The Vloid GOLD LOZENGES OF GLOW Yea, my sister come out in the plasmic body of a vloid‑‑complete with the drop-dead Eyes of the Glowing Void of Eyes, all silvery with her exquisite vloid lines showing the make & the model & the inclinations & declinations of the vloid vloid vloid, & we behaved completely artificially. I mean, that was how we were at that time in this particular fine line of the multistranded limneal polylines of time.  We couldn't take anything straightforward, much less seriously, so we larfed. Yea, we larfed & larfed, at first.  My & Dy's Incredible Clique of artsy-fartsy: soi-d santly clever-clever: "Friends" think it some new work of hers, involving deception & the taking on of a luminous gold polyplatinium frame with the fine lines depicting some sort of vivid instructions in some Glyyssingz-like clip & so on like that.  "It's Dy all over!" they cry before I kill them!!! Well my God! This sudden & most unhappy vloidhood on the part of my Big Shwester was like any other catastrophe for us, but which I mean to whisper (say:) we were constantly on the densest drugs we could synthesize and/or find and/or/or lift from the latest squat Glyssingz punk with its childs toes invading the sand of the broken jags that have long since the fall of God invaded our streets‑‑drugs, I say, desgiendslow slow any & all neural junction from a quivering snap of wet pain to something more like the Imagined Sunset on one of those Golden Cubeworlds some Unknown Forces keep ieing us about ieing us in the downloads to our minds we constanmtly & rather compulsively if I do compulsively say-so-myself downloard perpendicularly into ourƒelves or perhaps this is that is this is that is this is that is this is that of these Gold Lozenges of Glow that illuminate our minds with the scintillating smokedreams of losing our souls on the shores of a molting beach somewhere on a planet (ha!) we can't even reach, so even, say the violent impalement of a friend walking by our side by the downward death deatghlide of yet another fragment of sky will cause the slowest, coolest junky's doudoybleble ta ak ke you ever soar. GNÖGGIN So it was that, laughing, we asked a rilled-up-to-the-gills Glyss punk who was even as we soke selling us some golden dope & selling us at length some golden dope & selling us at last some golden dope & selling us some cumlike droplets of his squeezed-out, frozen dope & selling us with this krooqu't tasmanian Glyssingz smile some more crusty goddam wrinkles of some goddam woolen dope M-rills© or null-rells© or the myztseyr I mean mystery drug known only as the drug without hope, expect when she be known as the drug with know name, or mystery-dope, possibly lethal smope, but also thought of sans breathing or speaking Gnöggin basically whatever the little prick of a Glyss would drop into your hand, along with some very strange, very moony dust he would drop into our hands often in parentheses or only in thought or even only in our thought snikk'rig moondust, moondust, your Glyss being a surrepastingly poetic snootyloot. But in this case‑‑this lost incident or imagined time I am striming to squeak rebout‑‑we place our foot on the Glyyss' little neck and, laughing in our Golden Doper Way, ask him what it says, but the Glyss‑‑clearing its throuaght of some filthy thouaghught what had goten cragged in its little thoraueught, first corrected us as to its gender, then says (in an idiolect none of us ever understood) it's like in a dialect she never understood.  Or she said it was an unreal dialect, the apparition of one of the plethora of imglyssingzators the rells-riddled Glyssingz gangs themselves (& they have only (but dinna can find) themselves to blame, & thus run blind) kept trying sleeplessly to impersonate, I mean exterminate, I mean exterminate, I mean exterminate, I mean exterminate, I mean exterminate. I think she was kidding about her gender, though, but this, I think, is only because I think Glyys always kid about gender. Yea, out comes my dripping sister, my glazed new sister, transformed overnight into the most gorgeous molten Christmas tree you ever stretched back & died upon, & we all ran laughing & screaming. I TIMELINES OF LIFE begin again.  It was a brittle afternoon, in an air immersed in crystal insects which were actually the ubiqutous Eyes of Iei, which are the thinking cameras we loosed upon ourselves, somewhere back there before back there ere the scambling of sky & memory, O the scram bling of sky & mem o'er Y! which bob upon silver ionic wings & which take in everything, swutching down the very essence of the smell of what we are about to be in the very next instant of time your bright ieis or eyes functioinnig or functioning by snatching a crop of time & dijing it, like digitalizing only more of a form of rape of time but as a law-abiding Ux floating in the slipstream of a thousand maundering promises I am not at liberty to divulge, discuss, convey, or otherwise spill the beams, interlimnal strexxlimnes, timegrains, or scentles tinctures of that particular aspect, feature, modality, or big brimming grin-lips laced with a gold geometric pattern of ultimate euphoric idiocy of our racial estate hereafter known as The Exfinal Rape of Time, as Compunctively Conveyed by One "Ux Tentse Ampersand"‑‑Exrapiste, Excapist, Exrogue, & Exmalefactor Exextraordinaire or, more properly, Crystalline Insectoid Machines, when the filament fires up to a pitch of brilliance bearing down on madness, lighting central portions of the Uxtentse brain & thus in an unreal sense talking to us, I swear, your honor, were floating around, having stripped off our skin & our flesh & the identity of our bones in the sense of having wired ourselves up like those primeval stones our wounded, wound-down dead scientists had wired up in that first experiments, whereupon the stones very white stones, the white stones that hefted themselves in thair from the luminous volcano we had here we think once once once once dropped their stoniness & evolved into various Timelines of Life™, one of which was yours, & left the imagination of the stiflement not to mention painment of the lineaments of our bodies & were lying their in the brilliance of the omnillient silver light & basically listening to the sun, or rather the firmament of the sun I'm thinking veinly that you understand, yeRonoryeRonor, how innocently innocent in its innocent innocence this innocent was, when Dy come bursting in, completely imploding the foil of the shell of the body of the bogual© walls, & screamed nothing but a series of glottal-spottled ululants (yuk!), to the effect of "LOOK AT ME!" which we most certainly I think I believe we or someone impersonating we we did did. She screamed.  Her friends gaped & turned.  The ieinsects quivered & conjoingd, & the eyes of our lives fleeced round her, such that the initial image of my sharp-edged perfectly-transformed Fucking Sister I knew she was doing this Vloid Transmogrification thing deliberately, you see, despite the infinitude of facts indicating otherwise, a swarmstream of fallen angels cannibalizing my identity by consuming in their god damned LIGHT the very first florid horrible awful okfle ultra-absorptive thought I ever had, as it were became a mere blurry or a murr blerely uh cloud or cloud or clog of vague connotative "gold light gliding off the sides of the sleeping menaings of your words," as all of Ux turned its sheathings of desire inside out just to capture her. Yea well, she looked like the Vloid of Myth, all right, by which I imply that metallic body & the Gorgeous Crystalline Eyes, etc, eyes, etc. eyes-etc-eyes, sure, looking as some tactless types have said much more beautiful than Dy, aka Never the Beauty never was. But we were thrown off, as it seems to me evinced in a phrase not long ago, by Dy's distinctlessly trickerly tendenacities & by the fact that, after all, she hadn't "gone vloid" in the traditional, ieied-up manner‑‑I mean the manner you see in the intricate fantasies of iei, i.e, in an explosion of cluck like a strucken hin‑‑but had, so she related, swatting us down like a bunch of spirited balls, simply wokenupavloid! Everybody laughed at first, & then we looked with the nerves of laughter at one another & laughing rippling superscriptive numeraries on our first initial primal gravid laughs.  Maybe we laughed because we thought we staggered through the rubble of a civilization too fantastic to dreamlike to live‑‑a hypersophisticated society consisting of thing crystals defying all laws of beauty, light, & gravity, & by golly we considered ourselves as urbane as those infinite segments of the past that so constantly sliced up our calves. Or perhaps I exaggerate... & we thought, That Dy! & we thought about her works, & the distinct & creeping possibility that they had all been a series of every-involuting jokes, the peak & pinnacle & shrieking deadend endpoint pointblank blankface facened endpoint pointblank blankface faceend enddead deadpoint daceblank pointwhen of which was this business of, well, dressing up like a vloid or something like that, & as how a vloid comes precisely once an eon, & with a sniggering quiver of the wrist we checked that a vloid wasn't due for... Yea well, as we said "Yeawell vloids aren't atomic clocks, now were they?"  By which we meant "I mean they don't come on the eve of the noon of the month of the season of the goddam god damned year the goddamned vloid's 'due' or "due" now do they?" By which we were meaning to mean, "Yeawell, no one know." THIS VLOID THING You see, like only about six other things, vloids obsessed & upset us.  Your never-seen vloids permeate & oermeate our dreams & our dreams & our mythic dramas dramas & and & the brobdingnagain eie-shows we scared ourselves virtually unto liquid with. After that first little Ridge of Laughs serving to buffer us a bit, we pored the Ideation Stracks, some of us, until our heads fell off (still laughing as they roll laugh nervously into symptomatic syntax symptoms of a blue of rollalaugh and) on spottled occasion we asked or would make as if to ask the voiceless soi-pensant "professors" in their bubbles, shimmeringly senile with knowledge.  We'd try to scry the symbols on the shards of our invincible domes.  I blush to say "invincible," but say it anyway, for we looked & thought of them‑‑even as our iridescent cloths were slit to humiliating long raggy tatters by the edges of them‑‑as nothing other than nor less lan our invincible domes! Must be a racial thing, if we were in fact a race that is in fact indeed inrace & in racial or implanted memory... Anyway, you bloody well knew the image of the vloid, but they were unknown.  They obsessed & bugged & bothered us, even if we never saw the things.  No one except possibly those savants dried into a powder an dexisting if you call that existing in these little shaped plastic tubs looking like tubs like nothing other than the "folly shapes of child" if I may quote a deeply interior (hypothesized (hypostatized) text) text knew what they were, & while we told ourselves we didn't have the time to find it out, it was more like something in the vloid or the phenomenon of vloid itself that made us shake our chins in that infinitesimal shimmer of no that saiud "No.  We will not study this.  We will know nothing of this, even at the price of seieng this constabtly," which we do. Which we do. I stood there rocking forward & backward like a poem rocking forward & backward on its heels, unable to act, waiting for the inevitable lattice of inculpation to form around her, carrying her off to ne of our distant, broken prisons. There were you see too many ieis in the skies, too many clusters of anxious flies alive with their parxcessive consciousness whatever that means not to mention too many Legends of the Vloid, including everything from the sublimely surreal ancient passages of The Vloide's Progress (d. -312) and the incandescent swatches of the much-and justly-hyped & must-hyped & just-hyped "royal poetry" of Pol Sampamian in the poet who they say but do naught believe died in the ecstasy of vloid :) with his "Ode to a Sleeping Vloid" & "Lande of the Vloids," & "Upon Seeing the Ancient Vision of the Vloid," & his suicidally amibitously endlessly rambunctious Vloidiad, astoundlingly raunchy, which is not to say surpassingly bawdy to the mindmorphing Invasion of the Vloids & the awful musical Vloid! & the children's Hundred Scarey Poems of The Vloid, which we were all made to write & eat & memorize in a lingual cognito möbius loop of fire imitating the mooby-loopy structire of the Tales of the Vloid, if you must know, suggesting iymk that all this talk & legendating & racial memory of the dreaded, much-loved, intricately expensive vision of the Vloid was nothing more (nor, I suppose, less than nothing or nothing more than less) than another virus from another myth called "the tangle of time" which I am abjured from thinking, much less whispering, about. In Canto cvii of The Vloidiad, Sampamian‑‑in technowords that keep like quicksilver rims of tracery translate & tranform themselves, constantly revising so as to make his Samp's poems more & more beautiful further from the truth, as the textiles of imagery roam like the lusty variants of a seedy-dun tune fucking their way across the lands of sound‑‑sang or wrote or wrang or blote or bled a passage I;ve decided not to quote because it was not actually so hot.  So we'll go back to the story now, shall we? As I was saying before this incredible déjà vu took over my intellect, mostly your instant vloids simply shriek their guts out & run‑‑they "bleat & bolt" as the bleating great bibles nodding at one another in their "radiant mirrorhalls of infinite simulitude encrore."  That last is from the passage I didn;t otherwise quote.  You may now return to your normal mental state, if you can find it. If you cannot find your normal state, please report to one of the endless lines forming in front of one of the Recessive Rows of Booths. Or read the following section.  Do not die moving from this section to the next.  That would be very bad.  That is a bad thought & one should definitelyu try not to have bad thoughts buzzing round like some sort of literary Fly Motif inside one;s head.  If you know what I mean. THE FIREANTS OF LIES Mostly your vloids just roar & run‑‑that's the biblical phrase for the change & the symbical phase for the crage‑‑but Dy acted quite different.  I could tell her hysteria‑‑an infinitude of panic approaching a virtual plasmic phase-change of personality, I would imagine‑‑had reflected right back inside, & lit up those pure & perfect machine insides, so that instead of shattering herself aganst the outer hide of the city (they "impale & immolate" as some of our darker texts shay), Dy just kept sticking her fingers‑‑& in the heat of the rill she had some wondrous fingers rising like boneless snake in the wafty air of a time-induced Yulivriaharian hallucination‑‑into her gut & getting little pokes.  I think she was squealing, or maybe screeching, as she did it, but the sounds were too high‑‑the sounds just burned out to the ozone clabbering out to the formulations of propositional preps, leaving just that smell of burnt oil burnt urnt oillio that capt'd you as a kid when you were bricked in your creative basement making great olfactory-plastic replicas of the fireants of lies but with no dimensionst to fly them to. I digress.  Traula had "flipp'd ope the lid" on her fine exterior.  She had (inadvertently?  through sinisnetr miraculos of post-post-timing?  vertently after many a long long lash of unblinkworth time plicking at the pizzes of the pussle that kept getting smaller as you probed kept getting smaller nor ye proob'd oya) twished the flister that autocoiled her fleshwraps, unfurling her skin like the peeling of an orange, but with urgency inserted ug-rent-cy em-zerb-ed where the pungency should be, revealing all the fine little signs, bouffons, slygraze, teensy embedded mad little signs sighing instructions in a great dark empausebedded (pauz) of time, flickering promptors, hairline doorvay watermark poorways, implosive microbolts & and & subliminal wiring that made Her Vloidness up. Amongst the infinite rills of our possibly-incestuous diminfoliative trip, Dy (she liked to be called by the blough of her verivers'd name) took it with her usual noneuclidean aplomb.  "Hm!" she liked to've say.  "Hm," she say, & "Hm," again she "Hm! Hm!" say, immediately fillupping opfen the door not-to-her-heart whilst I stood there (as always) infinitely more embarrassed(as always) than(as always) she, but to ger abdomen, always one of her prized parts. I could tell she was disappointed.  All subliminoids are disappointed when that voutong is fliqued & they reach with irrepressible curiosity‑‑sometimes I like to sometimes think even sometimes joy‑‑into their various sacs & vacuoles & cavitatious cavanities, not to mention crooks & nannies & cooks & rannies & zooks & zannies & blooks & blannies. Don't mention it. It: T seemed a bit lazy, a touch laid-back, a mite cooldown droozebowm swoozhraum bluesbaum & so simply bent her SUDDENLY SHINY HEAD down toward her INSTAN-TANT-MEQUALIIQUO BELLY & with her ben-trovat-o'rtistico savoir-flair flippippid openinenin the "gates to her blusty innerds," the "axe-ash & pauvage {to her} comely porticul, revealing the circuits of her gut. "Hm," etc.  They're always disappinted to see how much empty space there is.  I know I was.  I know I expected a solidity like apotato‑‑only a potate mechanique with an airless subterfuge, I mean centrifugue, I mean of robotikkito parts interstersed in hermetic, spudlike purity.  Perhaps I project.  I can do that.  Perhaps I do not.  I can not. I mean, I am able to not. She looked to be a genuine vloid.  In legalese: I fucking doubt it was a fucking ruse.  On two occasions saw I her remove her head & insert something‑‑once her finger, the other time an axiopen‑‑as if cleaning a conduit or scratching an itch.  She rubbed with great vigor & for a long time, her tongue, down on the head {???}, doing the DIGITAL EQUIVALENT of sticking out in concentration‑‑which was a Dy mannerism back when she had a tongue‑‑& she kept rubbing, as I said, for a long while‑‑certainly till I fainted.  Dy could never take her head off before.  In addition to the facial impossibility, she'd always been much too ladylike for that.  We were a civilized family‑‑inasmuch as a small colloquy of children nurtured in an energy-park by golden gnatlike personages could be called a family. "Congratulations, T‑‑it's a vloid!" I cry, trying to lighten up the lofty lit-up incandewscent moment with a little helium huermior. She looks at me, her plastomazic face even beautfler than herere, & bust into this big ol' country-girl grin, this earthmama force de joi if I may frenchagain risin' up raght thru her soles, this most solidly healthly fleshly womanly comely simper-a-blushly-fwum‑‑except for the flawless podiplastcel featureless gleam & the utter absence of facial features‑‑other than the aforementioned microemblems, paratokens, sublindicators, undutabers, smarmy datacrammed signals with their inkblack hairblot partedglop inbop thedrok middleblopt waving you thisaway & that. Away, along whiff the unCUELATICLAly bizarreickatilay sighticalilay of her erstwhile tappers of fended flesch bobbing drapeise in a popring round her exnex & in the form of nothing soughmough as a desiccant Phallarian serial daisykiller. But she was laughing, getting off, as they say, on the electrical zats & pingles of easing her long purely purefucked finkers into the electrickles of her suddunly undud gup.  & on the fact that she still could feel. I tried to help her peel the false flesh off, but she was too fast & agile for me. I tried to welcome her to the world of unrealized vloids, but she was there already. I tried briefing her, but she as I later lermed had something that hadn't been endweloped at the time I flamedought which prised her instantly, so she blunk her crystal eyes at me there suddenly knowing a whoale of a whitlot mobyglop lot more err than I had ever dud. So I let her brief me.  