT VIVID DREAMS, which are generally BRIGHT GREEN VIVID DREAMS, known in the hi-presh depphs of the capital as VIRESCENT GREAMS for reason unknown OUTSIDE THE DREAMS themselves) that the planetoid was hollow.

"Why you say it hollow, Fob?" we said as one (1).

"The dream," Fob (she’s my butterfly-fren) doth sen.  "It was the dream whatsend."

"Yea," (1), "and besides, the word planetoid sound hollow."

Have I mentioned we don't have the word is?  This is difficult.

But twas true.  Planetoid does sound hollow, & there was Fob's vivid green goddam dream, whic hwe trusted, the premised of the dream (that the planetoid is holoows WILL YOU LISTEN to me?) being no less outlandish than the spatial-mechanical mdel of the planetoid rotating Fiouaeour at 2.5 feet, or whatever we had for feet.  I've been outside of tie so long, I begin to forfett.

& we elected we none other than me to crawl into the planetoid, to wormlike crawl into the planetoid, as / this was POSSIBLY the image Fobsie saw in his dream toward the greeny end of the teig of the springtide dweam when virescent pixels started to u h b r  e   a    k u       p / I was, after all, the wormlike one.

You should all agree on this we could all agree.

Once upon a time on a dusky dawm (there was too much forgetful dust forgetfulness of dust forget-me dusk for "dawn" so at a no-partiular no-time we agreed upon I tried to squirm my way into the planetoid.  This involved bumping my head against it till a hole formed in the side (a good omen for the thoerg!  Good!  Bad would have been, say, if I just kept flattening my head on the rocky face leaving nothing but a pink blustain upon the face of the planetoid.  That would be bad.) the following seems to have happened.  Now back to our story, if this is not the story.  Where are we, anyway?

Rhetorical question.  Back inside the story, I got my head inside (& you will agree this too was good, importing / I were burrowing a hole into a softshelled planetoid / I was kncoking another type of hole altogether, a hole2, as it were  through the side of a dream-fulfilling but otherwise hollow planetoid ha HA!

Well, I worked.  No one helped me‑‑oh no!  Of course not!  Heaven for bud!  & I snarled & rolled & kicked & clawed & reeled & rocked my seemingly-endlessly-longllyy bodyy more & more into the hole, fulfilling all that worm mythology my erstwhile "friends"'d built up around & preceding & needless to say trailing me, & my legs made useless airy walking otions in the useless airyaire,

but my shoulders got in, & larger & larger calubrated measures of my trunk

and after a while I got dusty, & the dust got wet, & the dust tuned to mud, so I got muddy, & I was like a very large, sincere-looking sapseeking bloodsapper supping into this dustball ofa goddam 'toid.

& I popped right in!

I was sitting, not in a hollow plan e toid, but in a ship, & I was in a seat at a console & (what is more( & I was perfectly clean.

I did several brilliant but brittle doudou bleble ta ta kes kes unbe lieving ly.

I was alone.  I mean, there was no dirty hole freshly burrowed behind me, no friends calling in to me, no sings of the surface of my world.

I have clearly gone through the meniscus, I thought, which I thought of as a Signal Thought, not-smuch cause it come perilously close to having an is in it (but that would be adsurb, no?), but because up till then I nor no noe I'd known knowed what a eniscus" was, in the sense I was thunking it of.

The meniscus, I knew & so can tell you new, I mean now, was the thin field you went through getting into the ship.  Seals you off; seals the outside off; & (evidently, now if you're folowing me wouldn't you say?) cleans you off.
[Whistles.]  Decks ya out in a neatso uniform too.

Fills ya with how to work the panel too.

Unless (& as we will see, this turns out to be The True Alternative) one was just remembering,

having pasht through the mneiscus and, therefore, remembring.

Like putting the tiny limbs of a broken millionlegged doll back together again‑‑re MEMBER ing.

So I throttled up.  The ship yawed a long-sleeping creature (uhbut its sleep hyperenforced) shugging its mighty shoulders if you willa wake, & she pitched to port, & shivered off the guck, by which I eman the dust caked so thick the lovely butterfly goddam ship had come to resemble nothing so much as so much as much as as a planetoid (ha!‑‑& is that a laugh or what?  WHAT IS A LAUGH?  Ha?) what?

& the chunks caked off in the great radiance of the revivified ship (even the unshieled friends being cooked outside must almost remember ha?) & the ship bobbed lissomely & relieved, & the ship glowed (I saw this on some sort of external scanners I must make up someday) & added just a touch of color to the dust & the ship went

SKEW!

That's right, the recovered & now-flying ship went

SKEW!

For, I seemed to know some(at that time still more or less thinking, by the crotch of my pants, more less, that the ship was somehow you know briefing me on all this know)how, that this was what they (though I didn't know who THEY were, so it appears on the template of my mind like a blank, like __________THEY?) called it‑‑a SKEW ship, having something to dew with the method of its flight, which was much muich much much more than mere sptial flight.

In fact, "they" made faces when you clumsily referred to it as "spatial flight," didn't they?  I remembered that vividly‑‑the ship-briefing-me theory fading like the very duistglaze on the sun as we flew above the sun, I mean above the clouds of dust so we for the first time in nonmemory saw the sun.

Not bad...

Sun, & we looped about a bit & suchlike mannerisms of euphoric quasi-firsttime flight, & then

We left time, or rather

SKEWed outside of time and
I was flying through a grey space, but this was a really grey space, not a merely dustcovered amnesiac-grey sort of space like the space I'd just come etc.

This place was grey, was it really grey.

This blond lug was sitting with his bulbous suit slit open, his lean body leaning through the slit, leaning out & oddly bobbing, & he was either sweating or sobbing, hollow to say whisch-witch...

Who is this guy?

"Recognition Factor...Recognition Factor..." bleats the gape of the skein of the speakers of the shape, trying for the similes of them not to sound metallic & mechanical, trying with all their little metaphors, in the realms where metyaphor fucntions as soul, to get some soul into the sound, because clearly they are sembling, in the realm where symboling breathes as thinking breaves as blieving in brief symbolization of belief, these are importantmemories coming back back back.

"Mumemories coming back...back...back," I trytobarkbutcroak.  I was not, as my speakers most certainly were, expecting that.

When you hit the Brittle Zones (Brittle Zones?  did he say Brittle Zones?  & like what the hell is that?) big memories coming back‑‑very big memories, memoriy chunks that would be dangoreus did they not float in smooth rotation like space-screen images of the chunks of memories having beauty & surface but no mass, being just mock-ups of memories.

No, the chunks of memory are harmless enough as they roll in & try to connect with one another, the memories you see the memememororoiesies yoyouyou seesesee not able to remeber their own connections (that takes intramemories, which are nowhere to be seen outside the whowhere scene of time), if any (they think, these being thinking memories).

But the memories might be dangeorius.

I land & recognize this dwarfish smiling little dude as one Hebs‑‑each recollection like a great bobbing icefloe I'm sickened upon, each one filling me not so much with asotnishment as with pique, a petty sort of outrage that these things, so endlessly hidden from me, should come back, & freeze my ass, & frostbite my hands as they hug the jags of the metaphor I float upon.

Damn, I'm thinking.  Hebs.

So as I land this "Hebs" ("Hebs"?  Oh yea‑‑Hebs!) is standing there arms akimbo, the blast of the engIngs turning him perfectly, plastic white, prving it seems to me for once & for all that Hebs was comprised of white plastic, of white, indestructible plastic stained each morinng ewith the daily colors of Heb, explaining the long-ignored biographical fact that Hebs was adifferent damned color everyday, like the aching screen you are forced by force of implant to stare at every day‑‑& when I say stare at I believe I mean thrust your head into to to every day, assuming you have day.

Hebs anyway, looking albino & distinctly disgusted (the (lesser, (smaller, (unindividualized (Ypions (standing (behind (him (like [surfetous parenthesuss]-i)s)s)u)s)s)i)z)y)z), doing a lot of rolling of the eyes as I powered down with the usual IngorGasmiuc Sigh & hopped in a tight parabola out to the brittle brittle brittle brittle gorund.

"Back, are we?" he snapped.  Appreciative laughter buried deep behind‑‑my turn to look disgust at his little buddies.

"Don't call them 'little buddies.'"

"I didn't say anything, doll-baby."

"Think them then."

"I did."

"I mean 'Don't think them then.'"  His thoughts fraught froth like ugly flowers ere his face.

I remember we bicker like this.  He mad, we bicke,r then we seetle in his tent.
SUSPICION DICK

Settled in his tent (with me a double take going this way & wide), Hebs tendered me a big plate of refreshments, & of course this got my hackle zup right away.  Priapic suspicions grew big green boner that just tuumed & twaddled in the timeless air.

It was not just the dreamlike size O the dreamlike size of the silver platter that did uh altert uhme‑‑though godknow twas a factor.

It was not only the way in which he did er dit (the outsized platter‑‑are you following me? are you following the nips of candy into my brain? see below), which involved some Inordinately Phancye Phö1tewerken & a dis splay of way too many fingers sticking out round the out round the eggs or the edges of the plat or the platter, or the pat or the patter, as I bleeveye said (ees evoba)...

Well maybe not...

But anyway‑‑returning if we might to the vast subjunct of my suspixiums so glisteningly impressively erect, nor even the leer, or sort of a waxy sneer, with which his face comborded as he leaned my way extending it like some shitty deal...

Sayin, "Try these, boy."

Boy?  He calls me boy?  He's trying to win me confidence & he calls me boy?  Allow me to react right here [finger thrust in my mouƒ]: "Ack!  Aack!"

"Thanks."  I said.  Much better now.

No, I think my suspicions really reached full fruition, really achieved a massive blossom, truly ripenoid to a color darker than even the most clouded-under oyes could see, was when Hebs said, his voice traveling difficultly round the plate which was hoovered so close to mine eyes it was, in point of fact, all I could see

when he said so help me

"Magnificent cock!" (with a gasp)

nodding toward said boner in the lucent air a sweetmeat thrust just a quarter-inch or so into his mouth, judging by the sound, just teasing into the unh! softnesses of his lips, his eyes involuntarily rolling I would think upup into his head

Where we follow him, or follow the chunk of pastry, really, into the recesses of his brain‑‑which is where these confections are designed to go‑‑& right down into the jammed & circular Intersection of Embarrassment that had brought him here, me here at his invitation, the bonbons on the silver platter, the rest of this poem taking place inside his brain for no better reason than we got sucked into his brain at this particular indentation & could never get the fuck out.  There's no point in  repining.  We have to move on...

"Did you feel something funny just there?"

"No.  I'm trying to tell you we've figured it uh out.'

"Figured uh out what?"

H "Uh you know."

"No I don't uh uh know."

H "Yes you uhuhuhuh-do.  Don't pray flames with me.  You know‑‑our uh problem.  We've figured it out.  The solution, out."

"Solution to what?"

H "You know."

X "I most certainly do not know."

Lids formed like gentle cloud halfway over his eyes.  Hebs was tilting back his chair way back & nipping another nib.

H "This memory thing.  This memory-nugget thing."

Upon wish it all comes running back to me in the form of a silver aura of racers running back like a maid in arms to me & I so say "O yea.  So what do we do?"

‑‑first mention of drupe.


FIRST MENTION OF DRUPE

Upon witch we both remembers in a stunning roundel of stares.  When he says memory-nuggest thing he means drupe & when I say drupe I am quoting him meaning the memory-nugget thing or crystal of one or more of my most terrible emories, the encystment of which memories is what's keeping me alive, but which is equally fucking up my world.  My world of Dim, that is.  That's why they can’t remember anything back there.  It is all my fault, or more properly, my awful memories' fault, or in parallel property, the fault of me for balliong up my memories, or in conditional would-be-properlies, the fault of the Yps for implanting the wished-for must-be-encyted memories in the first (if you can call it that) place (if you can place it then) naught (if we can breathe till then).

"So," to review shall we, "what do we do?" I pant.

& with psychotic intention he sprung forward in his chairs, elbows on the table & fingers first interlocking, then massaging one another, then touching their little pads together & like humping one another in an anabsolutely fascinating updown inout backforth humping motion, nnh, nnh, nnh.

"We lock the memory," he said cheerfully. "We encrypt it."

"You can do that?"

"No.  As I was saying, we encrypt it into a nugget, like these cookies (Have one? See blow), so when you go like back into time your like memories will not blow."

& here he did a weird little song & dance thing, right on the desk.  He became small to get up on the desk, & danced around on the platter on the desk, the platter being on the desk, & he danced, no smaller than the cookies, & he danced around the cookies asif they was giant props, & the kicked some of the cookies so theyslid off stage o where the grips I prazoom, dollyed em auf, & he sang this little number with a full rhythm section & some horns, a few strings, like nothing so much as a scene from a Tomasio Pyncazzio novellio, uh-huh, & this hahappened very fast.

The song didn't happen fast, if I might clarify.  The song & the dance didna happend fast‑‑just the set-up, as it really occurred in "time," not the verbal set-up here, which is o so long.

So, in a dark blue tux with a neonglowing cane, steel-tipped shoetoes taping on the stage-sized platter, suddenly as I said above enlarged for our entertainment if not benefit (& thiswas not a benefit), he sang, or rather chanted, "O your mem ries will not blow."

& he like piroutetted like the living Fred Astaire after he'd had a few, & huffed-hee, "Oyea, your mem ries will...not...BLOW!

& he tapped that cane very sharply on  the silver sheen & shuffled some long steps back‑‑not doing too bad really, & sang, "O yeayea man, so yer mem reez willa naught BLOW! Uh-huh! Unh!"

& ran right at the camera & sank down on one kneww, still sliding, so he was like, as I've tried to imply, or downright say, he was sliding toward us across the silver platter (now to be conceived of as a stage, OK?) with his arms outspread, & Jolsoned out "So yerloving MEM o RIES willa nevaneva, uh-uh, nono, neva-neva...babababa-BLOW!

"Uh huh! O yea!"

Sure, big hit.  Very convincing.  Lotta applause.

But the sun glinted on my bright green Suspicion Dick.

"So," I said mock-thoughtfully, though of course there wasn't a thought in my head, which was how they'd planned it, & why they'd so elaborately staged it, clever-if-demented Yps, letting everything return back to nomral (this is me, clamly letting this happen, here, pretending to muinch on a quote cookie), if that be possible (return to the nomral, that is), "that's where the drupe come from‑‑from you?  From us, doing what you've suggested we do right here‑‑right?"

"Something like that," said his voice, from behind the big back of his chair, turning its shell to me, like he's gonna be all Coy & Fey all of a sudden.

Either that or he was removing his make-up, which should not have been necessary here...

& he eventually tuns back to me & smiles, all very businesslike, even sliding the plate aside, giving me time, cutting me some slack after the big show, as if the big show had not occurred, which is how these out-of-timers operate.

I bit in, my cock bobbling.

& sure & soon & swoony nough, to get to the punch line, the cookies (o so nowthey're cookies are they? hm? hm? well yea...) were these bright explosive things that filled your mouth with blood.

Black bloodand your own black blood.  Very tasty actually.  I tasted & I gave that involuntsarily inevitable, I mean inevitably involuntarily sorry yip & my eyes roll up into my brain which was rolling up like the backdrop of a cheesy old travelin' show with Hebs (?) as the empresario, Road Show of the Bloody Cookies

roll up there & stay there

and I said "OK, let's do it," & did an attenuated "answering" song & dance, somewhat sentimental & lugubrious, with the enlarged plate-prop & tuxedo-props & the show tunes & the so ons, some of to so long it is still going on but which I am not contractually obligated not to not-descibe, it being shamewhit derivative, & so.
SPINNING HEADS
or
NEVERGUEST
First Appearance of Ing

It was a nice day, the light being fresh & brightly en CRYPT DEAD, HEY, bu-bu-bububu-but as you could see the cycles were making us all dizzy, what with me being urgently packed back ing the

Ing & sent bloody back‑‑which now that I was here (again) I remembered (again) in one great déjà vu containing quite number of lesser vu's, sending us all spinninf back many times, forgetting the premise, forgetting the story, forgetting everything in a fit of hyperventilation.

Some of this stuff is just metaphorical.  Don't try this at home.  Now back to our story, sorry to say...

I'm not sure I can continue in this state of multiple déjà vu, but I'll try.  It seemed I was remembering something about more things being found upon objective measurement to be wrong with Dim, & then me packing my ass back to the Brittle Zones & the Yps in a state of mellow amnesia & smiling absinthly, hat in a hundred hands, asking for help which was for me for the Very First Time, which I can tell you & in fact will tell you & indeed am about to tell you if you'll just keep rolling out of time drove the Ypions NUTs...

So it didn’t work, & as I say there in the cockpit of the unignited Ing sat back with my big drip druke in my lack of a lap, I looked at them & they looked at me & I saw they was sick of helping me, & they showed it by standing near me in a motley semicircle with their pale lips pressed together, in much the way an urph-dad does when, after an aching day of work going in circle after circle of meaninglessness toward a core of even greater meaninglessness, he's come home, been briefed on your manifold little offences, & sets out lavish clear membranes, wet sheets of pain, electrical sheets of pain, metaphoric sheets of electrical pain you decide upon you, his kid.

So I didn't trust their looks‑‑& this as you know or have guessed or do not know & neverguest was a problem to me, because I am a Trusting Dim.  I have to have trust around me or I will soon die.  & even here in the brittle zones when I could not tehcnically die, I needed the trust.  Or I would something-like die.

& I didn't want to feel that something-like die.

 
ImageBox™

Though I had this image, see, like the image the kid in the paragraph above has which nags him & pricks small portions of his thin skin, slowly flaying him all day as he waits for his heartless dad to come.  It was the image of me devolving ssllloooowwwwwwly into a putrid mound of glue, which the Ypions would transport right into the time rooms‑‑a place where I could take forever to decay...

it was OK...so long as I decayed...    

Yea, the Ypions were making a big show of their righteous indignation.  They'd shuffle into new rings around me as I moved (trying to ignore them), folding their arms & planting their many feet.  They were like clearing their throats, & I was like this sweaty dim, I'll tell you, trying to go about my tasks, or pretending to have tasks, & therefore going about the soundless rituals of doing things, when, if asked, I would have to admit I was doing absolutely nothing other than looking like I was doing things.

& that talk itself was starting to seem Immensely Important, even urgent, even an emergency, so I worked (at nothing) faster & faster & more irritably, so the flocks of disgruntled Ypions had to move back & shift their positions & try to fold their arms & spread their feet apart & frown, all in shorter & shorter units of time, as my own tasks became faster.

& you can do things with infinite speed in the brittle zones.  I was approaching this.  I was a blur; the Yps were an angry blur around me, disaproving as fast as they could, with me escaping just ahead of them, like two lethal lightships strekaing invisibly thoruygh space, murdering each other with speed, accelerating right up to death.

"All right, what is it?" I finally shrieked, with such explosiveness & sudden stop that the Yps, caught in their own atomic dance, were thrown like wooden toys clattering on their butts in front of me.  Gave me kind of an advantage, as it was now me standing over them with my arms akimbo, & them with their elbows on the ground, or clutching their heads their heads to get their heads their heads to stop spinning heads.
"Look‑‑we made a mistake," said Hebs, who always had more aplomb than the others.  He didn't try to move from his spot, but just crossed a few of his feet & acted comfy there, even though he was covered with the Ubiquitous Dust of Indignation.  & I know how that itches your nose.

Observe: Hebs wriggle his nose.  I also notice that Hebs zeznose will wriggle at my thoughts, but I don't let this bother me.

"Mistake?" I said, slipping back in my tenses & stomping in the Circle of the Appropriate Fashion.  "You destroyed my world!"

"Well, yes," Hebs said.  "Sort of.  I mean, we took your minds away for a while.  But we had them stored, right?  & we send them back‑‑I mean, we're sending them back as soon as you stop using us.  Like you're milking us for favors.  Like."

"I am not."

"You are so."

We were very quiet for a while, & now I felt feeble & petulant.  The Ypions, however, made no move to get up.  They lay there as if lying there were their idea.  Some of them sifted The Gold Dust Of Et Cetera through "serial cascades of fingers multifarious."

"What'd you say?" said Hebs.

"Nothing.  But anyway, I'm not using you.  I'm just trying to get my memories back."

"Ah," said Hebs, raising the Finger of But.  "We didn't bury your memories like that.  I mean, we didn't mayer them in, in a circle, like."

I paused a couple of beats, as Dead Actors Inanimate say they say.

"You might have done it."

"No.  No way!"

"Yes way.  You must have done it.  & forgetting you've done it sno excuse."

I had got to them.  They were exchanging The Palimpsest of Looks, wherein uncertainty & tender yielding make eye connect to eye in a circular skein, leading in this case to a different silence‑‑an enitrely different silence‑‑form the one that had gone before, hiccupping be tween the thick-tossed networks of verbs.

They never did reply, but just got up, & the old Circle of Anger dispersed.  Looked like I'd won some more help‑‑some more tries at my endlessly incircling drupe of memories.  But they were starting to hate it.  The help would not be guilt-drive‑‑much less friendly‑‑anymore.

& I had to make it through very soon.  The Yps'd try to kill me after a few more failures.  It was not their fault.
THE ESSENCE OF WHINING

I got back home & was taken into silver custody to Polabetma's lab

Polabetma: The Lab

Arrested again‑‑& I'll admit I was whining.  I knew I was whining even then but I had to keep whining, & that's the knack of whining, isn't it?

Yes it is.

But what was different here was that no one said to stop whining.  I mean, that, too--someone telling you to stop whining--is the essence of whining, which is what we're talking about.  Or I'm talking about. Or I'm writing about.  Or I have whined about & you are wheaning.  About.   Whriting.

"There's just too many dreams," I whining something like a baby whining in his father's dream or the father in his own dream of being a baby in his baby dream or the dream of the turtle who is the first of your animals to dream or the dream of the dreamless plant when it starts up in heaven to dream in the heaven upheaven of dreams.  Something like that.

"We just keep waking up into deeper dreams!  Th-th-the dreams are too many! Th-th-the dreams are too intense, etc.!" I whined!

But even as I did so my eyes moved restlessly.  No one was telling me to stop whining, & even my curling, whining little mind knew that meant they were up to something.

It meant they were up to something which, they figured, was going to stop my whining.

& I didn't like imaging that.

But I couldn't help it.  I'd been hanging round the godmamned Ypions too long‑‑my thoughts puffed deliciously out in visual-awkward dreamlings o' themselves, populated by universally-understood, universally-recognizable figures symbolizing my thoughts as distilled to an idiot purity, some of them figures walking round with lines through their torsoes, some of them not, but all of them whining.

Next thing I knew they'd stripped the silver I was covered with from the coverages of time & taken me up a narrowing lift into a little narrow lab which was stripped oits silver & traspupped up unto a littler silver lift upin a littlest silvrest lab & marched me off the lift & into Pola's lab & shown me round the lab blabbing very fast.

"Herewehaveretorts&stuff-herewehavewires-herewehavewvatwithinvatofcoloredchemicals-& here‑‑here...eherwehave‑‑well-hey!lookslikeanchair
yesitis-anicelittlehardchairhererightinthemiddleofthelocusofthecentralsilverlab
sohere
whydontyoujustsithereinthischairfriend
sit-here-sit-here...now."

& bound me to the chair in some Instantaneous Fanatic Fashion‑‑I imagine a Whip of Wires around me or a swift screaming of tape too high-pitched to hear‑‑& Pola sliced open my face with an old strop razor manifestly seven times too brong.

So it freely lopped my face like a steak knive lopping the numb pad of your thumb‑‑& that's your thumb, bub, not mine; sorry, bubs, but that's the metaphor‑‑in a horizontal curve from cheekbone through the upper lip & down to the jawbone on the other side

& my thought-rings poughed out various international figures with the lines hacking through them, to represent the cut going back & forth & back & forth & back & forth & back & forth in "Clones most incalculable"

so that Pola & her cronies (temporary help hired to fill up ineffable spaces in the ineluctable lab) could now pull the top of my head back like a pez dispenser & reach right in...
Which they did, while I‑‑in recidivistic reflex obedience‑‑said "Ahhhhhhh."

"STOP SAYING 'AHHHH'!"  PolaPoal bellowellowed, & I did.

(Though those thought-forms I've been so ludicrously 'luding to puffed out still‑‑only very tiny now, invisible micro-puffs with reducio ad absurdum International Stick-Figures™ stuck in Egyptian poses, trying to symbolize things but now too small to symbolize, lacking now the heft & the girth to "swinge & swangle" them meanin's round.

So they posed & they danced, & they held Truly Piteous Circles with diagonal lines in front of themselves, but the lines, too, were too small, & couldn't cancel anything; nor, in that world of tiny signs, did anything mean anything nor anything meam.  It was sad, but cute, but sad.  I have often thought they were like prepositions dancing there.

"There," said Pola with smug professionalism, holding another drupe between the fat wood calipers of some outsized & fat wooden tweezers, as if she'd gone in there for, say, a 24" x 38" color print sozzling in its photic chemicals.

The razor was gone & I was not dripping a bit.  My head was not acting like a real head, which when you ponder it is the nature of your head the whole time, isn't it?

It is.  I think.

& my eyes, popped hypnothyroid out the anterior flap of my bifurcated he!ad, rolled downward to see the drupe, which was a pline & fump specimen, a dazzling seedlike replica of the last drupe we'd seen  in the last drupedream, known as the Group Drupe Dream.  Which was the true dream, by the way, just to let you know, get it on the record, so to spake, just so no one will think nor accuse nor with innuendo insinuate that this novel got no solid ground of truth or that everything within these wobblin' walls o' words is a lie.

Not so.  That last dream was true.  But it's gone.  So the accusations are false from a literal point of view, but true in everyotherwise.  Like all accusations everywhere anyway or how, OK.

"This look good," muttered Pol, just trying to buckerself up, I think, though she was earnestly trotting the big dripe over to her VattoChemicoze®.  & I thought, Maybe it is a color photograph.  Maybe if we develop it‑‑that'll be it, & we can go home to sleep or whatever i' twill be.

& she planks it into the tray.  Swish the tray by lifting one edge (of the tray).  Swept the drupe through the chemicals with the calipers.  Sez Hmmm to us & not to herself.  Said nothing to herself.  Said Hmmm again.

Everyone but me went over to see.  Everyone said Hmmm to herself (& you should have seen the way the self replied!).  Everyone is saying Hmmm unto hirzelf.

"Nothing there," said Pola finally, walking briskly toward me & wiping her hands with a cloth made of her nacinet hands down the ineluctable timestrandes woeven into cloth my those metamorphoworms.  "Nothing at all.  Nothing whatsoever."

She smiles with amazing beauty & pulls loose my ropes (unless she unleashed my tape).

I stood up shakily.

"What about my head?" I said. rubbing my wrists per the stage directions of the scene of the stage directions.

"Oh, it's fine now," said Pola, nodding to some question I had not posed.  "It's perfectly empty now."

& they all laughed!  These whitecoated bozos just stood there for a full minute & cracked up, till their white robes fell off revealing their nakedness, wouldn’t you know, & their flesh stripped of in those strips of mirth excessive laughter, through its excessive laughter radiation, verves, & I used the distraction of their disintegration into the usual lattice patterns of fluctulant snow to go over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & look at the drupe.  There was nothing inside, but I went into it (the drupe) anyway.
IT (THE DRUPE) ANYWAY

& they "see" my "heel" dis a "pear" & they slowly say, "Hey!"

Which is where I learn the cries of those who watch you crawl‑‑though I lie to think jump (here!  think with me: Jump!)‑‑growl down real slow, you know, so I have the satisfaction of knowing I've escaped, for the mo, in the same way you escaped those roughhouse highwayman bums when you covered your self with mud, but never mind...

Hey‑‑turns out it seems "pretty easy," which is not to say sleazy to walk into a drupe, even your own drupe, especially your own damne drupe, when you're totally out of time (which a shake of my limp green watch indited clearly I was) out of time in these cycles out of time in these cycles out of time...

Snapping out of it, I walteze din their, & saw the whole nast-E-thing, the while vividly awful affair, the unbearable picture of the premise of my life, & when I say life I mean demise, & when I say anything I mean my wife, my little wife, my dry & horny little awful gorgeous humping thing of a wife...

"Snap out of it," they say, pulling me back, pullnig my face out of the drupe, & they say (they are paid to say this, just as they are paide‑‑I cannot say‑‑to appear in this novel),  "C'mon, boy.  We send you back to Dim."

I know I've falled for this a billion times.

So "No," I say (& boy are they taken aback!  They 're going to wanta a payraise now...).  "We've got to fix this cycle, rescue my world."

After they have count they pay, & after after their their laughter have died down, they say,  "What say?"

& I re-say.

And, in reponse, Hebs first feign apathy, lookin through limpid blue-drooped eyelids (sans eyes behondemz) as-if-at me.
"Rescue?" he said, vivislby turning the word over wor dove r wo rdov er w ordove r in the translucent working of his mouth, as if he'd never like tasted that word before.  "Rescue?" he went on, extending the metaphor with a spat.

"Well yesss," I said, considerably delfated.

Then Hebs pulled one of his patended turnabouts, lighting up & leaping up weightlessly onto just one needle-toe & crying, "Why, yes!  YES, young man, of course.  Why-yes-of-COURSE, that's nothing less than a brilliant idea coming from one so lowly, diseased, compromised, guilty & destitute‑‑or to put it another way, from one so hollow & dry & void of hope.  We'll do that‑‑yes we will!  Come on everybody‑‑we're gonna send.end Böéèöb.ymy back.ack to.o rescue.cue Dim.yl!

& the other Yps‑‑what grey volition they might have had dispersed & swept up in the various unemptiable cashes of the kashic records‑‑cheered dutifully, then rousingly, then downright euporically.  Hebs had given them life once again.

Hebs enjoyed pumping me up to raid Dim.  He apparently saw me soaring out of that drupe like an alien out of some actor's chest, as (saw me as, not soaring as) he marched through the flanks of Yps, who allstood pointlessly at attention, & they were all of them dressed to the dimlian nines
ENGINEERING ADJECTIVES

The preparations have been written up in all the engineering manuals‑‑particularly, one might say obsesively, in Preps Plux, which gives a good, if exaggerated accounting employing excessive engineering adjectives to describe the portioning up of the drupe & then the polydividing of me into countless me's, & it gives somewhat censored (classified) censored values for the formulae they used to thus to thus to portion me me me out, including the infamous "diagrams of the purple-stainéd yook" to epxlain the slit-divisions in time whhich opened up my both my physical & my psychic being like the superslit paperopener from the formless Myth of Rogg, the epic that flows backwards into time & up from the kashic reocrd & back from the parallel universe that thinks its so much better than mine.  I mean ours.  I meant to say ours.  I didn't mean to claim this entire universe.  That would be greedy.  & wrong.

"Whatchya doing?" a million of me cried, whereas we all knew the truth was Hebs just enjoyed messing with me.

But he said, with the measure-reasoned tones of the pleasured madmon, "We need all of you we can get.  We've got to flood Dim!"

The fervor with which he said it, & the shattering of my neck bones as she shooke me to hook me to tell it, made it seem most sensible at the time.

But recall: we were not in that time.
SUBZERO ON THE REFLUX SCALE

So all of me buzzed like menisces of insectisease back into the fantasy of "rescuing" my world: s billion tiny me's flying inin, piloting silver mercury versions of the old, gigantic Ing, now this bloated relic in the center of a playground half the size of a world on a playground on the brittle plains (the ones longsida time) much too big, this playground, for any kids to play, & much too far away to be reached, andplus there were no kidsa mongst the Ypions, no kids nor any whiffs of kids in the atmosphere of lies‑‑by which term designate the puffs of vapors saturated with thick & pixellated replicas of lies that puffed & poughed out the noses or noughthegheth of the Ypions‑‑which made it the perfect playground in my book.

But it was OK. I had the improved version, the tiny little nipper that would slit your skin if you came within an inch of its wicked wings‑‑wings, I might add, flaring my nostrils as I do I doo I doooogh, you cannot even see.

Silver-mercury fliers they were, dubbed Ing1, Ing2, Ing3, Ing4, Ing5, Ing6, Ing7, Ing8 (I thing1k you see the patterng2)3, & I just flew 'er in through the portals of every room alongside of time, cracking through the brittle walls which gave the appearance (shattering behind me) of titan mirrors slivering their way to earth behind me, in the emitraer rorrim casting "its lying light oer [my] refulgent brow," but which were doing nothing of the sort‑‑another illusion, another lie, this one, however, not the lies of the liesmoking, liepuffing Yp, but rather the Essential Goddam Lies of Time.

In any case, this mode of entry enabled me to appear in trillioniplicate, with multitudinous Ingsì filling the tattered air of my world, where nobody could much move & nobody remembered & nobody had the energy required to get up nor in many cases wake up.

So I was flying over corpses, as far as I was conblurned‑‑pale & slowbreathing fellows though they might be, in my ingspeedtime they just lay there, without even the gumption to react, with reflex rating subzero on the Reflux Scale (that's down where the scale is customarily colored blue‑‑even purple‑‑in the illustrations we've all had dummed into our eyes since split seconds after birth into the Reflux Scale).

I passed over an old dim sprawled in a fountain.  Distgusting! I thought, swooping in a fancy frenchqurve urvurim & spraying memories all over his corpse.

That's what I did, & that's what I was thinking.  But I was feeling he was my father, & that he was unusually huge, & that he more than filled the fountain, like a giant lain down to rest, like one of the Titans‑‑but what a sorry, sad, goddam snoring wreck!‑‑& with the sparkles of the fountain themselves frozen there.

I'm not sure if they were frozen there or if this was yet another lie of the lying instrumentalities of the lying Ing; I do not know; no one will tell me; I do not want to know; I cannot tell you; or do you by any chance know?; will you tell me?; WILL YOU TELL ME?; No?; You don't want to know?; What's wrong with you?

Yea, this was a Hercuhooleehoolian labor.  Lucky I was here in numbers, waving maniacally at myself endlessly as the job‑‑servo'd up the zazz by servomechnaisms of the jolly Yps, looking on through their glass like the audience at an operation‑‑only in this case, unseen behind the unseen operations of time.

Yea, this whole world needed gobs of memory, all the memory it could get.  Were the memories of the akashic records not infinite‑‑even those within one page within one book being, they tell me, infinite, unless this be yet another of the lies of time, being infinite, i.e., infinities within infinities‑‑they would've run out & the universe would've been in a lethic stupor for all time, I suppose.

Hey‑‑better a lethic stupor than the lies of time!