It was, methinks, a bond not never shared by none of nor sentients un unter off die altervoarolds. TRANCEYE No lattice formed because, so Dy disinformed me, her vloidfield knocks all the ieis out, so the air is filled with these ill-flying black marbles of broken ieis that still had the attitude of seeing everything, & so sent great torrents of lies flowing into the core of the Niloqunk berries or the nexus of the strexxlines bonding the fondly grazing steers of the bovine field of the astral city or somewhere in the mirrored innards of the Ideation Stacks, or whevrever all this information got to gnowing. So she slaps her abdomen shut (& that abdomen shines with the translucent vloidmetal science yet commences weeping in its very effort to begin to understand) & stands with her arms akimbo like the vision of Christ rising amongst the phosphor swamp-gasses to a height of 900 feet of phantasmagoric self-aggrandization, & sherears back her head, which in my trance(if you look closely you'll see a)my lips arenot moving to my wotrds but to someunimmmmmmmmagined huuming burr of verms just outside the smooth laving jacket of flow words in the glowfield of the jetstreams of your uxtly desires & b) my feet are several feet off floor & off duhfluor & aufdem flöör und off of all imagination there be of floral symphonies of floors exfloors super & suprafloors & floors gussied up in masks & costumery of superheroical  floors from the tales of floors in the supergalaxy of superfloors) I trance I tranceye recognize as one of her old gestures which now seem such out-molded unfathomably gauche outsiders. & the head, which never happened back in her organic days, & this bring sup up a bit of the old vloid-hysteria‑‑perfectly natrual, perfectly nomral, pefectly satanic you'll understandsomeday you'll under STAND as "A vloid!" she starts hollering‑‑by which I mean the head start hollering, even as she gropes for it on her hands & knees & picks it up & pauses very strangely ere putting it THE HEAD back on, as if someone or some wretched past memory of thing hath placed billions of periods between each word of her second... "A goddamned vloid!" she screams, her face aglow in a hush of color which, while utterly unhuanoid in the nomral sense of nonunhumivloid, I fall in love with, head or no head, stat. So she hoots out a bit, even as her "organic" registrations slipped with the relevation away, or slipped with revelation the away or slipped revelation with the away or revelation slipped with the away or slipped with the away revelation. "Little brother," she says, pushing me around & lifting me up & pushing my face back so it the face it FLUPZ inside out, which Ialways hate but giggle nervushly naougheoughw, "two things you have to know to survive to know what you can't help to survive to know: ONE: a vloid never sees it coming, no matter how obvious itizz.  Conspicuous vloidhood can be hanging out like the naked tatters of a skinless traimpt, with everyone laughing & doing vloid-imitastions & vloid-parodies (not the same thing) & vloid-parrotries & vloiduvular traffasties (same things) & pointing extensor fingers right up to the soft spot the soft spot between a vloider's knows‑‑& we remain pastoral Easter smiling vloido blivuous, right up until the end." & what determines the end are the actions of the blivovloid itself, we both thought together, smiling in the nod nod traceries of thought. & well, Dy's vloidhood or bloodhoid or hoidhud was not apparent to anyone.  We'd all piled up these snowballs of ultra-declarative attitude toward Dy.  None of us soar it coming, like that tiny emerald ship that hit the seven-breathed Kreexolykes right where they lived, & knocked all nocked ll ocked l seven breath ssaway from them or outerdem if you whoo!  TAPE OVER, PLEASE or FULFILLING THE GLOW A large Face of Rain comes into the room, filled with rag-soaked hangers-on, wet folks just here to see Dy & the floor bestrewn with blinded ieis like solidified bugs, & the narration flowing in uncertain cipheric terms behind & over & underneath my modifying head.  The onlookers lean on doorsills as Dy, leaning on her dorsal, describes Going Vloid in narrow little harrowing slices as of know unspertain turns. "I liked it," she said, nodding unconvincingly.  "Sure‑‑at first I felt dizzy, but it was relief, like a great shattered shard of a bloody great thorn being pulled so fleschelschly out.  & like a gorgeous, exfoliant, rather chi-chi halo forms itself around everything‑‑then another halo, then another.  Then more & more concentric halos, yellower & yellower, until your world is washed in halos."  She reached a peak of hysteria here, her trunk drawing up & her neck extended, her hyroid palpable vloid eyes© expressing the yellow with a goddam dusty beam of yellow.  Surprising, no?  A rich, dusty dusty beam from the unrememorable ancient palimpsests (that is, those were, the pasts behind the pasts we could only think about, but never had‑‑not that we could remember...), a beam that swept like a clanky superannuated spotlight licking the hungry stage for a star, but none found!  The beam in a permanent, frozen panic that drew you back to the eyes of the hurting robot, who then, after this affluent ascription, prepares in the whorls of her cosmos another cycle of speech. First she comes round, snaps to, completes the circuit of the universe reversing left & right, & now round the churchy glow of the sublte craft, & composes herself‑‑"composes" her "self" so much like an actress that the retro's back, & I realize she has always been acting, always an actress. "Tell us about the skin peeling off," says my longlost friend Scall, dripping & grey, yet still with his unearthly compulsion to shock. Skin peeling off, he says.  But Dy turns her arptliactuelated face toward him, & an eerie absence of drawn breath fills the weighty room. "It was more like chunks falling off," she said.  & I could see by the blue shift in Scall's plexus he was the one in shock all of a sudden. "It felt rather good," she went on (& was there, like, some sort of smirk on those metallic features?  Run tape over, please.)  "It felt suddenly necessary, in fact‑‑like scratching a green itch," (we have those here) now spitting her words out like little joltlets of static pricking your lips. "So you‑‑?" said Scall, while I gave little waves of wavery acknowledgement to him, his chest filled with a diamond glow & the complex map of the most complicated diamond in the world filling the glow surrounding the glow absorbing the glow fulfilling the glow. "I clawed it off," she said (a ruby glow flowering where the lips should be?).  "Yes, I clawed the chunks of my flesh right off.  It was fairly easy.  It was detaching itself anyway & falling in retarded time like cracked mountains of ice off the edges of the world." "I see." "Do you?  Of course I knew what was happening, but it seemed very funny to me‑‑like death was going to be, but will never be now.  So I was laughing my ass off & rolling, clawing off the flesh.  It was no longer mine, of course‑‑& this was all hilarious...but I wanted it gone, had to have it gone...Then I sort of forgot." "Forgot what?" "Everything‑‑who I was, my life, my memories.  All forgot‑‑sort of." Sort of?" Dy throbbed the lights of her eyes‑‑an action we came to perceive as thought. "Let's just say it was bottled off." "?" "All my memories, my life, my self‑‑all were sealed in like a bright ship in a perfect bottle.  My lives seem tiny & delicate to me now." & then, briefly, the feverish green band across her forehead‑‑a light we came to know as joy. I should point out to the tribunal that this is the first known case of a vloid staying to make a communication.  I speak, of course, not of the unopened later missives‑‑currently polycompressed in four-dimensional "cat's cradle" form‑‑& I might suggest that I‑‑given my close relationship to the absent vloid‑‑have a distinctly better chance to convey to you useful information about that work than the unfortunates who have been fished out of there so far. One would have to understand Dy's nature‑‑particularly her sense of humor & her cruel streaks‑‑not to mention the utter insanity that always subsisted within her.  In a way I share these things.  In a nice way‑‑& I submit to the glorious triple globes surrounding me that the inherent madness of this vloidodeo can be its undoing.  I have everything to gain by taking this risk‑‑& Uxtentse has mulch two game by letting me take it. Let me close my uhstatements by uh pointing out to you a small "sisterly communication."  I can hardly describe how I learned this‑‑not to you, who have known no bodies, whose minds catch not a whiff from the fevered jungles of the unconscious, & whose brilliance & weightless (dare I say beautiful) purity may in a sense cut them off from what my  lawyer says to tell you is "ahemthe diseased corporate knowledge" of your fleshly thralls (which she told me not to say). The vloids are taking notes. They are information samplers sent back from future versions of ourselves existing for all expressible purposes at the end of time.  Personally, I think this is rather interesting, if not really interesting.  I picked it up purely from the power of my long & perverse relationship with my missing twin, or purged twin, or delusive twin, or quasi-dead deadtwin‑‑or whatever polymorphous version of my sister you wish to collapse from the multiple, contradictory versions of her that exist simultaneously till the clumsy "paws of perception" collapse them into certainty. & I wish I could tell you‑‑O, warm & luminous rubbings of my restless infinite sleep‑‑that these retro-notetakers are harmless to us here.  But the same tainted visions that have told me the nature of vloids states as clearly as a cold grip on your loins ("go" with me on this one, marsters) that they could, for reasons best expressed in constrictive (bursting at their seams with meanings a bad deal lustier than those we can eke forth under this lethal, agonizing pressure of time) words as a manic lark‑‑invade/ Yes, I rather think there will be, if I may, a sudden onslaughter of vloids, & keep in mind this assault would happen in literally ntimeatal. & yes, it's because of me.  Let me hastily admit I am more desarving of your bloody punicumonts than any "paravloid" who has gone before {desurg-skinned...dipped in the purple fluids...reduced to screaming digits...} But I, to use an hoary flesh metaphor, can save your glassy asses. You see, I injected my twin, just as she did me‑‑infected her even more in her vloidhood than I could before, infected her insanely receptive vloid mentality with a sense of us, of a "life" in "time," you don't want them to have. We are in a terrible fix here, & there is at once no time & all time to lose.  You better send me into the magnified sickness of my sister's mind‑‑the madness only I can live in.  Yes, I'm bargaining.  Yes, it's my only chance. But after all, it may be the juiciest punishment you could do me.  & I might come back.  I might have something for you.  Dream on it a while, my frosty friends. PHOAMY PHORMULATIONS Through a small fissure in time, I find myself hiding out, having piped myself into the verticon, a sort of bubble-bath of fancy fantasies simp'ring in convex fashion from their billion phoamey phormulations. "Your sister's gone vloid." "Flimsy little trick, pal!" I said through the endless baffles, shades, polyplanar tubules, & glistening microbolts of my verticon helmet.   Scall‑‑in from the rain of time‑‑had not changed.  He was always trying to pull me out of the verticon, perhoas because I was always in the verticon.  At this point in the trip myhelmet was excited over what it was doing to me in the dense, sparking fluid of the purple room.  It had called down a lot of mass‑‑it was much much bigger than me.  I knew this because 1) for some perfect, lost reason the verticon‑‑in the midst of its millenial dreams, in which one shares the consciousness of incredibly complex, fictive races, all the vert's variations & the verts's variations's & charicaturations & elbaorations on one (1) lonely neuron of your brainiant (or sylizit of your udren, or brexet of your texerb, or forl of your trimakitamirong, or {cipher} of whatever {unit} you used to make organic thought thought thought‑‑& I say that with triple sincerity)‑‑projected or did project this grubby, grainy, snowy, whoompy little black-and-white (!) injection of your actual, floating, physical status in the world...if goobing in the plupul-dens eight hundred miles below the insane grey complexities of SubCity Tren for weekless months on end till your memory tubes glow like dismal embers of a lost rainforest fire can be called status, or thought to relate to the physical world; & 2)  Scall was helpfully beaming a very high-energy tresslewite image of me in the tank, looking like some swolt-headed doll, my legs kicking like lilies in the royal goo the azure goo the navy goo the purple boo.   So I saw myself in reality, all right? I made a vow to tweak the little prick, or at least swat the little twer, or maybe swinge the liggle gurt or blim the diddle furt if I ever woke up (that's the way waking up occuirs in the vert.  It's the big "always if" hanging just above your giddy sightline like some deep subjunctie hurt). We some of us we thought the verts were broken, that that little two-inch tube in a nagging corner of one's fantastic eye was the crack that would destroy all this highfalutin fun someday. It sure made us dream much harder. But it was more likely the smallest possible anchor or grounding wire, placed quite carefully there by whatever careful devils built the things. So I was having some hefty dasmned dreams there.  I had relaxed into the goop of delusion so deeply it didn't seem my partner was going to trick me out with one of his compulsive little tics, I mean tricks.  Hell, Scall was a Endrogonaum‑‑frail, shortlived, sharper than hell, & pretty much unable to refrain from draining the fluids of my fullflowing dream. Scall's every move was as refined & studied as a move in dimensional strexx (whexx is this game we have that I hate we have that I hate.  We have), which meant he has many more moves to make.  It was a battle between my tenacious little pal & the alien vert.  I confess I was rather interested in how this fight would go. But this was different.  This was some sort of desperate shock, both of the gorgeous sentient races of musician-warriers I was containing & embodying almost orgasmically & developing into soft growths megapregnantly dissolving like flupelets vurping down a cosmogonic drain‑‑during the awful swiftness of which I decided thirteen times I would kill the bony chit. With an abysmally toilet-like gurgle & a last, drainlicking bloop, I lay on the metal floor with a Rube Goldberg clantanceration of a helmet way too big for my cerebrum tilting like a worn-out hat, half coveirng my moistened face, & I sprawled there rather like a bug in an awesome gravity. Scall crouched beside me, waititng for my infantile grief to pass. I will not describe my infantile grief for your delectation or submit it for your puerile adjudication.  I do not wish, for the sake of my story, to descirbe the shrill & hideous bawling sounds ratcheting round the echoes of the metal room or the metoles of the echog groome or the rettles of the fetchole gloomb, nor the gross ugh incontinence, nor the kicking nor the flailing of limbs‑‑nor any of the other intense physiological reactions this disjointure of soul brought.  But even then‑‑in the squalls I shan't describe‑‑I knew this was most unlike Scall.  This was not some game of Scall's.  This was an emergency. & I gradually recalled what an "emergency" was.  I grew up, fumbled with the massy hat, & SCall pulled it off with a pop & a last few drips of fantasy (which I, in fantasy, licked up like a cokefreak raiding the grain-strewn urinal, abased & feeling like a giddy god). "Hi," he said. "What did you say?" "'Hi.'" "No...no...before that.  What'd you say before that?  Good to see you again, by the way." Scall nodded very slowly, giving me time to indicate another thing I won't describe: the distinctive slurrings or slurlings of speech or sleechph for which no mutant vowels will do do do.  So don't wait for that, please. Scall was coruching next to me, & he paused for a minute, as if absently studying the metal floor.  He touched his fingers to it & sighed. "Dyovylid," he said.  "She's recidivated.  Her skin is gone.  She's a vloid." A few negative black minutes here, none of which is wholesome eough to count as time... "Go one!" I said weakly, but Scall cut that exchange short by grasping my arm.  Scall had never grasped my arm, nor touched me, nor touched anyone, so far as I knew. "It would be one of her tricks, or a game, or some new work..." I mumbled on, at which Scall squeezed my arm several more times. "No.  It's certified.  It's real.  Your sister has reverted.  She's a viraloidio-dio." "Well I'll be domed," I said brightly, & we both writhed arounds in the hollow room, filling it again & again with hysterical laughter. UNSPEAKABLE FRENCH WORMS OF THE GRAND FRENCHWORM ARMORY Ah, the veritcon!  It pulls on the tight-fitting metaphor like the simile of a form-fitting gown, preens, pouts, & pirouettes, & lies revealed as a shallow puddle of mud, in which I have uh apparently been wallowing, into which I pull my waddling friend Scall who cried like the true friend he cries like the true friend he be like to cries, "Naww!" but he giggles in fulfillment like the small child running from his tormentors knowing they will catch him when they want, & then do what they want, & then... We were exploring the knowledge of the verticon.  We were like two filthy urchins in the infinite Borgesian stacks of the so-called soi-distant distantly misted emerald towers of the Straight Knowledge or White Information section of the verticon‑‑the section, they say, which may be Uxtentsian history back to the first burble of infantile myth, or maybe just more of the fantasy we postmodern ux like to squirm through like those unspeakable French worms of the Grand Frenchworm Armory. Ah! the ivory stacks! the light yellowed as a scholar's eye, the air dandered up with the dust of a billion infinite books () comprised of brilliantly euphoric little pixel-stars going nova one by one but, for the nonce & up there in the macrononce imitating these tattered but opulently bound old books featuring ripplingly inked letters wearing hats like hooks & posturing in insane egotistical displays of self-illumination, especially at the margins of their verge & the versionds of their words not to mention the (gold lettering indicating a truth once thought so ineluctably immutable she could shut up a million monks in polyfuracted gravity-defying Escherian tiers while smilingh quietly to herself indicating to herself the ascendant letters she wanted to shine with the force of her Moste Truthefulle Charismannima). & as my old pal Scall & I burrowed & wormed & in essence ate our way through these pleasurable pages, the books got smaller & the lett'ring finally to a primate fineness indicating some essential chasm of mind andwhenIsaymindImeanpast byond wish we could pinch up our faces to a very minute little screw & still find the flatus crox our ieis quite unsussable. So I can say with both truth & dignity‑‑but not at the same time of course‑‑that the first recorded vloid was the impertinent Doyy Barismul back, if this is possible, in Daadaasmo -266 (!), a date to conjure bye, back when Ux was basically a rock streambank & my fellow Ux these flexible animals burying their faces in the wetness, which must back then have been unthinkably pure. But Doyy himself, or itself‑‑who could barely stop talking before they removed his head forever head‑‑spoke of a long series of vloids before him, acted & spoke inasmuch as we can wash the dried primal mud of the verticon off the silver statues of his words, preserved in their oscilloscopic grandiloquent verismilitude, thoug I at least got the connotation (of which Scall swore the bastard that he got nary smuch as a murf) that these earlier vloids got smaller & smaller, much liethe books of lying life we were immersed in strife. So we crowded into the tunnels of knowledge that represented Doyy's mind.  We were staring white-faced & wetfaced, looking into the tiny screen that was the early gistory of vloid, or protovloid, urvloid. "You'd better not go any further in," whspered Scall.  He could see I was thinking of making myself smaller & going in further, back to where the tunnel of knowledge wormed down to nothing, to a virtual thread, & an infinite series of eies (& the ieis within ieis that take down in shorthand everything the greater ieis see, & the rumors of virus-ieis within these) would follow me down, each scriving a great mass epic of a poem about my journey. "I dunno," I say with false speculaiety, which is rather like the lie of speculative gaiety, which was the false light of knowledge our pretty pass had gone unto.  "Might be a good plot move." Scall says nothing but is thinking of shaking his head. "Face it," he finally says, but I notice many fissures of his face & many interference waves of face & much of the etheric pale ectoplasmeric essence of his face flows into the little screen, so his voice as I quiotye his voic is a nest of inaudle quite, a nest of inaudible quotes.  "Vloids go back forever.  They go back as far as the uxtentse do." The Book of Vloid says, "Once every thousand years there comes a vloid," whereupon everyone in the city, its frabrics broken like a substance of a sublte wing, slowly groze more brittlely mad & comes upon & kills the vloid, didmembers the vloid, chucks the vloid (possible apocyphal) into a humid old dismal-mucky vat, the VloidVlat©, & lets those piecemeal portions of what-one-was vloid descend to the uxtentse core. Poppycock!  & yet so... DISORG CONVERSION LESION Meanwhile Dy was still making operatic appearances, humid with make-up in a dripsy dalurreal style, seeming fat & luggy & loud, & seen trying "various techniques for destroying herself"‑‑another diamondrive vloid compultchion‑‑all with the same amusing results, just enough to engage your lips in a smarmy smirk or a quirky blurk, not enough to cause the sort of howling, keeldover gutrunching roars that habitualy split us with amusement two (another common frame for vloidself diskovery, as when their topholf flops to see the grunks still gurbling, & the sudden Disorg Conversion Lesion comqurrs). She tried a great fling into the acid vats, which led to a furious bubbling, like a a child's great mouth working giant in its rage, & a great dissolutive fuss about nothing, what with acid versions of my sister eating themselves away & going on in the forum of pheumes to eat away in our blind minds various onions of her, so she emerged if anything more vloid than ever, too pure to see, so she waltzed freely for a while,. in vis I ble. Dy waltzed wherever she go, from one suicide to the next.  & she sucked me in, did my sucky schvester, wrapping me in the nexusless degree of her polyfantasy like nothing so much as a schwested-schveater of finest thistlwdown silked from the meauing maw of the Illucidora-werm, & with a pattern of puzzled faces molting in the exfroth of their own bad designs they are being punished for, serving as they do as faces on a sweater smooth as the seamless bark of the everfalling neverheard nonexistent suppositional sungervlush tree.  Dy kept reapprearing in disguises which apparently looked perfect to even the sharpest ieis of the city‑‑I'm talking, or am about to begin to be talking anyway, about those yard-wide suckers humming in peculiar orbits like comets of inisght & acumen around KEK the central filament & singing hyperxonically, 'We are the eyes of KEK, the instruments of KEK the vision of the visions of KEK, with the look & the attitude I must say "'The attitude'‑‑There, I've said it" that they can warp absolutely anything inot view. But nobody saw her.  Perhpas they loved her too much, except you can jolly well EAT THAT THEORY‑‑GO AHEAD!  GO THOU, & EAT THAT THEORY!‑‑because her disguises looked pathetic to me, mostly a sad master I meand bad madder of a outsided lopsided green moustache slapped over a great glowing plastic gnoze & with clownsfeet  to match. "Oh my God, Sis!: I'd hiss, cracking about for somewhere to stuff her in.  But she'd giggle, grab me by the elbow so hard I went through a hundred dozen elbows in that period, rip off the flesh she'd put on that was fooling the townsfolk zo, & go into another of her new series of Suicide Shows. & suicide she tried.  She tried some of that grey explosive stuff you find everywhere.  She skinny-dipped the plasma balls with the faces in them that somehow fail to heat the city‑‑hence the cold swamps, the haunted, frightened trees, the need & the constant nighttime hunger for more plasma balls, to the tune of the video that goes to the racial tune in our head telling us we once had fireballs on commance, possibly pastel robots (possibly vloids in aprons!) possibly a government, etc.  Those fireballs made my sister glow to the point of blindness.  We were all blind for a long long time after that, exceptt for me, of course, since I would deign to watch none of her stunts. "I deign to watch none of your spumps!" I'd say, but she could never hear me, immersed as she was as my didter does in her mighty self-destructive romps (whomps the ieis recorded & would play‑‑for their own round delectation, immersed in the iei-field surrounding them circumfrentially, at one another, inot the air above the city to create great maxx lumiforms© intersecting like etheric menisces in the incredibly weird & runaway adjectival air over the heads of th headless (blind) city). ALEATORY REASONS OF RANDOMITY BROODING ARTIST REVEALED AS VLOID!  SHE'S A BLOODING BROID!  DY A DISORG: ARTWORLS AGHASP.  SPONGRUFT UFCOMING? & so on.  Then with the dark wave of a magician's hand she disappeared‑‑with everyone watching the little pillbox she'd reduce into every night within night within night (each night within night within night a separate color, from a spectrum withing the spectrum of the night within night before, as the pampered, lonely artist pampered by her very cruel loneliness pampers her to sleep within wleep within sleep), suddenly nothing come out.  Not even the dust of vloid gruftation (one vloid in a thousand‑‑some say one vloid in a million‑‑'s equipped for unknown possibly aleatory reasons of randomity to spongruft (sweet woard never saids nor known to exist as ananyword!), so she wasn't ona doze. They shook the little white box & peered within.  They sent me in.  They pushed me foricbly in to a enxpace I'd've died to go in but for my utter repugnance ever to go therein. "Do wum ghere," I reported, just as they'd feared. That's where I became a big fan.  This is where I started following down les clues, projecting & extrapolating with the help of rabiconic omputiteurs (O mighty thomuagchhtines!) the in absentia work I could see she was worpin gon. IMPENITRABLE POLYGOOP Uxtentse‑‑city, dome, city-dome, shittydrome‑‑was always plumping to be the "Crystal Dome of the Universe," but this basically shows you why we were regarded as crazy.  Barely 400,000 ganeekaberqs acrost, Bomer was made of that contraband, impentribable polygoop ("hot goop" or "hotgoop" or hopgoot or hokgooque or polygloop or one or another of any or the other of 125 or suther combinationzruther ofruther) they mined from that desolate ring of artificial powder wobbling in eccentric eternality round the mindless spine of that gnomestace spar whom the Dyuggulents call Nevin, so cheap it was profitable. Sometimes I talk too much.  I am working on this.  I'm sorry.  I just switched. I just switched to another personality for whom writing is possible & shall have to stop for now.   Author stops     Now back to our story.  Really, everything is OK.  You just feel funny because you just feel funny, as the kids would say back in the time of kids or the Time of Children.  Anyway, you just feel funny because of the system crash (system crash (system crash (system crash).  Now back to our story. You just feel funny because of the system crash back there.  Are you OK?  Please don't die.  Please don't die while reading this, gentle reader.  I would feel terrible, even though I've been dead for   Author of this book has been dead for: ___________________________________ This makes your reading of The Vloid different from everybody else's!!!     Author DOB: 7/25/1948.  Thanks for your cooperation.  Now back to our story. We did have quite a monstruous compolymergation of interloping concetrodomes, if such furcative interstitions at such hopelessly endeocentric angles can be called whatever it is I tried despite this very swaad case of the twenty-four hour neologumps to say despite to say, & that I suppose made our city some kind of awful wonder. I mean, instead of a golden glossy or silvery crimped or even tin-drumped firmament arching high oer our aching city, we had polyfractive spheroid segments, untoward interstices, various pockets of various gasses enjoying the Variegated Specialness of the Ionizations drawing Said Airs to Said Airs to Said Pockets to Unsaid Pockets with a consequerntly messy sky, I mean consequently, aka the Messy Skies of Negzi or the Yssem Seiks of Izgen.  NO wonder THE WONDERLESS KIDS (LIKE ME & DY) are not allowed to see the sky till decades after born, & no wonder the view of the city sky is the punishment for repeated misdemenaors irritating the godlike albeit wobbling spheres full of brainiants full of spheres of brainiants of bubble imagery of spheres that run this gross unsightly show.  No wonders, uh? So our attitude toward the appointments of our city earned him mad, while his paranoid engineering served in wipewhys as etiology, see, of the madness ascribed (unfairly, I think when I can think unfairly think I can) to the billion citizens therein. Precisely one billion citizens, yes.  Somehow‑‑despite a a a positively liquid birth of rate‑‑they kept it that way.  Or they lied about the numbers, as some (now dead) say (now said).  Or they were deceived.  Or numbers in this sector schmooze like dream numbers through his his oer her ohm alphabet of iconogravic dreams if I may finally coign a faze. So we're precise in a dreamlike way, clean in a diseased sort of manner, mad in steelyeye dwise, busy in an unemployed guise, dead in a thin surmise. @@@@ That dangeorus or really dangerous sky I mentioned's only visible from the sky, so from anything other than the sky the sky's a modulating screen of grey-grey-grey lovelily laced with the fancyschmancy faporails of our vapred zayicles, the soft-smokey dragons we vafor vor vlight.  You see infinite little dots up there, inlidots up there which force you to think, tothink Just think‑‑each one of those's dots a jerk, I mean an Izgenk, Anizgenk being what we call one another, oneother whilst simultaneously denying the name to ourselves, tourselves we think, Xink: each vapor trails resents I meant reantwezemps a life, an individiated Izgenk-not-me life, lf if you can call these trialings life trailings these call can you if life think (by various degleeze)! Pardon me. BRISTLE SHIVERY or GOOD FICTION or A TEAR WITHIN THE FLUENCY OF TEARS Into this stylish city, vapor'd with pinkish atmospheres, I went, nary a thought in my Dostoyevskian head. I went to our own Nent University, where chromey minds conglobed in suppuration of surplux gryxtals of arcane metagnolysis, facts sop small they made you smaller with them. "I'm on the Dyovylid MoVaque KaVase," I told Professor Varf.  With brittle chivalry, not to be mistaken for bristle shivery, the silent, cheery Bystle Thivery, Professial Eterminus formerly of the formless Oevuniverities (Poly) oev Traulapolyeu, his white-ponpon-white-featurelets eggastercated by the euph-helmesch over his by-now severely minudesst head & paled & pale light dilated eyewash of poolbloogroon by the ophorescent fluids bathing features way too musch two amMPLIpli tu'ed by the Oemiversity's amphetamine sun, Zeedphraoke (a hysterical, embittered white dwarf with suspiciously tinges-ly-blue lybluoo, so consarned rashly wild & flaring sans reck that maybe half the faculty sport these bubbblebubbulated frischbowl deads) embloabs me in this Ameboid Comfort Chair, technically a sofa or a love-seat, as it's linked with his on this plasmic span, & after a little start I settle down. "'The Dyovylid MoVaque KaVase,'" he quopes, & it takes me seven excised pi-portion shapes of time slowly clabbered down mit Milch ere I een rmeotely I mean remotely successful at getting to the rippling shores of getting to the edge of the rippling phosphorescent shores at the edge of the forest-state of being used to the circuitious sensate flowing of his voie is oice s ice ce e (f t lf t 't p elf st n't lp self ust an't elp yself I just can't help myself, OK?) blubbled round, as it wore, through many a fat & friendly tube waving like the great manifold loombing tubes of the "breathing legs" of the classy albino Ettrafraze (now sadly dexsitnctly adverbly enstinct) looped invivily in the textured air throughout the prof's most bookish rooms. Fucking syntax.  Now where was I?  In that chair, yes, with a gigantic bponer & reacting all over the place to Eterminus here‑‑bit of a character, no? "Yes.  What can you tell me about vloidery?" Here the Proflescious cackles into himself like the powdered old crone frozen to dust up on Agnes' Eave, & I stare from the safety of my love-fiery chair as the geezer's face collapses in upin itsinuponitsself like onadem "spent & rivelled puffbalz" of Azzuer, to the point here point there point where he bubbles the fluids of his tinted fasce. Let me take a moment here to confess that I have this effect on everybody.  I have always tended to make people laugh, & this quality has grown & burgeoned as if itself amused by the "cumulated autocaws of its own effects," if I might wax a tad poetic, to the point where I constantly crack people up.  This has played hob with my job as a cob, I mean pled hop with my jop as a cop, or rather, plague hog with my jog as a cog.  I've lost many iwtnesses this way, because a fair percentage (I will not forty-two-percent underbreath say) or a fiar placentage of your space razes up & DIE when you make them laugh.  So you can imagine Imagine here: & what I wanted to confess while the prof's resucitated hear is that I was beginning to worry I was myself a disgusting vloid. Scene deleted in which author wax a tad poetic.  Author served serious jail time for this, & the tad was pretty much all right. The point being the scene is deleted, the sex is all gone, the children are safe, should they ever come back. Now they say whosay allsay that if you think you're going to go vloid you will not gl vloid, to wish I say "Hooey!"  There, I've said it.  The dread spirits of hooey are gone now, & I feel nothing, which is not to say better, which is I relaize to say nothing, feeling better. Everyone worries they's a vloid.  Everyone who hasn't gone vloid.  Casting one's mind not only back but off to the parallel flanks of emplaussible time, I would say it's analogous to your "plague of aids" or to one of the virages inhabiting your compulers, OK?  Except we are a good deal of a great edible arabesque painted Eastershaped Viking egg less rational than you, as vloidery (ha HA ha ha) is infinitesimally rare‑‑some unknown bioprickster((')(s')) or mechaniquetranquster((')(s')) joke on these once-great races of fiction or fictions of fantasy or confections of verbosity or viruses if you well of words. Prentheses in the preceding paragrapg compliments of Prenthesis Guy, just one of the friends in my Imaginary City Imaginary City Imaginary City Imaginary City. Q:  Why the reps? KIRK (raised from the dead, molecules put back together, but still looking more or less like a wad of rubber cement, obviously in a very bad mood at this heinous awakening, forced by his own hand to return forever to the text of his own creation, forced to look like a wad of rubber cement & feel even more like shit than when he was alive, this little guy):  Yeawell, it was a ritual.  It's a ritual. Q:  Saying it several times? K:  Saying it a certain number of times.  Typing it several times.  Little ritual to the Divine there, Gentle Kapha Reader. Scene deleted in which author grabs reader's ass.  Part of author writing this apologizes for part of authoir whioch did this.  Part of author will kill this part of author. Pause while Part of Author kill Part of Author.  Now back to our story. What story?  So the Proposeur laughs for a long time‑‑right to the point of death‑‑then comes back, his head reemerging from the hole all aglowel, & inevitably repeats what I said, all beeamily bemirthed. "'Vloidery,' ay?  Vloidery.  Vloidery vloidery vloidery..." "Yeswell you made a study of this, yes?" The way I threw in that yes also amuses him, but I am mercislessly exising all his yeses just as the names tales existences of vloids are mercislessly cut out from the tissues of the worls. "Yes.  From the first known vloid‑‑Angrew Brossomb‑‑whose arm felled off during a conversation at table in the refectory of the Order of the Mumm back in 141.2.423.14." Pretty good memory, I thought, though I was later to find he was making it up.  I mean, he was trying to be nice & straightforward & acholarly, but it just wasn't there.  So‑‑high on his prosthetics‑‑he put it there.  But it was good fiction, as we in this "worl of loose truth" say.  It had the appropriate cast or mold. I jotted this down & said, "Is it true that no vloid has lived more than two years from the moent of its...vloidhood?" Bloodhood, too, proved trop amusant. "Not quite true," he spung, then detailed rare cases where the vloid had been kept, forcibly kept, "alive" or functional. "OK.  Is it true that...this state of of of...vloidosity {rich elations here} is undetectable in its latency‑‑as, say, through bioexamination or refractology or chemozzity or the like?" "Beauitfully said, yong man," he said, drying a tear within the fluency of tears. "No," he went on, rubbing the portion of the bowrtion where his chortion would borshee.  "I mean yes‑‑tis true.  Stop chuckling there, young man.  I come from the time of a different language when {lotta old-dude raping here, gracefully excised with a gracefull gly offglide}. "It is absolutely undeteactable except by the Addreondelay Technique, which as you know ha ha ha ha destroys the subject, & is hence only theorietically i.e. as you say hee hee conditionally appliocable as a prophylactic measure." "And we don't want that," I said in quiet horror, & we sat there, bobbing silently & sobbing bilently & wobbing twilently & swobbing pilently, agreeing at the horror of the said technique, which proved later to be a complete fabrication, the true designation & I'm not making this shit up being the Ixxittupullatt Routine, employed only in laboratory vats & not even in real vats at that but only in vats within the fierce fantasies of omputiteurs, & not even in real omputiteurs neither, but only in "sneither omputiteurs" within the real omputiteurs, or some dense regions of reference back back back.  But it would have killed the subject, not doubt about that.  Even performed on, say, samples of flesh, or cellular dresh, or een in sneither omputiteurs within bloodly sneither omputiteurs you get the picture somehow tended to kill the hosts. "Undetactable," in my notes did I wrote.  A nasty sort of parallel indeed to your cogitonic virages of AIGE, no?  Yes no? SUCCESSION OF THE FOREGOING THINGS or THE INSECT WARS Uh...I'd like to show you some slides... Dy's art was Fleischarp™, the art of intricately growing bioforms, lumescent bodythings arrayed in connecting tunnels, tissueplanes, euphorically bright & I MEAN BR!GHT neurocogs exciting you down labyrinthine pathways, forming K-crafted thoughts that thoughts that thought themselves, so you entered the rather big big (iei-eienhanced) personalities of these thoughts to become, as it were, one of their thoughts, wherein you meet other "thoughts" who turn out to be other people who turn out or seemout to be friends that you had all along, that onlyDythe fleischeuse gezundheit led you to. & as time went on she led us to crazier & crazier thoughts (I mean thoughts we were having while existing in ISOTIME© as the thoughts of her great metacrafted thoughts)‑‑thoughts dreams images somnabula (part of her Somnamula Series) that were, everyone agreed, getting out of hand. It was those silver insect nests she evolved toward that particularly dsgusted us & messed our minds, particularly tipping each particulate sentient right oer the scale (except for the insect races in their insext rages, of course, leading of course of course to the Insect Wars, extermination (not genocide), termination on top of exocide, exogenesis, huge etheric pestilential debts go on... But we could not stop.  We could not stop her & we could not stop.  We were in love not with her art or her thoughts or her creations but with the brilliance of it (a profound wekaness of the races in this corner here here here).  Yea, it seemed what we'd all wanted to dream of before‑‑something so intense & extreme it would lead us out of this endless end-of-living endtime timeless time. Then The Vloid Thing, first thought to be some new fleischarp, then thought to be some artist's hysterical simulacrum of suicide, then thought to be a fluke‑‑then thought each one of the foregoing things in succession of the fourgong stings & then thoguth tme all togther, & then thought none of thebove, & then the sequential series again...which is the way we are thought-to-thought thought to thought... In retrospect, this suggested something radiaclly alarming.  It suggested that vloids had hearts‑‑extrapolating: that vloids were built from a biologic core featuring hearts, where the sound of hearts is understood as a living orgonical soul, possibly explaining their apparently virtuallt pure organic nature, up until their skin peel zoff in formaldehideous seethes & they stand (or sit) there gleaming in perfect plasticuity. "Tott, wake up!  Little Tott‑‑you are to catch Dy MoVaque & revoke her heart." The orders come down to catch Kircha & discontex her heart.  It was understood I would understood what was understood by discontex when the time comunderstuud. The vloid phenomenon goes so far back in the meory banks the computers have as the nerds say "faded it out," i.e., the computers themselves have lost interest.  This is a phenomenon of time going back too far; it cannot apparently be solved technically, but only by trying to keept the computers' interest up, by trying to get them involved. The orders come down automatically.  All laws, all enforcement, pnishment, rewards, etc. are handled by those fierce little ieis," I keep trying to desgribe.  They woke me up, downloaded some stuff into me, fit me up with this nifty LIGHTUNIFORM, & sent me off. It seems inappropriate, to assign one so inarticulate as I to chase Dy down... But I put on my uniform‑‑& WHAT A UNIFORM! The second I fall in love I deactivate my partner & chuck him in my pocket.  I little realize my little partner's functioning as a recording device. The poets all ply their fairy harps & sing how I was instantly ierced & led through the nose by Dyovylid, who was no one's conception of preety but mine.  I think the gullible public in general was deceived by the stunned I mean stunning series of slave costumes I wore (that's over my uniform, so they the slavezoots kept on byorning orph), with the leather collars & binding face masks & white ropes bulging my fleshes into deliciously humiliating shapes (making it hard to hop around!) & the red ball lodged in my mouth (which waas  no ordinary red ball: it sent out messages, signals, rays...I believe it may indeed have communicated with‑‑you know who) & the little clips adhatched to minaples & the warm sun upon the flesh of the longlimbed little children who played on the matterless metaphoric beaches of my Italian loving or is it living heart.  But I will admit I was sweet on her, attached to her (surgically for a while; chronically for a time; astrally for a sigh; mindless for a why), exaggerbations notnotnotmythstandinginginging.  Partly I think these stories teemed or steemed or sweamed from her "formlessly arrogant air" or flawlessly vainglorox haughtaire.  Just a thought, eased out like a turd on the prison floor... I went with Dyovylid into Dy's former pillbox house.  The crowd cheers me ("They're cheering the uniform," I uniform her.) The white halls slide us inward in an endless spiral.  It's exciting, then boring, then oddly soothing, then then then downright fucking spiritual.  'She had the longest hall of al," * informs me laconically as we slide down slide by slide. Inside, * flips a switch that stops time ("Why'd you do that?") followed by a big greasy seduction‑‑excuse me, refined-oil seduction.  We chase one another round, getting slicked up, romping, making love throughout her sister's house.  We find a stowaway‑‑the weed-hiding drone, *. I report by muttering to myself.  "I'm sure she's been reflesched," I mutter my report in my report.  The mutter causes my perfect black eyes to rotate surreptitiousaly.  People gimme a wide berth like a ship slithing through the black ichorvattors of Eethe. It is feared she'll "reflesch" "suc'cess'fully."  No known vloid nor gnomebroid has successfull reflesched, gotten the sagging nuvofelsch to take, to grow, to goddma stay on.  Unfortunately, Dy's metier might make her the first.  The entire idea makes everyone nervous, that's all... @@    ROYAL SNOWFLAKES TOO or LIKE YOU} THE DEAD I hunched moist & naked in Quuque!, the first girlish fleischwork that got her all the attention, consisting of bristling white hallways‑‑of all sizes, some barely wide as your squinting eye, even the largest too wide for comfort & too low to walk down‑‑at once firm & membranous, becoming increasingly bright the farther they got, & each mesmerizing, as if each path led you to tunnel of light that stunned bodies dipped in death still babble about, so you generally spent your time bustling through the great eye-filled central coelum like a bagoon bug botting borck & fath, or like some Waweeweeneeun peeping tum working your lather into a sweat squouching & cratting & working into the ferventive fever for whichDywas instantly notorious. "More fever!" like children said they would say, so she would follow down her kinkily inevitable way with the dizzying Cerebrum of Snow‑‑astoundingly accomplished for a little girl‑‑in which the air of the atmopsheric skull you found yourself quaking in has been liquidfied into this brainiantless aquamarine jam (was this helium? some compound of azure snow, falling in torn flakes like the wakes of perfect idiocy?) such royal snowflakes, too, very quickly (but not instantly, you'll notice.  This is precisely the sort of small refinement or int-perceptible mininstance as it came with bragadocchio trump to behonk itself that at first marked her fleishcverk‑‑till a) she changed the texture of her every unpredictable detail & b) a thousand lesser fleischverkers groused to their jealous selves how they could seed forth such jots & tittles too, so it became commonplace as the bionironic miniflares flustring forth in the stressed urgency of your knuckle-buffed early morning eyes) causing a numbness which pre cise ly 50% of the gested (or the ingested or thingested or thinguests or inguestead or {my special favorite like you} the dead standing at the turn of the dusky stairs trying to figure what this cold heartbreak meant) found comforting & pleasureable, 25% found eventless & impressurable, 12.5% found relentless & immeasurable, 6.25% found restless & incredible, 3.125% found feckless & indelible, & 3.125% amongst whoomp I believe I recount myshelve found discomfiting & treasurable.  But we mostly agreed those were beautiful flakes, big enough to crush you but just kissing you ("With just the right amount," said critic Bazeel Baywray just before being crushed, "of irony to nip your catty flesch," though autopsies discovered him to be mad to have been mad or having been being mad), leaving you in a sort of a state of sort of frigid love the best they could call it then, though many larger, stronger, fresher, more genetically accurate words have been evolved within the greatcloudy laboratories of words since then & lost since when. & after Snow a whole constellation of stunners. Anyway, of course they were being creamted one by one‑‑a big broadcast of the delirious worls with gatherings, celebrations, & group popscorns & most likely bets being taken on what would happen when these "monstrosities" as they were suddenly known were sliced & confined I mean consighed to the fliers‑‑but there was a movement afoot (& when I say movement I mean a subtle flutter of the unmediated thoughts of most everyone which might change everything, might even force the Timecusters to go back in their painstakinged anal-crochadian wrays & try their best to clean up the whole messy polyfurcitative dizzplay, & that's why I say movement so infrequentedlay) to save the more pristine, less disturbing early works‑‑a movement which I'd say didn't stand a chance, except you never quite know‑‑& so I was crouching in Quuque! as a way of gathering not so much my thoughts as hers. Besides, it was a chance to sit around naked, without that bristling silly uniform on. A crowd stood round outside‑‑not Dy's fans but mine.  This was for me unprecedentedly weird, so in I hid whist at the endst of the warehouseanst hall distant, inebriative cheers did zound as monumental strips of her late-late "insect fleish" were fed into a deliriously lovely but perfectly contain edfire. But they knew I was barenaked there IF ONE CAN FANCY THE FLESCHES OF THE YEGG "Who this little girl?" they cried‑‑& when I say they I mean we, in the form of undeniably crying ubiqutiuskilous IYIS which forgive us were our florm of medial, our internexial comcommunicatifflisch interdividivenst allocation, our bube-toob or bob-tub or blob-blub or tobtuub if ye zwell.  "Who she?" we decopulate didingly. & off this prodigy did went.  Nothing could stop her nor did nothing not detry, as she "floumed froth" works with the resovolutive predescission of a pinship thimming through the intermact-a-void, her tiny hands seemingly made for the warm molding of flesch in this most populous strangeoush art if you like we call this looming of spurious cells imaginary tissues & magic membranes art as we cannot help but DO, andDyseemed to have no more need for the time to grow up feeding off her absence of years than we had the inclination to gift her the opportunity of (deep breath here), so her "career" was one of those comettailed doublewick flaming jobs waxin oo too quoockly toward their wane, the entire mess lasting just a fewverisch yeirds, a curve from pure delight unto balkanaizing depravity, vidillicit: those first-first groolding fleischverks of unuddurabule chorm & unendiable innovatividity, such as the white & black Angelflesch twyntwang serieses & the breathstaking Invisible (!) {sic} series, like being bobbed along by the tender beak of this most maternal bird or dandled on the strings of a heavenly puppa tier or bornced ablub the holy menisci of some fevreligious inysteria or something other than a'that, in the great impackted zepelinword of Dann A'Thatt The Inside of your Mouth series of series (to which we say, "Not my mouth, baby!") complete with hanging indents & Draped Uvular Flopposities, comprised of the Tooth series in which one becrouch in the nervy unmolar hollows (see unlisted Boanmarrow series) (Psst!‑‑& a series of illegal series I am not ploughed I mean aloud to quauck I mean stalque about about.) and & and The Intercranial Dirt which was cool, though no one understood the "dirt" part‑‑good reason to hold off the dis man tle meant. The Egg series if one can fancy the flesches of the yegg The tinglin' an' tasty Spermal series (which we still like but still we like think, Like‑‑what the hell is SPERM? but she wood knot seigh or kood naught say. Followed by her precipitous drop into weirdness, moving from the stell rillatively lappy-ho-gucky joi of the gravfree Babyflesch series & the ultrasexy Hormoanal series (for excellent excellent pitted dates) & the divine Iron series or Divine Iron series or Divine Iron Series or Divine Iron series of very hardpumped bloodflusche pulsated streamlineal fatless athletes' bodies to the disturbling Fetal series which we not all all of us could take & then the Deadflesch series of series (inkclougging the Burntflesch & Drownflusch & the adult-rated Poisonfloisch) (uqu!) & the pintless Purpleflesch series (which I always thought had a grapey cheeriness to it) & then that precipitous descant unto beastilness the resiliant Insect series, by which time the authorities were getting a bit antsy & the serious Wordseries I am not at liberty to talk about. But nothing about vloids, you understand. @@    THE DEEP GREEN SKEPTICS OF THE DEEP SEEN GREE or SLIPPED WITH THE AWAY REVELATION Thanks to that single slick little quirkgene we Uxtentse had, Dy had her fans, & they reacted to her instant idyllic vloidhood with an intense dullness known hopefuly only to our hopefully world.  Dy-freaks felt they knew what she was doing & "what she was headed for," so they were the most excited people in the worl for a wile.  Hell, their midsections fattened & glowed a juicy red, while the rest of us snorted again & again in the thick purple atmosphere.  Personally, I'd been disappointed in her since the Implosion Series, & had become quietly appalled at the Incision Series, the Powderation Series, the Invisible Series (which I never got), & the Immolation Series. "Her stuff just keeps getting smaller," I'd cry to the milky night.  (We Erexeen cry out solo solas to relievolo ourselves.) But gradually everyone got caught up one way or another.  I felt it, too.  Even the Deep Green Skeptics of the Deep Seen Gree were beside themselves wondering just what it would be, this classic act.  They were preparing their hugest snorts‑‑& with those gorgeous easter caverns of nostrils of the gleelesss gree, these were going to be some kind of modulated snorts indee-toodeed.  These were going to be "answerable works of art" intended as mock-invertive scofferies every bit the equal of ther work they were, as it were, blowing away. WORLNUMB EXOFRIENDS The frightening white behind my eyes was streaking again, cutting a swath like a Nellurian "pet comet" in bottles hot across my face.  Dy was making trouble again. "Isn't she overreacting a bit?" says my partner Scall, a rowdy Jalcalo, tiny, orangepelted, built like a mesh of Inquerdoydrer Wires, as always trying to draw me into a fight.  Verbal or physical, your Jals'd fight till your hopes blew into smoke. But I like that too, & as I watched the skies streak liquid past the lestorcio hull of the slazer, I drawled (in the low volks this kind of speeds create), "I dunno‑‑she was an artist.  She was famous.  She was this worl-glass loveur.  Dy had way too much personality for it to just...just..." "Peel off like that," said Scall, himself staring dreamily through the weird vapor-coils, inexplicable lightspecks forming letterlike patterns around us, the face-things rushing at you like the puffcheeked clouds of fever, various "Hallucinative phenomena" (per the official, T3 Books of Explanation, 426th edition, pages 52530.455, 28618.325, 39312.137, & 15228.407 (see especially paragraph 369), & he was suddenly still, a smooth purple globus in his head‑‑normally afire with jalactules of canary light. "Who woulda thought?" he said in a voice so weak its last echolated subnotes are still lapping at my toes like combers of a mercury ocean on the sunless skies of Sumg. My report read, "Worl were giving Dy a wide berth, & she responded by 1) pulling off her arm & offering to them, making them recoil & pull into themselves almost irrevoacbly (see appendix, passim Appendix Passim passim passim), 2) beating laboriously on a few porpollian sworbs, to the usual no effect, 3) offering to fight everyone in the Tammque-Qube she was tantcubetantruming in, 4) offering to fuck the members of the families of everyone in tTQswt in, 5) swearing to kill the races of said above in, plus assembled assordid paseurs-bye, & 6) whipping up one hell of a brilliant, metaphorically sky-hye mangle-dimensioned steelskimmed opalumiscent hypersentient uxotriture which was so much better though no less distrubing than everything that had gone before that several dozen spottles de 'instant critique said she had come in to her own, that "vloidhood agreed with her," personal torments aside, personal torments aside. "(None of them evidently found the evident puck-shoped pock-shuped fulcrum of consolidated pain evidentially qucked in a suscon-spicuous evidential viridential qruggy shade-hole in the blinds of shadowless "light-reum" pretty mulch at the swente rof the ux ux ux ux ux‑‑emplanded where anyworl with enough sensitivity to be in a proper eye-brade flever by that y hat at t time ime me e & staring at one's worlfeet like they was worlnumb exofriends could not help stub-but-up-stubb-to-phoighnd tucked away like an excandescent Easter-egg right quuquinque there! {My report whispered here there}) "She thereby gave us all the slip.  Again with the slip.  Partner Scallandaye beat the zwik outa oneunauthor & various sessile witlesses in molted meraimns of the once-teemy Tammque-Qube in the orange of downdown Bribbin in the Okko District of the fung-enfexted so-culled "Gomm BeZektor" & will report for in for for for emprempessment on the borrow of the morrow, Zyme willing, END REPORT {report confesh edthere}." AMPED & UTATED The green heed-sphorb now focused on Dyovylid's sister whose name kept shifting like tubes of Richest Polyglorh©, but which one-slough opgong a time begun as Kandankadorf‑‑now revealed to be no sister at all‑‑& she was gratifyingly worked up about the vloid business. I had to worm my way under the configravute skim of the sphorb to gain a private audience with Ejji.  If anything even more sensitive than we'd all thought Dy was, she had the atmopsphere I mean the atmosphere cracnked I mean cranked up to a Rattling Rabid Sping or a Wattling Wabbit Spring & was hard with which to up which keep or else hard to keep up with.  The hypergossipy sphorb transpathed her as "upset." She was in fact hysterical, & as I tried to interview her she woaped & woaped (!) till the whole room was in a Pink Flotational Haze aze ze e, & rattled on with the speed of you True Organic Degzel, till I my I my head my was I spinning its full 360 degrees & my eye whirling around their own microdegrees, about the egresious link between sisters "of the Degzelian persuasion" yes, little Wormmorx™ popped from my Long Blue Lips as she spoke‑‑it was the atmosphere of the haze of the density of the smoke of the cloud of the billows of the swillos of the Woap whatever that means! & how this meant she'd been amputated & How she amped & utated, that word! saying "AMP you TAY DEAD" with a movement of her lips that may have been swucked me subunstrumeantally into the zyging whipple of love & how this meant she was demanding reparations which meant in turn that she she she she she had to bet to the gottom she said "rumm to the fundament" & "frick up the undemeant" & I loved the floading aurror of her words‑‑file under Love: Why of who or what was "doing this vloid business" at least I swink diss wah zhe zed, her spirapularizations‑‑like words, only felt in a hot flash rather than the hnkywonks of zounds‑‑coming at me so fireaciously vaphasp they like to qoilderound the drufting segués of my skullkullull though I, swinning & grooning like a fusty guck, understood that what it really was meant that was that meant was that meant that was that she had to find immediately, with an ache a good deal deeper than my own, sans that little snarl of indecency that was making my fissures to berupt like I was being strengly hung, or strong. As I think I let slip in the slit of the staces above, I had that meltdown of mind, that sudden reshaping of heart like heart shaped of molden glass upon meeting Ejji‑‑a complication the structure of my life could not endure‑‑& my insantly instane devotion to the coltish white Degzel meant I had to catch up with Dy all the more.  Because her ex-sister hurt much too much to go on go to on. @@@@    FRIGIDAIRES AS SEEN THROUGH DRUGS or ACTUAL PUNISHMENT HERE Poughing a woap, I stepped into Flesch City, checking out the flesh shops of Loak.  I was at pains to ignore all the illegal things that went on here, but the denizens kept it in your face.  They filled the narrow streets with gothic details, symbolic hints of crimes not visible, so you had infinitesimal cartoon gremlins of a nightmare shorts biting your tendons, rolling into gutters, stretching their little buns through bullet-chokced I mean choked glass even rising from my woak & the countless (gigantic!) woaks of absolutely everyone here‑‑even the children...especially the children‑‑so damned big you couldn't see their faces though of course a Foul Plurality'd had their faces burn toff in acid, the acid with their preserved fazes still init preserved in secret dens with shelves in the eerie light of frigidaires as seen through drugs or drugs as seen through trnalucent or translucent figidairs now THAT'S a surreal image for ya for the smope of the woak.  Then oot, many had their fazes "flesched oar," so they were horrific Dorian Grey fazes out of globbed on glops intestinal corpoid mashes of shapeless flesch, & you thought over & over as in a tapeloop of some horrible death you are forced to live, I mean die, over & over again, actual punishment here). Did I mention there was no color?  