So I spritzed & I sprayed up my world, until the greyness begum to mmlt, subsiding in small patches of yellow at first, then spreading & regaining color gradually.  As I swooped away, backing expertly backout of time, the Dim & their world were even starting to move again.
THE CREATION OF ADAM
or
THE FORMER ME

More specifically, it started to sprinkle.  Doubtless another Hebsless prank‑‑he's seeded Dim this time, he'ld seeded all that gas around the cloudless hollow of the groundless vapors that were Dim, he'd forced me to seed the world with me's‑‑O potent device!‑‑till actual liquid droplets of that that grand miasma commensed to condense around those me's, smothering ALL the alternate versions of me (a sadness I still feel like a still wiping still inside but haven't now the time to get still with which to feel) & creating something the place had never seen before: rain, aka sweet spring rain, aka the great & healing monsoon aka.

Well, this seemed fine & straight & innocent at first (just like everything in this Dimlical curse!), & then grew unpredictable, then unthinkable, then through a series of concentric ontological declensions toward a drench definately beyond even the Kevin of God, I meant Ken of God, Kevin

so that this terrific rain was fallingon God & drenching him‑‑something nevermore since non nor nain hearn befrore‑‑& God, the rather silt-strewn droplets shagging up his beard & his white ruff cuffs, sputters & lets loose some naked curses on our world, naked God-wet curses falling themselives or themselves just like selfless hail onto a poor springing Dim, poor poor springpsringing Dim-yl, but the curses just sloughed off.  Too much rain, you see, with a sopping God all agog, his great mouth open like a wet & whistling verison of the Grand Canyon Drownded Deddeadded.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but the torn paper, or was it snow?, of our uh amnesiac world turned into these severe, unheard-of monswoonish rains for a long long time.  We thought it would never clear up.  A severe committee wanted to renegotiate with the Yps to go back to winter again.  Spring always does that to you‑‑& this was a truly horrific spring.

‑‑first mention of Dimnentia, dude

My girl Pola, short for Polabetma, also my wife Bluua, the former Bluua Bakubaloo, & my self, the Former Me, I stretched we a big piece of canvas over us, did we not?  She huddled under it, shivering.  It wasn't at all cold.  Dimnentia doesn't know cold; Dimnentia doesn't have cold (& yet we feel cold all the time, even in the midst of our superabundant, manylayered heat.  It was just so very wet).

Allow me to explain the concept of manylayered heat.  It consists of warm, invariably sopping-wet sheets of warm rain, verging on & bordering on & segueing into hot rain, steamy jungle rain without the jungles, tropical fever without the benefit of viruses

Allow me to explain the benefit of viruses.

Explanation most cruelly deleted!

You couldn't really breathe in the normal fashion.  That is, one could not, as was the custom, form intricate spiracles & Tubules Convolute out of mucoid membranes for the purpose of creating a massive inner hiss of gasses filtering painstakingly‑‑& if we had our way, painfully‑‑into the body.

We'd let the gasses leave on their own.  We'd hand them their coats & say, "Show yourself to the door & hurry," & they'd go, slipping out like shadowy scoundrels out the big round doors we have in our bodies that iris-in...iris-out...iris-in...iris-out, quite sensuously...like the rutting of chits, actually.

Whew!  Sex fantasy deleted.  Sex fantasy deleted.  Sex fantasies deleted like Insolently Fucking Moths.

So our bodies were constantly seething‑‑fuming & puffing with embarrassed vapors that had just been handed their coats & thrown out, essentially (at least, they knew damn well that if they didn't leave the cops would come; & your gasses hate that, your gasses they hate that & that at that; more at that).  So we were a smokey, seethy lot, & we were in general quite unaware of this quality.

You might say our steaminess was data that we filtered out.  Without thinking (otherwise, would it be filtered out?).
Yea so Bluua, Pola, & me‑‑we was hunched under that big tarp, though it was not a plain green cloth or anything of a plain, utilitarian nature.  It had in fact drawings‑‑paintings‑‑on it.  I became aware of this gradually & am therefore fore some there telling you in the incremental fashion by which the sublimity of our "garment" osmosey'd its way through my Perceptic Filters

then settled in my skin rather like the moisture which was finding its way through this tarp‑‑which was, great work of art though it might & in fact be/was, most inadequate & pitiful as a parapluie.

So I became aware.  Sooner than Pola or Bluua, I am proud for some reason to say.  & this caused me to gain color, to gain a bit of a glow, as if I felt warmer‑‑i.e., less shivery‑‑in my awareness of Great Art.

"Where'd you get this thing?" I said to Pola.

"I didn't get it.  She did," said Pola, pointing helpfully to Bluua, on my other side, as if I couldn't have figured this.  There is something about me, apparently, that seems so dumb...

"I got it from the Zome Museum," shivered Bluua, & I nodded encouragingly.  But she said no more.

"Looks like a painting or something a painting or something a painting or something a painting or something a painting or something," I bled nervously, sweating, holding up my section of it to what would have been light if the sky were not so full of the melting fragments of the melting amnesia of our world.

"Yea," Bluua went on, looking & sounding quite miserable.  "It was a painting."

I did some horriblly sadistic things to her, then examined it while she retaliated a thousandfold, as always.

"It," I said, stammering for a moment & licking my lips a hundred, then a thousand, then a million times time times.  Time was still misbehaving quite a lot.
"It...looks like 'The Creation of Adam' from the Sistine Chapel," I said, & I swore it was so.

"Dummy!" blep Pola, slapping my shoulder a hundred, then a million times.  "This is a canvas."

"Yea," I eckneggered.  "It is.  Couldn't be the chapel thing, could it?"

But you could tell it was.  My subsequent investigation of this matter in the akashic records indicated that the painting was first a gigantic canvas, which the early Dim adventurers stole, which in turn frustrated/inspired a whimpering Michelangelo to paint it again‑‑in an unfilchable fashion‑‑on the Sistine ceiling.

That's unless I was in the LIES section of the akashic records, which is a million times bigger & indistinguishable from the factual section, which has no sign over it & no name to it & nobody in fact wandering through its vacant, interlunar halls...

"Vucking rain," humjobbed Bluua, pulling Michelangeo's "Creation of Adam" over her head & face & into her mouth swallowing the entire scene.
THE NOTHING FOG

We were handing this big fat cigarette around, but in the unnatural rains we were having it absolutely would not light.  It was big & fat, like a homerolled joint in the homes of the poor, & we passed it on to share the duty of protecting it from the water, & just to share something other than being so abysmally wet with this rain.

It was literally soaking through our bones, i.e. these porpous parallel-universe things we have somewhat approaching your concept of bones, joining with our polyporous bones & making so the bones themsevles would squish, & we'd hold very still because it disturbed & very much excited us to hear our bones squish like that.  Bones squishing, you see, was generally a sign of sexual excitement, a time of incredible flexibility of bodies, the time of heat.

But this was just rain squishing up our bones, & we sat very quietly on our squishy-boney butts, trying not to be excited by our own squishing, & each by the others' squishing, & trying not to let the gusts of pure energy we use for hormones fool us, & passing this stupid cigarette around.

"Here."

"Thanks.  Here ya go."

"Thanks.  Here."

"Thank you.  Over to you."

& so on.  The cock, I mean the joint, I mean the bloody cigarette grew increasingly wimp, much like our fog-suppressed will to do anything.

Typically, Bluua was blunt.

"Why don't we just fuck & get it over with?" she said, finally crushing that fat prick, I mean reefer, I mean soggy cigarette in her fist, so it bled I mean dripped through her teeth I mean fingers.  She flipped it away.
"Funny how things just disappear when you flip them away," I said.

& Polabetma spud out of her goard, gluk incredulously, "You mean all three of us, fuck?  Yuck!"

Bluua reached round me (her slim butt squishing most exquisitely!) & mushed Pola's head back, a Dimnentian sign of contempt between two females.

But the squish her head made as it sucked in Bluua's hand!  It's a wonder we didn't fall to't right then.

Except Pola was right: we couldn't figure out precisely what Bluua meant, assuming Bluua ever meant anything precisely, or at all.

"Yes, all three of us, wimdit!" she said, squatting naked on a mirror with a very staccato plish that excited us, even though it was this plish & nota squish not to mention our afraid to look.

We breathed heavily in the rain, staring sharply forward at the nothing which lay beyond the eges of the fog, known as the nothing fog or the fucking nothing fog.

& we were indeed fucking nothing as we sat there, trying very hard not to squish & to think only abut or about fucking nothing.

Which is nothing but fucking hard thought to think.

"I could never fuck her," I kunk, pointing at Pola, who slapped my hand down & commenced to beat me with a piece of cardboard till the ice-water arrived

which she then dashed upon me to make the current flow.

Heavy torture scene deleted.  Trust me, you wouldn't want to see this.  Trust me, Mr. Hampton was beiong Other than an Asshole once in a while, which is to say Mr. Hamptoin may have just this once departed from his wonted assholery, as the kids would call it, had the kids not all disappeared.

Though we do feel they're watching us.  Now back to the show.

"What show?" Bluua snorted, bloughing all sorts of snot out.

"Thanks a lot, Bluua."

She snickered a snicker denoting that she rerceived this metafictional fugue as nothing more than psychotic fantasy inserted by some mischievous alter.  I think it was an extremely wet snicker, but I didn't look to see the sound.  You could see sounds in the thickness of the nothing fog.  You could hear nothing, but you could see the fucking sounds, fucking, as they were, nothing.

"Yea well I would never fuck him," says Pola, not just pointing at me but poking my soft shoulder.  Her hand disappears into my shoulder & I love it there...

My eyes have been closed & absorbing the rain for very long time.  My face has wellnight dissolved like some {screaming baconian pope}‑‑dissolution caused by daydreaming which will in turn induce further dissoltino, leading in circular florum to yet more daydreaming & so on.

I needed someone to slap me out of it, but the women were like as not dissolving even more than I‑‑Pola with her hand stuck inside me (Ahhh!), Bluua dreaming off somewhere to my dream-right, in the dream-directions of the dreamspace of the fucking nothing fog.

Not true.  Bluua slaps me out of it, with that special steamy sting of a sopping-wet snap.

Pola is a mess, her face a concave saucer of water into which you can see you eyes O so greatly enlOrged, & we grunt & struggle to pull her hand out of me, & grunt & sigh & snruggle & moan & snuggle and, yes, end up a squiggly, squishy mass fucking itself in the form of a pale old happy face from the paldays of happyface days of your.

"Urph!" we all say all at once, & we lie there & hate ourselves for a whiley while.
CHOCOLATE-LANGUAGE BOOTHS
or
I HAD NO TEETH FOR THE SCENE

& after the mega-monsoon monsters of blustery spring came a golden, sunny time‑‑a renaissance, if you will (a concept we Dim have always been partial to, having stolen just about eveything your oan Uerph produced during most of your forgotten yours)

only it was summer, and, if truth be known, kind of celebratory & mindless, what with the fine & multicolored powders known as hormones busting our butts & forcing us to couple- & treble- & gang-up & fling off our extraneous molecules, which is what we know as clothes & pour ourselves all over ourselves in the bushes‑‑or the blue crystal plosives known as bushes

& just youknow riffle our brains out, pouring our ovol or seminal synonymous powders of meaning into one another's split & widespread interstices, an activity enforced all the more by this being our first & only spring, our first & only summer, & our first & only Renaissanse Faire Complete With Hormonial Bashe, & an activity which, so far as anyone who who knows knows, has nothing whatsoever to do with conception, or regeneration, or birth.

We of Dimnentia have not cracked that egg yet!

& there were orange & yellow tents & banners & brisk breeze tufting up the fluff behind your ears & the bright sound of toddlers laughing (mysterious toddlers of the moon?  who knows?), & various ways of stuffing yourself & wasting time, & booths where you could try your skills at stopping time, & prizes involving the creation of

swirling "time-tornadios" in the spinner's immediate vicinio, & booths gifting one with languages alien & dire, full of sometimes dark & sometimes sweet exotic sounds‑‑rather like chocolate; "Chocolate-Language Booths," they were thought of by some, who, however, insantly disappeared when that particular thought was thought was thunk‑‑& the great works of art from most of your & anybody-else's-we-could-steal's renaissances, which was a monumental heap of pilfered art, suggesting a "repressed, piratic past" for the sickly Dim (a much-hypothesized theory amongst our introspectors as to what was wrong with us: a massive subject, there) (yea but-but right now we couldn't care, for we were thick with the euphoria of thieves, not to mention our own false renaissance we had going here, ar).

But it was so sweet!  I mean, we remembered who our mates were.  I, in particular, hooked up with my mate, Bluua (below more whom of more below), so he could interlock many an arm (& "lusty, thick-thighed liquid leg," if truth be gnum) & stroll the walkways of the big & hastily-set-up fair.

I was watching the whole thing from the much larger, glass booth of the Ypions‑‑a grey & humming, hermetic, invisible, & altogether more serious booth than the thousand or so booths swelled & flapping in the sexual winds of the Pressure Zomes down there, in compressed imagery of Dim I stared down at‑‑a bustling, miniaturized Dimnentia concavely warped upon itself, a fisheyed, spheric Dim-in-a-bottle which I & the Yps stared down at like interns observing some doomed & disgusting operation, which just happened to be going well for the moment, due to overadministration of toxo-euphoric drugs.  This was the situation here.

"Hello?  Böéèöb?  You all right?" whispered unnecessarily whispered Hebs, gently holding my arm.

"Oh...yeh.  I'm...OK," I stammered, touching my moist head.  'I forget...and slip in sometimes."

Hebs smiled indulgently.  "That'll happen," he said sagely (& I always wanted to punch in his faces when he faces when he faces when he talked like that!)  & he stared back down at the chaotic, self-indulgent godmam mesh below.  "After all, you belong there more than here."

"O SHUT THE VUCK UP!" I screamed & while this caused a humiliatingly minor stir amongst the two to three million-other Yps in the booth with us, it had become a minor thing, an expected thing, a thing of cuistom & an almost-normla thing.
You know this is how the Ypions thought of me‑‑as "an almost-normal thing."

"So," said Hebs, speaking in an ever-so-slightly more subdued (hence, pseudo-soothing) voice which abraded me like barbed wire scraped across your antsy, desiccated, sun-dry sundying skim (yea, I was preety much a godmam patient here, wasn't I?), but stepping a few strategic inches behind me‑‑you know, in case I should blow.

I would've ground my teeth except I had no teeth for the scene.

"Any sign of drupes down there?"

"Yes," I said with an inspired controlled brightness‑‑and, I like to think, a strength, which is its very suaveness made all the million Ypions jump

Yea‑‑made all the million Ypions jump.

Yea!‑‑made all the million Ypions jump!

I pointed, my finger stretching the thick glass out as it poken through the plane of the thick glass & further scared my "hosts."

"Yes‑‑I believe there's booth down there.  I tink."

Anf nosoonerhadI thunk than I was standing with Bluua before the Drupe Booth, digging through pockets eternal & infinite for some change to buy a drupe.

"Win a drupe.  Win a drupe!" the barker sang, & the whole world was a hum with the tune that the barker sang.

I was vaguely aware that here was my chance to win back my own drupe.  Here, therefore, was my chance to win back my past‑‑by playing some sort of weird game.

& I was game!
THE FOURTH SPHERE

"Five full mooniess, please, Mr. Barker, sir," I feg, my voice cracking into the same adolescent slide that made Bluua clutch my elbow in the standard fashion & jumping up & down with titless jiggles wriggling beneath the tank-top with Foreboding Aquatic Motif.

After slapping my many faces off, in a vibrato series of slappatos complete with with full repletive traceryraceryaceryceryeryryy, for calling him Barker Man, the Dog Man hand me four full mooniess.  Now please note: I gave him no coin, & he gave me four, not five, moonies.  Continuity problem, no?  & I was afraid to ask for the other moonie‑‑afraid of what he would do

and me afraid with my girlie on my arm, ganging on my arms, jumping & giggling, and, though I will not mention it in the Meniscus of the Savvy Seen, ripping my arm off, not at the elbow & not at the shoulder, no, but halfway been the shoulder & the soul.  & that smarts!!!

The carny music we need for the carny music we need for the carny music we seem for the carny music seen for the CARNY MUSIC SCENE comes up a bit late, sounding I might add {languid & sluggish}, & {langish & sluggord} & {lambent & buggord} & making a Lang Wish for a night slower & deeper than quag, if you dretch my rift, & some rather outafocal lights iling a whirl in a whiragig of lights in the backdrop of the aftermath of a backdrop there there there.

I made the standard moves.  Sing along with me, won’t you all?  I   steps back & glaceth at my goil,   pat the arm with which she holds my broken arm,   smile (you KNOW the "tune"!),   toss the first of the four moonies up in my palm, &  

FIRE that sucker at the first of the four {bottled alien worlds} that live in the {preservation alienworld bottles} lined along the infinitely distant starwall starwall starwall starwall starwall my first moon plungeth down, all of us‑‑even the Barker Dog Mandog-Man

follow with our faces & our skulls phlowing phorth in the phorms of lightspeed light as one would phuphollow a cosmic tennis match of an infinite scheme, such that our features streak down the long black tunnel of the tubule at the end of time until the tossed moon, all mossy & gravid with age & the massspeed flatnesss of their eye, like a contact lense arcing toward hell in the form of a flaght-ought mooghn, smacks against the first world, a desert world, a desert world because I sets mu sights high.

But the pitched moon shatters its face against the bones of its reflected face & face & face & the bottle holds.

"ONE FOR THE BOTTLE!" hoots the fucking doggone mad to the surrounded crowd who don’t realize that in the grammar of this seen they're surrounded by a crowd‑‑something a crowd never realize they realize despite the thoughts crowding in‑‑& punish me for my miss (with my giggling Miss!) by slashing off a hack of skin from my forearm, right where I mutiliated myself not sixteen years ago after a fight with my father he will never know, & placing in my hand the secondary moon.
 
& this time my relationship to my gal's condensed, & my gal's condensed into a dry wraithe of seareed, but still with admiration all over her weedy eyes, some look the gods've put there for to make me throw, & I throw

this time the ball a ball of balla ball of ball a ball of finely-wrought, multicolor polyphyrene unshatterable evenglass© tossed against the goop face of the sewerworld or swampworld‑‑(just think: an entire sewerworld!)‑‑& shatters obscenely againstnthe obscene face the blopptout sewerworld or swamprowlrd is wearing.

"BOTTLES TWO!" hoops the barter to the unshelled crystal amphisphere of crowds surrounding crowds surrounding misspelled crowns arounding crowds & hangs me the third bolus.

"The third bolus," I gasp to Bluua who gasps & holds my hand as we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & throw the ball of glue which is

The mythical Third Bolus of Glew!

So where the ball goes, so goeth my hand.

Doesn’t even touch the glass, & besides, the world I threw my hand toward was a blur behind the glass, & besides.

"THREE FOR THE BOIT!" shouts the barker whom I realize (psst! c'mere: whom I realize is God) & hands me the Fourth Sphere.
SMILING TOROID SKELETONS OF LOVE

Hell, that fourth ball was pure fluff.  Not even worth talking about, as it fluffed against the solid glass of the can in which some damned dead world covered with skulls was stored.  Not even worth thinking about as Gof with the great & tooth ylaugh of God hands me the last moon.

But I could tell the way it burned through my hand this was a substantial moon, that God was giving me a chance to get through this segué, & that when Bluua kissed this last moon at the expense of her lips, which is the explanation for why Bluua has no lips which was the pollen for the seed of this metastory, this one was gonna crack the glass to the water world or storm world, which it does, seeting us forth into the great rains that formed the spring of our world, in which Bluua & I, T-shirts & all, & waving goodbye to God which doubles as a call for help get drownded.  The water was just too warm to resist, much too warm to swim in, & so we simply sank.  We held hands, right down to the bottom of one of the many rivers that formed.

And, senseless & together, the two stringy corpses flowed down the very center‑‑not scraping bottom, not bobbing up‑‑& flowed with these rapid streams in to greater streams, into rivers & greater rivers, into monstrously mighty megarivers such as Dimnentia had never seen, much less felt coursing through the vague minerals of her vaporous flesh.

& as the rivers got greater, we became smaller.  Size works that way here.  We became little more than the eentsiest razortip pensketch of four legs dangling behind, & you needed special instruments, such as have been set up in the posttime time post times by the beefy Technicians of Nobody, to appreciate our smiles, the pale, silt-greyness of our eyes, still open & greyed over as we flowed, always with our faces facing up, from one super river to a greater one, till we fell like mere molecules into the secret sea.

This was the sea at the center of the dim.  Not actually the dead center, you understand, but damn well close enough for our descriptive purposes.  All our waters flow into the secret sea, & now Bluua & I were these dead swimmers in the secret sea, smiling toroid skeletons of love, our hands interlocked in primal perfect permanency, known as the Pluperfect Permanence.

The water was rich with the stuff we breathe, our nameless version of oxygen, so we were quite happy & still in this pseudo death.  We were lovers; of course we had tried pseudodeath (all lovers must try pseudodeath!), but we'd never relaxed into it the way we ah relaxed into it now.

We were plipped into the sea, where we underwent one great round of that ever-circling sea, then were shot back out by the Sectret Sea's equally secret self-purification currents, self-purification cxurrents, & shunted up & up, pretty much endlessly & not to mention...

...OK, to mention hopelessly, & washed in utter ragged cleanness & still (just barely) holding hands on the shores where we'd jumped in, ageless ageloops ago.
GONGS
or
SLOWING THE CHANGES OF MY VAPORS DOWN

The Yps were still fooling with us!

Those "sweet & limpid springey raines" washed all the works of art away!  It washed the colors from the paintings & the shape from the sculpture.  It washed out the musical notes so they were just this dreamy hollow howling of gongs‑‑nothing but gongs.  Dancing just seemed absurd & impossible.  & it washed up our writings, too.  All the poems were still there but the lines were gone.  So they wasn't really poems at all, see!  & the novels had either plots without lines or else characters without plots or clothes or else characters standing outside of plots & plotlines strangling the leftover wrecks of characters & all manner of settings upset.

It went on that way, everywhere we looked.  I wanted to come storming into Hebs' office so bad I stood around with my fists clenched, swinging my torso this way & that--furiously looking for the office door.

But of course it was not that simple.  Dim were standing around gesturing at me in some Italian movio, & they were telling me to DO SOMETHING (& their voices seemed muffled & dubbed, too, as if they were telling me in my ear, no matter how far away they stood‑‑& we Dim syand very very far far away from each other indeed.

My mouth kept working as I stormed around, still looking for Hebs' office door, then more sensibly beginning to look for the godmam Ing.  But the godmam Ing was always hard to find.  It had its own ideas about where to nestle & what form & which disguise to take, & it was always a Major Quest‑‑requiring chapters of action‑‑to find that bloody ship.

When I pictured Hebs & the Ypions watching & laughing, nodding with smug smiles, it made my blood boil.  It made me shake my fist at the sky, where I thought they were watching.

But I hated even more the eventual thought‑‑the thought that hit me in my sleeplessness‑‑that they might not be watching at all.

Or that the Ing was gone & I'd never get back at them.

& that they weren't very good works of art, anyway, & that the world of Dim was well washed of them.

Having nothing to be mad at the Yps about: that drove me mad.

& these layers of thought‑‑if you can call such monsters thought‑‑each one nastier to think or to have in thought than the last, sent me acrashing into the swamps around the city.

Treacheous places, those swmaps.  They had almost no pressure.  Your shape would shift with even the slghtest thought‑‑& I was having some hellish, powerful thoughts.

It was an impulse, unwise, but in I went.

& so you can see me‑‑as I of course kept imagining the Yps as seeing me‑‑my shape shifting instantly from one gordawfoul monstrosity to another, each in an instant & with no cessation, all a colorful blue of monsters ripping through the mapless dripping swamp, the once-quite, once-shadowy swamp, like a ripping blaze of novae, looking for Ing.

It was along-anog-about then, despite my madness & fever, despite the dirty looks the furry critters of the swamp were aginin' me, that I realized the Ing was sentient.

I'd not been riding a marvelous ship from time out to the brittle edges of time‑‑I'd been carried by a creature, full of its own feelings, its own ideas‑‑a sentient vucking creature full of wonders & perversiums--a creature with its own agenda.

No wonder it was so bloody hard to fly.  But it was a creature I needed, so naturally I started calling it. I slowed the changes of my vapors down & cooled out.  The angry lumescence from my bodies died down to an ember anna ember Anna Ember I could easily hold within a burning belly, & I trod carefully through the swamps like one looking for his pet friend Best.

& I whistled for it (Phwee-phwee-phweet!) & called out things like, "Cmon, Bess.  Here Bess."

Worth a try, anyway.

The rain, as you've guessed, was or were merely or masly the teres or tas of me crying my ass off mt my latest reunion with the Yps, the land of the Yps being everpresent therefore inescapable therefore vey very very guilt & sad & sad & guilty, as I'm sitting on my ass at some unusually tall, usually white <Ypion> crying on me like a covey of cocks dripping on the face of that gaping babe it turns out you know, you knew intimately, only my reaction is not that show of joy of the crochiung chick clutching her tits with her nails, but more like waving my hands around my head in effort to effort to stop the goddma rain.
AS BRITTLE A MOUNTAIN AS YOU COULD DESIRE

These creatures I was chasing were very big.  They looked solid, but they were much too silly-colored, with their reds & yellows & gaudy umbers, & way too bulbous to merit the term "brittle."

But they had mass, I can tell you.  This one I pursued went down many a rainlit avenue, then through a vast forest of trees as solid & as black as their own moonlit shadows, then into a field of mountains, & he paused with a surreptitious look over both shoulders (& that was the tip-off, that was the giveaway...I knew he knew I was watching grey-eyed in my grey-eyed mutinous little Ingy craft...) & bygol simply pulled the mountain over himself.

He crouched inside the mountain with his knees in his arms & he blinked a lot.  I could see the whole thing through the whole transparent mountain, yes I could.  I stared at my instruments & here's where I realized very suddenly that my instruments were reading everything backwards, or more precisely, my instruments were seeing everything as the negative of what I was seeing in the grey bulbous-brittle lands with my "two-D grey & greenless eyes" as our poet Gauden hath sub se quent ly said.

Because on my goddam instruments the mountain was a crystalline, opaque monstrosity named McKinley, complete with frosty forests & tumblings of granite rock.  It was big, with a precisely mass-weight indication of 3.12445 gigatoms.  It was as brittle a mountain as you could desire.

But when I simply looked through the walls of my craft‑‑the walls as clear as an insect's gossamer wings‑‑I could see the brittle giant crouched, the moutnain fitting over him like a Golgolphiannic pup-tent, his body completely black (the artificial shadow of the mountain, perhaps?  we are still dreaming on this one...) & his eyes blinking just as white as anything.

I landed my ship with the usual difficulty.  For all they were fighting me, these furshlugginer instruments, didn't want me out of the ship, nono.  Then I turned it off and

it became as ghostly & grey as the rest of the Zone

as ghotsly & grey as the rest of the Zone...

ghostly & grey the rest of the Zone

ghostly grey the rest of zone

the ghostly grey rest of zone

ghostly zone of grey

grey ghostly zone

the ghostly zone...

& I walked toward the giant, crouched in his mountain.  It  was kind of agiveaway, or else it was all a deliberate way of drawing me on, quite possibly of drawing me outside mutinous hairy Ing the Coiling Ship.

Dead Friend approached the crouhcing giant with the big white glowing eyes.

Dead Friend as white as the White Zone crunches cross crystal breathless toward the brittle giant clutched terrified in his zone.

& when I say zone (not Zone but zone) I mean mountain.

& it took me three novels' lengths to reach the mountain.  I had to endure.  I had to walk through those three empty novels.

So: through three, vast empty novels of white did the Dead Friend trudge to reach the giant tucked under the flap of his flowing mountain in the land of the Giant Brittles.

So...

I lufted up the edge of the mountain & peeked in.  I saw his eyes, a hundred times bigger than me, peek out.  The eyes & I cannot xlain this flew right down to where my delicate "fingers" quited themselves & reached under the liquid furl of the flap of the mountain-shroud and

lifted it

and peeped in fearful furiousness (& sudenly tiny, you'll note)ice up at me.

"Go 'way!" they say.

"Hey," I chuck -uck -uckle, "little fellas‑‑hey!  Just wanna talk to ya!"

"Go 'way!"

They sounded like funny dwarves.  They sounded in suspicious fact suspiciously like my instruments & I glanced back across the pale planes of those three empty novels toward my ship, but it was gone

my instruments were gone
as gone as the ship
and I returned to my amuse
ed stare at the big yet tiny eyes peeeping up at me from
under the flap of the
nder he lap of he
mountain there & I chuckled
"Hey, little guys...hey!"

So I was an idiot here, you see.  Just like before.  The clear me inside the me you can see stomped around, doing the little sarcastic dance of disgust that it does in

these sitautions, saying like O MAN! and

'www NO, man!

& so on

and suchlike

there.

"Come on out, I wanna talk to you," I called in to the giant

where

up

on my voices trailed through the slitting razorlike (I didn't see this cominh either, friend) blackness of the underside of the inside of the moutnai nthere and

went through seven hundred black novels of their own in reaching
the black ear of the
whiteyed giant I had
cornered within
(& I say "cornered" with pride).
Like, "Cornered," I proudly said.
& "Cornered," he primly said.

& "Welcome to the Brittle Zone," he said warmly, proffering a normal-sized hand (with, you'll fluidly surmise, a fluid wrist‑‑something I've always admored & liked & in geral lyspeaking enthusedabout) undert the flap

so from under the flap of the curling mountain comes this fluid hand
and I shake the hand
and we meet.
"I'm Garr Wrantiguoa," he said
nor did I blievim for a minute, friend!
my little minute friend
minute friend
min
itfriend!

"I'm Dying Friend," I siad, his shaking hand pulling my own, obviously ersatz, obviously-fluid hand

right under the tent
flap with him
So we shook in the darkess there
and we
shook in the darkness there...
MINUSCULE SUBINSECT THOUGHTS
or
PASSED OVER I'S

I therefore edit out the tears in this:

"Your brain be all grey.  It'e frozen with forgetfulness & dust," the Ypion weeps.

"Yea right.  Calm down, guy.  You might feel better if you crawl out of that suit."

"HOO! HOO! HOO! You know me, you know.  No really‑‑it'll be coming back to you in a minute."

"So where are we?"

"HOO! HOO! HOO! Aw, he don't even know me‑‑HOO!"  & here he wiped a tear so big it smeared not just his face but his head & the space seven-eight inches round his head.  The space blurred beneath the tear; the space smeared wehn he cleared the tear.  There was nothing in the tear-space for a while.

He continued: "You're in Ypion, Pliny-boy‑‑Ypion!"  & he waved his hand, which was still very bleared with the clearied tear, the which he noticed vaguely, prompting him it would seem to slowy-absently, then more rigorously-irritately shake the hand in an attempt, I was vaguely thinking attempt I was vaguely thinking to slur the blur of the tlur off his clurry hlur of a scuse me) "hand."

"You're head'll be cleairng in a minute," he said in very small letters, in really tiny letters, in letters too small to print here, in letters U have greatLy enlarged here, though Ihastentopointoutthat there are other "things," other "things" "here" I have not enlarged.

Thoughts‑‑little munuscule subinsect ones‑‑I have thought (tinily!) not too en LARGE.
"You have a hatchet face!" I shouted in alarm, standing up, also in alarm, wiping my lap with feminine fingers, but in something rather more fidgety than alarm, I should say, & backpedaling away, as if to pop back in the ship, hey.

Did he really have a hatchet face as I had so screamingly said?

No.  I mean, you could detect the fadings of a once-hatchet face beneath the goo that that had filled the space of his head with the viscous-smeary "tear," but the wiping of the tear had slurred "'e'en hi' hatchet-face,'" as the poet said in his self-quoted hatchet poem, Fafe.

He had only remains of a hatchet-face, grey, that had melt beyond the rain-run windows of no one's memory of a tear.  It was, as I say, the vivid, disembodied memory of a whooping, which is not to say wheeping, faces rounding in refraction round the rivulets of that heart-prushing dark monsoon that had pshed us all, as races, as beings, into the dank cornoners of that huge porch there (see? in nonmemory‑‑there!) where we became, o, wide-eyed & blind Creatures of a Rotting Log with far too, way too many, legs, each leg albino-white and, o, thin as a thread.  We couldn't think about our friends, our lost friend,s of course, but our feelings for thosse, ug, forgotten & unmentioned friends were, you guessed it, thin as this albino, useless thread we waved the many threads of our woodsoggy "legs" before the blanknesses (blind) that passed for (passedover)  "I's."

He was very sad, was Jam, my friend, whom, with a warming in my brain I remembered now‑‑Jam, the Ypions, the jolly suit & all, & the buggest of memory & the nature of its contents...if not the contents...yet.

I mentioned this, coming closer, as his face continued to move to move but refused to congeal.  I admire that in a face: refewsual too con geel.

& he like nothing replied, "That'll come back in a minute too."  He shook his head at no one.  "Then you'll understand.  May God help us!"

& he pulled out his rubberized Doctor's Frown & pulled it squawking over his head (Hey‑‑those doctors'll squawk if you stretchem right!) & hoisted up his arm where the Doctor's Big Watch perched like a golden blob of mercury (golden)  atop the railing of the Mercury Gate Bridge, & with his frown timed he a minute.

Timed minute...............
...........................
..................but it was the wrong minute.

So he pulled off the mask & lost the watch & we both cleared our throats nervously.

"Um, 'may God help us, you said?'"

"Hm?  Begparm?"

"I said '"Um, 'may God help us, you said?'."'" I repeated.

He stepped toward me, crouching goofishly.  I felt this small bubble of affection for him which I pushed down hard as a bullfart in the middle of the Vatican.

"Sorry‑‑too many quotes.  Can't make it out."

I picked him up way off the floor & shook him considerable‑‑shook the smarmy bastard till he became the Utter Blur we know him as today (yea‑‑twas I that did that to him; & I never get the slightest CREDIT for hurting him as I did that day).

Whilst shouting, "WHY DID YOU SAY MAY GOD HELP US, BUB?"

& like I drop sim to the concrete floor of what is suddenly this Wind-Swept Warehouse.

(Who schanging the scene zonus?)

Whozever zis zis sweeping us back to a greeting, like the great west swooping in on the indians, & I confront for the first time again a flock‑‑or fertilla‑‑of strange bigfaced Ypions, putting up an indancescent formnt of their lightning skin again uniquely as usual.
C-BLOW
or
SHMOOZING WITH YPS
or
BEGIN CRY

& I can see these Ypions, these eccentric out-of-timers (& these perverted dweebs, as I was-re to re-later re-learn) have utterly negative social graces.  Possible function of their essentially parasitic centrifugal a-social de-nature; possible sequlaum of their near-eternal tenure in the stop-time which is not to say strop-time regiums of the outer airless zomes of the peretual rereververberberatatinging circular dark hallways around the (brilliant, lit-like-a-chandelier...more below) Akashic Record Halls (admittance $9.99, $333 for couple; admittance for couples only; this means you‑‑C-blow).

Yea, negative.  Their instincts for smooth & comfy social intercourse would seem to have reversed utterly, so it was like interacting with a photographic negative of politesse, see.  Not that I ever engaged consciously in this politesse.  See.

So you might say it was awkward meeting them, in their grey nehru jackets which they all wore, like uniforms, no matter what their size (& while the Ypions all had the same shape & the same face which they handed so rapidly round apidly ound that you could just barely tell (yourself) "That't what they're up to," except  that this singular Yp-face was like terribly bluured turribly bleared torridly blaared tearedly bared from the polymultiplicitive passingzroun, & like it was almost always the wrong size, a-and not very wek-put-on on accounta they din't have much time for the passings to fit it rightly on (for "It takes much time to perfectly put on your face," & it-it wasn't "their face," not "precisely," but but but this "'communal face,'" wellworn and, it looked, not the right size for hardly anybody, which naturall make you ask yourself (turning to your self), "So like, Self‑‑'Where did they get this face?'" (the which the Yp named "Hebs, see below," was & were to later say to me, for apparently the umpteenth time, "We wore them out, down from a whole set with pritineer a face for everybody; but in there, what with all this time, a) you lose a lot of faces & b) your face wears out with so many 'changes-o-face,' & c) faces grow black, i) they do not grow back, & zo thar she blee," which I found & fine a superfind exponation by this nameltneg) & so) they were each of a very different size.  That is to say, they had these various magitudes (also of which Hebs C. Blow haff abtempted to insplain, to wit, "There is no Nature here.  There is nothing (here) to keep us all one size, or rather, of a comparable magnipude.  & of course time which makes ultimately everything the absolute end-of-time same-size doth not, as we say here, 'pass,' & so we have some, we Ypions, to be of many a different size‑‑i.e., some of us perched like canaries on the shoulders of our freres; some of us too big to see‑‑these being the like-mountains some-of-us, & so on some of us‑‑some of us wrestling microbes even as we speak (which is of course a metaphor, there no being microbes here).

Below: Their leader was this Blow I mean Hebs I mean fellow, hempsfourth down the qudrupular quoraores o "time (not)" as they call dit, gnome as Hebs was not too hard to look at.  He seemed a leader born.  He was just about my size, which I regard as the Absolute Right Size.  You look at him (albeit blurry) eye-to-eye-to-eye-to-eye-too-eye, and, as to that face, I have a theory whom I still break out of her jewel box & polish up sometimes (till she cum‑‑here the here the here the Theory come! Sblurting "Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Unh!  Aaaahhhhh!"  Whew!), that that Yp-face that Hebs he wore so well war really his erpsonal, iprvate face, the one remaining face, which he, in the selfless stupididty that earmarked all of his ex-goddam-fucking-race, loaned out to all of them.  Must've looked stupid on those unseen disproportioned Yps, dontchyablieve?

"Oh yea," you like say.  "Musta looked weird as hell."

Right on, reader.

But he come right up to me & immediately went into this reverse-social-graces sordothang, instantly revealed the quintessentially dweeby, dorky nature of the dusty-with-untime Ypiots, I mean ons.

He come up to me & he frowns & smile & shake his head‑‑by which he mean to smile & nod‑‑& he wipes his mudless feet for quite a few strokes, as if trying to build up a zot of painful statc electricity by which to shake my hand.

& he puffs out his cheeks & go cross eyed! (Which in my leisure time I have decided was a sort of inverse manner of politely (ha! (HA!)) clearing his throat.  I guess.  My best guess, I besgess.)  & he wimpidly punch me in the plexus (probably an Yp handshake; these guys‑‑& yes, they are all guys‑‑yuck, huh?), & burrows his frow until his shared-time face is just a beetle-black flurrow of australopithicene sagittal-cresednexx (an Ypion grin, no doubt, except there's always beaucoup de doubt when you shmozzing with Yps).

& it goes on like this.  You get used to it.  It catches.  So you start doing it.  So am I myself am a bit of an am societal mess by now, am I‑‑though I still love & respect myself & refuse to fick myself unless I give permission, bending over politely to myself; or backwards‑‑bending over backwards will do, at least symbolically, though it is not much goddam use when you really want to FICK YOURSELF, but that is neither here nor there.  ("Where the hell is it, then?" you say?  "Shutthefuckup, reader," I say.)

I will henceforth reverse everything that Hebs & the Ypions shay & dough, or saig & dead, I mean shed an did, or speg andub I mean feb angeb.

"I am Hebs, leader of the Ypions," he feb-speg-shed-saig-shay.

"Hi," I.  "What's with the crying?"

We wipes his eyes, a process with the peacock-eye edYps takes many an hour.  Dead, you know.  I mean, No time, you know.

"Oh, these tears," he says.  He pinches his lips together, to get a grip (which slows down the passing of the face‑‑hey, which stops the pashing of the flace‑‑so behind him stand these millions of faceless Yps: same shape, all sizes, Nehru jackets, nerd-pends & greased-up bigdick slide rules in the pockets oer their breasts.  They look better that way‑‑without the faces‑‑except it's unhealthy 'cause they cannot cry.  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAH!

Yea‑‑the first thing you learn is that The Ypions have to cry.

This is the end of "Lesson One: The Ypions Have to Cry."

QUIZ: What do the Yions like HAVE to do?

(Hint: cry.)

(Hint: cry.)

(Hint: cry.)

(Hint: cry.)

(Hint: cry.)

Begin.
CRY

"It's just our speciesal guilt," he swimming through the mackeral-crowded sea of ascriptions nasally says.

"Far out," I say.  I survey the scene formally, & the inverted Yps have no idea what I'm doing.  It shakes them up, then Hebs gestures them to get upset & they calm down.

& so on.

He places his shoulder on my hand.  We walk together for A Few Symbolic Steps.

"Guilt," he says with lotsa Jamesian pawses.  "Speciesial guilt, my fren."

"No kidding."

"It has to do with you."

Now that surprises me!

"Could I borrow that face for a second?" I say.  But it's not allowed.

He then peeled the Maske of Crying or The Masque of Cryinge off his face, remobing not only the tears, but the face beneath it & the thought beneath the face & the entire & complete Concept of Grief (Lagelli-Dennab, 19996) that went with it, revealing only a shadow below blow bo, which is The True Face of Hebs, which as no one has figured except by the use of forbidden (illegal (banned (!taboooobat!) dennab) lagelli) dark equations‑‑you know, the ones only the black eyes of the devi lcan see, or would even want to see, for that mattter, much less manipulate‑‑is the only Ypion, as I came to figure in my own white wright as every "other" "Ypion" I sauntered up to chat with or chat up or hunker down in the hunkerdawn turned out to be a mere quivering sheet of rather discolored, dried-up newspaper which didn't even goddam bother to goodam fucking crumple, but just goddam fucking bleeding snapped into a billion goddam fucking bleeding maggoty crumples right there begoddamfuckingble-edingmaggotyshittyfore me, like right in my hands, begorrah!

Er...removing the mask, as I slub, followed by long stretches of stringy snotlike glue revealing, as I may have tried to said the face of Hebs, head Ypion, only Yp, Hebs, Hebs, Hebs.

"Here ya go!" he laughs, handing me that face, which crumples into snaps as per preceding paragraph in the unnumbered innumerable measureless infinite endless coultess series of paragraphs that have gone like long-lived lives be lives be fore me u...

"Siddown," he sais, sidding down on a Toadstiool of Dawn (which they have there, outside of time, as they have never existed & they like have everything that never existed there, butcept they won't show it to you, much)m so I sids dawn on a toadstool too.

"We want to help you," he saus with an evident sicnertiy as transparent as the dawn of sicneries back when Tim Buckley sung so perfect of perfect sincerities in those most perfect notes of sing or sun or notes of sung or sin.
TRANSPOSITONS OF TEARS
or
I DON'T THINK WE'RE IN TOTO ANYMORE

"Here, let us help," was what the Ypions, in the form of Hebs the Head Yp, would have said had their said things straightforwardly.  I transpose as I write, & as I rtnepssoe I remember, & as I remember I cry, so that this account, while essentially accurate in every detail, is equally a transposition of tears or transpositium of tiers, & therefore inaccurate in toto, details notwithstanding.

"Here, let us help," they failed to say again, & Hebs was reaching for my face.  I thought, They're going to steal my face, but I didn't think what I thought so.  I mean, I didn't even think my fresh-thunk thought was so.  I mean the Ypions were evil in seven enumerable ways, but thievery was not one of these ways.

Hell, they could never conceive of larceny!

But I batted his hand back from its seizure of my face with both a seizured-look of my face & a literal bat with my concrete arm.

Hebs drew back.  I stood with my arm raised, like a superannuated warrior about to be et by weapons of the mind.  The Yps seemed to confer withone another.  It looked like a small fist-fight.

Hebs approached with three henchyps hoisting a mirror.  He smiled gratifyingly.

(Sans transposition: backed up to me with snarling gestures of violence & contempt & with both hands crutching his clotch.)

They held up this big mirror to me, & I was working on a) the concept of a mirror, & b) where they had gotten that mirror from in the first place, & c) where they'd gotten that mirror from in the second place, & d) this constant transposition in my hid of the opposite-goddam-everything that they dead.

Which was hurting my hid.  The same hand that was poised to bat back Hebs again, if it came to that, now loosened up a bit & touched my head.  I mean, the hand or whatever it was at the end of it touched & brushed & patted & started in to stroking & stroking & stroking & stroking & stroking & stroking my head.

Phew!  Till my head softened & began to sleep.

Phoo--till my head wore down a bit & I felt much better.

Fu: Till the mirror‑‑inching through units of movement frozen each in its slow-strobing unit of time‑‑arrived.

To my then-bare memory, a mirror was an unknown thing.  My reflection was basically this unseen, unknown thing.

So you can bet I gave a start!  You can bet I recoiled with horror, the old arm coming up again (followed by the other arm‑‑followed in later minutes by dozens & hundreds of other arms‑‑which surprised me, too), which the converse Yps took as a sing of unseemily-narcissistic-goopy self-indulgiant pleasure verging on the onanistic.

So to me, they looked delighted, too.

Hell of an awkward scene.

But my face was frost, see.  My face was this white, puffy, textured-but-shapeless thing.  My head was a distended, snowy ball, like a snowman without even eyes poked into it or eyes in the form of coal stuck into it or your carrot or icicle nose or your curl-of-pebbles smile or your simple etched-in-with-a-sticky-stick smile, much less your hat or scarf or your carefully packed & carve-ed ears, & even much more less your big buttons down the belly or your coat & rubbers & so on.  I had none of this stuff.

I looked like absolutely everybody else in Dimnentia.  & I was stunned. So these guys, these "Ypions," of the out-of-time regions, had effectively scored the fragile mirror of my emotions, as it were.  They'd pretty much goddam-doused me with acid's what they'd done'd.

So Hebsed been trying to brush the snow of amensia from my face.

"You're outside of time," he said after we'd all pretended to calm down & a pseudopseuthing or soodosoothing length of time had pretended to pass, pretending to be soothing, in fact, but being actually nothing, inasmuch as it had no qualities, was merely pretending, & did not in fact pass.

"Outdia time?  Moi?" iom tid.

"Yes, but you'll note you can remember now," he said, & I noticed that his eyes were plump‑‑all around their edges, which seemed in the Moment of Notice, like the waterrich equator of your urph.

"What's with the tears?" I said.  "You folks worked up about something?  Huh?"

"It's the guilt!" bursted dedHebs, with a very nice (unless you look at it as very nasty) echo bounding-reback foam the foameremint of the brittle zomes outside time, which is really like a big bowl over everything there, & all sound comes back.

No sounds escape from the edge of time.

So it was "guiltguiltguiltguiltguiltguiltguilt-guiltguiltguiltguiltguilt-guiltguiltguiltguilt" echoing for a while.  Very dramatic.

"So you've said," so I said.  "But guilt for what, man?"

"Siddown," he says, & with a tug on my shoulder plops me down.

All the frost of me falls from me.  The mirror comes up‑‑this time all by itself‑‑again, & I get to see what I look like in the skin.

Not much, I think.
& sensing if not reading what I think, Hebs sort of nods & says, "Not to worry.  That's what not you like-look neither."

I stare wideeyed at him.  It feels good without the frost‑‑but what does he mean?

I ask as much.
HEB'S CONFESSION

Takes the form of a complete denial, of course.  But, antipodified to its Latent Truenesses or Covert Veracitus, it was the confession of the Yps to their very severe "Crime or crimeses against the Dimnentians," taking the form of a very very bad indeed crime directed bad-a-gainst me.

Anyway, he delivers it as a harangue needled with locutions, by which I mean a senseless sentence consisting of one vast self-referential polyphormed period of periodicoty I mean periodicity with fat which is not to say Flatulent Clawses reiterating in Divergent Detail each Undevery Time the loops those loopthose loopdoze Feckless Yps took me through

how they seeded Dim with the poison of my drupe thereby keeping either me or my world or the drupe from any chance of, as I think he put it though his words were tattered like the vague & succulent, trite & nutritionless flakes decayed in some sort of all-soaking spurious creme, flaking into soggy miniflakes in the great bowl of transgression I mean bowl of explicative rationalrealizative explication he was echoing round me.  Yea, that Hebs could really talk, & I quickly got lost in the negatives.

What thought it was a blackguarded denial, this rap seems to've pooped him out, seems to've taken a lot out of him, & I can only (inward grin) imagine how many times my feeble presecne has forced him to do this chime.

So my host collapse, sit flat on his butt, making as if to arrange his clothes.  & I must say he look pretty shook.  I feel powerful pangs of affection again, together now with bruised pity, suffocating guilt, long longings for death & relief, intimations of the circularity of time, the blossoming awareness like a pang right here in the center of your brang of the essential circularity of time, the hardness & coolness of the pavement he must be feeling, the fellow-feeling suggesting that I offer my hand to him to help him gu-get up-up, the upwelling desire to push his face with my palm so the back of his head cracks the pavement, psychotic images of heads being ground to burgers on the pavement, savage images of me squatting eating rawbrained brainburgers raw, mild feverish feeling, mild relief, mild coffee sense that this was just a dream, sense that this is another dream, desire not to ever awake, slight boredom at the vastness of this Widiculous Warehouse™, sense of conspiracy amongst these other small beings, Hebs' cohorts, excitement for no cause, existing in & of itself, maintaining its own universe‑‑stronger excitement, breathless growing crowning GOLDEN EXCITEMENT, hopping-dancing EXCITEMENT, euphoric once-in-a-lifetime EXCITEMENT!, relaizaiton or realization he's causing all these feelings & will cause me more, love him for that, hate that, push his face down a bit, but not to the pavement, step back.

I know that last was not a feeling, exactly, but it felt lie a feeling during this long great breezy feeling time.

Whew!, huh?  But I remembered this fellow, all right, well enough to sit back down on the rock that looked like a toadstool by his side, reaching round behind the ever-blearier tear-space to pat his shoulder.  We were in a copse or somesuch goddam thing now.  of his henchyps was changing the slides of our background, one by one, till we got through all of Hebszez infinite slides.

Anyway‑‑I knew him; he was my friend.  I understood the tear-stuff & where (or when?) I was (or am?) & the nature of tearstuff & so on now.

& so on now...but I was still waiting for the little grye ah grey kernal to crack if you know what I mean.  Or if you don't know what I mean, I was still waiting for the memory or memories trapped in that little drupe to thaw, so's I'd remember dem.

Click here if you don't know what to believe.

Hi, & welcome to the State of Disbelief.  The text has altered your mind somehow your mind somehow.  Somehow we are trying to get back to the story which has falled completely out of mind but is still going on somewhere.  Now back to our story.

Still going on somewhere, I remembered my memories would come back in either this place or dis-place where the Ing (the name of that ship) had ta'en me too.
Pause.  Pause here.  Bloodspot here.  Deleted scene of violence quite possibly right here.  Now back to our story, I think.

& why, you may say?  I know, comforting my friend, I did say.

& with patience the understanding come (Unh nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn! nn!), like a regular-featured, handsome Frantenstein monstor sort of guy thawing, relaxed & smiling charmimgly, out of his ice as if this ice you'd put him in were his idea, his life, his goddam ice.

...Dusting off his nice dry suit.  Dry suit...must have been some sort of dry ice, if you can imagne that.  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha‑‑"dry ice"!

Ha ha!

"Because your memories cannot hurt you here," said the friend‑‑tuned out Jam said, as if the metaphor of the ice-coked friend & the snawe to the thawing memory, thought, had also existed also in a parallel, or we'll have to concede at this point not-so-parallel but intersecting universe, or we'd better concur at this poinkt intersecting narrative in which I would & must speculate, I had, you know asked that question lost in the burxuous prozhe upthere, asked it out loud to my actual friend Jam here, with the blurred rain-hatchet features & pre-sume ah ab-ly-funny suit, & he'd replied.

"Things get parallel here," he said, & I shook my head with peevish indulgence.  He'd used the word "parallel," you'll notice, which as we've conceded, cocurred, & detemined (C a bove) was not quite the appropriate word, now was it?

But the man was weeping.  What can I say?

Which, keeping with the parallels‑‑er, I mean intersectials‑‑Jam went right ahead just then ahead & said.

"What can I say!"

In a goddam great god damnwail which suddenly brought out a fleet, no I mean a floot, no I mean a thash I mean a covey I mean a pride mean a shame a tick, OK, a tick, this whole, entire tick of these other costumed guys‑‑fat suti, ripped-open front, hatchet faces, ridiculous absurd tears‑‑staggering with arms limply half-raised in supplication, I did not have t presume (for I remembreed now), to join this wailing fray.

Yes, I remembered by now.  I was, as they'd themselves'd say'd if they weren't so goddamn wheaning, "all warmed up," & the nut was glowing with painful effulgence (too many indancdescent colors packed vividly inside like the hyperstimulated & at long, last, revivified emotions they were they were they were) & I

REMEMBERED IT ALL.

I therefore cared not at all for the Ypions staggering toward me in their paroxysmic goodam speciesial guilt.  Let me tell you, I now understood that guilt, & I (in the screen just behind my face in the darkroom in the freshly-warm edbrain where I grimly watched this recurring show) smiled upon that guilt.

& I enjoyed their weeping & dishevelment (I mean those suits & all), & I wanted them to die of the dears, I mean tears.  I wanted the tears to form around their heads & dissolve those faces with the cheeks plouping oup in airless contritive wonder, which in fact they seemed to do.

It was like being approached by a mass of shuffling, perambulant fruit, the fruit-bulbs of their heads heady with tears and, well,

prepared to burst!

& I just sat down, cross-legged, on the ground as they all approached, weeping & dying, approached, & watched in sudden calmness, blissful, were 'tnot so [grimly gleeful; vengefully glad?] schadenfreudisisch, as the Yps stumbled toward me & began to die.

Damn here's how it began again...
OLISHING HE EERLESS HING

As I approach the ship I am forgetting things at a terrific rate.  It may be exponential‑‑I don't know.  I have long forgotten what exponential means, I think.

This is how I clear my mind for a test flight.  I move on numerious pods I've made for the occasion, & by the time I reach the ship I believe, without being able to think it, that these pods‑‑& the other limbs I've manufactured to operate The Erless Ing‑‑are my sole & permanent equipment, that this arrangement is the underlying nature of my body, extensive sensory equipment jury-rigged just seconds ago for the occasion & all.

Right next to the curved hull of the ship, I turn around, kissing goodbye with an incredibly wide & sensual strip of receptors I have come to believe are my "lips" to the last memory of what was back there.

I see rows of shapeless techncians, columns & rows of them, tiny & glowing with the energies they're tuned into, a three-dimensional structure of faceless, formless fellow-technicians creating something like a Mondrian rectilinear grid, its lights moving along the lines of bodies so that they appear to be waving goodbye, like a gignatic schmoo on a lost playground somewhere at the edges of time, hung on the bars & waving goodbye to their‑‑what? to their dying friend.

That's my code name.  I take that last look‑‑which is allowed in these circumstances‑‑& turn back to the ship.  I try to feel its surface with these elaborate handlike wings, with numberless fingers fine as highest wires, but one cannot feel this substance.  It is the perfect substance for this kind of travel.

But no one knows what kind of travel this will be.  I mean, we don't know what happens.  We can't get any records‑‑nothing electronic, nothing virtual, nothing from memory, no matter how hard we scan‑‑of any of the trial runs that have been made.

That's why this clean-out of memory is especially important today.  I can see a huge, pale-yellow sun half filling the western horizon.  I can see it especially clearly with the beautiful, multiple sets of eyes & eyes within eyes I have painstakingly manufactured for the occasion.  I can, if you want to know the truth, see the damn thing all too well.  This is our sun Em, who looks to me right now much more like a membrane or a weathered tater of paper, all speckled & sparkled with aHEM-spots, inverse flares, intrastorms, coolant regions, ionsworls, & photolicules [inverse energy pockets drawing in the light the ancient sun have spent so many eons trying to cast off‑‑signs of age, like liver spots on the yellowed pelt of age].

I shake my head sadly & turn back to The Erless Ing, jexxing & frozzing & qegging her quite sensualy (this also normal, albeit Non Napproved) & rubbing longer na dwider & longer na dlonger nad wider na dwider portions of my soft I-guess-you'd-call-them forearms over the surface, then leaning onto the surface with my belly, then placing my sensitive cheek to the surface, & finally pretty much doing a humping goddam dance all over it, as if I were polishing the peerless thing olishing he eerless hing.

Which is impossible.

They let this go for a Non Approving Minute then white-noise my head, "Into the Ing, Dying Friend."

So in I go.

Now this you've got to see.  Everyone loves this, even the nameless panel of insects‑‑& when I say insects I only mean beautiful panel of my brothers done up as insects for the patterns of this atterns of his flight ight ght, more or less or orer r ess r‑‑& when my godam brethren love something, that ol' cube lights up with entertaining patterns of love, let me tell you.

Never mind.  All that leaning in & loving the Ing has prepped me, to be sure, just as surely to be as the Forgetter Field I've in ad ver tent ly mo ved on thro ugh

& I melge aboard, as they say.  I ooze through its little slit with the little slit I've made of my "lips" until my whole body, part by carefully-manufactured part, turns sequentially into a "lip" (just a meaphoric "lip," you understand) until my lip slips through the slit that is the Ing that is the ship & I'm in

The Ship which naturally becomes one's entire universe.

I'm in a liquid inhere, by the way.   I'm in a perfect, sensuous, supple, golden, clear, finely-lit, nutrient-stimulant-emollument purefect liquid not on molecules nor the micromachinery of the clever but decadent Hoph but of enspex, which are nothing more or nothing more than or "splendid & superb & gold enspecks, atom-specks, built with insectival concentration to our specs" (couldn't've said it better than my) self locked up in the ship, filled with the liquid like a great & jolly tnakard and, well,

ready to go!

"Test Flight 111, Pilot: Dying Friend. Go."

...nor did I expect time to freeze, not only as I flew but after I landed, finding everyone everywhere frozen solid, & not, according to my (improvised) instruments moving at all‑‑not just slowed down but stopped
THE CUSTOMARY INTELLIGENCE OF THE
SINGOLE SCHELL

I get locked into the cockpit & spend several hundred years in the Usual Panic, pounding on the black, invisible head overdome, pounding till it hurts, apounding till I realize it is my apounding that ahurts, pounding more slowly as I realize each pound pumps my head from inside, I am beating against the inside of my head, trying to get out.

I grow silent & fall quiet.

I'm thinking.  The leftover, quiet, still throbs of memory-pane help me think, I believe.  They help me believe, I throbbing think.  They throb, but they do no such thing.

But still, I'm thinking, If I beat hard enough, I might crack through.  I might crack out of my head & the Ing ship at the same time.  I might crack right out of the megasteel strctures of this story.  I mean I know from stories that it's happened before...

Then with a shrug of what's left of my transparent, melting "shoulders (becoming "'shoulders,'" "'"shoulder,"'" "'"'shoulders,'"'" & so on)," because my polyphermory is coming back (!‑‑like sliccoliax, i.e., organic exclamation points rushing your spine from upward of behind with exclamatorious chuckles, which happens here‑‑! & here‑‑! & here‑‑! and) & I am able to resolve myself normally.

My cells are back, each one smiling like sliccoliax, each one with the Customary Intelligence of the Singole Schell or o' th' singole shphel or off the spingle shel, the freezing of mine body parts out there just a mere little precuationary measure as redundant as the smiles across the glowing hides of the sliccoliax or olii ee-I.

Anyway, it feels good, & I stretch.  It is perfectly dark.

I haven't formed any eyes!
Silly me!

I form eyes.

It is perfectly dark.  Still. Only except what I see it now.

No, wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...
wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...
wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...
wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...
wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...wait...
wait...wait...

I see it now it see I now I see it now I see see I now it see I now I see it now it see I.

Now.  The controls emerge as this ultrapurple haze.  Hey...it looms good.  It is a tasty color, just as if I'd formed a tongue.

But why would a Dimnentian ever formulate a tongue?

It invites me to spread out "arms" which-which give forth ento "hands" with split up into "fingers" which split each up ento infinitudes of "nerves," nerves nerves nerves which intrinsicate themselves so thoroughly ento the profuse molecular switches nodding asleep at their own "controls," each sending out their own tiny, sick little "hands" et "cetera," each excited at the purples most which summons them like some bogus religious vision down below.

Till I am locked in good.

"You are locked in, Dying Friend.  Time to go."

Which is a joke, as the Ing works (theoretically) by means of time, so I laugh a bit and

take off!
OBSERVATIONAL GLASS GONE BAD
or
CELEBRATORY DIM

So I hopped in the vucking ship, at which point a supergalaxy of imprinted technical routines come running back like a bunch of groupies.

I was high with it; I was dizzy with expertise.  I caught just the smallest taste of the world of superficial, vulnerable, & gaudy little weaklings starting to gather round‑‑just the last humid rush of the music & Bluua, with as wide a grin as is plausible within the rim of psychophysic law, waving to me, as hundreds & hundreds of layers slipped pneumatically sleeped numbstatically between me & everything in all of summery, Celebratory Dim.

Everything grew sequentially greyer, then darker, as pane upon pane & shield over shield, perfect pure plastic shell within perpurplasticel closed over, deadening light, sound, radiation, life, hope, time...

Until I was, as a result of my own unhesitant actions (most of them mental (most of them mere thoughts (mostly deep within what passes for a brain (within a brain (within a brain (within a brain, much as I'd found myself shucked in shell) within shell) within shell) of time) reactivated by the mere touch of the Ing.

For this was the mighty Ing, the legendary ship, the magical, time-straddling craft, the powerful "dimensional tug" or "polymensional lug" that was going to curve me back to wherever I was supposed to be.

1)  & when I say wherever I mean whenever.
2)  & when I say I I mean we.
3)  & when I (meaning we) say supposed to be we (I) mean time.

So what I really meant up there was that the rediscovered Ing‑‑her mirror flanks washed by all that rain & now dried to perfection in whatever was posing as a sun!!!‑‑would curve us back to the diamond-forests of dream we'd lost by gotten lost in time I mean.
So I flew off with a blast, laying waste the entire carnival & all of the faces in the carnival, such that they became utterly black, & I saw a dwindling, shrinking Bluua‑‑growing younger by the yard!‑‑still waving to me, relentless trusting little bitch that she was.

("Guess that fella won back his drupe," the barker says, but there is equivocal & uneasy agreement at this.)

I broke through the Pane of the Yps or the Plane of the Yps & broke up Their Little Observation.  I landed & hopped out of the Ing, which oozed stuff like an egg I'd never noticed before, & I stood before the shimmering soap bubble of the disappearing me‑‑you know, the one that was watching before the scene watching before the scene shifted up there‑‑obligingly & by ontological necessity deferring to me...the real me.

"Have we broken through?" I asked the Yps, disconcerted, to be sure, but panicking a good deal less than the screaming, bleeding minions at the carnival beyond the howling shags of glass with the grey storms roiling & whimpering below, their gusts fluffing up the stray hairs of the Yps & messing up my hair-do completely.

Hebs shut the transom with one hand, without looking away from me.  He was very good with eye contact, was Hebs.  & we all noted how it was a transom now, whereas before it had been a howling shag of observational glass gone bad.

But existences shift, don't they then?  & it was just a title now.

"Broken through, you think?" queried Hebs, who seemed insufferably skeptical of me & cocksure of himself‑‑both attitudes likely to drive me to an uncharacteristic murder, & both, I thought at the time at the tohught of the time of the thought, unwarranted.

"Unwarranted?" he smiled. Pretty vucking smug, I thought.

But the intention of his gaze made me look back at the Ing.  Made me turn round to face the Ing.  Made me walk back to the crack-toopen cockpit of the Ing.  Made me re member the Ing.  Caused me to lean into the planes of the Ing.

Had me pull out the big fat drupe what was lying inside, right on the sit where I'd been seating.

"Shit," I said.

"'Said,' indeed," misquoted Hebs, plucking the strangely blond drupe from my hand & brushing it off, for no reason, as if it had stuff on it.  The other Yps behind him were gently clutching their little heads as if to mime involvement in the scene.  I pitied them.

But mostly I pitied myself.

"It's not so bad," said Hebs from behind me.  "Let's crack this sucker open & see what we find."

"I suppose so," I said.  But I was afraid of what I'd find.
THE DARK LINE THAT SERVED FOR EYES
or
HAD SHE LEGS

"Well, but how can we do it?" I said, the feet I was apparently stuck with forever gently nuzzling the dust with their loving little nose.  "I mean, we're stuck in time...you're all stuck in time, are you not?"

They made no effort to hide their amusement, but it was pretty well lost on me at the time.  In retrospect I can tell you, their faces flushed with a very gentle light, & the dark line that ark ine hat served for eyes widened a bit‑‑slowly, in perfect, animated proportion, the work of an artist, obviously.

I made this mental note: #173856.  Must meet artist.  All the Ypions in the room laughed‑‑in a lilting, turquoise titter (sounds have color, not just meaning, here, & color has emotion, & emotion has line, & line has weight, & weight has comfort, & comfort has no end outside of time; therefore, there was comfort in the sounds, although they wree mocking sounds).  This confused me as much as that parentheses confus ed-you, believe edyou-me, as, outside of time, with all the comforts & the colors & the lines, you are me.

I can't deal with these bozos, I thought, whereupon, reacting, apparently, to everything I thought, Posted As Note or NOT, they all turned into clowns, a vision washed in the whim of a simple wind, just for a timeless sec you couldn't count in the countless count downtime.

"We just have to move to the right Brittle Room," said Hebs, deliberately turning a different color (a cool greenish blue I loved immediately, & I thought, If "female" has meaning here, this one's a she (wereupon she blushed only for me to see to a different color‑‑the color, I vaguely recall, of a pale brown island washed in its comforting sounds of a sweet, preadolescent, pangy love sort of thing I would never forget, never having left that island yet, though the lines of the love lent me the orientation & the weight (of course) to comfort me back to the "Brittle Room" where we were, you'll recall talking) & I stood there stupidly in love, so looped up in their forcelines even they were stunned at their power over me their owero verme ome there) but she didn't move closer to me as she might've, had she legs.

"So let's go," I said, heading toward a door.

"No, wait," one of the small ones from the very back of the crowd called, & it did seem that this particular one was awfully small & awfully far away‑‑& you have to ask, if not in space, or time, then how "far away"?

Perhaps in caring, huh?

"Other way," the other way, I mean the others indicated, waving their sweet winglike yellow armless armlike Things toward another door, a larger door, itself just a line in the paleness of the wall of the Brittle Room.

I stood at the door.  They stood observing me.  Methought I heard the scribblibblibbling of notes...

"I don't know how to work the door," I said.

"Nobody does," said Yp shockingly & becoming in a fever of deja vu VARY LORGE & leaning in past me rather brusquely & opening it.

No one does, indeed!

I tried to make a disgusted & sarcastic face at him or her as I passed by or past-bi or entered into-front or what ever-I.

I made that face, in the interface between the Brittle Rooms of Time.

...which we proceeded to move through, heading it would seem forward in time without ourselves moving in time.  I hate timestuff!

"We allhate timestuff," whispered my love.

"'We allhate,'" I echoed through the rooms.

Now as you might expect, there were many of these "brittle rooms."  There were in fact an infinite number of them between any two points in time, so the whole crowd that consisistuttereded Us were moving through a paradox as we moved‑‑a hopeless quest, I'm certain you'll agree, to move anywhere through time whilst outside etc.

I brought this up in the form of a Mental Memo to los jolly Ypions with their special padded clownly memo-reading (or "memo-imbibing" as they grando lilo quently "say") contumely costweumes.

"That's why they called brittle rooms," Hebs answer, & at the "time" it seemed an utterly complete, almost sexually satisfying Answer to the Answerless.

On we went, through room after room, each one a slightly different color, which I thought was nice, each one vey sparsely furnished, which seemed understandable, each one apparently somehow farther ahead back down on the old Planes of Time.
DRASTIC LAUGHTER

Whenever the Ypions told you something they also showed it.  They used a soft spheric screen which would nestle up to you like a muff, rolling in over the speaker's shoulder like a rogue asteroid, pulsing with triform chronophasic masterhued hyperimages that were invariably so much better than the lackluster, trivial words (twisted by some hired child out of coat hangers, or else twisted by the hands of a clumsy giant hired child of the mammoth Frush or Beiliewliculatriors‑‑imagine, then, if you would, now, a paiseley-pastel Frussh baby‑‑of their sweet gender IIIa, let us saya‑‑out of airplane hangars; they can do that; they do; "Out of candy hangars twists the tree-sinewy Childe," as Bailbraff sings, or sang before they goddma busted him for buggering boys to within an inch of their lives & went on trial & was chainsawed to pieces by a gang of these little boys with their little asses spackled shut & the dirty old pederastic poet wideeyed as if yes HE were being buggered....Except he wasn't being buggerdead at all, but rather chainsawed till he was dead is all) the Ypoids used, that you really had to focus on the fulsomely unctuous screen (whoever tapped the consciousness into these fuzzy thangs gave them very low self-esteem, as if you were going to leap out of your parentheses & chainsaw them to smithereens...

(Which is impossible) to figure out what they were talking about.

So here now (by which I mean there then) a half a dozen fat & furry screens streaming with information, their little gummy grins all a-teem, were in my face & nuzzling my cheeks & smushing themselves righti into my face until I couldn't breathe.  The Ypions were all talking at once.

& what they were talking about now was me, for I was seeing images of me‑‑all with that peculiar distortion indicating they had come from the Yps' zezminds.