There was no color, other than something like your block nor whipe, & not much in the way of Solidity‑‑more this "ink-scratch hint of matter" & thus an udderly sordud plasche. I woaped kicked off a few quick-stretched figurines with tooth-tubes as big as grin-gringe & tried to picture that hevaenly artist back in her juicy bellibone-days, a femme too full of color even to thin into limnes e'en of inky color, much less this moste anciente dire fiftyzische cathode glowe, strutting in her signature way with hey real weight on those callypigous hips & real guts arustle in that belly-ardon-moi & smells like nothing the arid lamp of this vaccum-lamp light-table stretch of intricate crooked city'd ever knoan gnone nome ohm, coming to this place with acute regularity just to score the reams of flesh she did knead. Sorry about that. That was some prose, huh? I had no actual decuqube of the new, vloided Dyovylid or oi-or-loid oroid, so I used some file shots.  Hell, they all look the same, as the swyaing grows, & half of these blighters lacked have I said this eyes. So I'm waving this waveform colliform deq of some vloid what hud come to a disCREPiant {end} at the woap-befexted nonface of some earless airless creatore with little more than those disgusting stringy lightsucking lighis filaments with which to take in the image of The Dyovyloid,  It caused me to curl not just my face but whole measureless stretches of my invisible spine with disgust, or some ink-scratched cartoon scoriation of disgust.  As it wust. "This vloid been here lately?" Excised segment of wormy proprietor feeling up the decuqube of the stand-in vloid. "No vloids.  Not here. Never vloids.  Never." I grabbed it by the segmented aluminum piping of its neck & shook‑‑something I'd always wanted & been taught to do‑‑making its scored face swivel in time. "Don't drub me chud.  Loak's where they all come.  Loak's where they try to get reflesched." At this point, for dramatic effect, I flash him my badge, which comes with 1) a virtual lightshow of 8D holorglams featurring faces in geometric shapes deisnged to inspire toward honorific regard of the hand if not the being holding the badge, 2) a number of dense-delcious chords with elements common to most of the most chordal religions as heard in their most spatially shaded cathedrals, 3) a quick run-down of the most dire punishments currently available (e.g., the reruns of death that run by you with the flow above the foe), & 4) my special number, vlaidating me, comforting me, giving me existence, & hopably inspiring open love of me. Barely got through the steam of the scrawny bloke's woap of of course course. "So you get vloids in here, right, quum?" "Maybe, you know, once in a while." "Recently?  Anyone scoring a whole lotta flesh?" I shook it till its head loosened loosh. It acquiesced. "Let's get a chemical trace on her quick," I said to Scall, invisible is is wont to nownownownownow.  "Specify fuzel oil, remblicant comvloidial polymers, metaplasticene traceries, filigrees of ohm, iotas of trace power." "I know," ƒnapped Scall irritably, & the little clerk chuddled, pink billows siying froam iz woap, an old song I rememebred that sent me back... "He gets Helplessly Sent Back," I heard 'Scall say to the little wriggler of a shopkeeper of a fleschvending mooch.  I do hate how Scally ally talks to everyone as if it were his egual (phanchy that!), even these stetchy inkblight wormin, & it always brings" me out' of my musical trance, both trance & dequoting out of it trance embarrassing me humiliantgoddamly.  Motherfucker. & then the shameful echo of the lettle-littered shamfeul echo quoting itself forever feverever everen.  Now back to our story. "You all right," Scall says emptily.  Not bothering to answer, I reach out & give the little wriggler of a keeper a snooque.   I may be psychotic but I do hate how Scally ally talks to everyone. "Any traces?" "Sure.  Too many, actually.  We've got...lessee...maybe two hundred vloids to check out." "Gank!" & everyone; shocked!  You forgot: there is no swearing in Loak, where words affect the cloaks of actual hexes. I have to eat my words, retch, & apologize in the sweetest terms possible.  You shoulda heard me‑‑but you ain't gonna hurd me! I confess to having had myself three hundred times.  It was actually more than that, but I'm not confessing to the other seventeen. I confess to having lied.  In the flesh of the paragraph above I only said I was confessing.  I confess to that‑‑& now I confess to having refleshed myself (by my own techniques which I was planning to take into the grave, but as of Daadaasmo 38, there is no grave, & I find death is a hope that makes me sleepy, the hope that keeps receding as I yawn, doubling the weer that halves with every yawn‑‑you know the story; it was a bedtime story, curiosly inappropriate, I always thought‑‑but then he was never my dad, the poor fool.  How do they simulate our births, anyway. & of course: why, why why?) reflesched mysefl has I was tiring of trying to say, 192 fucking times, 192 starry times, 192 clumsy times, 192 fatty adiposial times, 192 sickly sexual smelly gross times, 192 excruciating done-for-my-dumb-art times, 192 frigging times, 192 oceanic times, 192 rhythmic times, 192 endless times, 192 rotting goddam times, 192 {and so on, for 192 repetitions with an added adjective after each extrapolation I have edited all to hell & for very goodI confess! reasonI compress; Dy was obsessive for being so famous...Horrors! have I misspoke myself?} consuming ingestive inebirative etcetera {using up as you mightst whim the better part of Trumoualese's rich supply of ajdetectives. That woman‑‑exwoman sorry womanex‑‑et up words like she ut up plodoplasms}...{192 adjective here, ending with} long-dead times, & am giving forth an extra eight confessions, to be known hencforth as The Extra Eight Confessions of Dyovylid or -oid MoVaque which I refuse two hundred times to recant recant. Yea, some of those confleshions were classic in the nightmare fashion‑‑the red doaf of Alacksmiirium; the yellow-bellied sesquicentipus of Gruung; the Very Fat Man of Wyyte; planet of the dairy fat man; the burgeont Venus of Fla; the huge misshapen baby connected with no world, but simply something I drew, a job I blew; the rickety tall insect giaccometathing that brke as often as he'd walk; the freeform waltzing thing that broke as it waltzed; a lot of very brittle things that broke no matter what; a family of smiley things; blue dead discs that seemed so clever at the time; very hot things, very sort & shquat & short of sock that would really burn you, like little suns; various gelatinous freeform monstrosities that took up whole neighborhoods; seathings; woodfaced intricate things; splinter things; excessive parodies of myself with caricaturelike features that helped establish my reputation, even though no one knew nor knows it was nor nose it me; forgetful things I forget doing that forgot to come back to me, not that I minded; & of course the brilliant things for which I was known before this vloid thing functioned as the bomb on the face of the cake. So if you're looking for me now‑‑renegade, somehow danerous or at the ver least unwantred vloid artistically disguised & moving & living amongst you sort of thing‑‑look for something very big & weird.  Yours, le former Dyovyloid MoVaque. Tott Koarsch of the Cotchulo Koarsche (no relation), not to be mistaken for the Goshero Totts (relation). ANABOLIC HOOOPERZEROES My suit was of huge bouncy rubber, & made me look like the anabolic hoooperzeroes in the hydromicbooks the kids were said to iei these days.  People just said "Man," when I passed or tried to talk to them‑‑or anything.  Just "Man" in a sort of tonelessness a grey jotjot above the boredom of the void or ennui of the infinite or the eternal glaze. "I can't get any work done," I said to little Dyovylid hooked like a fur ur my urm. "Man," she sighed. "Problem is," I intoned in heroic clusters, overmodulant atom zapple shaping my tones much like the Brancusi-scalloped fleischers of Hekkolodough, Dy's only serious competition, now a very sick man, having once been her lover & now with the stigma of vloid over his erotic loins (Thought I always they seemed they to deny they their fleischness‑‑a peculiarity of that most peculiar H), "the last loody vloid was a hundred centuries ago, & of course {in vipriant sharquspasmos!} the dainty lil computers *'ve wholly lost interest in the subject & have, ahem, 'forgotten' {redlined oer the sarcolimit hoer} all about, say, the plausible faculties of my suit, or like how to deflate the poughygoughty thing or how to maneuver it through doors without dashing them unto dismal fuggy thwarts or how to like make love to this sweet little love of my life when I can't seem to uundress, or power down, or deblue‑‑or anything {odeoplasmic despairs'ere'ere}." I sigh dan sat ona grey bibliotech the shape of a toadstool, crushing roof & squishing visitors.  I sigh dagain as their tiny little trickholes of blood or goop or sappor ichor druzzed acrost the walk at my hefty feet. * spoke, but we all know what she said. I finally learned how to pull into or "pool entwo" the puffy suit or "peshy zoot," where any number of controls rolled in the internal fabric of the inner guts, as it wore, of the hefty garment.  I flipped off GIGANTIC & flipped on DISGUISE... ...and become as a nerdy little dwarf of a stinky dirgy oaf of an awkward awful wimp limping in his ill-fitting threadbare clothes & waggo-baggio pantaloons & fade-grey Hawaiian shirt with a miasmic sort of sheen to his low-placed paltry cheekbones shuffling irregulutousely in toejammed shoes of the holly rollers & also white socks (!) falling down. It was then easy to book passage on a SEED SHIP to Gaarn (holding in my towheaded flattopped illcut pointy little malmolded rumble of a head the thought a head the thought that she was hiding there‑‑based on a tip by Holdonfrg Faavleoa, from a story by Portella Fabrin in a book based on an idea crushed in a bibliotek by Doush Blimn thought up from a comment in the sleep of Arc Cabap at a party predicated on a noun of Inteighlighio Breederendershumum spun timeless from a gossamer thought by Akk! in a whimsical whim of the unthought unthought god Ipognix‑‑but it was all we had to go on so on we went on on)to the smudgy tub, just a mammoth thermos of itchy little greengseed seeds with little in the mode of gravcontrol, not to mention, you know, facilities... Dyovylid had a way of making comments about herself that were almost apt.  She was a neon-lit weightless flake of a little thing, with her intelligence, if any, either perfectly hid beneath her flashy face of felfishness (Here look: her peacocks eyes rotating like electrons focused on her center too fine to see, too strong to let slip) or of a type too alien to feel. & if I was ging to feel anythuing at all, * took care of that with her self-opulent wardrobe of klaarishells *‑‑satin-glossy plasticene affairs, purely lucid formfitted shells which (through Toorgan inver energy techniques, no doubt) seemed to light her up. Hell, I thought whenever a gleam caught the careful dullness of my eye, she's a STAR that no one knows... & she says, "I'm not the earth mother my sister is, was.  I'm more of a Venus type"‑‑said with breatherly gusto & a swirl of a turn, making her seem alarmingly childlike to me, & in my own breathlessness I had to suppress the need to correct her. ("She was always too twisted for the earth-mother type.  & you, my dear, are a young woman drawn back into girlhood through sister-shock," I should but for a cloud of inhibitions said.  At which she would've said "You old fuddy-duddy!"‑‑what she always said when I tried some wisdom on her.) AT THE "SOME KINDA AIR" INN Per contractual agreement, we were scattered to the clouds of Gaarn with the seeds, falling into the second-thickest, third-darkest clouds I had ever seen, clouds stuck in an attitude, clouds frowning with the seriousness of a murderous dad, their thunder scruzed to a muttering cluck, with the occasioal pop inspiring down to the world below. "Certainly rains enough," said my friend, still fresh enough & foolish enough to enjoy sarcasm. We flew with our limbs cricked back like broken insects.  We barely sank through the clouds, Gaarn known far & narrow for its tough, chewy air, "Some kinda air!" even normally articulate travelers said (& that was the name of the inn we were headed hopably for: The Some Kinda Air Inn "Where the air is always THIN!"), & the seeds just fell on top.  I wondered if crops or flowers would grow in this level of the air, & if Gaarn boastred any creatures high enough to graze gustily through them. The clouds had their way with us for a while, then passed us down to the thicker air below, which dandled & tickled us in a most exhilerating way.  My silver princess even lost some of her composure, those lean legs spreading just a bit apart. The atmosphere segued into surface, though one was inclined more to ride than walk‑‑or bounce in moony parabolic strides‑‑& all desires seemed stifled here.  What a place to be born, I thought, or THINK you were born.  The air, though cool, felt like one of those "Tiergean plessure baths" that were proved to be a hoax some *s ago, after becoming all the rage.  The T's disclaimed any connection, pronouncing their baths fatal to anyone other than a "full-bodied" Tier.  Buncha galactic putzes if you ask me... * put Scall under with a little flesh-mine.  She seemed able to produce devices from herself. She went dormant for long periods of time.  It was as if she needed extra rest, now she was vloid.  By contrast, I found myself needing no sleep at all‑‑as if I were the machine (excuse me!).  * would tell me again & again, & with some chatteringly powerful shakes, that she wasn't a machine.  "Then what are you, sis?" I'd ask‑‑just to get that indescribably odd, ineffably exciting alternate glow of her eye-things that would make us both laugh. DIGITAL CONSIDERATIONS OF A TERMINAL DREAM I'd look in on Scall with the blue-aura plug stuck in his cheek, his whole skin turned blue & rigid, as if he were the nonliving one‑‑as if he were one of those {"matter statues"} the primitive ages built‑‑statues, they tell me, that didn't even think or move! Dyovylid said never to touch him, but I worriedly did, just the back of the tops of the fingers of one hand, which I carefully unscrewed from the base of the hand before extending, just the wispiest fur of a knuckle kissed, at which I woke up on the floor with a permanent scar on the chin I had landed on, the bones of my face all broken with the fall like reborn into a frantic dead accident‑‑& *, if she were aware, would emit an eerily tonguelike clucking sound & say in her big-sister mode, "I told you so." But I kept on doing it.  My judgement has never been the best, & I was upset. Scall was going to report, then I'd be an undervloid‑‑an established phenomenon of all the records we're allowed to see.  Your vloids always had an organic thrall or follower or thralls or followers.  They always got to someone, who, historically speaking, had been treated so excessively bad that the epoch they suffered in would immediately end, with the wet drop of the last quivering gobbet of their flesh, or the final, heart-stopping jolt, or the last inch of pelt peeled off.  Everyone suddenly felt soriend & disoridied, & once again the vloids were blamed. Dyovylid kept saying‑‑with hypnotic sincerity‑‑that she'd protect me from this retribution...but no vloid ever had (or, so far as we knew, had even tried). So, the only conscious thing in sight except for the silver silvery swippers bobbing on the heat of the first flash-dawn, I'd go into *'s room She was always seated, her "hands" on her "knees," emitting a very deep & very busy-sounding hum.  It resembled my living sister in its utter self-absorption, & that‑‑& her sleep, always irresistible to me‑‑drew me in. I admit I loved her glow, which I liked to pretend was a tender glow‑‑something like the life-glow she had never, despite obsessive strain, been able to keep hidden. Just think‑‑she's naked, the idiot thrall said.  & I would crouch by her & touch that strange, feverishly warm chassis.  I put my ear to her chest once & thought I heard various things (like the digital considerations of a terminal dream). I donned exillobnox & flew over her surface like a dying ship skidding over its last planet, looking for an adequate place to die.  & I saw something quite important.  It was so important‑‑so revolutionary, in a way‑‑I kept pulling the exils off & checking them over.  I kept having them atomized, virus-purged, then reconstituted‑‑& then I'd fly over her surfaces‑‑crouched around her slim body like a degenerate albino ape‑‑& made sure what I thought I was seeing was real. It was extremely real‑‑much realer, once I believed it, than anything else there is. Her murky, plastic skin was covered in writing!  I mean, it was covered in writing!  I mean, it had one endlessly furled line wrapped infinitely around it‑‑one eternal line meeting & crossing itself, drawing up in parallel, or in skew, or in drastically strange loops around itself‑‑one endless line of text, of strange, interlocking symbols over every inch of her body.  I checked every inch, just to be sure. I submit to the courts, smacking their dry lips over my hide with a sound of powder, that this breakthrough exonerates me, that somehow‑‑if we can just SCAN herand READ THAT LINE, the sequential worlds will be saved from the scourges of the vloid. MAD STATS Scall & I cruised * {the city}.  We liked to think it gave us luck, maybe relaxed us, somehow gave us clues.  Like most of out thinking‑‑& like the *n's {race's} history itself‑‑it did not go back to its sources in a solid line. Mostly we were helpless, & we just liked rolling through the city's packed, turbulent air, where citizens flew & floated like pinpricks or sratsrorrim.  Our ongoing failure to find anything specific such as a specific memory for example of who the hell we were or where we were or whatever was magnified on the sides of the greet grey buildings, flickering with occasional, insane colors as their moribund batteries kicked briefly in, & marvelously inventive morphs of our faces & voices & mad stats measuring & formulating our inadequacy shot wildly round the sphere as if they amounted to some kind of snappy jokes. Scall & I sighed, our great eyes moist & wide, like swift-sketched idyllic cartoon characters, as the * {car} banked to the right, away from the readers. We'd cuss a little.  This cussing caused static on our spheric tachyo *, & that made us groan, & that would cause relative loss of power in the form of marginally deliquescent diminutions in the distortive space, & this would make us worry & our eyes ope even larger & our dry-licking tongues in tongues to lodge in our black horny lips, & the {car}, sending this, would arc down all power & train us into the shadows of a very lonely street. METAMORPHIC MUCK We sat in the flitter * on Secret Street.  All hell was breaking loose, as it were, everywhere else, while we sat in this fantastically old, fantastically dark street, which was pretty much filled with ancient murk‑‑not smelly, bancterial, disgusting muck, but a purified sort of metamorphic muck‑‑a muckstuff that remembered & would almost talk‑‑might even talk, we woulda swore, if we could sink down to it.  But we could do no such thing. We fiddled with the flitter switches a bit, looking up at one another & then down to the perfectly-blank anticontrols, then up at one another, & so on. "This sucker's dead," said *, & we immediately got out.  If the flitter was dead, then we'd be so in a moment. Of course it couldn't <POP> us out like usual.  It just oozed slowly open like a thickly-greased safe & plopped us onto the muck. We twitched our noses.  What the hell? {sis} glowed in the darkness with the strangely perfect grey-glowing skin of the perfect vloid.  I think she simply flung the dromers at us.  Scall says she "rayed them in." "*," I said, but only in my head, & consciousness was something we were only too prone to lose. Scall was folded up in a corner of the closet, his various arms, legs, wings, flippers, & those nameless, bristling appendages he loved to poke you with (& which seemed to change length, number, & configuration frequently) folded elaborately, with a compact neatness frighteningly alien to his character, & a smile that would have been beatific had it not been so brightly idiotic spread across his face‑‑& with Scall's enormous, biglipped mouth, that was a face-cracking grin indeed.  His hair was nicely frizzed, as if * had groomed him far beyond anything the {Scall's race} could stand, & a yellow-green liquid or lightfield shimmered around him with a rippling meniscus.  He had an insectlike device attached to his cheek. "Don't touch him," * would say, each of the four or five times I looked in on him.  * knew me well enough to know I would sooner or later, inevitably, disobey. INFANCY 54517 or THE USUAL AFFAIR OF BUBBLES The great buoyant leaves of the plants were actually energy.  The thickness of the forest all a joke of light.  It was a curved-space bubble, of course of course, & you could always see across to the dizzy other side, no matter how serious those euphoriant, giggling leaves pretended to be.  You couldn't easily hurt yourself in our childhood, so we had to try very hard (which was childhood 19463, I believe). We were raised in Infancy 54517, which was the usual affair of bubbles, phosphorous bubbles rising in pristine languidness before a screen‑‑which was of course the painscreen, creating the cradles we prattled in till moving on to Toddle 18.  In old 54517 there were just these milky hands, rubbing & bumpling us, making our fat little cells split almost as fast as foam, almost seriously, & we cried in unison, or (technically) in perfect, pure, innocent synchronicity. Then to 19463, which we knew as 36481, where we thought we got to know each another very well‑‑which was the beautiful & necessary illusion required by law, even though‑‑as the sphere of childhood seemed to expand & get tougher, more solid, more exciting & variegated as we apparently grew‑‑we were just neuronic clusters in bottles in a perfectly dark room, neurons firing in expressions of smiles, believing they were thinking, thinking they grew. Too much excitement causes your education to slide into nothingness.  This is something everybody knows.  Fewer people know that too much education causes too much excitement, which suggests that education causes education to cascade into nothingness.  Hence your education junkies, wastefully chucking worlds of knowledge to the void.  Hence, also, the Emps‑‑the Empties‑‑possibly the most blissful Uxtenseans outside the mint crystal towers‑‑roaming the streets with their idiotic smiles, either too stupid or too smart to say anything‑‑& no one picks them up because they're just too darned happy, & they cheer us all up. Dyovylid wanted to get some education, let me tell you.  She seemed disoriented, as if conversion to vloidhood had destroyed her sense of direction, & she pestered me to take her to the Ideation Stacks‑‑vast turquoise megahalloways in brilliantly lit, paradoxical, Escherian space, in which somehow everybody's head pointed toward everyone else's, so you had to look up to see anyone else in the stacks, as if there were infinite mirrors on the ceiling with everyone else living in the mirrors of the ceiling. * kept acting impressed, as if she'd never been there before, or as if she needed my help & was softening me up.  (My god, I thought.  She acts just like my sister.  Always these deliberately transparent plots, these glass-balled plots floating weightless in the crystal space of toys.  Now_is she pulling these old bonds from her slitted bag of thoughts, or is this vloid thing modeled on Dyovylid‑‑or is she still related to me somehow (making me relative to the vloid?) Suffice it to say, she used me to sneak her in.  With a worried twist of her head she would blink off.  Your vloids bliked off become entirely black with only the faint half-fingery auric glow of a memory of the eyes, which could well be not eyes but imaginary ideas, or even the glimpse of along-lost iei like that firt ie they showed to you when you were a child & DEFINITELY NOT READY FOR IT, when they turned off voluntary for purposes of reconfiguring, which reconfiguring involves pulling the vloid your sister half apart your half-sister a part into smooth blank chunks as of some volcanic rock which you could then stuff into the clits of anitty pocket here & there, there to enter the stacks, bulging & clickering & with everyone absolutely mad with their own hotohuse suspisions but definitely afraid to stop you at the door. So I'd get her into the stacks, alone with me in one of those little black stackrooms I'd envisioned getting hewr alone & bent over in in in in tumid fantasies, where, nipping me tongue, I'd put the chunks of my sister back together again, which was always & againa & anon the weak link in her little chian of subterfuge, for it would sometimes take me so damned long to put these puzzling lovling pieces together (their shapes made no sense...and it wasn;t like they formed the picutre of your perfect tumid fatasie when they were put together again, now was it?) that she should come back from the future along some line of time in which she apparently lived, smack me upside the head, stop time, & sit on the floor there with me & hel pme put the pieces of herself impossibly back together again. Needless to say... ...she was very good, then Dya'd sweep her cool & furistic rsther Brancusi-seeming-like but definitely heartsopping-seamless I'm here to grab my crotch & testify cloak & disappear, back to her "endless troubles in time" as she would time & never-again never put it, while her reigniting renaimant counterpart, Dyb, would light all up again, replace a few misplacéd pieces, get up & dust herself off & nod at me in an extremely intimate, extremely special way, & get on with the business here of glutting herself, as it were, on the sleepy morning rose of another in a series of bouquets of the infinite educations she was loading herself with oer all of time. I'm sure she had her reasons, except another part of me, equally large, is not sure she had her reasons.  Who knows, I say, maybe she has to rebuild civilization in the future she arcs through hwith the tiniest arc of her shoulder in her silver suit of time in order to glut herself with the education of all time‑‑& then sneak her smoking head & her stringless steaming articulations & the eerie glow (& inside, organic modulations of data swimming like phosphorescent fish!) back out, when it's hot as plasma with a distinctly nasty glow‑‑like some hauntingly objectionable pornoiei‑‑& a thousand times heavier, too, not tomention the problem of not mentioning the unmentonable I-deny-that-it's-a-problem of putting her together again at home, with everyone arounds my house & watching me, & Scall scowling & also watching me, & God, evidently waiting round with some big, objectionable plans for me he's almost qua God afraid to ask meabout, like he has to ask, looming & shuffling & digging his endlessly ownderful, endlessly perfect, endlessly sensitively big big feet in the pure white sand that manifests itself for the objectionable equation, also watching me, & Dy-from-the-future of course does not now deign to come back, so I go it alone, with little more than Scall's furry sarcasm to give me hope long & late into the absolute night. But we'd get her together, & she would be gratefully geracious & inordinately pleased with her gigantic new, objectyionably knowledgeable self, & when I sat self I mewan ultra-enlarged engorged perfect super- love. But still a damned vloidioid, when all is set & dun, what with time raveling moste obscenely out into infinite infinitesimally feeble strands fine as the volutes of near-invisible, smiling dust (smiling because a part of you becasue a part ofyour ast because apart of you & past) that greet you on the smarmy smiles of the other other side. I watched Dy jazz herself with education upon education, her robot body working in a whippling, fleshlike manner with each hit, then dialing up another complete interrelational datasphere, then lighting up the prism with her juice, then another hit, again & again, each download ten times fuller than the last, till one could only assume she was achieving insight virtually infinite with each bash, yet coming back for more. Dutiful fellow that I am, I finally closed my gaping mouth (as if I'd been lovingly drinking in the show) & realized, well, she'll be easy to catch after all.  Now we know: vloids are data junkies‑‑datafreaks to the hundredth hundredth power.  Hell, it's easy to send them out of control. I tilt my head 2 degrees to call & cops & am instantly stunned to a green web. She never mentioned my sins, by the way.  No‑‑not by the way.  When she released the web the stax were echoic & black, & we sat in the corner, the room well if eerily lit by my sister's head. "Can you get us out of here?" "Oh yea."  & I wondered if she knew everything or nothing right now‑‑not really a new speculation with regard to Dy. THE CAPITAL DEATH AT THE EDGE OF THE CITY or THE MEMORY OF WHAT Dy & I played the crescents, where a lot of kids were lost, but there was no one to disapprove (one of the best things about our planet: we never set up anyone to disapprove).  We were dumb enough to try to find our way out of the city, & it was there we met Death. We met the allegorical Death, the capital Death, & this really impressed us.  We were small with beautiful, moist white maggoty limbs.  The maggots here are beautiful.  Ask me about our amggots sometime soon sometime. The motto over the thought of the first briefing impressed into the shape of your unformed forehead was This is the City: No One Gets in; No One Gets Out‑‑but this was just a motto, right?  Like the noodly inscriptions in one of the prototongues acring over the rainbow of the libraries‑‑good mainly for visual fun (& I should ask you to tell me to tell you about the unquestionale visual cortexes we have‑‑the finest in the galaxy of jealous worlds * or asterisk worlds of ampersand worlds of interrogation worlds within question worlds within answer worlds within deathworlds). Which all but almost birgs us virtual .bak of course of .bak offcourse to the subject of Death of the capital Worlds.  I have been axed (by the consciousness of whom blipped from my memory along ewith the aura of memory that remeebrs only Hey...this was a memory along with any gold-dusty, residual tasty desires to wonder what the memory was, wonder what the memory was, wonder what the memory was, wonder what the memory was, the memory of what) explain to the members of other continuums how allegories work here‑‑their black-and-white nature, the fierce equations dreamt-up by the conical little involuters by which allegories ontologically sliced out of possiblity, as it were, in your fine-honed worlds roam freely through the interstices ostensibly quoting themselves in spiritless balwoombs as they corss the impossible planes to (impossible) leave the city, existing‑‑nay, thriving‑‑nay, THWIVING‑‑on the softening of conceptual separatives once thought (because once) absolute, now relative as the grey winds veiling the vapor pales of the flightless creatures living in the taleless untold untoward goddam adjectival skies of the absolute Where-Was-I? city. But I shan't.  I daren't.  It has been forgotten for me, the possibility of serving you, of helping you, of in some swense loving you lofted to the finest subliminary whiff of empossibilities (that delicate race of shmoo-like, beneficent germs floating in virtual idyllic pink within the pink within the thin etheric fanfolds of finest-flehm-fantanzanies...so I digress I guess nonethefugginglest) where it can be swiffed off, just plain & simply (& not to wince murds) swiff toff!, the bettert o get on in relentless fashion with the lentless tail. Yea so, the dumbest two kids in the world, allowed to clamber ove the desultory rocks someone or something or no one or nothing once or never piled as a fortress or else for no reason at the meniscus of the city where the planes of the domes seemed at least seemed to touch the fine floating Uxtetse floor fluomred as I believe I not recently just spraid was made of ring-shaped oblivio-poliotholine, toughest material made of the ungnonst faeroknomes (who also exist persist subsist emxist here * due to fierce, aggressive, spasage macronexus macromatics) & prush aside the wafery vacant leaves of the broadbeamed colorless lustless lustreless blush flaped wordlessly here‑‑plants nobodied bound to decreate, eternal plants wanting only to only die & thence beplusch oursolves unto the various crescent-solid spaces formed by the inanely complicated insanely engineered multinexes of the intanely redundant domes domes domes domes domes, into the various pastels there‑‑sectors formeing, drawing, synthesizing, & therefart containing their own dleightful segregated aires, oftnaught of a candy color, quite irresistibly to Dy & I, who loved & adored & sought after candy unlike all the other kids of Ux, most kids hating candy, candy here candy being so gosh darned good for you that generally only your adults (by wish I ming "No one's adults")‑‑& only your more anal-retentive sober imaginationless & decreative, not to mention older, adults-at-that (known as adults-at-that) eat in bitter fashion in masochismic health-food fashion after meals. Ugh.  So we weird twins sallied into moonslices of cotton-candy atmospheres & finely filigreed sweetly-smouldering aires, giggling as if enjoying (for we two came closer than most, if not all, to enjoying ourselves: enjoyment being naught function here of kids, & you can quote me to no one on that on top of that & that & that in my madness That) the various cirvulinear, Brancusizische deadends, turning & clamberining oar oa shoarp little rib & burrowing through something grey in my mind which I have not obviously forgrok, something once so beautiful I imagine, unimaginably forg*p. Whereupon comes Death.  Incarnate.  Crystallized by means of mean equations heretofloor averred like a tall glass of crystalline verr. DEATH'S ATTENTIONS He didn't bark out a cool & sophisticated "Yo!," has had been previously reporterred.  He was even cooler than that, cocking an ivory digit at our faces & pouring out the mere empty flavor of a once-savored yo, so that Dy & I felt instantly like his queasy friends, then like his teasy kids, sitting with no respect before the fiery old smoke, looking like the smoke & smelling like the fire, then like his friends again, so we'd have to stand up & dush the brust off our fusty gutts, then like kids again, etc. This is known as Uncertainty Before Death. Death's "looking" at me, though one must extrapolate, what with the tunnel of nothing eyeing down the big lidless tunnel of the light-lidded hood, and, it would seem, giving really me the "good over going," or the good "overgoing," synnot withtax syntandtaxing, & if he had breath I'da felt his breath (but only this parenthetical vacuum pulling first your hair, then your pores, into the goddam bore. Death emit chustling shuckle & pokth me in the plethkush. ...I have come to understand that Dy was jealous of Death's attentions, which were all to me, all for me.  Death was taking me in, forming those small tar-shaped duplicates of me, like sticky voodoo dools or vododolls, wet in the shimmering blacktop heat & rich enough to chew, measuring me as I was then & how I would be in the larger future, then, stretching out the deatho of the thread of the black tape measure to measure me shrinkage at dote-point or reckage, whiffling out little noteless whitles selves, prodding not unfrenedily & palpalating me, nodding unto smelv & sniffing silly sounding vowels out through his dnot-dnose, inking on parchment notes & (probably) probability figures on me, turning not to mention tilting my head threw & toe, berading the textures of my clothes betwixt his unnerved enrescinders, & doing an exhaustive bloody checklisted checkout on me, clearly fascinated with me me me me me me me, all the while note even perceivng Dy. Back then it seemed she shoulda been glad.  Seemed she was kinda funny, huh?  Back then it seemed. UGFLESH Now that Uxtentse has been cracked ope, with the cries & the flying & the intricate tiny legs entangling themselves in the vaccum of webs & the ultrafriolent light snuffing us each one out like the bulbulous blutts of flierfies, I understand that not all races have the bonnex.  Not to put too fine of a fine points in fact of a shine on it, no other race has been discovered with the bonnex. O, you'll say, there's the Syai with their grandiloquent opalescent vibrassae & the Viloy with their shimmering olive eyes the size of dinostrich eggs or the Zokk with that itchingly brilliant skin & all its mesmeric passages of white & also the Billitittrik capable of forming lightshapes with their lightshapes with the lishtshape shapely whipeyes of their lisps (you should try to see the ultraviolet show their shortwavey babyabies do!) & the baker's dozen or so of Ganoux whose cute little wispy lillies of brainiants light up at the moment they die, so reassuring that it cause clogging imminations of all your ocular races to the region of their deaths at the time of their (well-timed) massy deaths to watch through special expansive spoddoculars the scintillating patterns of their deaths, one after the other, very quickly, clearly giving their deaths all they have, & the murkoid Dyydelerp in their poisonous balck, whose‑‑ahem‑‑porous effusions of subflotational gasses (hem!) light up the blackest sea in the seas of trees, I mean trees of seas as girdlocuted by the Exoencycladeous Index of Exsufflicate Trees (versions III, IIIa, IV, & V). But I say, "Poo!" None but us with the shimmering flower or bonnex, or some have said "magic ice-clean comb" of restlessly electric light of a shocking value, with colors already highly regarded‑‑despike galactic contempt deskite‑‑for the variegated pulses, warps, & quantum jumps, the modulating synaesthetic pastel flagrant fragrances & chimey tincts of tinks & sadly teardrop-irised Sad Colors (our very own specturm of blues here inhere) ranging up to quite a raucous palette of pulsar pinks, uproaring reds, wooftop yawping yallers, clear-cries, dolorosio grunios, lip limbics, lip livids, lip linguids, liquular lips, orgasmic rips, crimson custards of pellucidity, & the shape-shifting orange flagrantes of a hundred motely hooze. Everyone's mad at hus cause we can't control it.  Rather like your meercat's tale, I'm told, or the cowlicks of the Calgari or the polyflonic tongues of the Remickleubriouoze.  So for a long time after the end of the story I've lost in here somewheres, bigassed tourists'd chuck us some geld & ax ux to f'ash something‑‑anything‑‑e.g, "Hey‑‑ya got anythin; in green?"  or "Cudya gimme some kinda BIG EROTIC FLASH‑‑mebbe some red...c'mon, guy, let's go," "De me a coupla dem light cathedrals we soar on the news‑‑c'mon, kid, lessgo," & so on & on, & us no more able to perform than the dead & skewered stud like a chilled corpsicle on the paterd of his endlessly frittered boneyards, now buried inflames with his detumescent ugflesh. Our lameness stunned everyone, & then the very same Everyun said, "Well yea‑‑we should've expected that," & then segued to "Ya‑‑we expected that," to "We knew all along," & "Hell yes," & further, unuggerable delisquences of thickened rejection rather like Mine Parentes of Olde & so. Unappreciated!  Unloved!  Desolate!  But then came the scinetists, breahting if anything even harder‑‑& with even more a pungent smell of certain geek-legumes they'd been eating since the smels of time immemorial barely able to rise from the steaming nostirls of the eyelss swamp of time‑‑if I may‑‑who were more (& more appropriately more) intrigued by the complex & disitnctly "symbolic"-semblant goddam shapes of the sha's'o'th' colors so colorfully evoked in the Color Paragraph o Love ablove, not only because of the intricate & almost certainly linguistic formations of the symbols that float before & just a bit above & often reound the side & (at night & whilst makking love) behind (& wet!) behind into roughly or smooothly three or four dimensions or continuums behind or within our heads or the bent space wherein roil & reside our thoughts, but also because all those tewrrific albeit uncongoddamtrollable colors I hab hapst ought jughst aboughve (ahem) seemed to add quite a new dimension to it all. They hypothetiszed that the bonnexs told what we were thinking, or better yet, were about to think.  They hypothed that the bons expressed certain spiritual considerations outside the vugging pale of time.  They hped dat the b's betoked telepathy ro incipient madness, or some big ol' anagogical thang, but... But their utter wrongness caught up with them.  More slowly, & in vaguely graduating ah degraise, the scienitst linguisque texnixons folded up their white machines & laved, in their own intellective wray more bitter than the tourists evoked so soulfully whilom. Because our bonnexs have no meaning to us‑‑no more than the pale fingerprint-connections of tender fur across the ridges of your ancestors' sagittal crests'or.  We never thought about them.  They'd perfectly blended in.  We'd never seen anyone without them, nor any tnig.  Everything has them in the old hollowwoarld of Ux ovvux.  Our lizards & toatds have them.  The bobbing heads of our windless rimmy plants goddam have have em.  Everything here has them‑‑even some inanimate things, calling into question the menaing of etc.  Everything here has them, & Ux in tot has them.  Our books, recoridngs, tapes, & various forms of entertainment I am abdjjured not to divulge to you have them.  You open a book & a lovely light bonnex cometh forth.  Little children's poems have them, the tiny logoflies has dem.  The bonnexs even have them themselves‑‑shimmering, ectoplasmic, barely-registered light-light verisons of themselves bearing, one instincively knows, the same relation to their base bonnexs as etc.  Our molecules, upon scinetific inspection using instruments which have instrumental bonnex upon bonnex of their own, have them, & our words (especially the newly-discovered & highly fashonable verbs) doth havem...and so ona dn aso forth & to reiterate everything has them (even the period gleaming like a cube at the bottom of the depthless plunge of this here sentence here sentence has one, maybe more, no one know, no one care‑‑too bloody many bonnexs to bonnexs tooscare), caui\sig us all to talk the way I am talking, with the filigrees & tensions & hyperextenskions & all.  Big ol Death has them‑‑all of lour gods & godlings & allegorical figures & figurines have them.  This a lotta bonnexs I am talking here.  We're up to our lightning arses in them.  I trust I make myself peerlessly ply clear. ow that we know we know we have these things‑‑& now that we etc. how positive-unique they are‑‑we will figure out what these letters mean.  We are working on the theory (here it is:) that (here now:) they are balloons of a cosmic comic strip‑‑something like that or approximating goddma that.  We will get back to you when we have something, maybe.  Ux out. CAUSATION The effluorescence of bonnexs comes from the murk.  The murk comes from the sealed, closed-ough hollowness of Uxtentse, which is either an old planet with an ice-cold sexless core that our ancestral engineers (the sonsabutches that left us with nothing‑‑no knowledge, no transcribed loars, no history, no myth, no way oux) hollowed out, set off some slow-eternal bomb at the center for our hearts to warm, pumped it up with curlicue molecules of organic self-reproducing air (so you can hear the air at night the air at night...fucking...re pro duc ing it se l of a  l   l    n   I  g    h t    l   o   n    g   !  ! !), then sets it tp spun, maybe not forever, but much like forever, as bad as forever, for degenerations that have lost most every lucent fibre of remembrance & brainiant & can't even begin to start to figure out why to try to figure.  Out. Or (to continue a long-lodged thought just dug-gud up from the dry swamps the dust swamps the silvery aleatory Gustwumps caused by that relentless light & the spinning & the foct thot someone forgot water...somewhat forgon moisture...not even oil...) a great segmented skull (I like this) dovetailed together perfectly, except for the great gaps around the edges, which are filled with segments of spheres in the sphorm of crescents already mentioned. But I'm afraid the skull is just exxiting, wishfuel thenking, for there's not a lost thought in this not-long forgotten head. But at least I've suxplaingd the "bonnexs."  We‑‑I‑‑can‑‑should‑‑be‑‑are‑‑thankful‑‑joyful‑‑for‑‑about‑‑that‑‑this‑‑that‑‑th at‑‑that. See, we live amongst a lot of things not predicted, based on causations not considered, or else ignored as mush two minuschool, nonconsideration of the aggravations of causations of exponentializations of realizations of of of magmagnifications of of titimme, if I mught sput ut out thuts: *  . SELF-LANGUAGES or EGGS TO EXAGGERATE EGGS! The greetrees, for example.  Just one example here, herewith considered: the greetrees (more properly greegree trees or aroboreus egregius tease).  I'm sure no one thought certain trees would get it in "mind" to head all the way "up," or to the center, given the low-spun grav around the higher lassitudes, the no-grav at the spinnerly Poles, the strange languages that grew along the axis if the torque all by themselves like languages of myth talk talking to themselves all along the rim the axis axon dendrite triterite fragfole forefloong ganxole breepdrung extongue brumpoale, & these hidden, secret, unused, self-referential, self-caused organic self-fucking self-re producing self-languages exaggerating everythed, ith no moist tongue to hold 'em down & no brainiantvolutions or smooky-colutes to hold dem-down & no gravity neither no, gans to lying about us, about bloody Uxtentse, about everything, & as-at-wore (did we have eggs) egging them on (would we have eggs to exaggerate eggs!) to send up bitter-black-grey tapering pointed singular branches toward the sun, that is, branches toward the central sun & branches toward the central sun...a central comswupt hier. It led to an even more unexpected thing, growing out of the motefluoric soil of the preceding unexpected thang, of adventurers, greeclimers, expeditions fitted out in their nifty leather shorts with their grav packs & their heat helmets & special sodden snowgluing or snuegloaling shoes or shmooze, trying to climb the converging branches that would, one presunned, somelay obskewer de sume, Censume.  They actually roped themselves together, time upon hoary time, & did they climb.  & clome & clomb.  & come back with faces perfectly black ("Close up sung, you know!").  & go on up again. As time went on it became like more acceptable to make your climb from the low-grav branches, then the zero bronxes, so temas finally gan to reach Censume, there to be hilariously scream conswoomed un todo fire, phfft! Vapor expeditions, they were called.  Cool name, huh? More suicidal impulses, to be clogged, I mean logged, in the nethebanques of the rich computers that were seemily enjoying the taking of ther notes of the faults of the descendants of the races that scooped out this tight world. Another thing they thought that wouldn't come was the smung, I mean drung, I mean the goopy brown-dun timid air, whereby you couldn't () see the other side of the world, meaning you could only skee sigh (shiverins!), meaning all the old crystallizations were gone.  We had obviously been here too long, & were by now far too genetically swind to get out.  The thing looked pretty well sealed, so we didn't, as it were, get around too much, despite the way we flied. & what's with these vloids, huhmun?  What the hell's a vloid, rightmang? THE EGGS OF THE VLOID0 or SMARTEST TREES In the highest, most airless branches of the sunreasching twees we found large fruitile globools, like grapes as big as Volkswagens, inside of which‑‑after cartilege-like digging like digging into the cartilagenous skull of a shark only to find the blue face of the goddamned shark grinning at you just as you scrape away the final filter AGH‑‑we found clear beings. We found uttlery transpliant Uxtentsead beings, shaped not unlike you or me (though hard to sweem‑‑yad to cover oner or more eyes, turn your head to the side like that psychotic burnhead tilting at the skies), palpably rockhard & smooth, & with no genitals (we checked) or breasts (we checked) or hair (wecked) or assholes (eck!‑‑we went right up in there so's to check; we draw straws on who's too checque; bas news, fum: it is YOUR TURN TO CHECK), but they did boast articulated limbs (we warps dem in humolumating poze after poes for eur zaftereur aftereurs) & torsoes & heads & stuff. We couldn'a flayem.  Webroke a stolen diamond knife which still haunts & pursues us down the diamond corrdwars of nwite trying night trying nite. These were the eggs of the vloid or the bnesting place of the future vloid or the storeohuse of the oldest vloid or the bummer vloid which never had a change nor the speculative leadervloids watcjhing with vague clear eyes the wredcking of the doolings down below.  Judging from the title, these are theggs o'th'vloid, huh? @@    FRUIT OF TOOTH Here's my theory re UxCity.  Here it is.  Is: the buildings were not always "these careful declensions of greys"1, but were instead actual structures of color2, gaining each a very individual shape of color,  Then the batteries in the buildings3 entropood down, becoming those black  spaceless configurations4 at the bases of the buildings, like rotting vestiges of a moldered tooth or fruit or fruit of tooth5. OK?  The whoole idea was that each & every building (though they were needlessly mentioned strunk6 together on a limidimensional string7 such that the spaces of no two buildings existed, not really knot, as a separate space with its own mind & attitude & face & walk & ideas ha ha ha about space) was to be some sort of Waqyasquahadakon butterfly8 of aching eternal colored light‑‑all-colored light, opalescent rainbows of eyeshattering mindful light (this being the theory I can get no one to believe; no; everyone strucks me when I mention thast; everyone struggs me when I magine dat)9‑‑but when those cheap, lousy batteries (purcahsed is memory swerves from the quintessentially untrstworthy Trinkingagays10, though you get some good deals from them, sometimes, if you don't mind feeding theft of minds, which is howhere they gate they're stuff) blunked out, as the Black Myth11 telleth us, there was left just the husk, all these fuggy greygrey husks, with shapes so loathsomely dull they were "antishapes"12 or "negashapes"13, like dead tooths or dull & boring mountians boring out their last gyrative daze in the pungent mists of malaforlic14 Kaay. So the buildings suck, my theory (controverisal!) being that they didn't always suck.  That's all. Corollary 115: The trees came later.  The trees came as mutant shapes.  The trees were nightmares we became used to & growed to love.  The trees were escaped & inky pixels from the stern machines slowly folding mathematically maftohledmiantgically mfoldingcly fligl fil  I  nto themselves hmevs hes e, so they were Smartesest Treeses, also capable of sternly folding through sheer mathomanical brillionce unot themselves hmevs hmv m, & so on, & most certainly giving off possibly deliberate traces that they's reporting back to the humps‑‑the humps being the computers‑‑the computers being the malformed rocks‑‑the rocks being our own clenking teeth, the teef talking like swamped rocks, ancient computers bred into our teeth, our teeth doing all of the thinking for us, the ignorant teeth. So the buildings died & the greetrees flourished. Footnotes: Footnotes not found. Don't let them tell you our uxaires are dirty, smudged, filthy, shitty, stinky, skanky, smelt, swelt, or zelt.  Au contraire‑‑our airs are scrubbed & chastised every day by the great black Chastisers (with their burning white trim‑‑oo!), grinning religious figures in our incoherent world described incoherently memoryless world, chewig out particylate matter, unnverved ions, fat bloppy molecules, free radicals, closet reactionaries, gays, faeries, cocksucking queers, smells of sex & sperm, Hemingway's contrived smell of death & the smell of the stuff he contrived it on, the dander of mountains, faulty strands, dismal genes, rain, mist, exhalated breaths, sundung, dew, not to mention the strange pink exhaust our flyboys function on. They get the amtosphere quite clean, I assure you.  Then they undo it all.  Yes they do.  They pull down those tight black pants, revealing lurid pink & yelow butts, & they moon our faces from the skies they do, & they‑‑well, let's just say the sky winds up this funny dun.  We have hired analysts to anlayze this gung (not to be mistaken for the iospazian gung, i.e., the weapon that no one hath), & inasmuch as they've not merely taken the money & hung around & rung, they reportagiggling back that it was some sort of spray, some antiseptic, killing off underorgs we might have, underorgs being our flat & parasitic teemy microcreators, thought by somedillysmum to be like little gods, to be despite their size & daily pograms of the priestly wungs the true & constant creators of Ux, creators of Ux, I say, without womb the whole dovely spuckture of the "egg with the centroid sun" would fold into itself like one of those computers hammered in above, therefore sticking into this paragraph like goddam stalacpipettes, or like lexhausted sighs of sterile lovers who have just blown their passion in a sticky white passionate wad dripping down the bare voluminous breasts of the Virgin Mary.  This is an approcimation of certain madnesses here. So the air is sprayed every day, see?  It is purified ridiculously, then sterilized.  That's why it's so raint & griany & gley. THE GREY TREES IN YOUR HEAD or @@    THE WHOLE GREAT DOUBLE-CUP OF UX 1.    The air in the sky flows in declensions of grey.  There is a missing file in my mind corresponding perfectly to a missing tubule of grey on my missingey brainiant of grey which causeth mine thoughtes to flowe in various arabesque paiseley formal climax declensions of tensions of grey. I think (greyly) you get the picture: air, buildings, facial features minds‑‑all without color, but in charcoals of the master of masters, God-greys more gorgeous than gilt, perfectly sturctured greys such that you couldn't tell the difference between inner & outer‑‑between the grey trees in your head & the treegreys in the airs outside of town, between the buildings & the clouds between the clouds & the planes between the faces of the planes or this just a smokey thought, hey? We move around bravely by braille. 2.    Uxtense, see, teems with missing record everywhere.  Everywhere you step, the ground, the infinite purple tiles (& when I say purple, fearing discontinuity, I mean greys arranged in such a wheys as to simulcrate the crakes of raze), you see signs in the ancient symbols, sings of the ancient simpoles saying Record not found & chasing you away like the spark-tongued little steel lizards in the armor charging high ionic from beneath sun-conductive rocks.  These records contain descriptions of color which we can extrapolate with the advice I mean advance I mean aid of the fierce, mean, mammoth mind-devides MIND-DEVICES! we have here.  Or who have us here.  Have us by the balls right here (& of course of course when I say balls mean the aching of the brainiant at the limp comswupt of colors you can wear like a tossed-off plastic bag but can neerere "see"), which partially epxlainth that look on our ruptured face. 3.    Where was I?  The dead batteries have done more than consume us‑‑consume those of us who stepped their think, blind, clumsy but lovely leg or hoovuntewo, stepping in the acid of the ancient battery & disappearing so fast large portions of their past disappear, & the blob seems to lick a sort of a morphic tongue & wait for more.  "Hell, maybe the damned batt'ries'll start up again if we‑‑you know, just feed 'em more," says Gyyragyive the Wize.  But we can't test his theory.  His theories always involve consumption of selves, so we are moved & compelled & drawna dndriven to tiers by his endless fecund moaning theories...but we dinna kin followa one. 4.    Anyway, I was thinking if these color-batteries pooped out, how much more filamental light do we have, before the whole great double-cup of Ux rachets off like a fluorescent tube rubbed in a tight hot hand?  Not worth going on in the dark (not to mention the cold, which is something we have no receptors for; like color, something we have no percepts for; something we are uttuerly underly readily flore) with these acidpools o' black suggingushin heehere. 5.    This was once a brillaint pun. Twas i' sooth a Bitterly Brilliunkt Pun in Old Uxtentsese, a language in which tooth & fruit were not only homonymic, they had some sort of interlnked metaphormic history wound like your twin gods Helix & Helixones which seemed toove worked or wormed or vermked his sway into the germ plasm, so that the two words, used thusly in the homonymic pun above uvurred untoe, had an overhwelming oetic sorta drift to the ind & the purblind ear of the Uxteneseasoner. 6.    That's right.  That's literally right.  The Uxtentse engineers did some tricks with space we not only canna understunned, we take forgranted with that smooth subliminal sough by which you see us (in the now-famous flims) numbly stepping from one side of the planet to eht rehto, losing only our forms & minds in the process, our raw emotionds emering intaxt or intext, in the form of the luminous ions I have so colorfully described back before I decided against color DECIDED AGAINST COLOR as "bonnex." 7.    Mm?  Oh!  Sorry.  I must have gona sleep.  This is a dull footnote, an impossible footnote, a horrible footnote to be caught forver in (footnotes in this sector being tiny bottles of time unfortunates like mytalkinggoddamself get plugged entoo), unagingly agin, because those pesky engineers in the preceding footnote also made it so yez could‑‑& bloody well did‑‑walk form one level of reality to another, in what we call when the dust poughs from our mouvs "Yer Ontological Jaunt" or "Promenade." 8.    That's right. You could head for the kitchen or your lover's arms & wind up in this crystalline footnote here, all alone & hungry orhorny.  Or you could walk out, a mere scholarly niggle, & find yourself saddled with a family & pets & a car, or find yourself some sort of powerful & deeply irresponsible mythillogical figger sashaying round the edges of the cuty here‑‑all this the fault of the engeers, who have messed up three footknots in a row so far, giving me here almost no chance to discuss the Waqyasquahadakon butterfly, which was not an insect, not a life form, & not at all the god it appeared to be.  I personally think it was the last thought of those engineers, but enough of that... 9.    A strugg is thought to be a form of hitting which removes the cover of the face, flipping the face & the scalp off like a suddenly-thrungéd glove, turning in the air & flopping down to the ground, which down in the Coves of Ux looks like some sort of volcanic gloss puddled in solidifed pools as shiny as forgotten ice.  One's face can be pulled back on, with the same degree of difficulty (Galactic D-Scale 1) as the donning of bipedal pantyhose or or of Briddiochay multiple boots (!), so it's not to be thought it was so bad to be thought of it's so bad.  As for belief in theories, no self-respecting Ux believes the theories of any other Ux. We are full of theories, teeming like mad white moths fluttering out the cracks of a tal-skull's multiple orifeyes.  But consdier this: 10.    There is a theory‑‑put forth by an Uxtentsean theprist who spends most of his time chasing her face (we switch genders just like that, where that is here & here is a snap, but I am not allowed to get into that equals snap)‑‑that we got all our stuff from the Trinkingagays, & that our ancestors were not so smart, not such magic engineers, but simply bought the silver globe-hollowers, the big tubes of dome-sealant, & the bladders of pastel gasses, the million-lensed color-shape-generators too tiny to see but by refraction of sepcial miniaturized photonic light generated in turn by micronano-CS engendreators reduced by the ubiquitously handy Vuor reducers, grey-base cement for the once-invisible buildings & the big brishes for slapping 'em 'on, 'and 'even the perspicuous dimensional shatterers or spatial drills or boreoreadorers binding the whole miserable place into one skewered flush.  Big silly myth, despite our theorists overhwelming documention thux. 11.    This story‑‑which pops up everywhere, in libraries, bottles, bubbles, neural transposed memories, genetic flux, the songs of children, the books brought by the rare space visitor, dreams, subdreams, anaesthetic flusch, warped thoughts mergant from the inter-D corridoridors...everywhere‑‑is thought to be some sort of cognitive virus we have.  It seems logical to us we would have cognitive viruses‑‑blasphemous black thoughts forms like the Black Myth which has fathered this footnote like a black rapist wielding his big prolific dick‑‑thoughts & pictures, even beliefs, which have infected us everywhere, as the black dots of Gottzossimier's Disease spread through the eyes or the nightmares of Ooldear's Plague implant the nightmares of the poor, cool, blueskinned Thuuscherole. 12.    Uh some of the discussion in these footnotes needs footnotes, but we are not going to go that way, to disappear into self-referential boreholes like the Urvuor, Taytraze, Sogonoofra, Trep, & Nugaspapes.  