I strained to hear, still instinctively looking for a connection amongst their wirey little words, but what I mostly heard was that the weeping & the wailing & the gnashing of teeth & the soulful sparkles of tooth-particles turning to stardust in the stardust air had somehow someway somewhen somewhy resolved itself intto laughter.

Laughter!  Huh!  Laughter drastic as the screams had been‑‑laughter as triple-tongue staccatoed as, say, a chainsaw reaming the pith from the trunk of a filthy old vucking tree, a chainsaw, as it were, up the ass, a buggering chainsaw sputtering up your ass.  I speak symbolically, of course.

Yea, the heretofore-blubbering Ypdweebs were now in a state of bloodless glee.  I could imagine‑‑hell, I could wellnigh see‑‑how dizzy they felt.  So I wasn't getting much from their words, even by the standards of words bent from coat hangers by one symbolic, paiseley-pelted child of whatever size.  Size does not matter in this run of metaphors.  This streamy figuration give not a hoot for size.  These conceits be heedless of magnitude as the machinations of a Fnool.

So I was trying to focus on the frigging screens, but there were too many of them stuffed in my face.  Some of them were crammed in my mouthph as well, which was ridiculous, but the hysteria was, well...absolute.

So I've sorted it all out‑‑words, fleecy screens, chainsaws, ceteras‑‑& cyrtsallized the Main Rant for you here:

THE MAIN RANT FOR YOU HERE: "Hee-hee-ee-ee-eeee! You were like a damn virus, man!  We schuted you so smooth-man back into your time‑‑man!‑‑a-a-and you were this dinky little virus shot right back there to infect your crew‑‑& you did, man.  You did it!  You infected your Whole Disheartened Species, my good man!  It worked so perfectly we died here.  We like to die here, watching you, watching you‑‑& we watched you do it, man, & we like to died."

What the fck is he talking about?

Along with this came many a myriad parallel animations of me‑‑replete with cartoon music of the high-hysteric type, very funny music to make a very funny me look even funnier‑‑in his kinkadink ship, slipping on home with this chartreuse cloud of like skeeters around his big, big-big, obliviously-simpering head, symbolizing the infection of memory the Ypions wrought on us, the day they turned our world into snow‑‑& apparently, thanks very much to me.

& the crowd huffing around me had vented their grief & their guilt (seemed pretty genuine, I thought I thought), & now they'd gone into some substratum of hysteria, the glee of irresponsible insanity.  Some of them were actually rolling around the ground, bumping into me like tipsy cats.  I was kicking the bastards, too.

& saying over & over, "You guys [you sonsabitches] have got to fix this mess you made."

They calmed down very gradually, became almost instantly quiet at some point, & coughed & cleared their throats desultorily as they slowly & awkwardly stood up (their screens withdrawing‑‑O blessed optical silence!) & brushed off the illfitting jumpsuits they wore, & came round me, looking serious & sincere.

Yes, we'll help, they said, not in so many words.

Now I was really suspicious.  You see, these were Ypsssss....
SSSSSS....

The Yps?  The goddam Yps?  Yea, I rememeber (again) "now," where now means again.

See, these or those timeless weasals or rascals‑‑in any case & whatever you call them a race of bounders extraordinaire‑‑built the first skew-cruisers & shipped their little asses right into the Akashic Records, where all memories are clear, a place herefore cleary outisde time, & from this vanatage the clever but-then "ethically disadvantaged" Ypions took u residents‑‑even going (yes!) so far (yes, YES!) as to ship their neighbors & their wifes & chilluns & any belogings that could be shipped outside of time (which turned to out-be out to none, ah well) & trook up residence there.

What am I saying?  You want me to say what I'm saying?

I'm not saying this: I'm not saying the Yps were flukes of the Akashic Records.  They were not vucking bloody parasites.  They were not time parasites.

(making faces within his faces) I'm saying Ugh & ugh! & UGH!

So you learn to feel the disgust they feel at the advent or comeuppance of the shingles, a kind of god-given tit-for-tat, I firm leebleeve le bleev, & you understand (evena as you flee, filled flittering with falsetto hutterings, as of "Hu-hu-hu-huhuhu-HU!," too high to here to high hysteria, groping out of the infected minds of the infectious goddam Ypions, infected at least with the disgust of parasites felt only by parasites you see (you see parasites) their (the Yps') multiple repulsions at the shingles, given their flimsy oculkar coherecne, known to Unknown Science as their FOC, or "vucking FOC" foreshort, & the singles' essentially making fun of this.

In a way, naturally naught, that hurts.

So I delayed contact slong gaz poggible.  I stayed aboard the Ingthistime.  I flew around & cruised & wasted timeless fuel (fuel: little time-crystals firmed in the fornace of the vax) & I buzzed around Fiouaeour like a colorful bug, but a sad little insect, alone & without mass.  I was the only spot of color anywhere.  Everything I touched with one of my long silver feelers, everything I landed on with my crisp little pods, spread with the richest color.  Like the color from your acid dreams they diffused, & they warmed the areas where I landed (without shadow), & I stayed in places for a long time thinking They're going to start to move, they're going to gain life, & time, soon....

But they never did.  This was a world of borrowed colors, without time.  & when I flew off the surfaces returned to a grey if anything even more metallic than before.

Fuel was low, & as it petered out I became more & more angry.  The anger was growing greater inside of me, like an explosion outside of time, or almost outside, an explosion greatly & immensely slowed down, & explosion of anger-death, & I kept on flying all over, everywhere, & as I flew & the fuel became lower in this grey & ghostly world I became simpy madder & madde & madder‑‑each surge like a fever, or like the dial twisted further by the torturer, bringing greater agony than one had ever realized.

It was a great grey anger that was eating me.

& I assumed four things.  They ran round & roun within my mind like your four seasons, & they became familiar & known to me as The Four Things, to wit: 1) that the anger was free to grow within me, just as the colors grew on the surfaces I brushed, because there was nothing stopping it, 2) that the anger would become so immense it would drive me mad, 3) that the Ing would ultimately fail after god knows what eternities of torture, & 4) that I would then return to time, to normal Dimnentian Timespice, with absolutely no memories.

The Four Things made me mad.

I couldn't stand it.
THE BEAUTIFULLY ALIEN

Hell, this thing went no faster than a child's trollycar!

I flew around forlornly.  Everything seemed very sad‑‑all this swollen greyness...the stillness...even the concentric thaw of colors when I touched down.  It was all so immense, so hopeless, so far from what we'd worked for years to get.

We have these vivid dreams.  I mean our whole race has them periodically‑‑singular, vivid dreams with a meaning we gather together to decipher.  These are among the most intense times we have.  They are almost sexual‑‑they are more than sexual.

We work together to decipher the meaning of the dreams (the question of where the dreams come from we keept deferring.  This incremental, endless deferrment brings us right out of these parentheses, right back into) in the real, liquid-vivid world.  & the meanings emerge piece by piece, like a great creature growing out of the black pool ,cell by cell.

We think of it as a great creature.  We dream of it as such.  to us, it is the great child of our race, the meaning of the dream, a great white bible of a child we have created together, just as someone or something created the dream

Which brings us out of parentheses we were never in again.  to wit: This latest dream was what led us to the Ing ship, & the effort to get outside the vorpfield that surrounds our race, the same field that gives us our freedom of shape, our virtually infinite lives, etc.  We wanted to travel out, to meet & touch the "brittle races,"as we called them‑‑all this without sacrificing our own freedoms.

That may have been asking too much.  But you see, these big dreams (called *) of ours come complete with vastly-developed subfiles & indexes, huge directory trees of micro-information, like whole, plump universes waiting to be born.

So we knew everything about these brittle people we were supposed to meet.  There were the Ypions...

...so instead of all that, libraries of luminous races admirable in their crystalline rigidity, so much more vivid than us & yet so beautifully fragile‑‑something for us to love in ways we'd not loved anything before (& we needed that)‑‑we got this elephantine universe of ghostly greys‑‑stiff, to be sure, but the absolute opposite of the beautiful alien, which is what we were looking for: the beautiful alien, the beautifully alien.

I was shaken awake by a gigantic thumping sound, like a cosmic foot kicking the wall next to your sleeping head, removing the head, sending it down smaller & smaller tunnels of repressed parentheses, thumping its own small-painful parodee of that one great awakening Primal Thump.

I thought I saw bright colors from the corner of my eyes.  I led my instrumetns that way‑‑they were charcateristically hesitant to move that way, chilly, incurious instruments!‑‑& they did detect indeed traces of red & orange.

Red & organge?  Enhance...

Big fat jolly red & orange.  Extrapolate...

Big bulbous fellow capering along outisde the windows of my grey world, laughing & thumping on the windows, a delirious giant lovingly taunting me.

"TEE HEE!"

Hey‑‑I heard that!  & not with doily-sweet instruments, neither, but with my own big flapping, fleshly ears!

He was laughing at me!

Actual life!  Maybe some unforeseen domain of brittledom.  Maybe I was flying around inside what our universe was to the stiff universe‑‑some colorelss wintry window-display, & me whizzing round in here like a damnfool fly...

I headed round, fighting the fighting of my instruments, as slow as molasses dreams...

My instruments kept fighting me.  They'd flurry around my hands & swat at them, as if my hands were giant flies, & whip up a tiny breeze that had an electrical charge exactly that of pillows beating against your head, & they'd pull my flightpath this way & that, rather like a small child pulling on his mother's dress in a hopeless attempt to get her to move.

They made my flight a zig-zaggy, looping affair.  I drove the small gnat-craft like a drunken man.  & every now & then their surface would mold into the shape of Pola grimabetmacing‑‑really poleering at my efforts, in a way she would never do, in a manner completely "counter-ba-met tahooer," so I knew the controls were somewhat beset by madness, that mad controls were one of the dangers of the Brittle Zone.

So like I finally had to bow to the forces of the phrase & finally had to touch down & so finally touched down, finally, if I dew say myself, "like one of those weightless, silver 'snowflakes' of Villurdoa," & wittily scamper from the craft.  I dust myself off as Hebs, who has been standing there with the retro-ascription of a dream, watches politely, then starts to clapping me on my back.  If we ZOOM IN on MY FACE we can see the CONSTERNATION & the CAPITALS inditing how things are indeed & enfact COMING BACK, the multiple memories of the Brittle Zones coming back back back back.

"Welcome back," he saus with neither meaning nor feeling, neither denotation nor evocation, not sense nor life & neither truth nor intention.  O yea, Hebs, I think I think (& here's where I notice (& here's where I clue you in (not that you deserve it (pa!)!)!) that everything I think here in the beside-of-time so-called self-styles soi-disant well-known "Brittle Zones" [as detialed friends, my detailed friens, in various scrofulous articles in & around the printly aura of of the Brittle Zone News or gazette ette et] is actually just something I think I am thinking, or think about thinking, or at the lvaried leashed thoughtlessly watch myself thinking, & you can bet I have to craftily avoid any of these sort of metathoughts in here, as for example the thoughts inhabiting this sentence like mad little gremlins of the dark, mad little black gremlins with their golden-tory-ayes BLINK & BLINKINKing in the dark anf flashing generally up-the-dar or -ark, lest my thinking I am thinking turn too quickly into the concentric "sphericon of mirrors" out of which Hebs has to snap me time ha ha & time hehe again while I'm avisting here, if you call "this" "here," which I think I think you do.
LAUGH AFTER ASS

So, says Hebzeses.  What can we do?

You mean, said the glass of my lisp unto hipsps, what do IYEYE have to do‑‑am I right?

& Hebs nod zwizely & wide, the influence of the waves of the form of the air of the passage of his nod affecting milliong of children, millions upon millions of children or the flesh of children hung on drastic hangars in the schools (I can epxlain this adn will, will, later, later, when the bomb of my mine goes off in the rich thick texture sof the timestuff down down there there) etc., but of course "what I had to do was" so "obvious" it made us "laugh," me & my timeless fren Hebs.  & we stood there laughing our asses off for quite sometime.  We'd calm down a bit, stoop to pick our asses up, & the sight of us stooping to pick our asses up would make us start laughing them off again, even before we'd pup dem on, so we'd "lose more asses," "'lose more asses'" you know, & stoop & crack up again, laugh after laugh, ass after ass, laugh after ass, until there was nothing but asses up to your larf, & of course asses over your elbows, & everybody stoopidly stuping down.

But it was obvious.  I had to find the right Brittle Room, the one with my wife's mouth in it, & I had to go into aforeshed brittle room (quietly, without capitals, now...), & I had to just boldly walk right into that wide-open wifely mouth

and I had (continuing the declension of this laughably-obvious logic which makes my sides urt ven ow) to operate on my wife's grey brain.

Consider that: I had to operate on my wife's grey brain.

Not an option for your natural husbands, but I was o natural huisband, was I now?

Naw, & I had to remove the desire or something like that (the logic, less funny, get hazhy at this poizhnt).  I had to remove whatever something I come to that looks like a desire.

Would diss fixx tangs?  It would.  But you "see 'the "price."'"

I know I saw the price.  It hung on the whole chuckling-silver chain of logic like a price tag long as a donkey's dong, to wit:

Bluua would never have desire again.  She would have no desires again.  She would be no wife, much less a mother, no love, much less another...never a gain.

See?  That stopped my particular laughter right there, & I had to ponder.

But there was No Point to Ponder Fum.  There wazh thuz No Poinkt to Ponder Ing, & off down the brittleraumz (with laps-ed chuckles failing far behind, the Yps somewhat, one might say even a good bit, more amused than  I I I), our passage through the rooms this time the rooms this "time" different than before

in that our passeage each-through the rooms o time

erased the room before

0) so 1) we 2) were 3) bustling 4) on 5) down, 5) er 4) ASE 3) ing 2) each the 1) room 0) before

OK?

and headed for & down the tunnel of my wife's ecstatic mouth...

"Bluua?  Bluua?" I called irrationally, just to have the pleasure of the immense vertical coils the golden qoils the curling choils of the echoes of her inner ear coming richly back to me, & I thought Also irrationally, I wonder if she's always heard things in this arpeggioed way? continuing to call out her name as if the real Bluua were going to actually appear in the fantastically enlarged drupe-image of my memory her ultraservicable mouth.
Other were there, in that great hall of echoes that great VCalhallen AllHall of Echoes of Sublime & Servicable Mind of a grey clayey version of something like Hebs sort of waving & saying, "Don't worry, son, we'll figure it out," an answer beneath all questioning, & yet it did get a rise of a rise from me, causing me to flick a fist into his face poppinglike a puffball flowring the air with too many spores of Hebs.

Boy, did I cuss up a pullenstorm!
FROM THE AGE WHEN KIDS COULD PLAY WITH TIME

Anyway, cussuss-and-all, Hebs would seem to be taking me through all the brittle rooms, & not just the drippings of my dead wives' ching, timing things.  This means he Has Another Plan.

He has this huge green stompwatch, which he clicks to kick in time again, pressing just this opal lozenge at the crown of the head of the insentiently-smiling watch which looks & looked just like the most beautiful earring you have ever saw (the one that glinted off the most beautiful black-locketed head you ever saw, the one you knew from that glint would pucker your lips with syrupy regrets for the rest of one two three more natural & unnatural lives following one another in sequence, back-and-forth, to wit hero-dawrf-hero-dwarf-hero-dwarf-hero-dwarf & like that, the way lives spozed to be, in perfectl articulating black-and-white eternal pearls), Squlchz!, which as I said above said would click in time

more properly, clip in inertia & mass & things like that, which would make you even more dizzy, say, than reading The Moonhare fifty pages at a reminiscent clip, & anyway & as I was saying way way far above in the centuries of the past, back when black when galaxies were as I was attmepting to say in the near-parallel univers wheich just just clicked in now, would clip in time

at which monumental point the gigantic grey figures would start moving, the frost cascading off of them I swear just like or at the very least rather like the condesnation from liquid oxygen as it's shaken off the flanks of your old great ships‑‑the Saturn, the Jupiter, the goddam illfated Gandymede‑‑& time would thus resume, so's we could follwo it.

I especially resented the silly watch‑‑half as big as Hebs, slamost spherical, & with an animated face of a grin pussed all over it.

"What's with the face," I failed to ask.

Nor did Hebs reply, "An objet trouvé, m'frien', from some silly-billy corporation back in one of the kashic books in which corporations ruled all time‑‑a time we are still within as we write.  But deny to everyone what I say."

So this was a toy‑‑a clown-clock© (just think of it: from an age when the kids could play with time) proving my ancient suspicion yes that children have played with time‑‑they have played with our time.

Which would explain our time?

Naa!  Only of psychotics got aholda the clown-clox©, too.

He was clicking on time, just to let me get the feel & the sight of it.  He was warming me up, getting me used to (if ever) the sound of that thunder when gravity & inertia & the entire book of physics kick in‑‑like a migraine, like the morning of your execution of despair, like the last long dream endling the endless night of bloodless oxymorons lying like skulls on the corpses at the foot of your bead‑‑& showing me how to scurry to avoid the free-falling ice, their jags slagging the urph like like like triple-similes of skyscrapers crahsing when your glass planet crashed.

Remember?

No?  & anyway Hebs got me used to it.

"Now we're going to Brittle Room 333," he said.

Not that they had numbers.  He said that to be cool.  He said that for dramatic effect. I was in a very weak position here, but I was vaguely‑‑no, not baguely, but dimly‑‑able to catch on, just with a thready edge of a breath that Hebs said everything to be cool or for dramatic effect‑‑& for no other reason.

In we went, to the brittle room with the big 333 over it.  Maybe I was wrong.  Maybe that previous paragraph there was like dead wrong.  I couldnt; say.  I wouldn't say.  I'm simply & utterly not saying, but I will say this:

"If it's dead wrong, it is the only paraphrag (save this one here one here) dead wrong in the daedbalsted blook‑‑& I have spoken," & I have.

& so this was the brittle room‑‑so different from the rest! so fine & crystallized! not with "chunks" & monustictures of dead-timey ice & rime but with delicate, intricately tiny microchips of memory‑‑O microchips of memory!‑‑displaying like some sculpture drawn so purely & purposefully abstract that it circles back round in the ol' commodious vicus of rebeing to being (rebeing) concrete again, in perfect, ice-sculpted images of my wife.

In flagrante delicto, however, with persons of gender, identity, & species quite unknown.  This important information was missing (no doubt edited by the Yps, I darkly dudpsect, for intrigue & prurient reason stolen for their own, for they never had reason of their own, these sleazily Eeps), as in we went, to a britroom of pure passion.

"Shit," I said.  The statue of my wife with a massive cock of ice in her maffif mouwphth a story high.

"I quite understand," said Hebs briskly, hoisting hi swatch.  "You had to say that. Only thing for you to say, really.  Part of this room, actually.  Are you ready?"

"Ready?"

He hefted the grinning cartoon corporate watch.  I nodded, not at Hebs, but at the goddam watch...

Hebs flicks on time again & again & again.
WHAT THOUGH THE RIME DED STENG
or
TORTURE) OF THE WATCH

He flicked it (time) it (time) it (time (it) time) it time ten times.  It made me dizzy, & yet he flicked it time fifty moretimes more.

I lay flatback at the backfar wallback of the back-brittle room‑‑which was a great room, big as a warehouse, but not big enough for me, I'll tell you.

"Not...big enough...for...me," with my big, weak head propped against the frosty wall (I could feel the sting of the wall‑‑O yea, I could feel the sa-sting o' th' wall, uh-huh, but I will not say nor sing nor sun nor stung of this now, what though the rime ded steng).

"Say what?" calls Hebs, clicking some more, even outside parameters of the scene, clicking way beyond the script, clicking ong after the director yells "CUT," clicking beyond what God hads in mime, clicking way farout byond what even God'll allow, clcking till the poor blue watch lose his grim & turn green (muss be dizzy as me I mean I, ay?) aye!, & clicking still beyond time.

"Gotta get to the 'perfect mo','" Hebs said, again & again.

So there you had it, see.  With each cluck of his sickly watch (which by now was actually rosy-cheeked‑‑but not a healthy glo, o no, not no healthy, pregnancy, bun-in-the-oven glo, nono‑‑more like he was agonna puke his guts out

(Woulda been intresting to see that watch's guts, huh?)

) the figura Bluua‑‑like some ice-mountain on that iciest of icymoon Puritegula Moon Unit Too‑‑would jerk O SO PAINFULLY into time & croak out one time-chunk of her orgasms, which I swear must've been a ninety-minute job if ever therever was everone, & jerk back again.

& I could make it out‑‑oh yea!  Hebs was getting in his metaphoric licks, not to be mistaken for the endess, literal licks my wife was getting in on the massive frosted gob of her quaking partner up there amongst the shiver-mists of this magnified timefrozen brittle old alp of love she was mounted in my absence on.

I say "Mounted in my absence on."

"You OK?" called Hebs, but without stopping his torture (for that's what it was; that was the point & the function of the whole scene: torture) of the watch.  [Reader Note: Add the intention to perpetrate torture to thelist of Hebs motivations Paragraph 333 above.  Thank you.]  Don't menton it.

"Menton what?" he called, but he was just rattling in his minor ecstatsy.  This was a minor ecstasy Hebs was having.  This was one of those moments‑‑so preciously goddam rare for us rare for us all‑‑in which basically everything has lined up your way, a veritable Ecstatic Syzygy, forsooth, & we might say Hebs had it all.

& he had time in a stretchable state, too, didn't he‑‑something which you & I, by & large & I, dont have during our own rare-to-virtually-absent, E.S.'s, ay...ay?

I, indeed.  So it was with a mixture of admiration & sadness, runneling along as they did beneath the acid-bath of jealousy I was being suffered through.  But I'm this tough guy, see.  I didn't let it affect me, otheer than my no-doubt temporary quadriparalysis coupled with tatenaic, epileptoid fibrillations of my whole gealtnous frame.  True, language in the flowings of my heart froze up, then shattered into fragments such that the morphemes, the letters, even the corners of the letters frags O THE CORNERS OF THE LETTER-FRAGS! broke up, & ripped through long-shut-off tunnels of my mindless bodymind & my bodiless mindsoul & my soulless bodysole (making me itch so terribly!), such that feelings for Bluua‑‑dmb name, Bluu-a!‑‑rampantly like electricity raged.

& like made my lovin' little footsies kick.

Hebs chuckled now & then, I think, judging from the timing, at the sounds of my feet.

"There," he "There," he "There," he said "at last!  How's this for a hot shot, Jym?"

"Unh," I blurbed, ewmiting disgusting big ball of censor-colored censor from my mouth, which I hab discrteley censored out even as I censor out the same censor coensor that is censor censor my censor mouth right now.

"Ugh!" says Heb in the cheer that flips off ecstatsy like nothing no much as a senseless solar flair.

Yea, he had Bluua at The Moment, I guess.  I couldnt help but prop myself up on my elbows‑‑a movement which has occurred many times in the pure circlings o this novel, I must not say‑‑& observed.

Yea, she was as soft as could be‑‑you could tell the glow & see it e'en beneath the frosting sof the aery stop-time effect.  You could tell.

Hebs had known (or hoped‑‑& had his hopes come true?) it was there, the perfect synaesthesia of rutting, hot-crotched vacant sexuality & etheric holy-mother love: right there, in Bluua's features, distorted though they were at this particular moment by a godsized glob o' hot-throbbin' funk from some churnin' damn Apollo o' cump-bustin' humpin'.

I saw this & it made me like to faint.

& Hebs revivied me (read: Hebs forc-ed-me t'wake), & the sight of it, sucked into focus, made me like faint.

& Hebs, a crouching nurse at my side, whiffed me awake, & the ammonia fumes & the sight of my wife made me faint.

& Hebs' salts wiffling under my nose distended like a Dali gnoze wokes me up, & I see this ice-sculpture of my wife giving it up for some one else (& Hebs Hebs whispers in my daliesque ear, "For anyone else chum!), & I faint.

And‑‑so on.

Hebs torturing me awake two hundred times.  Pure torture.  I believe & think & confidently even believe he had orignally intended to ewake me up & watch me faint no less than 333 times, you get the point, but relented after two hundred.  I'm pretty sure of this.

He got bored or else got too excited by The Introduction of the Neb the Photographer to keep up with the faintings.

So he stucks the salts like up my vasty dose, so's to qeep me qonstantly awaqe, & bustled around to help out NEB, who comes in to the director's long-attenuated, almost-froxt in timetime Q.
NEB
or
HEBNEMMEBELLLP

Neb chews gum.  I hate him.  He knows this.  He sneers when he smiles at me, & he hoists out his camera as he looks at me, not looking at the camera, see, but too busily smeerling at me with his lean little head gnarled at an angle.

I have hated Ned since before I met him, hated him since the beginning of time, and, before me or Neb, this not-yet-mine hate for prenascent goddam Neb existed all by itself, a lone axon of raw emotion with no terminals to connect, with no zap for its incirculating pain.

Ned pulls out a camera fit for this frosty room, a camera bigger than Nebimself & bigger than Neb melted in with Hebs‑‑with whom I see Neb melt & I see Hebnemmebelllp & slide next to the camera, just to prove their magnitudes‑‑& bigger than the three of us melt together as we see on the big-melt screem.

Hebs, Neb, & I molt together = one psycotic butterfly with its wings wrimpled in hatred of its own & selfsame colors, a butterfly exploding into light in relief of death where
                        death = light
                        death = light
                        death = light
                        death = light
                        death = light
                        death = light!
                        death = light
                        death = light
                        death = light
                        death = light.  So of course we didn't stay "molted" as I so quaintly in that last sort-of-paragloph put it, as they say.  But I've changed a lot since then.  A lot has happened between that & this here porogroph.  There was a lapse of time full of significant blood & stuff between those perigriffs, & I am not at all the same person (now) as I was (then).  So I regret the hatred & all, not to mention...

OK, to mention the rhetoric that made that hatred seem so terrible.  I would not mind being morphed into a butterfly with Neb & Hebs anymore.  It would not bother be, & there would probably now be no bursting into that awful but admittedly beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful light.

"I'm gonna need this fella's help," says Neb, pointing toward me with his thumb, a dead giveaway to many sordid things which I will not bugger you about nor disease your mind nor slice off your ear with or employ fire to bubble your skin with nor pinch off gobbets of your flesh with these here red plyers.

(How I hated him!  Somewhere during the last few paragraphs‑‑I really can't keep track (it is, you should perceive much more difficult for me, living inside these words, to perceive the typogroptic phase-changes of the text than it is for you, shmoozing so dizzily oertext like a paper plane about to burst into paper flames from the grimp of the redhot plyers here) that primevil hateneb come back, only much worse than ever ever before, aka never-ere.  Ooh!)

"Uph!" grunts Nebs as he tries to pick me up.  For a long time Neb just jeams unhelpfully on one tiny corner of the lower portion of his giganotaur cameaur, chawinis gum, letting Hebs slip all over the ice that has gathered round me (from my hot breaths, I think, hot breaths for my jealous love of Nebs, whom I think may be my wife's bigdipped lover in this very brittle room the size of a worehous, haha, & I want to be taken by him too.  Hatred will do this to you sometimes) just trying to get me up.

Then after a very long while Neb moseys over & starts helping, too, & the three of us have to put all our effort into it.

"Jeez," Neb keeps saying, freshly amazed every second at my impotence.  You should see my sheepish loving eyes play over him!  He's so thin!  Could he be the throbbing geezer up there, splitting my wife?

"Jeez..."

I'm like covered with white powder.  I'm like all bemimegarbo'd.  I'm like this bloodless mess, & it puzzles me that my colleagues here have not percevied that simply getting me to stand‑‑were it like possible‑‑will be insifficuent to get me to move my arms or remian upright or walk or, in short, to do any of the innumerable things that will clearly be required in order to properly set up & orient Mr. Neb's photographic equipment to like snag this porno-billboard of my wife.

& I am eyeing Neb some more.  I am eyeing him a lot.  I am disitnctly suspcious of him.  I am riding high as none say, with the overriding emotions of love & hate & love that come with the unique & remarkably image-rich & image-goddam-rich situation I fail to find myself not in.  So no too spake.

"It's not me, pal," grnts Ned as  he hoists me to my feet at last with my arm over his shoulder.  I am providing no help.

& so like, was he reading my thoughts‑‑or, like you, reading the ascriptions?  Is that possible?  Kirk‑‑are you allowing this?  Kirk?  Kirk?

I want to tell him that I know damn well it was him.  Where was he, after all, at the time in the joint of time when this immense swiving took place?

"I was outa time the whole time, friend," he says‑‑up-close & real friendly like.  Now I like him again.

I guess I am having labile emotions‑‑tremendous problem for a shapechanger.  Such as me.

& turns out Hebs & Neb & damn their names were right‑‑propped up, I'm full of strength & tensile rigor & ruddy vim.  I can sense Neb eyeing my shoulder muscles as I move authoritatively around, enjoying this latest swift personality change‑‑another t.p.f.a.s.s.a.m.  Only not a p., see, 'cause like I just tried to tellya, I'm enjoying this.  to the fullest.

No, really‑‑I am.

So we get the twenty-foot tripod & the 235 pound camera set up, & Nebs‑‑seeming rather hesitant now, as if he'd lost the stuffing, & now sans gum (conceive of it: Neb sans GUM!)‑‑slowly pulls the sun from its nestling little softbox & brandishes it a moment‑‑long enough for me to gasp & realize this really is the sun‑‑our sun...the sun of Dimyira itself, proprotioned to the photographer's mighty hand that's scewing our sun into the silver bonnet of the flash of the bash of the photogash.

Screws it in & POPs actual sunlight on my crosseyed wife wheezing with her knees behind her ears in absolute pink for the moment of the flash

whereupon the sun dies & the colors fail & Neb's erstwhile tripod claps & the voice of an unseen because in the darkest dark Hebs sighs & I slide boneless to the floor again

and the ice just keeps crashing lightless down & down in this pure ebony cube of lifeless night.

You can't imagine what all this did to me.  You can't unless you imagine me worried thin as a snake's discarded hide (the snake snorting & disappeairng round the corner of the orner of the alleyway.  "Mr. Snake!  WAIT!") crumpled in  corner of the great transfixive Brittle Room with the giant of my wife & the brittle memory snagging right between the last two firing neuwands there & basically Neb basically firing up some of his great vats of cheimcals (known throughout the throuts of throughough as his "GVoCs") & processing his photos, greater than large.

"World's gonna pay a pretty penny for a sigt of this guy's wife," Neb says in the callous expostional way (KTtToTah "CEWs").

"Don't be unfeeling," says Hebs, but with the tenderest touch to Neb's arm I am ever sneem.  "Can't you see the little guy is hurt?"

"These photos will fix him up," mutters Neb, his head disappeairng in a great F5 twister of silver oxide he's been stirring up in his sitrrinippin vat.

Hebs croucheth next to me, looks down tenderly.  He suppresseth a burp.

"Aww," he say.  "And I thought this would be so therapeutic."

"He's good for nothin' now," noted Neb, picking me up with his wooden calipers.  "[Mute little chuckle]  He's been overexposed!"

They proceed to laugh their asses off again & again, staggering round, arms groping to one another for support, clapping their asses on, the act itself causing them to LtAO again, again with the staggring round (in a circle perfectly round for some reason might I not add, for as you can see I could see everything) & the inevitable clapping on or Co of the wrong asses or arses or tWA1oA2, & reoduble mirth.

& then the cruelness that comes concomitant with mirth, like two great drunkards they stunmble to the giant Bluu & pull the tarp off.  It snags on her cum-coated tongue, & they have to climb up the tarp to pull the canvas off some of the intricate tridges of the frozen falling cum, all of which further intensifies this truly hazardous mithradares, the sight of her making me die no matter (how much further (I try to (crumple myself (in (to (unconsciousness (in).

"'Lo?)  Jym?)  'Lo?) Come on out), little guy!)" they guffaw.)

"He's broken," they say sadly, walking roun me in unfocused blurd foclust fashiun.  "We'll have to huhuhu pack him back!"

& so they did.  They pumped me up with air, & we got to work & bloodywell got the bloody bluuars cleaned bloody yup & the droop hypercompressed, & they suited me up (prissing & preening me like a bride!) & excitedly shot me‑‑using delicate yet immense & ultra-irresistible machinery in the form of this gigantic bit, this megabit I had to crawl (& creep like some French grub, & they had to oil me up for this with degrading oils from The Seven False Heavens of Degrading Oils (with apologies to the dead imagery of Qert Bottotoci, I mean Bottotic, hero oer heroine of The Seven Heroins, now reduced to the very purest qert oil used by the same gods who did im in in The Seven Oils of of of The Seven Of Of Of (timeloop he*re) The Seven Seven Seven (timeloops here.  There...that's betterno?)‑‑right through the Memory Meniscus back into

my world

...plopped right on my butt into my world, with my lethal memories locked doubdoubly inin, OK?

...But as we've seen, or as we started by seeing without knowing what we were seeing (which, after all, is how I see it, or saw it, I forget, or forgot, wish, or witch or). those cursed Yps pulled a fast one on my world, druping up its memories & covering it with the snow of forgetfulness, Coleridge's Phrase, lost in the opiate of Xanadu, I believe, which was why the first section called itself‑‑rather like playing with itself‑‑THE OPIATE OF XANADU‑‑wherein all names were retorfit into those tiny pieces of paper (you see? torn paper qua snow‑‑again?  again?  this Wakean obsession ne'er going to vrip ipshelf to shveds, aka shvivereends, A)? a)?

So I wandered round the dust with the drupe as we've lamely scene, till that time I got back into the Ing & came round, see.

So the problemo here was to punish n hurt the Ypions whiles preventing them from pulling their loop again...

Not easy.  They in fact pulled that trick again‑‑as with too many, or rather, so many tch-tch-tchasks in this tch-tch tchale, it went round an estimated thousand times.  I mean those bastards pulled the same damned trick (crude but effective, huh?) a thousand times (estimated) ere ther loop wer brok!n (as poor brok'n doped out consternate dedColeredge war h'ard to sayd, his h'ad clanked against the buttress of the john, all poppied into frags & like going down, poor bloke, like me, just going down...
QUESTIONABLE CRANES

...into time‑‑just like that.  You should have seen the Ypions, decked out in their best Peter-Max yellow suits & Beatles bellbottoms, faces washed with some sort of special soap so clear you could only feel it, slipping around, sudsing you, bamboozling you, slipping up your ass again & again with the long & languid eagerness of that special cock your ass's always been waiting for‑‑a soap, sold in the brittle zomes as Ream-o-wray©, in any event, that made their faces shine (temporarily) like temprary joyboys consumed by their glatitude, waving me goodbye.

They'd fitted up the Ing again, because they knew I had this psychological need to go back in the Ing, though Hebs claimed rather repetitively (especially when I was falling asleep, me always falling alseep to the cooing sounds of Heb's long blue lips stuck cold in my ear, telling me things like repetitively‑‑foolish Hebs!) that I needed no ship, I needed no ship, that the interval plane© cracking me through to time was just as readily transgressable by the mere repeated (Hebs!) intrinsic pattern of one's sundry feet, decked out in their own intrinsic pierre-machsisch yellow heels as high as the platforms hefting the mystic night (these are not real platforms, you understand‑‑just mythic platforms erected to keep our spirits up to mystic heights, dangerous rainwashed & weather-eaten platforms, warped, loose-boarded platformms creaking endlessly at the end of irresolute cables hung from gigantic, questionable cranes which are ever-so-clearly not sure of themselves, not at all certain nor comfortable in their idenity as questionable cranes upholding these trap-strewn platforms waving like foolish ships in the wind, movio platforms, actually, actors acting the lost Shakespahearian roles of crane-dandled platforms barely existent outside their own "quotation marks"‑‑a stupid play, but with some mighty poetry stuffed like cracks in its internex of ore), the heels clicking together in a complex & manic rhythm worthy of the worthless K.H. Bach the Lesser, the sounds, so Heb's long blue lips proclaimed, i.e. proclangd, of these many heels clickering like crickets in the wind & cracking the interval plane© just like that©.

But I needed the Ing, & the Ing they gave unto me‑‑nicely polished, to be sure, & with a lot more big bubular shapes blooping out its side, but a lesser Ing, an Ing without that bite, a rather wimpy little Ing this time, this-time-Ing, looking like a bumper-car because they'd shrunk it down, so I sat huge in the cockpit, with half or or of me gams dangling out & most of my right butt oozing over the lip of the kiddiecock pit, turning my whole spine to wave goodbye over my shoulder, which was also waving goodbye to the friends (and, apparently, many diseas-ed lovers) it had made during my timeless stay.

They cheered when I smacked through the glass.

Though it felt (subjectively, you understand‑‑sub jec tive ly, so it doesn't count) like I smack!d r!ght !nto the glass & splattered like yer loose wet flakes of grape, yer loose wet flakes of grape, your loosewetflakes of grape, yerloosweatflapesograte©.

But I was home, back in time, just like that, & everything was quite all right.  Quite all right.  I might even add...

Yes, I will add that I even felt better than normal.  I felt loose, free, swingy, aggressive, masculine, young, bouncy, rather light, somewhat limber, not disinclined, very sleepless, rampantly manic, spurred by psychic imagery, foolish, jokey, funny, amused, silent, secretive, nocturnal, sweaty, sexy, bigdicked, humpbacked, authorial, self-referential, futuristic, coxcombish, fully & adequately prepared, nice, rotten, sadistic, cold, vicious, rhythmical, talented, inchoate, impossible, alone, dippy, rhythmical again, sweaty again, dead again, aliove again, rebron to no good effect (again), parenthetical (again), again again, & home.  Again.

& I was ready for some ugly fights‑‑for a lot of really tough & no-holds-bar-ed ask-no-quarter-given tough-and-timble hyper-hyphenated god-damn ugly fights, which I will now explain.
UGLY FIGHTS EXPLAINED
or
APPARENT 0
or
YOU-KNOW-WHAT IV

We were Dimnentians.  We could change shape.  Better, we could shift rhythmically‑‑those of us that had a sense of rhythm, that is‑‑& this swift-spifting capability marked us as ShapeShiftShapeClass Shapes-AA (shape) #117 in the Supragalactic Book of Special Classifications, Version IV (known as SBSC IV to workers in the field & to the vowel-deficient (or more properly, supravowelic) workers in the darkblue (almost black) fields of Gatigaigarian, a race of deepblue worms, rather cute little vermin, too, who had no use for vowells & who shipped their extra vowesl out‑‑just shipped them out!‑‑to the other races who were starved for vowels, asking apparently nothing in return (& it was sent to them!  Crate after crate chuted down, & marked APPARENT 0, landing like the great slow weight of some depsairing revelation on their backs as they bored the ragged soils of their world, Gatigaigaria, like I said upbove, which was believed‑‑& certainly bleved by me‑‑to be some sort of colect of gobbets, yes a collect of gobbets of the guts of exploded other worlds, just a theory, classified as MythTheory 721aa in SBSC IV, which calshifuiles practically everything (it classifies me...it classifies you...why, I bet it even classifies your cock, or whatever it is you got there hanging there or whatever wet tunnel you have tunling into you there); small wonder, then, tha this was wolrd colonized by worms, & a world classed as fit fore vorms by the you-know-what IV.

Where was I? Oh, & we ourselves viewed this polyphantasmorphic faculty in one of two mutually conflictive rays, known as Way 1 & Way 2 (none of this to be found anywhere in SBSC IV).  Sometimes inapropriately known as Love 1 & Hate 2, these were feelings that came over us, that guided our mood & our movements & just howlong it would be ere we thrung oursolves right thoruh the whitewall of toruosity, aka death.

& it controlled the ugly fights, which I really am getting to.  I can feel myself getting to them.  The ugly fights, I mean.
OK, sometimes we felt too amazed by our nature to take a shape, much less change one, & this is the way 99.99% of us felt 99.999% of 95% of the time, where time is figured as .0001% of the numerator of timespace, where timespace be figured as an imeasurably small fraction of the distance between our world & any world where they think we are insane, where they know we are fucking insane, where they lean on bars or whatver the hell they have & expound on how craxy we are, how they laugh, albeit bitterly, at etc. insane.  Way 1, then, is the usual way, & this keeps us in the hot pressure zones of the Zome, nice n' shapelessly safe, where the exoskeleton of the thick hyperpolymeric oil that we oil that we use as atmospheres holds us together like a syrupy goddam exoskelelton, & this we generally‑‑in the way of Way 1‑‑like,

Then there is the rare & delicious Way 2, the fatalistically disastroid Way 2, the catastrophic troublemaking recidivisticly aggressive Way 2, best described as "jittery joy" or jitterjoy, in which one (usually standing at one of our own bars, which take the form of plumply shining horizontal columns known as lustrovorz we can plaster ourselves against & just sort of hold onto, like a toddler to her mother's thumb) become tartly prideful of the polyfluid flesh of one's endlessly repressed protophilia, just gets hooked up on the hankerin' need to do some badassed shapeshiftin', just comes round to this intransigent voluptuousness of multimorphology, just sorta eases in to this unbearable compulsion to start showing absolutely everybody within the teeming ranges of this pansy planet's puffing surfasces a tight-tempoed polyrhythmic display of nmble molecular infrastruxic virtuosity.

More, one wishes to complete with someone else.  It's like one of those guy things of earth‑‑creatures we have heard about, the dreaded guythangs‑‑but it hits us no matter what gender we happen to be appen o e in.

One picks a fight.  & one can, on some occasions, pique another Dimnentian into a similar 2-state, & they step outside the city, where the shapes can xift xo free, & they have an ugly fight, which I will now explain.
UGLY FIGHTS DECLAIMED
or
RIPPED LIPS

I lit into this big blond guy.  He had big muscles & a moustache.  I thought of him as a pretty boy, & I told him as much, & he rejoindered in terms so obswene I am not allowed to access them.  They're in the Dirty Room of the Joke Room of the Coat Closet of the Back Wrack of the Under Akashic Records.  Plenty dirty stuff in there!  People go in there & they see some stuff & they come back different, if it's really they or them that come back.

& they can shape shift then, no matter what species, no matter when.   & like us, they just cant hold a shape without clothes anyomore.

& me & this hulky hunk of a blondish guy got out on the marshes where the mist from the water had this smell that got you itchy to shift, just jittery to jiggle, just hot to trot, until every thought you think becomes your shape, with intriguing morphshapes in the shapes between the shapes, which is where I live, as you live between breaths, between thoughts, between loss...

& he like slips into this GIGANTIC CRAB.  "Pretty good, prettyboy," I say, my vowels distorting as I turn into the GREAT WHITE WORM, & this guy‑‑not very voluble‑‑says nothing but repsponds by shifting into THE WHITE NETS OF A GIANT SPIDER, which, hell, I like so much I'd applaud, except I'm a worm you'll recall I'm a worm.

Except for course now I'm not, & I respond to his (ha!) web by ripping it in the form of THIS RABID RED MOLE, with whiskers all around his lips & dozens of little red eyes even redder than the rest of him (of me), the manic eyes of the rats of Frankenstein, & that scares him pretty good, pretty good (He even distorts him up from the ground he has like a sticky sail furled unto into these murky, ripped lips, ripped lips, artistically rendered enlargerments of his own, complete with torn moustache nd an echo of a torn moutache out on the space-plains of your Dali-planes of your melted-moustache torsoes molten in the sunless blinding bright of your daymare pains, & mutters like, "Pretty good").
Guy just washes around for a bit.  He's gotten in over "whatever he happens to have for a head," to misquote an old Dimnential slaying, not expecting, then methought & methinks still, I would get quite so psychotic quite so soon.

I mean, it's just a bar broil, right?

I don't wait for his response, as I can see he's ganging back in the form of a megamash of vitreous humor, in effect a shapeless big eye cowering across the lilyplush surfasce of the swamp, shaped by the jutting bones of the deadthrongs of aliens sizzling into moles in the lyelie liquids who lie so loquaciously there there there, so he's helplessly watching me.

This is what separates the true fighters (of which not one of one am I) from the psychotic sadistic swine (of which I), as I blorped with an instantaneity that beggars description & descry into this GREAT SADISTIC SWIN, with eyeteeth & lungtongue of crushed diamonddust & well-honed to gobble up his guts.

He breaks in two!  This is beyond what any "normal" uglifiers do!

I get overexcited, which as you've guessed by now is pretty much my Mashed Muddle Gnome (last names dissolved), & form a geometric pattern expressing the subsconceush conshlupt of supreme & deathdealing ugliness.

& the two halves of the guy shap speparately into mirroid smithereens!

He steams into pieces in the oily lumprids of the swamp, which begins abosrbing him into the mini, doughnulike toroids he resolvesinto, as we always resolve into toroids, which is just somehting thast we gotta do, & the bloody swamp makes a burping sound.

& I decide I like this, & I head right back down the pressurechute© to the center of town, & into the nearest bar.  I have enough ugliness in me to kill everyone in my world.  I'm happy & pleased to be back here in Dim, & in the monotome of times, perfectly normal & healed by my good friends the [What's their names?  Amnesia...timeplane amnesia...amnesia...], & serially killing, now, Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim 1after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim after Dim.
AFTER Dim
or
SLIPASLEEP
or
THE FUNERALS OF Dimnentia‑‑YEA!

I lay brightly awake that night.  My wife was nowhere to be found, not that I looked, not that I looked her er‑‑either lost in another existence or cracked across the timeplane nakedly looking for me (which I find out later this is true), or in such a deep sleep I couldn't see her (this is true; this can happen; I myself have sunk so bluely into "Stage 1000 Sleep," as it is gnome, collialocally...I have been as they would say "so dreeply empurpl'd" in my "hairy cocoon" or my "viscous cocoon" or my "polymeric, adjectival indigo cocwomb" of stage 1000+ dreep, in have become a matter of complete indifferecne to the quanta of the lightbeams, such as they are on my world with its hundredfold layers of fogs, of matched & blended as well as smoothrunning, unmixed "parallel 'quotational' fogs within fogs," of fogs upon fogs in striations & archeologic layers, with each fog below the one above so much denser than the paltry, ptiful, & one might even say sad ones above that the inexpliquibbly endless numbers of gawky alien folk (GAFs) who put down inixquipiddly on our world (perhopes some sorda accident some sordi spacewrap wraping them warm as the very cocoons of that multiple-delightful faery cocoon medapoor above see cocoon metaphor above cocoon methaphor till you get to the utmost outer mos' rraefified cocoon metaphor really more a silent & purely empty quintessential metaphor of himself, sleeping empurpled in the swoom of the woon off him un xelf xelf...xelf) are wrinkly & hilariously cwushed! by the time they stagger on to our wet, resilient trampoline "lands," there to beinstaly slaughter, as see cf. above,

those lightbeams I believe I was speaking of, wearing scientific nerdish megaglasses, or rather, metallic-rimmed complexes of interactive lense(s) piled upon one another in a metallic cylindar with precision-freak markings marked down with the use of electron-microcilloscopes glowing in the Perfectly Measured Night of the onemillion precision freaks who calibrate & rule the metrics of our world (& not very well, if I can slip this comment in without y'know being zapURGHK!).
Und so...in this complicated setting like that fever floating just above your forehead waiting to drop its teemy nightmares on your face as soon as you let down your guard, by which I mean slipasleep, I lay brightly awake, because I had seemingly killed a fellow Dim, if that guy was really a certified© Dim© (& I think he does, I mean was).

No one had ever done that, we didna think.  O‑‑we'd wanted (& I mean WANTED) to kill each other, more than anything.  Rather like the human race in this conceptual space, O O, the human race in this conceptual space, Oooo, yer HU mon RAVE in DIS con ZEPP shoowuhl THPACE, Oooooyah da HOO mung WRAIFEZ in DISQUE gawn XEPH chyoo-yall-ique XAXE, ohyeah (hic!) ya! (k!) ouia [END OF SONG] meaning END OF SONG meaning END OF SONG-MEANING SONG meaning END OF MEANING XONG meaning MEANING meaning XONE gone & GONG.

Okay?  But we'd never managed it.  So you can well see the joy that spruces up our "funerals," turning them into the wellnigh legendary phantasmagoric events, with exotic, ultrapotent, & the latest trademocked drugs from the truly doped-out  droped-out doked-oup xope-tout ectors of the universe (the so-culled & soi-disantish OpioZongs©) wherein countless bodies of every variegated hue writhe loosely oer one another in an incoiling inspiraled visionquest of visions of "impaired" which is not to say impaled nothingness, which is the term given my the tyightlipped disapproving ones always murked like shadows at the verge of our solar system, frowning alla time!, meaning visions (impaired visions, grnated, Imgrantit, I grant to ya!) of the infinite, impaiured visions of the infinite beingn what earmarks, leaving this tiny tiny marque tattoo on your ear (for all the races have ears, O yea, yea‑‑all the racews have EATS, un-huh!).

Or as the kids today say the kids today, "The funerals of Dimnentia‑‑yea!"

But methinks no one could possibly imagine the excitement, the murderous joy, of suddenly, albeit mysteriouly, & as I saw it or more precisely felt it mysteriously having the capability of killing another Dim.  Not those fucking miserable alien pile-zoshit, no NO‑‑but a "real" & "'actual'" fellow Dim, you get the spimpure, enh enh enh?
& in an ugly fight, yet!

Man!  I mean dim!  Man!  (Dim!)

Man-o-dim!  There's gonna be some funerals (know what I mean?)‑‑YEA!
FUNERALS‑‑YEA!
or else
DRACULAR ROBES

Murder of our own being moste unknowne, I achieved a following.  This was at first, when I was killing only other dims.  "The young love death"--on ours as well as any world, so it came to pass that the young started following me around in a flow, like tracers off the tail of a comet, with me in the lead in my ceaseless, eddying Dracular robes & sunglasses to cover my great spheric featurelessly-cool sun-face (which my fans would fiercely emulate, so I evolved from comet to virtuoso veritably-virtual galaxy, a sunwhorl trailed by his lesser tracery of suns, with their own emulative suns within suns, so we performed quite a galaxy there, round the lesser-pressure zones of Zome, where our corproate coolness could, you know, flow into its full fool selves), hiding my newfound self-respect & unseemly self-love, & my new power.

& we bacme all the rage for a while‑‑this on a world long without rage, a world so sadly spinning blue through its furyless ages‑‑& pretty much all the citizens of Zome would gather along our route (we very quickly got A Route, known as The Route) & cheer & wave little flags with my likeness on it & balloons blwing up etc.

& as I said (quoting Vreg), The young love death, so they were always shyly coming up to me & asking me to kill them‑‑irresistible little blond daisy-faces digging their toes in the soft & artful skin of the billowy roads, shyly hiding their faces & saying "you know" & "kinda" a lot, & clearing ther sweet empty throats, & basically afraid to ask for it (death), & too bashful even to say "it."

& at first I said, "No, I only kill strangers in bars."  But they became sad & bitter, and‑‑much more importantly‑‑they had a tendency to fall away taking boyfriends & friendsalong so my following withered, & the galactic lights grew lezzer, & this indescribably smell of their going away...

& I couldn't have that.

So I started granting their requests.  In fact I jumped in with all four hundred feet & started to kill my young fans, who were requesting it.  Soon I was all over those little girls.

I started killing the young of 'Lyria.

Which was even more powerfully popular at first.  There was absolutely nothing precedent in this‑‑this massive sun with his absurdly high collar & his hair oiled into the shape of some vast drug-mountain & his larger & larger shades & his cosmic goddma glitter, every now & then turning transcendantly ugly in the face of a screaming kid & turning her fresh young flesh into a stinking, warped toroid right there, in the street, in from of her parents & everything.  Then taking a bow.  Me taking a bow, with wild screams from my entourage & gentle flickers of love from the crowd.  & then moved on.

& you'll notice‑‑which none of us did‑‑that I was killing off my fans.

So you had your slow deliquescence, with suns blinking out like the glow of old scabs & the cheers dimming down like autumn croaks & the light demming dawn like the very last dusk, & the crowd itself adurkening like the dimbulb thought-hah-ballwhooms they was & was along the gravely sides of the Route...till one had but me, Butt-Me walkin' roun' The Route, my erstwhile coruscating glow now cooled with smutch to the sort of dull, cracked mosaic of crenulations you see through the filters of a blind & dyeing sun, my collar now looking awkwardly & unfashionably high, its tattered edges whistling stupid pop tunes in the wind, dust dismalations everywhere (& noted in the news by number news, viz. Here1 & Here2 & Here3 & Here4...on unendingly past Here110110101 & Here110110110 & Here11011100 in virtually incalculable humiliations, here & here & here & here, with never an et cetera to save my ass), & my ass, come to think of it, the thought of my ass just bubbling up like a fat oil bubble in the pressuruzed oil-sops they grow the high-pressure image of yerass in‑‑for uses in the really stinking tabloids‑‑the Dimnentian Sung, the Zome Prush, the Excaliblur, the Liaraire, the Zum Todo, the Never Et Cetera, the A.S.S., & me & that ass looking both of us very fat, like the fat thighs of a proto-Venus, the one that rises cackling from the sea with her slick paws all over you, & my glittery old suit with its belt as wide as an icecap with its very glitters dripping like some sort of dry & airless rain, all of this making the sound of my lone waddling round "the route" (fallen from its capitals!) a rather swishy sort of empty crushy sound, witnessed now by only the ever-so-slowly blinking lizard-eyes of the rare ZCE (Zome Concern Edcitizenry) who even other to wash, I mean wartch, the rest of them beneath some giant candle somewhere, to the loud & molten loud & molten dripplings of the wrox, woxxing woath as they quill various etchy-old letters to the editors of the angry letters editors of the Sung, the Prash, the Caliburr, the Lye...

So I to-wasn't two-much to-to-see, & as I see, with just this puzzled, silent, silpuzzlimentio (& sullen!‑‑with none o' the "fun" of the once-plaizerisch, once-zooft, now spiff & spinking & de(!)ad fl?sh of their d!ughters cr*shed to cr(-)stals at my hond, or boond to rubboms by my pand, oror zommd too gribboa' mifanned, ororor chromed two-xiggins par moi mand‑‑none o that, I say!) "None o that" (who said that?) crowd of bereaved parental Dims watching me (& thinking None of that to me).

& another thing, rather important to me: None Of These Good Folk Wanted to Die!  None of them wrangled their way in front of me as I shuffled like a plucked dodo round, with any of the leftover golden glow of their little girlies offering themselves up to me, & saying, in purely symbolid, crystalline terms of course & terms of coarse, "Ugly me, Daddy-O!," which had become the Cool Term to Use.  But none of them moved.

Inasmuch as we can hypothesize "a form of fungoid thought-consanguinity in 'dat fat-infexted rancididity of a soi-deviant "brain"'" (your A.S.S) I hauls roun' like thiS Sisyphean megaboulder roun' da "dimndomn 'Track o' Hell,'" (Anonymous Hell) I dimply uh mean dimly ah figured a-a-nother ugly fight might do the trick.  Hell, I still had a lot of uglies left in me‑‑so-so I dimfat "thought."  But skulking back to the bars was out of the question with my fame & my hyper-Vegas get-up not to mention...

To mention, then, the indelible pleasure of killing the young which it looked like I'd never get again.  There was this bitter sadness inside the spoiled & rotten cocoon of my show-biz personum.  & the people of Zome could smell it...
So it looked like I'd have to start killing them, huh?  & me so famous now, & with fame there are no disguises‑‑I was the First Famous Dimage of Dim, & we learned this disguise bit from me. I was their first star andtheir first mass killer, & I like couldn't stop‑‑& that's like probably like whenlike I finally got into trouble, as they say.
WHY OUR ANCESTORS ARE SO WINDY & HOLEY

Q:    By the way, what happens to you guys when you goes to town?

[Spitoons!]    Depends on how far in you go.

Q:    Beg aprdume?

[Spoom!]    ...how far in, how far down, ow far down the phosphorescent silver=green (some say [spoot!] "silly green") chute, known as the phosgrechut down you go you down you o, see [spop!].

Q: How far down you go...

That wasn't really a question now, was it, son?

Q: Yes, & that was "sir"‑‑am I right?  AM I RIGHT?

[Soundless soulless speum.] Yup.  I mean nope.

Q: OK.  Now we're getting somewhere.  You go into cities down a chute.

Into the city.  There's only one city in Dimyr.

Q: You mean only one city on Dimyr?  They're all joined toherther?

[SPOOT!]    I said there is only one city, "son."  I didn't say, say, "noly ecity" or "lony ticey" or "olny itey" nor goddam "oliney ity," now did I, hum?  & as I was a-tryin' ta say [ta-spim!], you go into it by means of this magic chute.  Not magic really, but manic...and manic you'll notice manic you'll notice manic you'll notice is is is pretty darn near closenear to magic, huh?

Q: You're losing me.

You're loding ye.  Heh-heh-heh.  Yea, you jus' slide down this virescent chute-unit entrance unit-way

to which there is if I may very well say a helluva long line in waiting, with folks physically fresh from the protean county atryin' ta yaknow slip their icons in, just kinda scatter themselves on in without no one seeinem, just sort of quietly disperse their ways into the entry to the chute, down which only one soul, however fluid, may go may go may go at once.

Y'see.

But they always get caught.  Unless they never get caught & we don't know that, of course.  There's Dimyrious flexxiff goddam loggic for you, nn?

& anyway, Mr. Q, the choice you have as you start down the chute is this:

How big to let the city get.

'Cause it (Q: The city?) don' tincrease in size physically‑‑O there's still the billion interlattices infinisteimally eely-resseelated exhilerated megahypernexes of tubules & compression-dode-matrices, still the structure equivalent, you will have noticed to that of a minibubule micronannooquip

but see (Q: or rather feel) the density of the goddam city just keeps agrowin nexpotentially grong‑‑andso the "aura" of your molecules (that whish gibs ush our polyfluoriphuormisisch "shapes" Q: of the shapeless shapes) yesson, got like compressed (!) inward (ng!), till the poor, central-city molecules (or ICONS or INOS as we clal edthem) carried their own auras around notheir backs.  In some neightboroods, they carried their auras as black scarves around their necks.

& you can bet your shapes went awya‑‑all lodged firmly in that little pack.  This was if you went all the dwo nthe chute,which you always did.

Because the chutes‑‑& as you're no doubt beginning to see,travel in general‑‑held a pure fascination for us, & we simply couldn't help ourselves.

Speaking as a [renegade, illegal] Dimnentian physiciatrist *, locked in the silver brackets of [ILLEGALITY] as I am & am therefore a great deal sillier, I mean freer, to threak & spink, my theori (THEORI THRII) tiis as fillews:
 
TABLE HERE    

We were fascinated with anything that would force us to retain our shape.
Hence the pressure chutes, the power chutes, the silver-silly chutes, the menscus-shewts, the hootskuss-shootz, the "Oo'-scheyutes, the U-fiioughtss, the phosgrechuts, which shunted us down to alevel of molecular-iconoggic implexability the country versions of our folk‑‑you know, our families, our still-living, always-living ancestors padding about...they who had retained as we always in the county retianed the ability to disperse, raggrandiyize, rephrape, solephrape, & disinnisid but who refused to change shape, as if they were "happy" (ha!  "'happy'") with their shapes! ("ha?") "'shape(s),'" which of course the flattened-out, tarry, smeggy things could not possibly be‑‑would have envied had they not forcibly & with masochistic near-suicidality burned out the markings & the spottled spotlings of envy all all OUIT of themselves.

A: Which is why our ancestors are so windy & holey.

& YES: that is the answer to this section * here.

Did you give the correct answer?  If so...good.

If you dint have time enough to time to ascertain to correct to answer to this * section here, wait [HERE] [Q"  questionless] till the section come around again.

& Q: This time be readier.
URPH-CRAP
or
UNWISE PRACTICE!

We are are known for our walk, which is a stylish stumble. It goes into vogue on your more susceptible planets & stellar-spheres, ribbonworlds, & tanglelit labyrinth-convolves.  There the natives wear diaphanous wilty Greekoid glow-pink robes which swing teasily over their crotch, & they assay the "dim-walk," with its halting arhythms & polyhalts, its half-twists & sashays, its galumphin hand waves & arm-flinging swaybacks.

Some of them have tiny little sound recordings of us, sliced whole from the thick, audiosorptive gasses forming scumrings round our fondest swomps, & these they stick right in their ears (unwise practice!) so's they can venture the dim-cry which goes with the dim-walk (or so they're told), which goes something like, "Uhhhhhhhh!  Whoaaauuooaauuoo! Yeeaaaaeeeeyaghooooaaa!"

The surface of Dim's lipdeep your stuff.  It is covered & littered with stolen urph-crap.  We're sorry we take all your stuff, but it's a compulsion, which we're paying for with our walk, "Uhhhhhhhh!  Whoaaauuooaauuoo! Yeeaaaaeeeeyaghooooaaa!"
LESSON TWO

No one's more hotrod-crazy than us.  We live to make seeped-op jupes, rot-hods, silvery noisemaking machinery of everyu variety.  We specially like being flattened or, better yet (best of all!) spun by force fields into toruses.

Ah, toruses!  It is not a shape we can manage.  It is not one of our shapes, yet it is out favorite shape.

The only time we shapes into toruses (except for a couple of high-tistility shopemorph freaks) is when we die.  You must come across a room of us dead sometimes.  It happens often, for reasons I am too ashamed & amnesiac to say, that entire roomsful of us die, just like that.
Just like..........*!*...........THAT!

& if you break the oval seal which releases the murky bluegrey gasses of the gashes of the room in which we have for personal & yet racial reasons died you see

this dim room of vapors (of vapors leaving, of vapors picking up their hats, their vapory long trenchvaporoushcoats, & poltely, sadly, a bit embarrassedly, leaving) round which in an apoximate circle, or may an oval, ormaybe lie an O that has been sketched, you know, & not yet quit yet close...d

lie these dimly glowing skeletons

if you can call them skeltons

(& that's what most people, which is not to say moist people, do: they break the ovoid with its thick & brittly crystalline seal & they scoop grimacing the fume zout & they stick one long white muscled leg in & they see the glowing toruses which are the skeletons of their friends, & they think I guess they died some time ago, & then they look, or sort of obliquely almost glance, at one another & they say (un inusim):

"Them skeletons!"

& they feel relieved, so much so that they often they yes often yes they lie down & you know join the circle & attempt to die.

But this secondary attempt to die never works.

Lession Two: Noan snecondary tempt to die non't never nurk.  This has been proven physically, I mean physicsly or physicsally or physics-a-ly or whatever the hell adverb we can agree on for physics, as in by means of OK OK.

That's generally how friends are made, though.  They become friends from breaking into the rooms, about which I refuse to speak, & finding the softly glowing corpses‑‑more like collocations of turquoise-gleaming seashwells poured lovingly into perfect, perfectly fragile toruses that shiver & scintillate & iceslide to the floor when touched or even spoken loudly at or even even gibtein direaty look at at at.  Some skeletons.

& that's what they say, later on, though not in the absiolut unison with which they just said "Them skeletons" back there in that silver rot-hod of a paragraph tacin' it up upbove upthere.   They say it to one another as a means of sealing the sealiant bod of their newfound friendships, even as they busily seal up the speechless room, the shameroom, if you musat know the shame, I mean name, in inaccurate inmemory inof what they'd said in unified consternations above, e.g., "Them skeletons!," only now they say, like a drunken chorus with the voicewaves lapping all around, they say,

"Some skeletons!"

Even though they know they're about to become such perfect, if frangible, torus-shaped glowforms when they die together in that room in just a minute, now...

...The huge faces of our leaders form in a sadly soft & pink, albeit monumentally huge, image in the interstices of the pressure-centers of our pressure-towns (& when I say towns I of course mean town, there being only one; you thought that I'd forgot that didn't you?; didn't you?).

Sad because the faces immediately be to degenerate deform deconspuck pock up meldown age & sadd in the manner of a leader shamed slandered defiled & sudslung through the very marrows of his own inner swamps of inner hell, sad because none of this has to do with their actions or their qualities as leaders or their true shapes or even of what will happen during their time.  It just comes about as a soret of natural process designed one sees, to deny our race from ever having leaders or coherence.  We are polyform & pliable in our socal spheres‑‑even here at the pressure center of pressure town. Even here.
LE MANIAC OF DOTS
or
COILED TORUSES
or
IS IT SNOW?
or
COILED TORUSES, OR IS IT SNOW?

I was walking through the turquoise seas of fish.  The seas‑‑& for that matter, most of the fish‑‑are in turquoise pixels, with sometimes little br!ght *range p!x*ls mixing through.  I guess they're not "seas' in your sense.  I mean ,they're vast, & they have this flotational atmosphere, & something resembling currents (but these are only afterthoughts; they are the afterthoughts of currents, thus) but with none of your seas' powers to pound your mind to a pool of bruised pieces of a seawharspt mind miming itself in the dreamsweeps of diseased & unremembered seas, if you know what I mean what I'm thinking I mean that you know what if.

We walk in these seas.  We float-walk, & we see things, & we weep.  I don't mean to portray us as unhappy or weepy or seepy or as we once said urwhiipeye (but the word died the word died died the word died died dead the word died died dead the dead word died died dead the) no comment on that parenthesis (not even here, in these parentheses) but on that last parenthesis, this:

We figured, we reckoned, we calculayted, we agreed, we intuited, we allowed for the possibility that most fish were simply incvisible, existing as they figure-rek-calc-greedin-tuit-edallow ed in the form of pixels as esastically as the seas suprarurouning gem, their essence interflowing with the seas‑‑for that's what we loved about the seas, & we all loved loving the seas, & there were many a sea to love & many lovers in the seas in love by the lovers of the seas, if you tuitwhat I meem.

So we walked, we figured, amongst incalculable oddities of loose, invisble, pixelated fish, with whom, along with the seas they were in, we walked in love's dance of pixels possible title here & imagined the invisible fishes.
...and also saw, however, some lovely big bruites, nothing invisible there, of fishes, too.  I mean, there wer these fishies you could see, blinded with love's pixels thought you be.  True, gold pixels flew in your eyes like golden bees, but they just pollianated as it were your eyeses so they the beyes became parenthetimetaphorical which is lovely, & you truly saw great fishes.

O, you truly saw great fishes as you walked floot-futed in the seas!

Through sea after sea like bubbles, or have I said?

So I was waking & seeing in my goldbee euphorias many Great & Solid Fish, meaning solid-seeming fish, not-meaning soldi-meaning fish.

For fish mean nothing, solid though they seem to meam.

So I was some lovely lugs, breaking down into subhysteric cascades only as they drew near, great lusty, loving pointillist fish, owing the measure of their scales to the interuniversal ghost of one Seurat, le maniac of dots

whose leftover dots, his thought-dots, as it or they were or are or weren't, or subjunctive of to be came forth to our soft realm o to create

these fish I have been going on about, amongst whm I walked.

& verily did I walk, as I walked where lovers walk, where lovers lose their integrity & tangle in the pixillated murk, where lovers try to make lovers, trying to figure out to put it bluntly just how you vuck when your vucking body's in a flux OK.

I may have stepped on remians of many lovers, for they looked like shells, lying dead & sealed there, & they looked like corals, & they looked like nothing so much as

coiled toruses, or is it snow?

coiled toruses, or is it snow?
coiled toruses, or is it snow?

coiled toruses, or is it snow?

coiled toruses, or is it snow? or?

So I walked sad & lonely in the sea with the great, more or less visible fishes shooming by me frighteninly, till they dissolved around me making me gig hysterically I say gig hys ter ical ly I say gig I say gig! I say ! ys ter ick! ly!

Gig!

Great orange fishes, the major subject of our art, by the way.  Our artists like (meaning seem to be hung up) on the obsessive-compulsitority of large massy orange fishes, fishes whic hthey try tomake seem solid, fishes which they paint & sculp & render odd infantidum, fishes which they like I walk sadly among, fishes which, I rather suspect, are haha fishily unvolved in the deaths of the double toruses my "feet" crush incrementally like a mem or y.

It mades our art not to mention our artists terrifically puerile & dull, doesn't it?

No it doesn't (or as we were wont to say before the thoughts behind the words killed the words & the words went, "Uhnk!" & died with an etch of blood dribbling down their suddenly sullenly lippenly coroner off dare moufs, do it noesn't).  It would mean that were our artists not to terrifically good.

& they are good, let me tell you that.  They may be or are the best in all the alternates.  May be.  Hard to tell.  Too bad about that limitation in subject matter, huh?

But they make us love the fish & the seas of tangles toruses‑‑I'll tell you that, quod erat demonstratum, end of argument, close parentheses at that.

& that's my glosh on that particular plockoff parentheses.
ILL-FITTING WHITE JUMPSUITS

Everyone wanders round the cities in these ill-fitting white jumpsuits, some with cryptic symbols on the chests & backs, on the side for ventral-oreinted ones, & the opulent shops, a few evidently so bright beneath their dust they must be of an obscene, unthinkable opulence.

& nobody understands where all this guilt came from.  But the sane amongst us (!) know it was for a damn good areason, a damn dagood dareason indeed.

& we each think, This can't go on.  This absurd emotionless premise can NOT GO ON, because we after all have to eat (& we can't eat dust now can we?  can we?) & this dry thought is the thought that serves for language is the language that serves for hope is the hope that serves for life is the life that serves for death is the death that serves for dream is the dream that serves for memory is the memory serves for light the light the light that serves for God God God serves us memories of God serving us as memories to these incredible Beings of Light living outside of time & worshipping our memories eating our memories in the forms of unripe fruit, i.e., fat memories in the forms of fruit, specifically, godlike goddelicious drupes© forming memories on the great gold bowl being plattered forth, if I may plattered plattered second plattered third & plattered fourth to the god's with their mouths as sumptuous as my wife's in one of those platted memories I am reaching for by trying to reach into the dream through the skin of its meniscus fruit if you will fruit if you will for which of course to goddam god wither my hands & eat the fruit of my wife's mouth whispering something I cannot hear (or I hear "Perhaps SHOUTING something you CANNOT hear?  Hm?  HMM?" but I do choose not to hear) & I have the dry & withered (sad...awww...) thought..that...this...dream...can...naught...go...on

which naturally enough becomes the language of the second dream which is a poor pale second to the language of the primal, I mean primary dream (dream: what do I mean?  what do I MEAN?) hempsfroth to be known as the dream of fear or the platter dream or the dream of platters, the second dream being nothing but a dry compendium of the goddam names of the first dream, which, to recap‑‑shall we? not‑‑serves as our memories, just this collocation of dry & indecipheruhubble (how I blush to say these words in this encrypted, indecipherahibble Language II) names (& when we says names what do we mean?  Do we not mean dry leaves?  Do not names mean dry leaves in the secondary language of the withered soul? yes?  no?) yes serve or no serve as our memories.

For "'We have no memories' (which of course we technically can not say)," & when we as we just said say "We have no memories" (which of course we technically can not say) we mean (in Linguo Too) we rant we we rant "We have these memories of dust, memories of dust."

& with that last thought last we end this section wish you have chosen not-to-here.  Go on to the next section hear.
SHRUGS

I used to fly the big art freighter, on the Negative Art Run from Urph to Dim.  I'd park over your world, & we'd hist up every bit of art you had.  We've got most of the art you ever had, & you'd never catch on, because we did things do you which by their very nature (& by uncertain uncarefully unstipulated noncontractual derepressions that I cannot reveal nor never nunderstand) you can never understand.  Mostly because you can't remember them.

You always saw us, & we always hurt your brains when you did.  Those of you who saw us the most, who fought the most, have the utmost damaged brains in your whole world.

You want the truth, urphlings?  Seek out your most damaged brains.  Go ahead.  Good luck.

The ship I rammed into your space filled half your sky, a yellow behemoth called Shrukthaang casting nothing but dumb dun shadows in your faces, clouding your eyes.

You always shielded your eyes, as if our coming were light & not darkess.

No subtlety here, we sent down our big, art-grabbing, statue-snagging, canvas-snatching, book-seizing machines which would rip the tops off your museums & dump the entire contents out, pouring your stuff right into their mouths (so amusingly even some of you laughed; some of you laughed, appreciateively, but they are all dead now‑‑everyyukkhingone), & scoop the loose items from your parks (including thousands of children = children disinfected (hey‑‑sorry! [shrugs]‑‑can't be helped!) instantly.  Shrugs!

They were immensely thorough.  I know from our hauls, though I slept at the controls the whole time, while the dsmal, soon-to-be-forgotten, soon-to-b-tanglelit urph c o  o   l    e     d.  They scoured & scavenged  & enjoyed (machines programmed to thoroughly ENJOY) especially pluckin' stuff from the hands o' babes (= disinfected [Sorry, man (Shrugs)!].

Till you was cleaned out, babes!

The big rednosed jokers'd hop back in my maw, & I'd swerve the Shrukthaang round in a loving loopoomoonoeuvre & plough on back through the simulated stars back to Dim.

Where the stuff‑‑your stuff, I'm confessing here (& this isn't easy, you know (despite the way I show (or make it show)!)‑‑was uncrated & catalogued & polished & primed & in most cases enlarged & enhanced & simply IMPROVED & made if anything "more urphlike" & distributed & collated & set  up for display & et cetera, in et cetera displays of the most exquisite primitve urph-art you ever soar.

This was our way.

& your way?  Yours?  You were already reinventing your (uh...forgotten) things, sculpting ...uh...things, & generally shrugging to yourselves & stratching your swollen heads & wollen eads in random memory accessloss & starting over (& over!) again, working all the harder for the ache that made you glow, & the miraculous, awful absence of children & of babes, & the need to fill your lives up‑‑once again.

& I'd warm up the Shrukthaang for another run, generally every month or so.

I was vucking Bluua & she was beginning to flatten out & squeak.  Her eyes closed togheter, folding inon themselves & losing their glitter but gaining a hot, dense, deep SMOULDERING there that was driving me, as I coiled & curled all through her, mad.  Driving me mad as I coiled & screwed through & througher.

Her face grew flat & nearly transparent, & it glistened with droplets of grey as it widened, to the ends of the room, then curled up the walls & back overhead, finally enclosing both of us, till I was an incandescent worm raging through the dark cave we were forming, our elongate tissues rustling there like the leaves of those most soft & hot hypertropics of Luulioo, Iboriaorge, Neevcor, & Blyeum, where the plantlings lose their gourds breathing constantly the steam in that mulch so compulsively fertile they explode into lightgenes, as evolutionary forces get too hopped up to flow simply linearly & start evolving OUT, in two & three, & even four or more directions at once, in "insane heat-stoked mutating hyperbole," as the kids say, blowing their stacks, foaming over their frizzy tops, giving delirious whirls to just anything, to the point where the botanists who have lived to pant the tale pant "They got plumbless & crazy as jellikuuns with their vucking life, like so flamingly vucked-up with vucking, fumey life they would vuck your brains out, vuck you blind, vuck anything that moved & vuck till everthing moved & everything was mindlessly & wildly vucking EVERYTHING & even then, in the vucking midst of it, they would vucking do anything you asked!," though of course any botanist who would leave such a wild-swiving dream must be dead.

& we shuld not trust the words of the dead, should we?  This, anyway, being what our deadha haauthors tell us, in a manner of speakvucking eaking it?

That was Bluua & me, just a big loving pod, with our corpuscles buffing their membranes clean as they did the dirty all over one another across the fluent dancefloor of our ambient suppurations.  Something like that.

It was then‑‑or more accurately, just after then, that I knew I was nothing without her.  I would be, I knew, just a small, focused cloud of pain without Bluua, that the farther she got from me‑‑in space, in loving, in time‑‑the more condensed & red & bleary I'd become, like the sleepless, suffering eye on the hopeless lookout for more pain, the eye contasining all pain in itself.

So that, extrapolating from this feeling, I felt nothing outside that encapsulated ballon of femotions in which we breathed.

It was like I said to her (panting like some escaped, dead botanist), "When you go, I go."

& she would squeak one last time & laugh at that.  We would all lie there pulling ourselves otgether & laugh at that for a while.
SADDEST LAUGH
or
SWOOM SPILL‑‑HHHH

My wife.  My "wife."  Ha (rueful laugh‑‑ha! (blue laugh‑‑ha? (sad laugh‑‑ha (saddest laugh‑‑hh) hh) ha) ha?) ha!) hh!?

Bluua was a defective. I have always had this one defect myself, that I have always loved defectives.  There was Oosh, my first youthful crush, who left me almost a torus of coorfus crush-shapes on my wounded little breast; there was Wamma, the robust mama loving to form herself into the orgasmic corpulosities of Reubensesque fleshesesques, & whofor all her de fec tive ness (or because of them) was too much for me, & left me crushed, this time with brittle whit edges in frostshakes around the tear-dried idges of my soul, my soul of course a torus, my soul-torus naturlaly a big eye, my eye big & dry

but NOT FOR WANT OF CRYING but from Crying Herself; & then Kove, who was a dove, a big silly, loving dove, who pecked out my tiny heart (disappointing! we Dims like to brag on our hearts the way you brag on your rods‑‑but mine turned out to be smaller than the pinched little mouth of a loveless goddam dove) & fluttered off with it; Jabecesser, whom I remember as nothing more, ar at least as ittle ore, thana red buzzer, a series of red buzzers that buzzed at you as you sweate down a hall of hot halls, I mean red doors, a hot hallway of gusty red doors & a RED BUZZER zapping you for unknown, dream-mysterious "mistakes" ("'mistakes'‑‑hh")

so whose defectiveness took the form of this torturous game (yet till Bluua I lov edher most, I tell you: Most); & then Subvicta, Fuseera, & Blee, who were our equivalent of three sister, & who foamed like some trivessescerent beaker of a gold feffefferent beverage featurning three gold-floating-obabes, & whom I loved in a confusing, triple fashion which would have split my head had I at that stage in my existence, uh, had heads.

But at that time, during that particular love affair, I had no heads.  This is nomral.  I am normal.

But, getting back to my loves, my women were not.  Not normal, I mean.  Never normal, subsequent studies have scene.  I had in myself the Defective Defect of Love, a defect incurable inmuchasmuckasas I was in lov with the defect, & my love of these wo men was in fact my love of my de fec t.

& then Bluua, possibly the most defective of all‑‑the first woman with whom I not only was aware of the defective nature of my love right from the start‑‑actually slightly before the start‑‑butwithomb I acknowledged the defuct stuff from the mouth of the veryfitst vuck.

Cruede but truede.

Bluua was a skinny, scrawny, feisty little troublemaker, a fighter, a young boxer, who liked to wear sleeveless T-shirts showing off her sinewless arms & box the CRAP right out of me.  She like from the start for me fum daspart to mco kup One Huge Bulbous Ol Head so she could dance riungstyle roundsit & just simply BOX the CRAP right out of it.

Tell me dat ain't defective, Mr. or Ms. Detectives!

But it was lovely and, silly, bouncy me, I loved her from the first punch.  I must say, I loved Bluua from the very first punch, which is how she greeted me as I attempted to visit the family of Bluua & she POPPED me a GOOD ONE (very good!‑‑it makes me swoom spill--hhhh...), such that I visited this family for many hours, & long after the apologies & the sweets & drugs & treats done to make up for her de FEC goddamtive faux ah pax, I remembered nothing of the Ypions nor my visit nor the reason for my visit (unless, needless to say, my creater saw it needless to  ake up the Yps in any fullfilled fashium and/or make up any rationale for this "visitatio," beyond the skin-thin backdrop of its setting for my meeting of my so-called "defective" wide).

I mean, really.

No, but really, I'd had the flap crapped out of me at it, so I dint remember.  This little gal really bounced around you head.

& always the loose & sleeveless T-shirts & the fine sweat & the tiny tits, & the hair undone in pattismiffs styleshnesh & the black cuffs & shoes & the hand-medowns, & always the dancing around in a circle beating the ABSOLUTE CRAP out of the FACE of my bulbous head, I mean HEAD.

I sat around for ages just letting her spin around me, just letting her ah indulge her defectiveness, which is not done, & thus in effect thus letting her thushbeat my love into hopeless ness thugh‑‑which, more than anything, ahh, simply Is...Naught...Dum.

So I was a goner & in trouble from the start of this little conception, see.  & that explains my willing to fly the Ing.  I was in trouble, see.  I was headmoled into all sorts of desperate shapes, see.  There was & is a gallery of my desperate shapes, a goddam entire fullfledged marble Gallery of Desperate Shgapes, see, & when it says "of Desparate" it implies, clearly & totally, Yysy desperate shapes.

So I was more than a tad in love, & thus more than a tad in trouble.  I was a big dim in trouble, thinking this trip would somehow get me erased from that (these test flights had, after all, erased the sins, the identities & larger portions of the identities of Phrynkyng, Phlybastymo, Quoughuo, Non, & Bob, my predecessors; so you see my thinking was right you C-I-mright), not thinking this flight would get me & the entire race of Dimnentia into real trouble.

That's real trouble‑‑not silly Defective Love or a misjudged maritial mismatch or a bulbous head pouring out, like a coconut, misshapen states of desperation spates, nossir‑‑but real trouble from a single flight, just "one skew into hell," as they came to say.
(NOW DEAD) WOULD SAY (NOW SAID)
or
LYING SIGN

I have described the essence of Bluua‑‑the gamine, scrawny little Dim I fell in love with.  & as you know, I fell in love with the glitch in her being.

There was therefore a legitimate sense in which I fell in love with the most atypical part of Bluua‑‑almost a diseas edpart, some (now dead) would say (now said).  & the power, if I do said-so myself, of my love almost fixed her in that form, circling round & beating my face in all the time.  It was a wapred version of love in a world of warped visions of love, & I all but stuck her in that one form.

But she could change, though.  She had her Other Passions.  She kept them in a silver ovalular storage unit, like a closet but black inside & without space.  & the closet was Off Limits, & it was the reason we Could Never Have Kids (for some encloseted reason, see), & it was called‑‑writ large like a 1950's television cigarette logo over the booth in which various clever people had their booths fill with water as they engaged in clever duels to the deaf did I say deaf?‑‑THE OUTER PASSIONS, except sometimes, you know, you'd come up to it‑‑not too close, natch‑‑ur-lee, & it'd say like THE OTHER PASSIONS, only at times it would seem to whisper to you, like "Psst!  Hey, kid!  Hey, hey, Jym.  C'mere," & the sign, a lot smaller, would say THE OOTER PASSIMS!!!

& at times that goddma sign would burn like a prism, or like a passion, or like a passion-prism in a nightmare of fever & would say‑‑this time in The Veyr Vey Largermosht Legger of Hell, BLUUA'S UTTER PASSINS.

So it would be folly for me to say I was not tempted by the Lying Sign (which sometimes it would sometimes said to me too, like it would read, flaoting overhead‑‑over my head, not even over the entraceway, bu-bu-bu-bu ut-ut over MY head & buttinmyead & saying‑‑one must think mockingly‑‑LYING SIGN), & THAT I DID NOT SPANE, I meant to send spend every pare oment, & then some of my onspare oments, & then most of my time, & then all of my waking, I mean weaking, time, & thenceforth all of my (sleeping) (ti)me, (sleepin)g (tim)e sleepi)ng (time) (slee)ing t(ime) (sle)eping ti(me) (sl)eeping tim(e) (s)leeping time inches in front of the heated portal of that sign, NOT THE SIGN, I MEAN, BUT THE OVALUcular "closet" thing in which she kept (what did I say up there?  Oh yea...) he other passions.

Her orderless passions, her unthinkable passions, her rational passions, her hopeless passions, her little-girl's passions, her forgotten passions, her morning passions, her mournful passions, her wordless passions, her passions bristling with too many words (present company accepted), her passions like very slick eels (ee!), her passions fricative & her passions vindicative & her passions irrespressible & irresponsible & disengaged & skewed & running along outside the french windows of time hallooing like a feverish clown & waving his arms though you know this is a flash-fak to the side of time waving passionate but silly there.

& I felt some of these should be my passions, what with my self-declar'd love & all.

So I slept there‑‑not by her side but by the side of everything she denied, you see.

Now that's the definition of love, you see?

Works for me...

But still, ol' Bluua would get in there, or her passions would tiptoe out over out over out over my sleeping form curled like an oxymoron in slack attention there there there there there.  (there!  Feels good to get those extra theres out now, doesn't it, boy?  I do wish we'd had a boy, or something...)

Anyway, Bluua could & would become very large, almost a swollen man, very fleshy & whitely bulky.  This was her most frequent outbreak out of the perspired disheveled selve.  This was where she would perform or try to get to peform her Mad Experients.

& she would work on these to the point of exhaustion, to the points of madness.  I let this go on because 1) I could not stop her, 2) I would be afraid to stop her, 3) she would come away from these epxerients‑‑in which she was always & ever trying to make something happen ,to get some tiny things inside this dome of a model city that she had or had made or had had had made there in her study or den or dzem to, you know, do something‑‑anything‑‑with an insurmountable need to bong the whap out of my big inflatable lover-woozy head, 4) & she would.

So this scientific crap meant some good lovin for me, by my standards.  I even encouraged it‑‑I tchink‑‑by losing consciousness there by the outer passions with its dying signs of love.

So her work became entirely a matter of beating her big, thck lug of a brutish head against the clear shields she had herself e'en made, trying to thrittle the little creatures frozen in there, trying to get them do do something.  I don't know what‑‑vuck, maybe, or move or kill or die. SAhe'dbecome psychtic battering away, & she would of course become psychotic if anyone interfered with her attempts to break through those clear shields‑‑& I don't mean lovey-dovey pummel-your-helium-head Type O Love, neither.  No, in these cases she would be mad.

She would attack.  & you don't want that.
INAPPROPIATE FLUIDS
or
INTENTIONS THE MUCK WOULD COUNTERMAND

Bluua was awfully thin.  It made her look so young...

Sometimes after our lovemaking I would fall into irrational funks.  I would suddenly fear I had hurt her, as if I'd gone back in time to when she was tiny, vulnerable, to when she still breathed liquids, & hurt her horribly, & my lovemaking was not a separate, adult act in time, much less a loving act bonding us etc., but was connected by this ick-yellow thread‑‑more a string of mucous than a thread, more a pseudopod of base slime than a string, more an extrememly deep & damaging form of light than a pod, more an evil thought than a form.

& this funk formed in me solidly, like a large bolus in my midsection, psyhng aside whatever organs had been living there, taking over their functions with a grim & hatchet-faced grin

a grin etched on its rotund surface‑‑a grin, actually, in the form of one of Bluua's very own T-shirts stretched across its muddy-bluegreen paunch, yet in its essence a thin, Anglo, hatchet-faced grin, the grin of the blond villain in the umpteenth sequal to that film starring dynamic black men that assured you in endless, biullet-strewn loops, that these were <the blond images of all your worst estfantasies>, no matter how black you were‑‑pumping my body all sorts of Inappropiate Fluids, thesmelves variations on this colorless blugrun stain affair.

& in the exhaustion & remolecularization that followed our lovemaking‑‑a period when she'd sleep & I'd roam around, disheveled & awake‑‑I'd eventually be sitting on the bed, watching her sleep, checking her breathing & fallen deep inside the ball of my very own funk, so the goddma funk was watching her, having taken oer my body like a pod (& I don't mean no pseudopod, much less a form of light or an evil form‑‑I mean me), & sometimes even going so far as to hold her little hand‑‑which in postlove exhaustion & sleep would tend to rewduce MADDENINGLY to the from of a little paw, aw!, such a tiny little PAW, aw, which the molecular ruination having taken oer et cetera would hold, like one of those mythical Doctors of Olde...you know...the ones that used to come & hold your paw...aw...

I would, however, know enough to draw the line.  Picture me, hunched in the belly of my own lovefunk like a ball-turret gunner, with my own form of a grin frim, I mean grim grin, trying to stretch out an ectoplasmic paw, not-awe, & draw a goddam line!  Preetty far-stretched...pretty shakey, no?

Prettyshakey yes!

...a line of protection (as if, sliding milky guilt aside, Bluua ever needed protection from me (as if I could ever provide protection to anyone (much less Bluua))) to protect this Prettyshakey Miss, Bluua, my prettyshay little sleeping miss.

Things I Would Not Vow in my Mind.  I would not blubber or cry.  I would not lower my head across her flat tummy & weep.  I would not vow in my mind never to love her again, & when I say love her I guess I mean 1) love, 2) make love, 3) fall in love, 4) fall into the guilty funk of love, 5) not-vow never to a) notlove, b) make notlove, c) notfall in notlove, d) notfall into the filthy spunk o love, e) vow not-never no to all of the above.

...all of which intentions the Muck (which is what I call my funk) would countermand, all therefore coming true.

& often-snot, I'd wake her entirely up with my blubbering, forcing us both in rekindled desires to do it again, a cycle rounding round until we got it right...

& we would eventually Get It Right, & so would dress up to the nines‑‑she in her thinnest, mos' Translucent Frayed & Vicous T-Shirt, I in my Cat o' Nine Tales Tux with the ant's ample abdomen  & the blazine white neon bow & the Eyebrows & the Nifty Grin & the sparkling spats & the gilt cumberbnund & the truosers flaring like that Fred Astaire & the shows snazzing riht up my pantleg revaling my panties & my legs, & together go out in to the world, such as it was, like unlikely twins & twins & kick some ass...
DIRE SHRINKAGE
or
WET BRAIN MINDSET CRYSTALLINE SUSPENSION SET
or
STRETCHED FRAG MEANT OF MEM OR Y THERE
of
THE NERVE OF WORDS
or
GOLFERS OF THE TACHYONS

Now the next scene's hard to recall on account of it's been shrunk as part of my punishment shrink to the merest crystal in my mind, & when I say mind I mean wet brain, & when I mean wet brain I say suspension of crystal images in a medium of cruelty.

So like it takes like these powerfully amplificative magnificently magnificative "suspension instruments" which play quite a comlex rhythm down the hollow sound corridors of my suspensious susocious brain I say mind I mean wet brain mindset crystalline suspension set [WBMCSS]

which Is the Proper & Moste Technical Name for Minde in these here Partes, & these painful I-might-add modalities, stretching & ripping, as they did, the very tissues of sensitivity that, say drive you mad at a party or cause that most sweating humiliation at the rally, right there in front of everyone tiglig or tingling or tingaling on the broken boards

stretched frag meant of mem or y [SFOM] there, have, in a motif of further shrinkage [MFS] to contend with the further shirnkage of the event, which shrinkage brears direct relationship to what have become gnome as My First Trial [MFT] due to what has been hastily albeit permanently Miss Construed (the old prude [OP!]!

as a heinous crime against my wife, who was in fact a coconspirator of mine to commit certain crimes which‑‑due to the second shrinkahe I've begun to get to aver too hier along these infinite crystal tiers in which air plays the role of ocean lapping bluely on the great & mountainous toes of the longlost yet still capable to hurt you livid gods were at that time (before passage of The Second [or Secondary] Shrinkage Laws [very small & I think funny laws, dismal laws, foolish laws, totally unnececssary & I might ass unfair laws, laws given their shrunken nature smiling up at you & waving one hairy-pitted arm, with very small initials: SSL) were technically legal,if disgusting at that time.  So they can't get us for the carnage.  Ha ha. They can NOT apparently get us for the atrosicities, the mass murders & serial criminalities, etc.  Ha ah.

But my wife & I weren't shrunk, so they got us for what happened next.  I mean, nexat after this shrnk down memory happens, if I can ever get to the damnd squirrelly thing, the tiny thing. the furry little monstrously-digging chipmunkory thing.

Which, now that were stretched through the tightness of nerves (& of rhetoric, which is the nerve of words [NW]) & can nip a glossy view a dis TORT! Ed View of Mr. Ed View in the narrow-eyed suction views of the vooze of this crystalline part-of-my-punishment negative memory (for everything's revesed in this memroy, as prat of my pnuismhetn, but that's fairly easy & painlessly easily painless to easily "fix") & sort of see what my wife (that's Bluua) & eye dort a dorely did.

first appearance of Vuor Reducer

See, we'd get sprayed up as mentioned in a larger universe, a sweeping feverlike feeling which haunts you like the Titan Hand of Air that doth sweep through your many heads in your Worst Sort Disocciate Of Dream [WSDD], & Bluua had this like directive Vuor Reducer™ she'd scored during her "days as a scoring whore"

Bluua's term‑‑& if you dubt me die, die, die & then see "Clarity of Transcripts" in The Curt of the Later Air, & later die, come back in air & tell me you were sopping goddma wrong; or, alternatively, do none of these things
which we'd like direct on some citizen "wandering shapelessly up the Avenues of Air," as the song used to go before it was not-ised, & rather shrink them down.  This was a powerful device‑‑highly illegal, as it said in letters large as the curtain facing your life in the gallows of a Sunday night, right rising like Irised Apparitions from the side of this great, Bazooka Tool, only it bent like rubber, so as to stab 'em round the safe bends of corridors, see.

Or not see.

& anyway, Bluuandeye'd like to take this device‑‑she always used it, you honor.  It was always she who shot it, she.  & we'd shrunk these bastards so goddam small they'd fall way below the image of the laws or the Technical Spectrum of the Laws, so it was safe to do anything to them, in the same sense as, once, before the passage of Ameoa Laws {sic}, it was perfectly & safely & completely & really quite comfortably legal to legal to shoot shoot shot an ameboa, if you could find the dang thang.

Which was our immediate problem, because we couldn'a shrink ourselves down.  That would defy some neural link of aaaeeuuurr logic that's built into us & Must Not Be Questioned, no more than any link, no more than the thought that our links must not be questioned, the thought that links must not be questioned that pretty much landed my ass in jail in the Absolute Place

which is the air where we keep our floating jails; really not so bad; really like angel cake; really nice; really.

Yea well anyway, we'd pull on microviewers & use microlimbs & the like, & chase these folks round like chipmunks across the blue fields of a golf course, with sizzling golfballs whizzling pazzt our headzz with a dizztinctly dizzyinyiyinyintying zipping zound, which of course were merely tachrons or some other subatomic shit, & catch 'em in heavy cloths we'd pund over their heads.

Or if they got into their holes, we'd damn well uncluck the shovel & dig 'em out (which made the golfers of the tachyons [GT] mad, I'll tell you) & wrap 'em in ur cloths & take 'em home.

Then.  Then?  Ouch!  Yes‑‑then!  Then, youronours, after dinner, we''d do things to 'em.  Too many to confess.  Too many to face off.  Too many to pay off karmically.  Way too many thinngs, also known as dank thans or dire strategies of hell or Sadistic Otherwise.

Sometimes we'd flay 'em.  That was nice.  Not nice as jail...but very nice.  Made me feel beautiful for one cramped little minute.  Sometimes we'd half flay 'em, you know, or flay merely their bodies, or their heads.  Sometimes we'd jet water into their mouths so their cheeks'd pop out & their eyes squeeze shut, or they'd blow up in a pure jet of life which filled the dead air of our youths with these jets of suffocat life‑‑but it was life.

Sometimes needles.  Sometimes rim-lipping, I mean limp-ripping.  Sometimes a large category of other things still being ineffectually categorized down in the municipal Categorge of Lies, where our crimes in the grimy half-fluorescent light doth defy all eyes.

That's what we'd do.  All perfectly legal back then, I'll have you know.  Or reknow.  Or reflesh those neruons in your blough.  & each time we did it, Bluua's get more excitingly attractive to me, & it would take only a (miniature-timed) year of strung atrocities, of torutures, if you will, all legal etc., before I'd rip her clothes off so as yo‑‑well, delicately prohibits & my lawyer nips the corner of my ear & wakes me up by biting the flesh of my hair.

& this would, as you must expect, be an inevitably aggressive sort of ripping off, we have hear, with a mind toward a very, how shall I sway, affirmative sort of copulation to follow on the slow & hideous deaths of these, er, shrunked decitizenized entities [SDE]

& not to put too fine a point on it, I'm spoken of as being cruel, or perverted, or as being some vague sort of criminal (applicable under the Vague Laws) for how I ripped, or as I prefer to think of it, peeled Bluua's T-shirt off, & she came off with it.  This happened time after time, but has for legal purposes been crystallized and/or shrnken into One Great Time [OGT]

But I say without stuttering (bubut the sashitr wawas cucovered wiwiwith vavveins!) the shirt was covered with veins!  It had always been part of her!  Ripping it off was just peeling her back, peeling her farther back, whch was al I was supposed to do for her.  I was what I was supposed to do.

But in the Vague Laws, even doing what you're supposed to do is bad.
THE PIT ELGODANTS
or
WHERE THE STORY BLEEDS

Marriages on Dim can get a bit tempestuous.  I knew Bluua was mad at me the morning she slit my throat.

Yea, she was mad, all right.  She swung a pendulum stropped to a razorlim a half a molecule thick, each little metallic guy with his molecular armlinks grimping the LMGs on either side, little pot bellies bending the stripes of their Katzenjammer T-shirts riding up over their respective navels, standing in pure & perfect formation with the ridges on their heads

which must have been like flawless rows of quarks at curious attention, their own ridged heads aligned, & those bladeheads comprised of what unexistent microquark things too small to be worth hypothesizing, even by your scientists, degenerate if I may say descendents of the original, flynnish, swashbuckling particle physicists who discovered all the particles that we stole from them, from you?

in ripping harmony, ready to go, all of nature from microcosm on up to my fierce wife's bloody hand in agreement that I should be cut up.

So that pendulum‑‑bigger than anyone could lift, leaving me with this gaping pit sliced right into my story, the pit Elgodants with his dry blood seeping out much as my rusty-powdery blub piffed out starting the instant before she slit my dewy skin, zipping straight through my soft, sleep-etiolated throat, in a hack the stuff of legions & a-HAQ! the GUFF! alegends anda QAAQ! the SPUFFA! legends and-a-HAQUE (par-me)!

So this is where the story bleeds   .

I woke up & clutched the emptiness where a certain soft & fated segment of my throat had been breathing, & I cried out Bluua's name employing those special vowels available only in that rare & fleeting Language of the Gash-Ed Throat I was suddenly speaking‑‑not a tongue that has had much time to develop, but one with definite sounds of its ounds of its own‑‑a language, par adhomple, without consonants to speak of, just gurgling fricatives, & whose million ululating polyvoewlic morphemes all groan Why?

This lang I spoke to Bluua, whose one-ton-tilda pendulum had shot off down the angular corridor of lines that represented distance in our world.  Too much to hold for a second swipe‑‑much like Bluua herself‑‑it carried on a long, ecstatic career of its own, known as the Pendulous Career of Bifurcation to no one whatsoever, as it sliced our erstwhile singlewhirld in two, whirling round & round the puffy disk that we called Dimnentia, but would henchfroth perforce have to call by one of the many names you've probably heard but had up to now & back to then had then had no understanding of.

The names, two-wit: Dim ! yria, The Planet With Its Hair Parted Right Dawn The Muddle, The Planet Of Twinj, The Planet Of Gaxhes, Slitsville, Bi Bi, The Planet Of Dividedided Gaksh, The Planet Tenalp, The Siamese Planiats, The Planet With Its Very Air Wedged Thinly In Two, Double Planetoid, The Many-nam-ed Oneeno, Splitsville, Ambidim, The World What Was Cut to Ribbons, & And You'll Be Next.

"Mad, honey?" I wanted to ashque, but when she's that mad Bluua just breathes & sweats.  She's a hot item there, with her cave-din chest heaving from convex to conVEX & the sweat so thin & yet so plentiful, & as almost always I wanted her most whilst in no condition to swive anywung.  I could only roll around in my red powder & roll around in the meanbarrassment of my rolling areound & roll around in the shapes that floated liquid in the aforementioned rollarounds, & roll around in that in mortification, & so on & so froth till I really was a froth, which was what Bluua, who could completely control my emotions, must have wanted.

Dawn, I thought.  Dawn One, & she's cut my throat already.  What day is this, anyway?  (But it was Noday, which is one of our days, & my blood barely made a difference in the rosaries of air we floated in in 'Lyria.)

Swooosh, the big blade went by, carefully cutting my world into ribbons.
As you have gathered or are gathering, this sort of treatment couldn't kill me.  But given the personal nature of the wound, I would never have my old shape again.

& here again, my gagginwife triumphant ack (I cut did I a verb just then?).

Swooossshhh!
THE ILLEGALITY OF THE ALLEYS

So, beribboned with bleedings & bitter, I patched my ass back together in ways too translucent & too heinous to describe & highed me down to the Pressure Zones of town‑‑& I mean I went Deep.  I just kept walking, or sliding, sort of.

 
This section of Timestuff brought to you by InstaPatch™.  With InstaPatch, you walk away laughing.  Now back to our story.    

A Dwarf Camera moved backwards before me as I walk away sort-of-laughing or not-un-laughing, my tongue threatening always to stomp on it, so in the archived Dwarf Shot you can see the lights of town, & the pressure of the lights of town, getting denser & denser behind & over my head, crushing in the ribbons of my head my angry wife had made the ribbons of my head dangling in the pressure of the air ribbons of my head turning into light in the heavy ribbons of Pressure Town ribbons of my head expressing my thoughts in the form of instantaneous subcutaneous scrivenings of the thoughts, not of my unconscious, much less my subconscious, but of those dent block dents balock dense black portions of my mind that cough out various hilarious verversiums of my fate.

So the other denizens of Pressure Town‑‑down whose illegal, high-pressure alleys I did me wend‑‑were laughing at me, included amongst the laughers (whose laughter created pressures even more dense, even mareintents, even beyond the frigging illegality of the alley) being this woman in an aviation cap & goggles, & a WHALE of a woman she was, so I pushed into the pressure emitted by her laugh (for this was a pressure laugh not a pleasure laugh we are talking about here) & swopped her head off, then swapt the helmet off, & it was Pola, none other than my bitterest enemy, beautiful goddam Pola, her eyes, which I swept off with yet anonner swupt, glitter!ng with the b.tterness I "Could Naught Help Butt Love," so I'd succeeded in zetting the zeen & was in the very densest part of town [pause] smackin' Polaround!
BURIED THOUGHTS

Her face was very big & ruddy.  She was huffing up her face, & while I wanted to pretend this was "pathetical & funny" (those are my words Don't USE THEM), or "parenthetical & boney," or "heretical & bomey," it was frightening me sorely.  She was red, & she was all face.  & it wasn't her usual face, which was

one had to admit under one's breath with the admission huffed into uffed nto ffed to fed o ed d d de o def pt deff otn deffu otni huffed into an underbreadeth bag, which is where we'd like pough out our soughtest, sooghtiest amissighiogns, there to be crunkelled, tied off, burped, prexxu!d, & sometimes brutally popped, counter to the law thought this may beeve

a rather handsome face.

The Sentence in the Bag reads faint & greenly, sickly with its ancient green dust‑‑not green with mold or even the passages of time but green with the circularity of O-Time‑‑It was a rather handsome face.

But not now!  Naow!  Puffing herself up in thish extreme way

and why, one may ask, packing the thoughts like shit into the small black back-thought bags we use for the foul thoughts we do not wish to have thought or been thought of as having thunk, black little plastic bags to be curred.

That's it: buried.  Buried thoughts, like the thought buried thoughts itself, which has been buried so many times it has a special Catholic Funeral Certificate & a series of sequlae in which it just keeps rising from the dead, a tough, eternal Bag coming back

but too small & too uninteresting & just too many times buried to catch anyone's interest as they bustled along the tight tunnels of the rush of their emphatic infancy or intimacy or words that thought like that‑‑words, need I say, stup into likkle bak baggs the likes owhich cannaught be descryed by any of a milieu of ambiguous, Bag-Begownéd Words, which are just the words we coigned to describe the real words the words in the bags, the real & actual words that we stup in the BAGs, may God allow our sould pone last decent burial, sans bag?

drained her body, invisible behind her Great Face of course {of faceof course offace} to a small & crimson puppet dancing like a forked chunk of beef jerky, one would imagine, & perhaps the audience watching the fight from behind might see, they just might see if they had "eyes [heehee] 2C."

& it (the puffing up, complete with rotunda parantitheticules) also brought out‑‑either through a process of magnification or else through the sleer, snilly, adolescent (with apologies to adolesnits & to adolesscence) unhealthiness of this fight, simply bringing out zits.

So it was an unuhhealthily ruddy & russet & roguish big ugly pockmarked face, with its lower lip thrust out in a manner that would have made even Mussolini say, "Hey‑‑lighten up," in Italian, probably, & with his lip thrust slightly out, I suspect, that was bumping up against me down there in the highest pressure zomes of Zome, City of Prezzures.

Should have made it easier to smaquer, but I was scared, as I think I said in some bag I have lost somewhay, & I wasn't fighting too good.

Because I was like having this like nagging like thought, which had to do with just how right Pola seemed about everything, & how very awkward & difficult‑‑& painful, like a daunting asana of questionable value & plausibly malicious intent‑‑it made my need to hate her, the repressed desires which her very ugliness, here during our fight, made shine right at the tip of my nose‑‑the thought, the realization, the crystallized image, if you woll‑‑of how much I wanted her.

This cannot be!!!  So I hit her...I was whomping her bad.
& Pola just kept dancing around, swelling up her face to proportions dangerous to everything, ugly & frowning & with that monumental lower lip, the carbuncualar monstruosity ushed up right against me.  She was hurting me in some way that wasn't direct, wasn't clear, as always.  That's right, I realized as I poked that big lip with my scrawny little fist, she was always hurting me, but in a way that was not simply malicious, not matter how much I strained to pain it thataway.

There was always the hurt, & yet always something going on beneath the hurt.

This stuff must have registered on my face, for her gargoyle puss shrunk back so rapidly there was an Esrever Relppod Tceffe, turning that once-proud-in-its-repellentia face into a dissolving tuquoise globe of lighttwimes weaving in upon thesmelves like nothing so much or little as little as animated green basket-weaves of barbed wire, sometheme like that.

Pop.
GLASS ALERT

Some form of inebriation & broke into Polabetma's lab.

She had built up a vast structure of glass‑‑virtual cities of blue-lit beaker, labyrinthine mazes of tubes within tubules, apparent dead-ends gnipool ylsuiböm all within concentric complexes of big beakers & megabeakers, all of it interlaced with metastructures of glass that, to my mind & multi eye ed sight (not to mention...OK, to quick-mention my breathless with my hearts my many beakered hearts chiming on glass alert, not to mention...), added up to nothing, or else spelled out my own name (which surely seemed vain!  I laughing at my vanity!  I gasp at my hilarity!  I die at my breathlessness!  I forget my death!  I am reborn crying at something I can't remember!  I am a warm babe, full of vanity!) in possibly the Betma's own personal cryptic script.

I was cowed, I don't mind admitting.  I was not expecting glass.  I was absolutely not expecting everything in her lab‑‑including the lab...I mean, including the walls & the ceiling & the roof & antennae of the lab, even the potty of the lab of the kind of perspicuous glass a Dim could create only when mad, thus proving my enemy was mad, of which I was vainly glad, which made me swallow & slow down and...stop in the midst of all this glass.

I stood, a dark figure in my trenchcoat, a million images of me in my various shapes & sizes filling the vaporless room everywhere rune everywhair moom ivorywore zoong ovoraywire soom iviriywaor.  What was her trick this time?  Sure, I was drunk‑‑plenty drunk.  But you'll notice Pola was the very cause of this.  Pola was deliberately galling my kibe, getting me wrought-up & wired.  She was not just torturing me; she was manipulating me.  Of this I was dumbly, I mean dimbly aware.

Seemed a bit too easy to smash up all this glass, didn't it?  No, I thought (and, soused as I was, probably mumbled zazwel), don't break a thing.  Try not to breaka goddam thing.  Try to work your way‑‑no, try to worm your way to the center of the maze.  That's the trick‑‑a trick no machiavellian gopddam princess would ever set a drunken dim to do.
Goddamit.

So you had me down on my elbows, with the trenchcoat stuck roun me still, hampering my movements, my face making tipsy little moues as I started creeping through the glass forest like a soldier in the Moronic Platoon, First * Divsision, of the Armies of the Night, clashing with my own ignorance of night.

To make a long story short.

To make it a bit less radically short, however, I found my drupe in a beaker at the center etc.  It was mine‑‑& it had been died white.  He had been dyed white, for, looking at him in exaggerated amplivision through this most purest ultraviolet glass of this moderate vial, I saw the features of his face‑‑the doughlike face I thought of in my bespackled state as the white, dough-babe fetus-face of something meaning to be me, but a face quivering weakly & inanely oer the encasement of a toxic memory.

I poured my face out of the beaker into my white, threefingered mitty & bepocketed-ocketed dit, thereyago.  Then I looked proudly & loudly around, my little neck a bit hyperextended back, my spine awfully rigid, like I'd had a big rod runneled up mine arse, and, still in that endless trenchcoat, now "drorved on down" to match my dimunitive features (I had lost all my height somewhere‑‑Fauxlish pax!‑‑& now I'd I'd I'd foolishly have to double back to find my lost height, all the while thinking Perhaps this is the trap sprung at last & after all at last) I surveyed the scene, i.e., Pola's lab as seen from the center of Polazlab as seen from the center of Pola slab as seen so on.

& I noticed she was all around me.  Typically!  I blew big bug exasperated raspberry, my oscillating lips bashing the glash from the centre out with its jagedged goddam sinewaves of frustration.

Yet a fruistration somehow satisfying.  Maybe my very drunkenness allowed me to realize how much I liked being trapped by Pola.  Or maybe the drunk was gone.  I felt like a sap‑‑& indeed, there I was...a dwarf sap.

"Would you like your height back?"  she asked, but not so vauntingly as you'd suppose.

"I dunno.  What's it costing me?" I sais, my voice moving fiercely through the glass, sounding God knows whatlike like out there (probably importent, wouldn't you know).

She moved, but since her face was all around my view, it just rotated like the sky rotating during one of your fainting spells as you lie grass dizzy on the youthful mounds.

"I had to shorten things up to fit all the equipment in," she was saying too matter-of-factly.  "Come out the red passageway‑‑the one that's glowing red‑‑& you'll be out."

"And...big?" I said like a squeaking liddle fnool.

"Yes, of course," she said hastily.  Seemed to be moving again, that dizzy spell again spell again, the grass cool against the back of my head & the sky golike in her mysteriosity.

One of the openings glowed a dull red.  I went forth.  Soime trap, where they show you the way out.

"What're you doing with my drupe?"  I said, though now everything was a nightmarish black passageway of steam tunnels & clanking pipes, always with that aching red light right in front of me.

"I was hiding it," she said.  "From X [the decryptopgraphers].  They were going crazy, trying all sorts of insane things to get it open.  I was trying to restore it."

"Yea‑‑right.  Then why was it white?  Why was my face on it?"

"They bleached it.  The smells would make you faint.  No‑‑the smells would make you die.  Many have died.  They put the face on there to identify it."
"Then you won't mind if I just sort of keep it," I said.

"Oh‑‑you took it?"

I made the Face of Extreme Sarcasm.

"Actually, it's not smart for you to keep it.  They'll just get it again, & they'll put you on trial.  You know what I mean."

Face of Fear.  I knew about my trial (I always had), & I didn't want to know.  More on trials below.

"I'll just take it out of here."

She looked intrigued, & seemed either incapable or disinclined to hide these things.  She stepped a bit toward me.

"In the Ing?"

"Of course.  How else."

She was looking thoughtful.

"That might work.  That would get rid of it."

"And me‑‑if I never come back."

She looked at me silently.

"Aren't you going to smash the glass?"

"What glass?"

FACIAL DETAILS NOTWITHSTANDING

She had become very large & godlike to ask this last.  She'd spread her face out side to side, & top to bottom too, & thinned her tissues out & turned a pale shade of turquoise, assuming something somewhere between the face of the Virgin Mary as rendered in the foggy atmospheres of Kassopuli, Planet of Faiths, & the face of the Mars intruder as detailed in the final brainscan of the dying scientist Al Liddons, dying from the spice of his own mine owne insanity.

& I must say I am proud of my cool reply.  What glass‑‑how cool!

Cool, too, those in a lesser wise, was the way I jokked my elbow bok, against the outer rim of the (also glass) sensor plate of alzo-gloff & crushed with a wush her whole lab into powder.

Like the refrain of the song, her whole lab into powder‑‑that's powdered glass, my friends.

"Not much of a substance," she said, smiling disarming & alamringly‑‑smiling therefore disalarmingly‑‑as I ineffectually made a few motions as to puncture her etiolated Mary face.

But I was disarmed.  I was plumb alarmed, & my stump pods mer blar oggnst the surface of her face, her face whihc was, was in any case or case jelling again, again thickening to a normal thick earthly face, a face with a brain behind it, a talking face.

& besides she was taking me by the arm, & there we were, in a vague moonset (in which the eternally black sky of Dimnentia zlit but by our measely little moon, Greeny la Meezaley, so you had to put all your material into eyes, into only three or thwoo, or even just one gigantic eye, & you had, in this meezaglow dew, nothing but gigantic greenish eyes aroaming the planet (green because it picked up thelight, because the vapors of the cryptic substance that serves for "water" here tun greem in the measeleye light, because it makes a better image, or at least a weirder image, because someone or some thing was arranging everysomeonething & they want it this way, OK?

We do it without thinking.  The shape changes, I mean.  we cannot do them whilst thinking, just as the caterpillar loses the effusion of his little stump-legs when he focus zesonem & rolls around like a silly little croun or lik the affectionte worm from the fable Th'Affectionate Worm roling on his plubby back for to get some love, the love of all worms everywhere.

So, as I believe I've implied, we walked, crunchingly, through the glass, clunchingly, tiny arm-in-arm, cunchingly, a pair of gigantic eyes crossed cockily on each other, as we'd each instinctively mocked up just one eye, so we were a perfect pair.

Did it bother me that Polabetma & I kept harmonizing so very well this way?  Yes.

Did I think she was wooing me?  No.  I mean, I had the thought‑‑I was in full mental possession of that thoughtform, suggesting itself quite distinctly‑‑but I didn't believe it.  I had few hopes that way.  She was trying to destroy me, so I had to try to keep my hate (our emotions, have I said, being every bip as polymorpheous as our fleshly we's) coherent & undiluted.

Didn't I?  Yes.  So anyway, she wasn't wooing me.  She was messing with me in some way...but probably not wooing me.

Sometimes I thought (sadly!) she was definitely not wooing me.

But here we were (absurd & curnching images!), two big green eyes (rather toward the charteuzse end of the great green prism speculum) strolling barefoot & bleeging through the moonlit sand, which was formerly glass, & tiny little hairlike arms intertwined, more like the roots of trees than arms, more like black veins within the soldi urph than roots, more like dead intersections of longpast memories than veins, more like nothing than memories, more like memories than roots, more like roots than veins, more at memories, & I just couldn't think of breaking away.

Greeny la Meezaley moon does this & that to us, this & that being much the same.

"Do you wonder what's in my drupe?" I said.

"I know what's in the drupe," she said, rolling her gaze far away from me, but obviously still able to see every molecule of my bigeye face out of the great big corner of her eye.  I liked this fact, & I rolled this way & that, confirming we could never be out of one another's sight.

"So what's in it?"  I said, not believing her for a minute, I will assure you.  In a minute.  Or thereabouts.

Now she gets coy.  I sense she smiles, facial details notwithstanding.

"You believe I know?" she said.  "How would I know?"

"Well, er...that lab back there?"

"But you know just as well as I do that lab was just a set-up, a trap."

"For me?"

She butted me affectionately with her head, giving me a lot of trouble in my head.

"Of course for you!  Don't get any stupider‑‑please."

I tightened my lips in anger.

"I get stupid when people give me a hard time for no reason.  If you know what's in my drupe, tell me."

"I can't."

I went on, "And tell me how you know.  Or at least tell me how you know, if you can't tell me what's in the goddamned thing."

"Would you believe I can't tell you because it's not a language thing?"
I didn't believe her, I assured myself from a minute back or thereabouts.

& accordingly, I said "No."

"Would you believe I can't tell you because it's encrypted?"

"No!"

"Would you believe I can't tell you because it would kill you?"

"No!"

"Too bad."

"I mean‑‑maybe. Maybe it would kill me."

"It would."

"And why's that?  You mean it would reveal some crime, & I'd be tried, & convicted, & killed?"

"It would reveal a crime, but you would die before you ever came to trial."

"You're fooling with me.  Why do you do this to me?"

She broke away from me & undid her shape & undid everything.  I undid my shape & so we couldn't see one another.  We were voices in the dark.

"I can't tell you," she said‑‑& it was good imitation, I thought, of pain.  "That would kill you, too."

I sort of reached out to hit her, in the dark, but nothing much came of it.  Just confused, confusing sounds, more crunching sounds, sniffing, breath.
ACROSS THE THE NEVER-PLANE OF THE POSSIBLE

Polabetma grimaced.  It looked as if she were trying to take a shit.  Her face turned a purple darker than you could see, so there was just the afterburn of a grimace there, burnt in deeper than anyone could see.

Finally the thought popped out, in the form of a huge fruit of some unknown kind, some fruit she'd just dreamed up.

"Not bad," I said cautiously, reaching subfingery feelers in beneath the strangely colored skin, sensing the structures of knowledges there, like the dry mind's structures of knowledge, but flwoing with some sort of juice.  Such were the fruit of our thoughts, & I have mentioned, haven't I?, that we eat each other's thoughts.

I'm sorry.  I am sorry.  I don't mean to come across the meniscus to you as some sort of race of degenerates.  We know your babies eat your
thoughts, but we also know you move on, as it were, to eating the
thoughts of other things‑‑the thoughts of the urph, thoughts of slaughter,
thoughts of blackness & the black fruit of death that comes from the
thoughts that die in flotillions acorss the tarry black expanses of the
thoughts of death (now there's some food for ya!).

But we never grow up.  Our bodies never soldifiy or gel.  We never stop eating our mothers' fruit, except we broaden things to eating eahothers thoughts, which in this sphere congeal in the form of infinitely variuegated, jellolike shapes, some big, some small, most solid, some hollow, some sweet, some indecipherable* (*which is a flavor we have here; indecipherable is a flavor we have here; indecipherable is a flavor we hear ourselves think when we aren't tone deaf to our tones of hunger).

& the picking or the pliucking or the sezing & the eaitg of this fuirt varies also, across a wide & variegated range of empausibilidies.  Sometimes we just scoop 'em up with distended fruitmouths as we slide on by the generators.  Simetimes we ask for the thoughts & the privilege of eating someone's thought or thoughts as fruit, & this wish is granted & we eat the fruit (and, have I mentioned?, have the thought & eat that thought & have it too; we can do that here; we do that all the time here, when we have timehere here).  Sometimes the thoughts are stolen from repositories or "stashes," likely as naught as someone tries to slep on their own mound of impossible thoughts

& you try sleeping on a mount of impossible thoughts sometime when you have some timehere some.

Sometimes the thoughts are fought for, as one might fight for a man or woman or a passion or a freedom or oblivion.

Sometimes the thoughts are forced upon us unsuspecting, or for that matter, suspecting.  Yes, somethings the thoughts the thoughts the thoughts I say I'd say are thrust down our throat in the manen of unwelcome tongues, where they gag on us & make tiny little thought-wretching faces in our throats (in our throats! as if we'd asked them there!), at which point as often as nok we swalow the thoughts and, well, you know...kind of...burp thoughts.

Disgusting, true.  But thus it is, & thus it was, to cycle back to the time I was trying to touch on here, Pola's face empurpled itself as she gave forth her thought, & the show of effort got me on my guardm, let me tell you that.  I never trusted Polabetma, & this display of sincerity & effort & herculean will‑‑the sort of effort lovers make to woo one another in the "lover-suffer" stage of mating where you're supposed to show off & make these big, sumptuously cataclysmic and/or cataclysmically sumptuous thoughts for your lover to eat‑‑the eating, needless to thenk, taking about as much determination & will as the "bringeing forf" of the thoughts, so that most lover-suffer lovers get sick.  It's not healthy.

But then, no stage of our loving is healthy.  No stage of love ever is, is it.

Except for the actual "no-stage" of love, which we all love.  But which time will never allow us to get to get to get.

"You expect me to eat this?" I (nng!) thought, & Pola ate the tiny thought.

I walked around it a few times. It was ver ver very huge. It was impressive.  It was in fact awesome, which made me pretty hungry, not having eaten a thought since the start of the novelgand.

"Pretty good," I saidwith my lips pursuing themselves into me with their little purple lines.  "Pretty impressive.   "Hmph."

I know now I was prompting her to say something‑‑I don't know, to ask me or beg me, or even to command me to tuck in.  But she just stood there, in a stalwartly alien way, I now say, I mean say, I meant see, as if this was never intended to be eaten, as if this were not that type of thought at all.

"What," I stammered suddenly, lost in this thought.  "What kind of a thought is this?"

I was circling around it.  It would seem to have grown huge with the progress of the scene, & Pola walked around it opposite me, the two of us orbiting in silent syzygy.  She was going just fast enough in relation to me to peep the front part of her face across the burgeoning mass of the thought that was gradually widening our twin & tandem orbits, gradually filling the room, across the never-plane of the possible, forcing us out of the room...

Finally she stopped, & I found that I had stopped too, the belly of the massive floating (& one must logically think absolutely inedible) thought squarely‑‑er, rotundly‑‑between us now, so we were connected only by voices, connected only by voices.

Which I found I very much liked.

It's not as thought to be eaten like the others, Imthught in admiration.  It's a thought to separate us, so we could be joined by our voices. Dimnentians, come to think of it, are never joined by voices.

I confess this in the very heat of the seen: our race are never joined by voices.

But now Pola & I were.
"You go inside this," she said.

You're kidding, I thought I said or wished I'd said.

"No," she said.  "You go in there & you'll remember everything."

"How's that?"  How's that possible?, I meant.  I was new at this voices thing.

"This is the memdrupe," she said.  "This is what you brought back from the skew."

"Get outsa here!"

"No, really.  It is."

"Naw!"

"No‑‑it really is!"

"Pppppp!" & I blew the ultimate explosive skeptical raspberry.

She flew through the thought & throttled me.

"IT IS! GET IN THERE & SEE!"

My throat drew out like a golden ribbon, drawing thusly my tones out like a golden ribbon, & I must add here that this is the more normal form of communication for us, with our flexings mezzing up our voizezes, see, which is why we are never almost joined by voices almost never.

Now we were joined by throttling, & without much considering I began eating the thought, reaching a hand‑‑also like a ribbon, maybe, O, let's say, Ooooo, let's say it's a dark green ribbon here, just for flame, I mean variety (I mean variety when I say flame), with a lovely filigreed little spoon like kind of coffee spoon you feed fine cats out of, & I began taking in spoonfuls of her thought & eating it, tiny bit by tiny bit.
Yea, I think that's what she wanted, too.  It couldn't really be the memory, could it?  That would kill me‑‑I mean, that's what Poola said, wasn't it?

So she was tricking me‑‑again!‑‑making me eat some goddma thought of hers, & if I ever got it all down, & if I survived, & if I remained sane, & if I remianed myself, I'd be full of some thought she wanted me to have.

& I did, I did, I did, & I did‑‑so I suddenly was.

THE BEAKER'D TALE

Yea they were getting high on my drupe (my drupe!!) & doing nothing to decipher it at all.  It was as encrypted as ever zas, & Yooy & his overtrained cronies were eating it up with their brains.

There are two schools of thought about thish eating with brains.  Well, they's not actually "schools," as such‑‑certainly not in the sense of concrete & form physical structures setting heavily into the purple tarpits at the edges of the Realms of Knome, much less rotund professors with features drawn in indelible fat cayons across their balloomy, furfitly-sphoricule obdomaims & daisy-faced students triping oer the oereoles of their own succulently stupified grins, much less low-grav "campuses" with the regulation blue-crystal grass (known as filanelockumininnal for the Karaakakkaakak, i.e., those who love big words) & the broad sweeps of the muscylar artist's brush, still showing the rol of his shoulders‑‑there & there & there‑‑but simply general contours of opinino held by large, pluralistic gropus of us in no partiuclar nor espeicaly way conjoined nor even necessarily even even in communication with one another.

One school [disclaimer here] finds this very suave, very soigne, ver appealing.  Eating with the brain is cool, they'd say, if the sonofabitches could talk.  It's remarkable, these cogsockers'd say.

The other [foredisclaimer here] school [disclaimer post] agrees with me in finding the practice disgusting.  Remarkable it may be, but yuk.

& this subhuman * procedure was going on, & Yooy & his stuprous henchmen were essentially using my drupe up, rather like the chemist who eats the sample he's spozed to analyze.  I dunno...a sample of rock candy maybe, huh?

I can't describe this: with a mouth pressed shut yet swelling outward, as if shit or cum were about to shitorcome spurting out, & with eyes druped, I mean drooped soppily, & of course the head‑‑suddenly greatly adverbally enlarged OF COURSE‑‑tilted at that precisely 7 degree angle denoting the legal nadir of torpidity, & their skin (their skin!) disgustingly tiled, like some malproprotioned ceramic snake, one would hold the tiny (with a dent in its little side!  like a cibe of ice partmilted!) drupe against one's cheek, using both hands, perhaps because this process rendered everything sloughily slimey, perhaps just becausei added to the fulsome insipidity, & begin...pressing in.

Distorting (gad!) not only cheek & my poor drupe, but also Sequential Staggers of the Space in concentric iSolimes around the head, so the entire visual field of the room might well, were the procexx to go on long enough, which it goddam did, be crumpled round & sworled in the manner of a sheet of cheap tinsel right in toward the Object of Desire‑‑my encrypted memories!

They'd make sounds, too‑‑& hey, if I couldn't describe what I've just descried, I most surely cannot even get my poor cold engine to cough even one little time along the dark journey round half the chilly globe of evoking for you that sound!

So I play the reording of it: An ululating wail like a parody of the feminine existing as an insult to femininity, with a mighty twinge of effeteness an utter pop in the chops or crack in the chaps or smack in the puss to homozextuals.  A sound clearly indicating an unwaveling of the rill.  Anyone who made that sound would be morally capable of anything but otherwise incapable of everything.  They'd vuck their own mothers but for lying helpless (facdown!) in their turds.

You may have gathered I was displeaded when I caught them.  Such Wrighteous Wrage by Wrights shoul'd've shocked what little zits of their "souls" they had inem, but it did Know Sucks Thang.

Giggling with a looniness a close rival in rebuffery repellancy, pardon the cliche, DON'T STEP IN THAT CLICHE‑‑agh‑‑they pranced into a ring, strategic spots around the lab, & played keepaway the drupeaway.

You've played it?  You run to one & he flings it to the next & you run to the next & he or she dandles it to you rnose, taunting you till you snatch, & flips to to the first guy again, with varaitions on how lond the tease ond to whom the toss, & as you'll recall it just goes on forever.

Plus they were taking time to drain a little more of it into their respective funloving heads, eating my precious drupe evn as I played, gave chase, jerked & snagged away.  I was big & clumsy in this scene (I think the sets were built too small‑‑nay?), & the lab was a shambles.

Here's where the principal's spozed to come in *.

But here *'s where things take a Turn for the Sinister.  Sure, it was childish fun.  Sure, it was a harmless hoot, with me emitting just a little blood out of my mouth.  But you see, someone had gowned & bagged the principal.  That's why he missed his cue.  I never even had a chance to make the character up.  He lay bound & twisted‑‑like a thick sheet of wrapping paper wraping nothing but a dark no-thing- in the shadowzone.

So the game of keepaway went on forever‑‑much longer even than Yooy might have wanted, were he still functioning at such a degree of sentiential sophistry (which the vucker wasn't).

We'd gotten worn down with repetition, which happens to you but which happens to us in spades, & we were little Fnool-sized microdwarzes by the time a sternfaced Polabetma reached in & plucked the merest sliver of my drupe away from us.

None of us could breathe for a while.  No air in the beaker we'd been dropped in.  Always, I thought, Always I am being dropped in to beakers in this tale.  This is a tale full of beakers.  It is The Beaker'd Tale.
THE BREAKER'D TAIL

OK, so I loophs up at Pola.  Pola look down on me.  She smiles‑‑& now THAT really worries me.  & then, man, she sterns her back (an.THA.really.worrie.m.!) & whirls .BAK at me just abristlin' with instruments (a.T.r.w.m.!) & reaches 'e, in & mushes the other fellows.

Well, I try to raitonalize my shock.  You'll note the Act hath snapped me into presente Time, where I woodknot wont tube-E.  & she sucks'em inot Tube E in precisely the manner you'd suck up the cells of a rotten fetus, yes the CELLS of a ROT ten fetus, not to‑‑I mean, to mention knot the cells of ten rot fetusesuses, nor the sells of a thousan fetus-E's, and‑‑still smiling with this trmenednosu lipschmique from another scene‑‑she warsches out the beaker (E!) & pus her lips (this really happened) up to the mouth of the beaker and

sucks me out
xuxth meeought
ux E ut!
NO MORE MEMORIES to CRACK

So Pola's sucking on me, & I'm becoming a very lovely shade of light blue, & I'm alifting up like a great & weightless wafer or a sheet capturning the sun & as broad as the first great field the toddler sees‑‑the one that makes him stumble & fall on his face, forever ruining his face, his face always scarred & distorted & ugly & aching, but with the memory of that field within, the field within.

As I say, I was flapping all over the place as Pola's lips‑‑as broad as callypygous hips‑‑stetched & nibbled me fore & aft.  It was interfering with my breath in the worst sort of way, so my speech came out with an attenuated slowness notable even for us Dimnentians, our speech already notoriously & infamously attenuated, such that the faster races‑‑the races that look more or less like Brancusi-curving lightbeams or tapering solid crescents of most perfected platimum‑‑wouldn't even talk to us, not even by paraladio (can you believe it?), not even with accelerators attached to our voitboits, not even for a moment.  They felt insulted.  They simply wouldn't take the time.  They just shot on by, & all we could do, in our slow way, was gooo oooo aaand aaaa, the head of each member of our race swinging crox the skies like skies like every other head of every other member of, our eyes fixed as one like watching the cosmic tennis match, the one with the perfectly incandescent, perfect-polished bolls shooting with gradually-deadly radiation overhead (a radiation which would distort & dissolve us & eventually lead to our polymorphyry, in case you were like holding your breath waiting for a slowly-enunciated explanation, that aforementioned radiation, however, never hownever even catching up with those swift brancusis spinking ox e xi), & we would all say in super slo-mo, "Gee," the most miuscule, viris-ized fur on the idges of the words‑‑the sounwaves just waking up at 5:00 AM & clearing their throots (for they don't have throats), grizzled & itchy & with gup in their eyes, & with too many eyes, each one the size of a yellowdog pinprick gummy with i's, iyis‑‑taking too long for even normal-speed races, like your homero shapeeyin, much less for those speedsters we love so much & admire so much as they zhoot through the paragraph above

cutting the very paragrapg to shribs!
slaxxing the xery teztiers of meyeprozaic into ox e xi, & show ong dand xo froerth!!

& so.  Even by these standards, elaborated acutely above, I was speaking slowly, & so I edit the vast blubbers of time out of the following, as Polapolapolapola said (ever so slowly, it goes without saying, as she was held back in her own right with her mighty & diligent sucking; O yea, & she was making sucking sounds, too, & I had to edit these out too.  & we Dims edit as slowly as we talk, so you can imagine without goes without saying how long I was by this time this babe was all done sucking me):

"[Thlurp thlurp] So you see, we've been looping around, only not just around but out, we've been looping farther & farther out, farther away from the core memories."

"The [uh! UH!  NNNNNGG!] what?"

"The [lcklcklcklcklcklcklcklck] innermost memdrupe, the smallest nugget, known as nusquet.  Once we crack that schechter, pardonnant mon anglaise, there'll be no more memories to crack."

"And we'll be [eeee!] OK?"

"We'll be [shthphllptuk!] 'OK.'"

& then we shook each other like sheets, a line of 8-point thoughts inside each head, separate yet virtually parallel, & with the same color ink, thinking, Again with the sheets, & the god damn dew flew everywhere (except thatdew never flies, the dew never flew, "ne'er flew the gogdarmd do," as the poet shed in his poet sted), indicating as far as I've ever been conclerned that we made love better than anyone at that stage, plus we were busily shaving, I mean saving our race, & the neighbors said, "Hey!"

& when the neighbors say hey you fid yourself zooming out till your life seems like a tiny island in the possibi.ities of time, & you ask Where is all this taking place? ips the lithp of the drip of the delicate newbore spume.
Wel, kid, on Dim.  Dim, kid‑‑your new home.  Deal with it!  Your little halflife, halfkid (I'm half-kidding, kide!)'s taking place on somewhat less than a gas planet, orbiting as far away from a vague red colossal sun as was possible‑‑the sun, Iripugno, actually thrusting us away as we cling like the dwarf child deform edchild the monstrous soft mutatated (& disgustingly STILL MUU TATE XING! Still!  Monstrous!) child needing exponential quanitittiums of love beyond what any mum can gub, the perenniel goddam suckling having sucker his mother dry.

The bad child.  The smelly child.

& not even quasi-solid or innardly-solid like your gas giants‑‑no ice core, much less no rock nor stone.  No essence, nor core, no guts, just the wooshy gallic gashes of hyperabstracted French philosophical texts commenting on the footnotes like lightchips of hypothesized hypostaticized hyerptrophied ruminatory soi-distant "solid cores" & their mythically emplausible "je ne sais" quots, & the hymptonpompique eyes unable to float near enough to rea these texts, hence light-sensitif yet purblind eyes, floating in our troubled panet's gassy little corps, reading nothing, surrounded with incoherent light, taking in nothing...

There's a set-up for you, huh?

Yes, abstract gasses in the core, lesser & lesser gasses as you go up, with a resultant almost endless size (so big we can be seen from anywhere, even from the Universe Next Door (here's us waving at The Universe Next Door‑‑"Hiya!!"‑‑dis con ce rti ng t hem greatly ahem), so now you know we are the great & gassy faces that fave faces that have been waving at you, from your very own sky, for all these years.  When nobody believed you, then nor naow,

and a resulting wimpgrav, & an atmosphere differing very little from the "ground."

& a resulted very vague dawn.  This is why I rarely decribe times of the day.  We keep trying to make up calendars‑‑but in the gashes we have no stars, & our rotation 'stoo sloowww to tell, & Iripugno) barely visible, recall, & not wanting to be visible) just this vague presence, like an ancient red wound, keeping no fixed scheudle, what with his always pushing us away‑‑unique in the universes, to my knowledge, except of course for L'Univers d'Uniques where nothing is unique.   I wouldn't want to go there, but I may have to the wray this story wrends.

& that's where we live.  Immeasurable & foggy time, a sad little monster of a planet crying for its spiteful mum, a vertiable celestial argument for abortion which no one, not even God, especially naught Goughd, could dis agree with, no matter how much he & she (& we) fall apart, as we do at night.

Figure it: at night there is nothing whatsoever to hold us together, right?
THE LASAR-SCAR WALL

We didn't know exactly who we were, or how we had gotten this way, but of course we knew something was terribly wrong.  & that we couldn't wake up.  Or what would happen if we could.  Wake up, I mean.

But we couldn't.  Some things manifestly & as irritatingly as the radiant sandgrain in the tender moistive gorin of the cosmic clam that the clam's pain & near-eternal goddma time turn into the radiant pearls known as clamsuns, simply id not fit.

To take der primary example‑‑der xampole which has really led to this memory, & this enforced compulsive, grain-irritant discussion of the memory, there was this famous wall, in the form of a massive, furlongs white wall arced scarringly through the membranous heart of town‑‑a white wall like a laser scar, its curve increasing at one end according to some unknowable but glaringly evident, hypersophisticated, metamathematical formulae, the wall curved in this vexing fashion known to all of us, despite our tendentious tendency to slouch & to just mope around, generally glum, generally expressionless, & not exchanging much in the way of War Verbal Cocommunication, the wall known in virtualy-wordless point-of-facts as the Lasar-Scar Wall of the title there, slightly greater than twice as high as the highest one of us‑‑any of us‑‑could stretch any one of our heads.  & I'll a dmit we usually had just one head.

But see, if we stretched any farther, the molcules of our attenuated neck or necks would perseparateforce perfrom our heads, & we'd lose that head.  This set-up‑‑the precisely too-difficult height of the deep-hypnotic wall, seemed deliberate.  Obviously deliberate, we would think, again & again, & this sore ghost of intention, yea this goddsam sore god damn GHOST of goddam INTENTION like made us want to‑‑nay! have to!‑‑stand at some point, any of its pure tensor-calculus-goddam-points before the wall & stretch our heads up over it, so as to lose our heads, but few of us ever did that.

Some did it.  I'd seen it happen; it was funny in an eerie way, like everything, really.  Everything.
Yea, their heads'd loft themheadselves up (up smilingly, I'll admit! heartbreaking-smilingly UP!) so "gently oer the wall," as we'd say, & as we'd think, as in some inscrutable game, & land O ever-so-gently-O in the dust-O! on the shaded, dried-murk-greyly tutherside o the Scar Wall o, o to lie qua contented little skulls in the thick dirt, the strange & deeply fine dust, on the eternal shadey shade of the far side of the unscalable, indecipherable wall, on the back side, the unconscious side, the safe side of its cryptic letterings...

For, to get us back (safely back) to the sunside of the wall, you could tell it was incredibly ancient (I don't know how‑‑something deeply dreaming in the light, something smooth as an infant's memory about its curve, added to its general sense of remembering things none of us had "the will to could," as our poor paltry thought came bluping out) although it shone like spanking-new, dustless & unlike anything else in our world.

Unless you count the sun *.  & we never count the sun.

& along the surface of this wall were scarred, animate, organic graffitoids everywhere‑‑constant, multilayered, turquoise-glowing palimpsests of graffitio, of ancient, near-foreign, possibly-alien communiqués, crys, declarations, clue, keys, formulae‑‑all swimming through fluent surfasces of that lightglone timewhite scarwall like scads of these Drowning Hypnopompic Beings struggling out their last, best syllabic cries !! to you...

!!!

But to no avail.  That's particularly why we stood there‑‑& I mean at one time or another during our grey & dusty days everyone stood there at some point along the data-teeing wall scrying the lettershapes for soundshapes or meaningshapes or at least the inklings of faces, or pieces of image, or something...something...

& like I say, we had a tendency to stretch ourselves upward, in the same way you would crane your clumsy, gelatinous necks to snag one glimpse of the white parade, only in our case far moreso, in surreal fashiuon, you may have noticed, farmoreso.
& like I said before that, some of us would lose it.  Some of us (& one wonders‑‑the weaker ones or the stronger ones‑‑or which kinds of ones?) would, as the saying goes "disconnect" & die, with their heads flaoting oer the Enameled Artifact to turn into tiny toruses (which is what your dead & disconnected bodies do, heads included too) amongst the dust of their fellow-toruses on the shaded, other side

the side on which, as we said "the scars don't shine" like the dark side of a moon, only you could, given time, walk right round the Lasar-Scar Wall to view the heads, to retrieve them if you were so inclined (as none of us seemed to feel we were; but someone was, for many of the heads‑‑I might go so far in the safe womb of these parentheses, to say half of the dis con ec ted heads disappeared, or were retrieved, perhaps to be spatially if not molecularly reunited with the larger-forming toruses of their bdoeis

I mean bodies bodies bodies bodies bodies, equally dead back on the other side, softing like larger & unlike twins (twins of the heads is what I mean) along the popuated, "sunny" side of the scarwall the scarwall of the wailing wall of scars; so you'll probably agree with me when I whisper (psst!) that that's a lot of surreptitious retrieval there‑‑huh?  Huh?  Am I right?  Psst‑‑Huh?), in contrast to you moon, with its side so similarly dark, but where retrieval of the many heads we know damn well y'all have lying there, turning not into toruses in your world, where as I understand it nothing turn too-toruses‑‑sad world!‑‑is so difficult as to be next to impossible, a safe little nexus to be.  That's why we-craning at our scarwall envy thee.
PIRATE-ATTITUDINAL HATS
or
THEORIES?  HA!
or
HAHA "FACE" DO

No one can approach the planet because of its "snow of pain."  It whirls within a cosmic snow (analyzable as organic fragments of one of three big thoeries*, these being, in decrescendoing ordeur of audoacity and/or/and discombibulatium:

 The Vapor Theory holds that this torn papiere or snowlike tordpapyore stuff are the "remains of a vaporized protoworld," the glitch, or hitch, or zitch in this theory being that this world would have had to be hehehe, pretty durned big‑‑say, a diameter pudging its weightbelt out past the orobit of your Saturn, burping & eating Saturn, & almost all of it made of these, well, flakes‑‑organic longchain goddam flakes, which then would've had to blow apart (against god knows what gravfield, right, right?), through chemo interactions undefiable even by the quaint haha theorists of this Vapor Theory.  Vapor theorists are thin & sensitive types‑‑vatalike, with curly hair, only generally rather short, easily excited, forming a nervous band as their theory, by general concensure, is

 subjuncted, as we say, by the swahsbuckling assholes of the X theory, who maintain, no, it must've been some form of manufacture of organic materials, some starsystem, massive feeding or chemical warfare or manufacture or feeding kind of hypercivilized thing.  Garbage, then.  The hardnosed Garbage Theory, which likes to say the firm & clorlful chunks of its theory vaproize the Vapor Theory.  The Garbaigists laugh at stupid jokes.  They wear jackboots.  They hitch up their drawers & wear large & silly, pirate-attitudinal hats.  They go "Haw!" a lot.  "Haw!" is their main refutation.  But the Grabage Theory itself is broken into

 Chunks of Virtual Garbage by the Lifeform Theory snooty artistes.  Thei "artforms" unknown, poseurs extraordinaires, they seek something more abstract & interlaced an elegant‑‑more a Gallic cat's cradle of interlocking conceptualizations of how this dealy crap got spewed out in the much-abhorred though some say whorish "atmosphere" so wide & far round Dimnentia.  The LT poses, then, that the stuff was or even still is a lifeform.  Subcomponents of the theory are 1) if exrinct, we are seeing the fossils or dropping of the spacelifeforms ("Haw!"); 2) if extant, we are being driven deliberately mad by some vacuum-breathing species or multispecies that eat your thoughts (& don't gimme haw for thaghwt!).

There were minor theorists, but they were killed in a great pogrom much too bloody & large abd bloogy & loorge to fitz withum the scoptiums of this soidisant "book."

So the only aleins we ever saw were dead ones‑‑dead or mad or madly wishing they was dead.  So we had little feel forthem.  You know‑‑like fish worshed up up on the shore.  Who gave a vuck, right?  Or coughing, sickly malcontents bitching about our atmosphere, it sounded like.  In many cases we killed them.  We killed them.  We killed all of them.  We killed the alien fish as they warshced orschor.  We killed them & their small families.  We slit open their bellies, inasmuch as this mode of killing of mode of killing of mode was applicable.

We have a graveyard to prove it.  We killed the aliens who came (even, we will now that we've descended to this paragraph, admit, when they seemed fairly healthy & in protective garments or "suits" & walked upright, inasmuch was "walked" & "upright" etc.) because they could none of them change shape.  We killed them & place them in the Alien Graveyard in the Alien Graveyard which exists like a small drupe or memory-drupe in the pressure center of our highest pressure zone of the City, known as Zome.

We killed them & buried them there, OK?  Wanna make something of it, hnn?  Hnn?  We buiried them just as you bury your dead when you bury them, only for different reasons.  As you know, we never bury Our Own Dead.  They turn into pure crystalline & one-might-say lovely toruses, gleeful beautiful perfect better-tan-living toruses...so why buryem, right?

These alien others, these chinks, these niggers, the gambinos, these spics, these goddam kikes, these chiggers, these gnitz, these slants, these kokomobozos, these odiferous trash slag bap bastard os, these lilyliveried liberal psycho owies, these greentinged gooily-glowing grotesqueries, these inedible unmalleable monoformed undimlish deivant freaks‑‑

I've forgotten the rest of my sentence...Oh yea: these etc. got ugly & toxic after they died.  You wouldn't believe what happened to these bodies after they died.  We were appalled.  We were not, however, sory we killed them, just as we‑‑& to make this a bit more personal, I‑‑would kill, say, you were you to land on here, without no regrets, & plant you very deep (much more than your six feet‑‑I mean, Hoo!  Haw!  Don't make he hoo!), somewhat close to the center of the urph, I mean dyrph, so's you wouldn't, god know, stiffen up & rot or start smiling more & more insanely brightly until we just couldn't stand the sight of your enalrging, smiling "face", or you'd simply rot & make us all sick.

Frankly, I don't know what you would do.  & frakkly, I wouldn't want to know what you'd be likely to in the event of inevitable death if you met me or us face to haha "face" do.

Haha "face" do.

OK.  So you've wrestled with & thoroughly grasped the gaspless concept by now that we were not what you'd gasp call "Galactic Citizens of the First Order," though we had plenty of aliens here.  A thousand dead ambassadors if we had one, a hundred dead intrepids under the simulated urph material we had hyperpressurized beyond even the hyperpressure we lived in in the core of the pressurized City.

So that's your image of us.  The approach, the undreamt-of kill, the encapsulated burial, the silence of time, the isolation, our shapes shifting like the concepts of the dream, our smiles like the hypnopompic fever grins inhabiting the micro-sci-fi novels that burp out in your deep inebriate dusk.
What the hell am I saying?

This: Unstated Theory Number Four‑‑held by none but floating over all of us, just back of our heads when we have heads‑‑whispering Quarantine, murmuring Exile, moaning something like Planet of the Dead.  You get this theory?  You "get" our "position"?  You extrapolate from this the way we might, uh, "feel"?

I didn't think so.
FOGBONDED CONTINENTS
or
MIST-ENSHROU-DEAD-OTHERS

It's not that life didn't hurt.  It's not that some of us didn't think there were voyeuristic aliens watching us

Why else, they reamed while reasoned, did we break into musical numbers all the time?  why else would we change shapes & colors so beautifully, like a race of organic screen savers flaming the unseem screams of some yuppie sonsabitches up in the sky, or on one of our seven (count them‑‑seven‑‑"One...two...three...four...five... No, I only get five."

or so fogbonded continents, where we were unable to go (not afraid, not afraid, not afraid, not afraid, not afraid), where anything might live.

& if it lived, reason-id this plurality, why, it could watch, right?  Right?

Right.  We could exist entirely for purposes of cruel entertainment.  & some of us, myself swoon-aswim in this Smooth Metaphoric Yolk of some of us, were not nil-peased or nil-peaséd at the thought.

I mean, we wore that thought around our necks like a Qoiling Qrimson Snaqe & a fine petsnakeatthat, or else we smoked that thought like a Long Plump joint or we sucked upon the thought like adulterous wives sucking cocks in hell where the cocks bleed bitter & small or we hang that thought like a long plumb-bob into the destitute depths of our aching need for fantasy within fantasy probably a causal thing though we are by no means sure we have cause.

Yea, a few of us‑‑a modest plurality of the paranoid plurality, suspicious of the rest‑‑felt this gave us a purpose in life.

& an audience for all those musical numbers, so frequent & elbaorately or elaborately staged & with such frequent changes of shape (i.e., costume-shapes) they took it all out of us, so we'd lie in various nonsexual heaps like soused partygoers too hungover to regain our shapes, much less talk, but only give an occasional mirthless toot (O mirthless toot!) on our coiling noisemakers.

"Plaaaaaaaaaaa!"

& it's not that we didn't try to kill ourselves, an act we probably I think performed as an added form of entertainment, for those amongst the (possibly legion) hoards of aliens or mist-enshrouded others, mist-enshrou-dead-others, of a morbid cast, & which we had no clear concept of, death being something we only rarely & ultimately do (see TORUSES above), going to a heaven richly conceived as 1) no change in shape, 2) no adulterous wives, & 3) toruses above toruses.

But we'd like fling ourselves suddenly off bridges or the razored shelves of rockcliffs (plentiful sometimes here) or the towers erected during some of our more massive, manic musical shows‑‑flinging our bods off the towers, right in the midst of the shows!  Yea!

& some of us fell like rockets, forming a sharp point downward as they fell, & would be quite utterly destroyed...dead, if you will.  But most of us just "floughed out" & frittered down like pansies, colorful vapors oozing down like vapors of carbon over the dry lip of the icy glass, or like effulgent scarves spreading all over the tips of trees, or like autumn, igniting the trees themselves, or like a small child's thought of suicide, may heaven forbid, or like the dead thought of hurting yourself to death.

& they'd watch this, our audience.  Or else no one did.  & I'm pretty sure no one watched us as we meekly gathered ourselves back together after these falls, packing our molecules in like you'd pack the form of your snowman in, & wander home cold & pale & somehow wounded for good.

A tough life, in many ways, & strange one, too‑‑but worth it for those shows, huh?
EDITED!
or
1) PER 2) VER 3) SI 4) TY
or
DEAD COURIERS BY DAWN

So I'm walking through town, the high-pressure zones of the city, at the very bottom of the blue shute, where few shifts in appearance are permitted, & even fewer possible.

The pressure at the heart of town keeps us from shifting our molecules, see.

& right now I like this, duded up in my black trenchcoat.  I've taken to doing this wandering business, down where the sidewalks möbius-loop into one another & the folks gaze at one another downside up & upside down like figures lost in a Skescher etch, ever since I began to suspect my memories have been edited.

Memories, Edited, Signs Of.  Like you run away from people who seem to think they your friends.  This has happened to me.  Twice.

Or like you're holding out your keys, as if headed toward your front door to insert & turn the keys, thereby getting in, when you realize 1) you are nowhere near a house, 2) you don't know where you live, if anywhere, 3) people you thought were your friends are running from you down unknown hysteric streets strewn with the bodies of couriers see below, & 4) you are lost.  This has happened to me twice.

Or like you be reading, some well-lit, crisp, & large-lettered adjectival text & there are holes where words are missing, or evidently missing, judging from the existence of holes in the shapes of suddenly unknown, indecipherable letters, through whiuch you can see past your book, no matter how fat dat book.  Happened to me twice.

Or like persistent, chronic, coronic, often longlasting adjectival fits of jamais vu‑‑that's the one where you look around, particularly at others' faces and/oer the sky, & you just can't fit them into any conceivable frame of referance that has anything to do with you.  Happened twice to me.

Or like you become convinced there is another you stalking you, so you compuslively begin stalking thi other you, the dificulty of stalking an unseen being of uncertain existence serving somehow only to the fires of your desire, so you search & seek & quest verbally every night.  It affects your speech, your shapeshifting, your dress (I mean attire) your attire mean your dress.  Happened once & is happened again.

Or like you're pretty sure you have a wife somewhere‑‑damn it, you know you have a wife somewhere‑‑but you cannot even begin to figure out 1) where this idea came from or 2) how on dim you would ever start searching for something so intimate & basic that you do not seem to have & 3) something tells you not to pursue this one.  Twice-happening as I speak I speak.

Or like your body seems strange‑‑I mean, beyond the normative strangeness of our bodies here.  I mean, it seems really strange.  It is not your body, yet you are stuck with it, as with a very dense dream you cannot even dream of waking from.  Or trying to awaken from.  I have felt this of my body in two sets of two times two.

Or even like all mathematical calculations you perform come out two too much.  You can't figure this; you can't correct it.  You just know, like the gifted idiot knows, so you feel like the Gifted Idiot, double-crossed.

Or like things happen twice & then happen twice again.  Amazing stuff has happened that has happened to me once, so I am waiting for "the other foof tofoll," as you urphies say.

So like I take to forming myself in the image of The Tall Man‑‑a famous poster in Dimnentia, a figure so firm of shape that we all love to hold ourselve in his shape.

Except that holding ourselves in shapes comes not very easy to us.  It is, not to put too fine a point on it, impossible for us.
For the likes of us.

We are Dimnentia.   We are not, as the rumors sifting through which is not to say thorghu the poisonous clouds surrounding our world would have you believe "polymorphously perverse."  We are not perverse.  I mean, no more than any other smarty-pants race (& we Dimnentia are Class IIa Smarmy-Pamps‑‑& this is pretty dard smardy-pantsh't).  I mean we are not particularly perverse.  Not much more perverse than you, I'll bet, though you're not in our copy of Perversity: The Book.  I'm waiting for our new copy to arrive‑‑the one that has you in it, under "New Entries: Check This Out!"  It'll arrive, I trust, by Dead Courier soon.

All our couriers arrive dead.  But they are well paid, & never complain.

We are a dark-humored lot.  This is our main perversity, unless you count changing shape as a form of 1) per 2) ver 3) si 4) ty.

Anyway, everyone loves to form into this difficult shape of The Tall Man & hang out in the high-pressure zones, where we wilt from that shape fairly slowly.  We can spend a night‑‑or at least one of our long lingering adjectival dusks‑‑in this one gorgeous shape.

A kind of a sameness there, of course.  But we don't think we mind, though we are often often wrong about what we think.

Where was I?  Oh yes, wandering the trottoirs of the pressure zones, amongst many another Tall Man walking the looping sidewalks there.  I find this comforting, & it gives me time to build, cell by gluey cell, my Theory of the Edit Memories.

Now this is not a nutty thought for me, for I have been in a position where soma memems coulda been edited.  So I'm not as scared of being crazy as I'm scared of the editing, & what, & why.  This concerns me as I hold my coat to my upper thighs amongst the stuff & whipping winds of a cool summer dusk.
FINALLY
uh
THE THING BEYOND THE TREES THAT HORRIFIES HER
or
THE BIGOL SPHORIC STROPOLATER©

No matter what deep pressure-folds I ducked into, no matter how tucked into the high winds that rip across the alleys, no matter how many turns of the dun-grey alleys I turned, growing smaller & more inconsequential with each inward turn, no matter how many forms of myself I tried to hid within various highly imaginative forms of my other selves, no matter how much I tried to change the changing shapes of my shapeless thoughts into unchanging thoughtless rocks of a tutterly alien shore, someone was following me.

Of course all Dim think someone is following them all the time.  It's subgenetic, as is the need to be following someone all the time.  Casual observers‑‑suave observers, high-soaring laid-back clear observers blinking their deep blue lids at the tiny scene below‑‑might think the world of Dim is just a big ring of Dims with one following another‑‑a wide-ranging theory we Dim Dim Dim are too busy with evading & following to refute.  Though we could, quite easily.  I bet we could.

But this was different.  This was that awful Polametma, following so closely I could feel the sniff of her hissy snit against the backed-up whiskers of my nape.  Trailing along like that in addition to whoever was following me in the proper manner, & poking something into my back, something soft into my back, and‑‑furthermore‑‑going "Psst!  Psst! Psst!" endlessly.

I tried countermeasures, such as the alleys I went down some long lines back.  & I tried fanning various snag-formations of arms behind me, so as to puncture her‑‑& puncture her I did, but she'd reflate like an old bag & come back after back of me, poking & hissing again, possibly trying to drive me nuts, possibly just for fun.

It is hard to say.

Finally‑‑& I might add magnificently‑‑I snapped & spun around in a swiveled pirouette© (mine owne patented move©) & with  apatented moue© I punched her right in the face, & the fist slipped beautifully in to a head that was the texture of the smooothest molten glass, & it took on the precise contours of my beautiful fist, which was now an enlarged fist that glistened, I had hit an enlarged fist of my own fist that had glistened, & the tingling I could feel & the tingling I couldfeel withing my fist were her thoughts & memories entering my defenseless fist.

& of course I was the one who looked stunned, I was the one whose mouth was open just a bit too much orgasmically.  Pola's face, if we extrapolate Pola's face & project it into one of those projectosphores© so dark blue they appear to me at least to be black at least we can see that Pola's face would appear to be the inverted contours of a fist, the mold of the fist, but if we extrapolate a little fiurther (stretching up on our toes just a little bit more, like the girlchild in the white nightie streching up to see through the window the trees & the thing beyond the trees that horrifies her & the thing beyond the thing beyond the trees that eats her alive) we perfeceive that Pola's face is in the feminine distrotions of amouth scking on a great big goggling cock (note the huge lump in her cheek; note the lips stretched into thin red lines; note the heavily crossed eyes; note the nose curved down to a hook; note the jaw dropped down into a gape of utmost idiocy; note the breathless wetness of the skin; & note how, most of all, with all this stretching & suction, she looks immensely bored); but if we decide, as we really must decide, to extraolate even more (so the little girl tumbles right out the window but keeps on falling, kicking, into no ground below, because she stretched simply into her dream & falls into the feminine quest, & falls forever into dream after dream, kicking, just like that), we see that Pols the concerted look of the concerted lyric look of conquest (almost perfectly hib!) as she trnasfers all her thoughts to my stupid fist.

& if we replace her face of my fist with my fist in her face & project that back into the bigol sphoric stropolater©, we see my face with a haze of foolish white make-up, as if I were doing The Mime Of An Idiot (which your Mimes Of Reality never do), & for a face that's receiving‑‑leastwide within the face of its fist‑‑massive jerks & spurts of disinformation & distilled dispurtz of distilinformation & burtz of illiformatium, this face looks pretty dumb; & if we extrapolate any further‑‑something which we must not do‑‑we see (or would see, I mean) nothing but a childish pout, like the little boy pouting over the loss of the sister he despised (without even having the word despise (despising her all the more without the word holding all-it-ing)!), & (not-extrapopollenegating more) he would be even-direr pouting that her very existence had been taken away (our sisters' dreams can do that‑‑take their very being zaway), so that he'd (now) never even had a sister to love & depsise, and, in the negation of our final non-extrapolation, we would see nothing but a boy's swollen face, pouting with bees, a face swolt up & polleng with bees.

I pulled my fist out of Pola's face with a Pola's face with a pop Pola's face with a suction pop & the fist was one glad dude lemme tellya; it was one satisfied little tumid guy, I'll clueya; & Pola's face with a pop even as it was packed with information it looks foolsomely dumb, & in point of fact rubbery, & almost gooey, so even as one expectantly Pola's face with a pop observed her pulling back a much bigger, much more glazed-looking fist (as if it were already enwrappedwith something, as if she'd socked me sometime back there & still carried the glistening mold of my punched-in puff on the furfafe of her fift), one knew my face‑‑hell, my whole damned head‑‑was gonna spritz into sparkles when she hit.

I mean there wasn't gonna be any of this "molding around the fist" with this bigtime counterpunch‑‑nozzir!  For the folowing reasons: 1) the fist was as big as the head‑‑hence, no moldability; & 2) the head was, as w'uv ta'en "strands" to "pixel oubt," already hardly a Pola's-face-with-a-pop tangible gourd at all, to sway the leashed‑‑hence, "Shit splatters," as the kids today huhuh try to shay.

So I just run.  Pola relaxes, & upon denser inspection with the later-denser help of the laterdenser-blue-proejected extraordinapolatinador© you can interpolate, using the help of the inverse innerterpolatibor© used to interperrupt the splatter we seeon the macrostraplador©, that she never intended to strike Pola's face with a pop anyway.

Pop!  I run & pluck off my fist‑‑you know, the one periphrastically descried above (& when I say above I mean before & when you say before I put thihs fist over my head) as being somehow in some unscientifically-impressionistically-hebephrenic way "filled up with knowledge," packed with iotas of info from Pola's ©lacigolopot deah, cunningly downloaded with digitalized data from the foolhoardly ponch.

I ripped off the fist & buried it, Pola laugging distantly.  Standing right next to me but laughing distantly.

"It'll follow you," she promised, as if she were the fist & the fist were a friend & someone's borrowed memoires forced into your flesh by your own grunt impulses were going to dig themselves out & follow you, till your own fist grapped you by the throat in your sleep & choked you with the knowledge what you'd done.

& it was so.  But for my evident stampidity, I shoulda knowed.  "Nothing stays buried on Dimnentia long in Dimnentia on buried stays nothing!" she laughs at me (distanctly).
THE CHEEK, THE CHUTZPAH, THE NOIVE!!!

She was tormenting me with memories, hitting me with my own drupe.  & she didn't stop there, but went on to & kept on polluting portions of my flesh, & I had to keep on burying them, wading out to ever-deeper layers of the swamps, which seem to have endless strata thickening as they go, alternating between various ick-hues of blue & sometimes green, of muck green shades & sometimes your odd glazed blue, strata which had the eyes of flat animals that looked at you, eyes that eyes that liquidly surround you as you passed down through.

& here I would blow My Big Bubble (that's how it happens here, have I descrived?  You go underfluib & ultimately (you) exhale but the (air) just forms (One) Big Bubble, not your (urph) effervescence that we love for you so, but just one simple bloat of a billowy (balloon) sort of thing, in white polymer voam, with all your latest WORDS WRIT LARGE across their ever-srteching belly.  'S one good reason we dinna swims.

But I bloody well swum, trying like hell to reach a solid bottom, & leaving along with many a (limb) many a (swell) & (billow) of (air) below‑‑though never on the solid bottom I was never to know‑‑trying to shake off the poisonous little jargs this she-witch was leaving in me.

Hell.

Yes, hell!  It got hell! so she'd just pass me by (can you imagine? PASS me BY just like that? the cheek, the chutzpah, the noive!!!) with a smile to beat all smiles & just...puff a load of Crystalline Knowledge into me, sometimes spritzing one of my endlessly dopplering tracers of my fleeing afterimages of limbs of imbs of mbs, sometimes actually succeeding in successfully spraying my face...

...and JEEZ! (to borrow the phrase of the young dead god we stole from you; I mean after all, it looked like you didn't like him much...) I had to rip straight off, I say rip straight ouph my taint-, defile- edface and, with whatever it is that hangeth goopy just below a face, slobber my blind way to the Blinding Swamps & waddle right in, face help bleeding like a mask of life in one hand, me looking for all the worlds like Grendel (Grendel‑‑the monster what stole impself from you, a rare case of stowaway in the hold of The Fucking Shrukthaang) with someone's ehead‑‑though not a head, actually, so much as a loose & flapping gobbet of face of course of face of course of face‑‑to stuff it into imaginary mulk I mean much I mean muklich I mean mulph I mean as deep as I could go.

For the ditch was All Too Right: nothing lets itself stay buriéd on Dim.  We're just not grounded like that.  So all I could do was to bitch, to coign a phase, my contaminated body parts (including, on variorious occasiums, my xain & qext & palves & zheels & jucknels & vur & aff & face of course of face) with their Offending Phrases instigated deep in their clear elaxatic vesh so as to delay for as long os pozzivule the day they'd bopopen the big oak folktale door & stand, all-meat shoulderpads & pith, with a Mary Shelley lower & toss out a grunt like a charred chunk of log notsaying, "Ready, bub?"
DIVORCED SOUNDS, LOOKING FOR MATES...

Well, no, but I kept digging in manly fashion, as if I were readybub, & I came to a lot of very Bad Things, & also, too, to some, too, bad too things too, but then after all that too too too came I finally came I fine to the Finely Gold Book or Finelye Golde Booke or Finne Lygoldde Gabookke they'd set out or sete oute or sette outte for me, & the first line, in its fine, coalblock print, says, "The Ypions were crippled in their decision making."

& I slam that book shut & my mouth superstrung in an instant into a lipless purse forms unsmiling bigrippling & wide & agrees thusly: Yes.

You see, the Yps were smart enough, despite those clown costumes; & they were as we have seen (consulting the books again..) ethical enough (as defined etc. Ethical: Enough...), but their "dwelling 'place'" hanging out in the moonlit wee-hour timeless goddam dusky timelanes of the Lesser Akashic Records had certain, how shall we say (consult book again...here...), physico-modalities rendering it quite (& I say "quite" below) below possibility for them to Meet & Make Any Decision.

They tried, & here's what happened.  We OPEN the BOOK again & find ourselves ZOOMING IN to the GROWPHZHOOMING BOOK expanding outward round us rather like a rising pie full of currants or those little date pieces spronkled I mean sprinled I mean sprinkled with coconut or powdered sugar that I like in all directions, the Expanding Book Universe with its Cheesy Prose, evidently a book on food growing in all ways expanding round us in anti entro P...

They gathered, in a grey room, naturally‑‑a dimly lit, blinded (I mean window blinds, not gouge-your-leary-eye zout-blind eyezoubt blinds of the dustcovered I ZOUT BINDS) room puzzlingly absent of records‑‑I mean, the premise & the scene having been set up above as this being some variation on the so-called "akashic records,: e.i., repositiur of all data, including those obsessive intricately-defuckingtailed insanities of your early youth when you stood alone in that shower that shower that shower that shower (is this insane oor what? (I think: Or what below) below‑‑but anyway, maybe there are sections of time where there's, you know absolutely nothing to record, so the record of that, the akashic record of that, the record of that is like empty, see.  I don't know.  I have no time to speculate ha ha.  I have this sad meeting to describe here we go in go in go...

They'd gather round a big table in this room.  You know, in Classic Committee Style.  We're not going to mess with Classic Committee Style here, becuase I will assure you below this meeting gets messed with anyway & of its own daccord.

So like one of the Ypions round the table they were all so greyly sitting round, with me in tiny atendance & witnessing the whole thing like amphetamine nightmare with no implication any of this is written (it is not written) underinfluence of phetamine the Great Gpd PHETMAINE 'cause-it snot would take charge of the meeting‑‑you know, clear its throats & cal the meeting together, as if they weren't already sitting round & round that indintley upward spiraling frozen gyre-shape of a table (have I mentioned it wasa "frozen gyre-shape" of a table?  I guess I just did.  It was grey, a buig ol' mothervuckin spiral of a tubt going upward, infinitely.  Many Yps existend.  Many Yps were in like attenlikedance..and they did dance...I saw them do it...I will swear I did below) below anyway.

& so it'd clear it's throat & pound the gavel, the ancient gavel yet freshly created here: the Paradoxical Gavel.

& attemtp to say, "Let's bringthis thing to order," or "Let's get gong," or "Meeting adjourned" (which seemes inapprorpiate to me, at this point...but you but you just consider these were creatures out of time; they had trouble with time; they were dis joint ed vis a vis time ok & they like sort of got it...wrong some er times ok), or "Whatever," where up on

Its voice would melt, e.g., "Meeting called to uuurrrr gaaaa daa faaa bblll aaaaaa!"

& it would itself start to melt, in the following manner: Its voice continuing to decay, the sound of its voice would, as if in the disgust I think we always, I mean all, felt, divorce itself (tossing the little gold ring down with a lil gol ching & a fillippy fillup of phingers, jus like dat, chiiinnng!) from the orifice emananting what will henchfarth be revert two ash "attempted remarks"

A-and the speaker would melt.  Disgustingly, stinkingly, with a lot of liquid (grey, of course bubbles & frartsing noises‑‑& even these foul noishes di vor ching them elves from the bubble braxting with the zarks, phphphhhhh!, so you had 1) noises flating (disgustedly) away & 2) grey bubbles & 3) the entire head, & avey large head it war, 4) melting

and also I think the gavel, rather than making the sort of good solid spark of a wake-up qaak on the echolating surfasce of the "table" quoting itself like akashic table zwould, would pop like the thinnest lightbuln into dist, the sound of the pop not even a proper sound but more like the memory of a sound, so as not to have to divorce it self from the etc. & thereby get mixed up with the other, sometimes & very often less-than-desirable sounds sifting up into the "air" (& when one says air one means dust)

and so, to make a short story sort, the gavel'd pop.

The speaker'd melt (have I said disgustingly, the sound of the word disgustingly divorcing itself & taking the property & kids etc.?  I have?  Yes?  Ching!), gavel gone, etc.

Another Yp'd take up the effort, & start to say (very quickly, faster & faster as time went on & these poor guiltrittled lemminglike suckers'd try, one after the other, to pound another, new, similarly-evanscent pseudo-"gavel" & start the Reparation Meeting that Would Obviously Never Start, but rather just sorta disinteg rate into an orgy of kamikaze would-be qolls t'ordeur, as they say), "Meeting to resolve how to help Jym & the Dimyrs now called to, arg etc.," & would quickly melt down‑‑not in precisely the same way, because the Ypions were individual, we must keep sometimes in mind, & they liked, as I think we all can safely goddam say we all goddam like, to do things differently, to some modest extent, one from anothers, & so there would be like, different words, different specific call-to-order words, an different ululations as the words melted & the sounds cast down the golden, incredibly thin, wedding ring, & the bubblesud be BUBBLESUDBE slightly different‑‑i.e., of a different size, perhaps, or possibly in slightly different places along the flowing surface of the slightly different, albeit always grey-shaded, ooze, or wooze, into which the temporary speaker'd melt down, & maybe the brief incident would take slightly different specifically intense moments of time.

But let us face it & let's face us let it bravely, friends: the results were roughly the same.

No‑‑the resultats were exactly the same, as I believe I have made abundantly clear, an will go on believing no matter how obsceer it uuurrrr gaaaa daa faaa bblll aaaaaa...

"Quite," I say.

Or what, I think.

I assure you.

I swear I did.

So the Yps would seem to be able to do little to help me in this formal, committee-oriented fashion, nor will I detail you with the boredoms of the entire, countless number of  Ypions all along that upspiraling gyre of a table, each one of who mwas stupidly, yet determinedly, deadset  on trying to call things to order itself.

But believe me, they couldna do it.  Each one tried...it went on forever...but it was all just melted balls of greynaturally wax, lying round the endless spiral of an escheresque grey table rising upward to the air of a nineteenth-century phantasy of a grandiose, sublime superbuilding with spirals round its vasty sides there, & smelling pretty bad, & as I think I mentioned thinking I mentioned, all manner of divorced sounds flying round the empty pseudo-akashic room, divorced sounds, looking for mates...
DEAD CELLS to THE SNOWS

But, this being out of time, anything could happen, & in fact anything would happen & in ultrafact everything had to happen, & so it was decided with the abrupt arbitrariness of a jerk popping out of your socketarm & incited as follows‑‑& this was all very silvery legal, you'll nunderstammed:

WHEREAS I liked to think we were visible in the following scene‑‑I mean visible to my fellow, frozen Dimnentians.  Time was not really stopped you understand, so it figures (to me, anyway) that we might just leave some one (1) retinal image)!) of ourselves of trekking of across their world‑‑an image which, albeit virtually instantaneous, was bot literally instantaneous, & would therefore or theremight lay a singular image on someone's tubes they might see as time, for them rolled on, & they might think‑‑however subliminially, What the hell was that?  I liked to think that.  If you like to know what I was then-like, this will, in one iotum, tell you.  'Cause really, that was the sort of thing, in that unusual situation, I liked then to think.

Then.  I don't like to think it or mulch off anyging anygnore.  But there are a few things, & I feel I owe you like an explanation.  But now I haven't time.  More below.  More blow?

More blow indeed!  The Ypions & I were wearing these neat silver suits.  They (the suits) had bulbous helmets & stumpy, bilaterally symmetric lumbs & no tails.  They were perfectly silver, if by perfect you mean "laced with opalescent streaks," which is certainly what I mean by "silver."  We had thick hoses that tried to lead us back to the air of time, I mean the air out of time, which would keep us stationary in time & oriented.  We couldn't see how far them hoses (they were known technically as them hoses, & they too, were silver if etc.) went.  They seeme to disappear in the giant, silent snow.  They seemed to disappear, to turn black, to the black hoses you sea in your undersee escapes, so we couldn't be sure of what air we were of breathe, nor whether time might start at any moment, if by moment you mean the current stretch of eternity with its opalscent streaks in the frozen snows of time etc.  Which we by no means mean.

So we looked like nothing so much as the tiny crew of the Nautilus waltzig crox the ocean floors of Verne's pressured imaination, pressured as it was by its deep waters of French & of nineteenth-century histrionic prototechno freakophantaseize.  Only there were thirty-two of us (thanks for the number lock, Tori) in a scattered pattern far beyond such old-hat, old-hell-met julseshnesh, & far beyond any pattern even you, so very slock, could e'er conceive.

& also we were very tiny.  Time froze up was big‑‑at least five times too big.  So this wasn't the normal, big me gadding out the lanscapes of my erstwhile whirld, but a dimensional-warpage parallelo-vernsion me stepping out like a minidwarp‑‑like one of the small scadcilions of Swarpph, roguish & eoguish & tufted, but not at all loveable, or when loveable at all, not all loveable, little protogremlins & troublemakers, if you ask me, but at one-fifth our natural size very a propos at this momentio...

I liked to think we were looking for a pearl in the snow, but I cold tell (because they told me‑‑they actually kept stepping up, with their own dimensional-one-fifth-tinii stiips, behiind mii, & tpaping me hard on the suited shoulder or the shuited soulder & bloody-well telling me, right out-goddamned loud) the Yps thought it was more like looking for a turd.

See, they hated my idealism.  They were jealous of my idealism.  They hated my idealism & all that it entailed‑‑you know: the rhetorical thrice-repetitions of everything (or at least of so many things), & the gold-tinged images that floated like Macy's day flotational gods above my dreamy heads, & the archaic-heroic language with its -eths & -oths & thinges archaique & my delusions I mean allusiums to the other worlds‑‑your world, the world of the tiny scadcillions, the world (itself very huge, quite gargantuan, in fact) of Swarpph, & my references for adhomple to the feverworlds of Iboriaorge, Neevcor, & Blyeum, with their luminously-growing mad plants‑‑allusions galore & so aum & the Ypions hated it.

Their guilt seemed well contained all of a sudden.  Was this some lacuna in the authorial woof, or some unheard bark up the wrong tree in the author's uncreated forest where the tree falls despite everything he wrote‑‑or what?
Answer: What.