Not us‑‑not here! 13.    The Urvuor were thought, as their name implies, to be progenotirs of the Vuor, infamous inventors, now too small to exist except by subfluxionx of disbelieved myths.  The Taytraze or Taytreze were as fine & clear as nerve fibres moving through their motionless, high-pressure air.  We are, I think, well rid of the pink-eared Sogs, who not only were smarter than anyone else but smarmier, & thought themselves so (smarter, I mean, not smarmier-I-mean; & what the heall does smarymean?).  Never hear dof the Trep.  Nugs were like long-armed orange bears, I think.  This is not my field.  The antishape & negashape bits were mathematical construpts designed to epxlain how separate, small buildings made out of tachonomoff cement could, in möbius manner, connect every inch of the cove.  These theories collapsed of their own weight, as the buildings should've (and, according to one hypergeometric timewrap theory, have). 14.    Malaforlic is an adjective legally applicable to the plane of Kaay, though of course much stolen & bootlegged here & there. It has absolutely no deonotation, but suggests the oriental inkwash of the Kayyean waves, the plane consisting only of washes of degrees of grey probabilities, with nothing much solid in between, only the clear eyes of the bodiless, massless Kaays. 15.    Ux-1 equals pi equals the tiny black seed of the polluting trees, thought in some "face-ripping theories" (but arent't they all ha ah?) to be single molecules brought in by the Trinkingagays, who are thought in these hideous red glistening flesh of the flayed-face theories to be infected with mlecular trees, which have grown very large in the Ux environment.  I love this theory.  I love this theory, what though it not mine, more than I love my self, more than I love my sister, more than I love my own most-loveable world, more than I love the trees & even the trees the ostensible subjects of this theory here, which as I said I love so much I squeeze the seeds of the theorietical trees from the theory of the trees I squeeze like the dead & empty corse of your faceless lover limp in the dismal rain of the thoughtful trees. @@    BUG-INDEED or LIKE THE SMALLNESS OF A FLOWER OF HANDS. The Timnivvidang were like tall, gorgeously supple grasshoppers.  Their green skin was soft as baby chicken, but they wore helmets like little bubbles over their heads (their heads were on the top of their bodies, furthest from the grouns, which is where I, for one think heads should be‑‑but others listen to me, their eyes blinking sowly, vacantly, & then in the slurred ones of the lurred ones of someone woken at three a.m., dismiss my thoughts as "teleological").  The bubbles changed shape like soap bubbles‑‑now spherical, now eggshaped, now sprouting eyes like a giant bug-indeed, once in a while going through very rapid angular opalascions, as if the helmet were doing some serious painfu lthikning on an din na don it own & oan. "They're just recording," the kindly Tims'd explain.  Rare & sweet, notable for their courtly manners & hands-off attitude of apparent respect, the Tim's were studying us. In my life I have run across them quit a bit.  A function of my neighborhood & haunts, I believe.  (I do not believe, as others have suggested, that they are following me.  Silly!  I can tell they don't give a chirp about me.  Of course, I am followed & watched, my every thought recorded with intricately tiny mathematical correaltions to my actions. Of course this is so, as it is for all Uxtentseans.  So it is so so so: I hoards my paranoia for other things.) "Why the helmets?" I ask. "You may as well also as as well, 'Why the suits?' sir," said the tall male Timnivvidang, standing at one of our famous grey dust-windy whirwhimmy corrridor-coroners, the intersection of Gaunque, Traazpadian, Vettikarl, & Kwerler, I believe.  You could tell by their indirection the Timnivvidang thought differently. Sure enough, he was wearing a transparent suit, so fine it did not fold nor gloss, though nobody believes me about this one either. "But why?" I pursured, following him as he gazed almost affectionately at the broad oval instrument cradled in countless, tiny hands like the smallness of a flower of hands. To my surprise, he stopped his work for a moment & looked right at me (I think; his eyes were too complex to tell right away; our computers are still analyzing the scene & I mean STILL ANALYZING THE ETERNAL SCENE to figure this out; it has been earmarked for FIGUREOUT) & tap-tapped his instrument, which was a paler green than he. "It's the air, we belioeve," he said. "What's the air?" "The cause of your squiothinkingness1," he said, with a smile I think also marked FIGUREOUT with no positive reuslts yet yet. I followed him round the corradores.  Uxtentseans flashed in a power blur several ways along all three directional axes.  It made my hair do very funny things. He knew I needed an explaantion, & he obliged. "We've been sent," he said, laying a tender but creepy arm across my shoulderblod, "to study your distorted thought. I mean," he added hastily, afraid of offending me, "several sectors of the local universe regard your thinking as‑‑distinct, even odd.  It's called squiothinkingness." "Y'all think we're crazy." "I didn't say that."  Long pause, long look at his handheld board.  Quick look at me.  "We think it's the air.  Hence the helmet." He disappeared when he joined the roar, and, like all Timnivvidang, was never seen again. But I can tell you this & will you think I will: subsequent Timnivvidang wore more & more extravangant & elaborate shields‑‑reached unto hyperrococco gold preposterosities‑‑till they looked like gigantic wadded bags chucked out of the fridge of the gods.  My interpretation is that there was something terribly wrong with the air, & that‑‑beneath the diplomatic words‑‑he was saying the rest of the universe thought we were crazy, crazy from the air. OUT OF NOTHING COMES THE STRANGE BLUE TRUTH The air got very white & wispy in the upper branches of the trees.  We thought the branches had become white, like the albino branches of the Mraeey, but it was just frost romed all over the usual grey. We were breathless & chilly & excited, & we kept emitting fragmentary exclaamtions in the form of four-inch snowflakes, glassine cubes, diamond shapes glitteirng with the sort of light nomrally found spanking off the bow of a moonlit ship on a black & vasty sea.  Meanwhile the air thinned out to gentle wiusps, as if God were smoking his pipe up here‑‑which is what they said. Instread of God we found a bundled-up Timnivvidang within a nexus of tachyonic lenses & his head stuck through the membranes of a Niloqunk Berry.  It was the biggest, bluest berry I'd ever seen, & the Tim was the most eloquently suited up of all, & the tallest, & the finest cricket green, & I think we both knew this was the head Timnivvidang, doing the most esoteric recherche in this exoteric cherche. We couldn't get his attentino, though.  His head was way inside the belly of the berry, & we could see the alabaster body ablurd nside the berry stirring & moving, its limbs in aquatic articulation, as the eager Tim butted his nose or head or helmet against it, invetigating. "Maybe he'll explain the berries," Dyovylid thouught. "They never explain anything," I thought glumly.  We were tugging on his bellbottom whitwhite pants, kicking his tendons, sticking our fingers far far far up his butt. "They have no feelings," we thought. But he did pop out, in a state of exhileration.  He saw us & moved his complex head in what later transcriptions have deocmputed to a nod. Then came this.  This is the surprising part.  Part of the mind of the world believes me in this.  This is the truth here, coming out.  Out of nothing comes the strange blue truth.  Truth gathers into snowflakes falling from your stun-ned lips.  Lips gather truth into coldness.  Coldness becomes reality.  Reality whiffs. The Tim pulled off his helmet‑‑or rather, elegantly pulled off helmet after helmet, lense after lense & little lenes faling like the parings of the creator to the snow, his head growing smaller & smaller like a sentient artichoke, while a numberless umber of unther hands-or-what plucked at his lower garments, ripping them off, stealing from them, pulling of shred after shred of self-tattering clothes (cool!), stealing the forms right off of his bodies, a good deal of crystal steam pouring forth from the hot body underneath, & a panpoly of (later calced) 359 cricket-groans & gasps rising out of him, evidently expresisng the relief this guy felt with the tought that he could once upn a time & at last rip off all his shields & just, you know, hang with us Uxesere in this vast white crystal frostcave known as Uxes' Ear. He kept spelling, I mean getting smaller & shorter. His head looked like a tiny prick.  His body a miny smick.  He stood at last green & frosty & naked & onting & steaming & (let's not gforget) moaning befor eus & during us & after afterush. "You have soemthing to tell us, right?" * thought.\, & he nodded, unable to speak. "The berries told you something, right?" I piped. He nodded again, with a dangeorus vigorousness. "Too excited to talk?" we thought, whereuon the naked freaktout Timnivvidang scientist commenced to rapouthisstory. "These were the Vloid," he said, nodding more rapidly & dangerously eagerly the more I dud gaped & gasped & drew in rimey horror.bak. He pats the walls of the berry, the berry making the chime of the berry, the chime of the berry lghting up asstwirr the other berries, creaitng the interchiming of the Niloqunk Berries. "They'd built this place and‑‑ah, planted you in it, & set everything up (they thought!) so perfectly, & times the vloid to appear once every ten Daadaasmo to inspect, investigate, study, analyze, memorize, collate, annotate, & generlly suss everything was there were to as it wash too no about your poor city, friends." Pause for a crickety tch-tch-tch, interrupting the berries. "Yeawell, things went wrong.  Forms of entropy occurred in the highlytahcyonic aura here," pointing with just his prickly head to our whole echoic empty globe, "that they hadsn't foreseen.  See, they set their alarms.  They wrapped themselves in these berries‑‑which they called something like, lets see..." He pulls on fibocals which fall right into the snow.  "They called them jjortsutticukk zaars, meant to let them sleep almost eternally, after thwich they'd pop out & hear the reports of their hundred vloids.  That was the orignal plan‑‑one hundred vloids, one thousand Daads‑‑then they'd hear the greatest story ever told‑‑& I don't mean that ragged little pustulent pack of morbid, degenerate lies known as the bible." Dy & I looked shocked. "But this big, exsufflicate, hubristic, suicidal plan went, as the Ehrlmunts say, 'down the tubes' posthaste.  To itemize:" nothing was stopping him now.  "The air went bad & the tachyons called I mean caused you aus I mean all to go almost immediately insane‑‑no pun  mean offense upended I mean intended‑‑& the jorts zhorted out & grew cold, & up come the branches of the trees which are or were really the rootses of the grees, these being inverted trees, & they sucks the life right out of the jorts, so the jort sbecame mythogoddamlogical berries, & the ol' Vloid were gone, so you had & you have & you had & you have {this cycle hypnotizing us for an hour or zo} & you had & you have the machines you all call 'vloids' appeairng, gatheirng, & going off to report to nothing!" We busted up his truimph almost ere it hob begung when we thought the foggy thoughtform, "Go off to where?" "Beg par?" "The vloids‑‑the data things.  Where do they go?" The Timnivvidang looked around as if to find them right there. "You mean," he said‑‑enlarging to fill the foci of ourscreems‑‑in a really phoney way, even though what he said was "positively two-true true," "you didn't know?  YOu mean you don't knoiw?" "No," we both thought & dreamed. "They go nowhere," said the Timnivvidang.  "They report to nowhere.  That's an actual place, you understand‑‑the mathematical center of space‑‑where they go. It's where everyone will go‑‑but the vloids go first." Then in BLOWS the SNOW. We lookd & looked round the berry.  Round & round the merry berry did we go, the vacant berry, the white berry, the frosted adjectival goddam berry‑‑but it was no go.  No sign nor track nor smell nor smack of the Timnivvidang there. "He must have gone nowhere," we thought, but the lips of our thoughts were numb, & you couldn't very well "make out the 'nothing "thoughts."'" QUEER ATMOSPHERES The sextapedal spider plugged into his froxty cheek, Scall looked ghaxtly.  Dy was going something horrible to him.  He wasn't the same blueglow sleeping child he'd been two days of butterago.  That device was eating him away from the inside‑‑you could tell by the gentle shimmer of his tissues, the thinness of the crystal-meshed stuff that passed for skin.  Small shrugs of the air in the room (which was going weirdly mustier, betoking a corpse‑‑that was it: Dy had killed him & changed the smell, so the chastisers wouldn't sniff out our hiding place; this I suspected; I, moI, suspected my sister) caused him to bob & billow like a the loose plastic bag I feared he was.  His throat seemed oddly swollen, & if I satred at him, squatting wideyed while Dy was humming & seated in her inamimate thought-glow, I thought I cxould see throught him.  I thought (& could later swear) I could see the floor, the corner he was crumped in, right through him, & if I really concentrate (using techniques that come back to us from the microgenes‑‑techniques that generally kill us, as we have nothing to ocnentrate on that can bare even to be thought of sincerely for one seonc dof time, much less focused on; plus it tends to affect our bu-bu-bu-brainiants like forbidden sooth, like all those microgene things do, searing it from the center like a smutch of celluloid) I see limpid little fishes swimming round in him, moving the gapes of their fighy little ouths as as to move the liquid in his gut to say, This has she done your friend. So it was Third Refeeko, Bame, Daadaasmo 98619.599, at about grenfren fee-feigh yo'clock, that I matched to dead, denaimated flitter.  Dy had sucked the energy from it, so the damned thingamned gatheramned subliminal polarplanes of frost all over ti, & steamed intensely in the old spherioric garage never built for such queer atmospheres, sucking in even the light, even the smoothness of the walls of the old, once-green garage, making it look like the denty eyeball of a dead Haabzooarl (they were drawn to us like marboglops to a diinlight, though we constantly waned the little flurries of thenm off, & they'd enter anyway; it was a racial compulsion; they'd always implode in our atmosphere, giving off a dense & gorgoeus light; it drove us nuts with joy; I loved those Haabzooarl!).  She'd ruined it, the cast-iron bitch.  That bloody fliiter'd never work again. Anyway, plugging by doze (which protects us Ux frob du cold), I detached the icy corpse of two (2) diminfoliators, normally gentle yellow gashes in the form of these big, simpering, stupidly reassuring grings‑‑now nipped to a copious slags I shook did slags did I shook with little cries of pain (cries of pain (cries of pain (cries of pain (that held their shapes resistless in the air) & wouldn't clear no matter how much I waved my turquoise palms through them helplessly there) so Dy was going to find me out) so my motions lost all inertia as I thawed the folds out by holding them both to my chest with) cries of pain.  A broken ux, I limped back inside, place don eof them on a small device not unlike a device not unlike the dream of something meant to be somewhat like the simulacrum of a chair, then set the destination of other & threw it over Scall, who popped away. This'll either fold him or kill him, I thought, desite the half-thought that he was already dead & the quarter-thought that folding him in this state would kill him & the eighth-thought that unfolding him at the police station would kill him, & the sixteenth-thought that Dy would kill me & chill me & fold me up & send me after Scall when she found out, not to mention thirty-second, sixty-fourth, one hundred twenty-eighth, two hundred fifty-sixth, & further deliquescing halfthoughts evoking various childhood fears (which I'd never had in childhood but had now‑‑so there you go), sisterly loves, & various generla philosophical topics of a deeply feared deeply loved deeply repressed kind too small to fit within the words to say. The body of Scall (or Scall (or the memory of Scall (or the concept Scall) disappeared) folded into itself) was transposed automaticaly‑‑through the strexxlimnes the diminfoliators sturxt‑‑to precinct 99 I believe it was.  That's not bad.  It's a section of dreamy pictures.  I can see wh yi never saw him again. SAD2 or EXCRAZYEXOSCHWESTER Dy was working on what she called her "flesh dress." It looked outlandish‑‑like nothing I'd ever seen before, or hoped before to see: bloodless white, with circumrollicking ruffles or little villi-like things flapping round it, & a careful read line spinning up like a barber pole.  She was still enough Dyovylid to attempt adrt, & this was veyr sad, wasn't it, gentlement?  This was very very sad, or sad2, which is terribly sad, which is a cold & sapphire sad that blocks the tears from coming out.  It is eternal sad. Anyway, the flesh dress seemed modeled in a rotted old wedding dress kept forever in a shaded room till its once-bright tassels truned formaldehydick brown & the dun of human dander flakes it miscroscopically down to the same grey as the long-dead, aching wedding bans.  It was, in short, a flotational, rotational Miss Havisham weding dress of flesh.  & this was the body my crazy sister, excuse me, my ex-crazy sister I mean crazy exsister or rather excrazyexoschwester, was making or weaving or growing and/or aging or poisoning round herself & for herself so as to "bend in." ! I haven't mentioned much the way we look because I've been afriad mention the things we do with our flesh. This kept most everyone far away from poor Uxtentse, except the crazy Timnivvidang & the equally crazy Haabzooarl, & a few other even smaller, more mothlike, more wideyed, weirder racers weirder racers I have been too subliminal to mention under my blueskin yet. Anyway, we Ux can do most anything with our flesh, & we bloody well do.  Thanks to the (possibly mythic, of course) Panfraggamag Act of Daadaasmo 31a, we are free to alter our skin.   This act is regarded as a great evolution of freedom on Ex, which shows you what's wrong with Ux, if this perverse self-editing can pass for freedom. Hey‑‑but it's widely praised & held in near-religious esteem.  Its anniversary‑‑which changes every year with the arbitrary insanity of that grotesque celebration of savage maggotry known as "Easter"‑‑is the occasion for sickening parades & the mounting of vast symbos, not to mention contests of the flesh. So we Uxtentseans value our abilities, the chance to change color, rexture, & any shape‑‑up to & incluidng shapes out of space & shapes covering vast maniestations of circular inwinding phantasmic circular time inwinding phantasmic circular time. So the upshot here is that Dy might fit in no matter what shape she took, no matter which flesh dress she made. The only different, see, was that she wouldn't be able to change shape like us. TRANSPORTED TO AUGHT I picked the other diminfoliator from the slugthing the wet exchair had come & set it. Now this was tricky.  I wanted my friend to go to the cops, to the hospital‑‑to places thick with ux who might maybe could resxcue hum.  I set some very precise corrdinates, now known to everybody & known all too well to the court. For myself, I wanted nothing.  NOthing.  Nothing but.  Nothing but ut-buttery nutter bobscurity‑‑someplace where Dy couldn'd find me, if only becuase I wouldn't know myself.  & aplace with very few‑‑preferably no‑‑uxers hanging round, a dark & dismal, dea,d & buried sort of place, as close to death as was possible in a world where death was a capital bloody offense (I will explain; I will; I). So‑‑in a flash of genius I should've been psychotically suspicious of‑‑I set all six coordinates for zero, flung the dimi oer myself, and was trance ported to aught! NOORDINATE I have since learned (thru...) that Coordinate 000000 is indeterminate, a random designation for some coordinates that hasn't been assigned.  That's a million places, selected by the diminfoliator according to God Knows What criteria... When I unfold, I try to make it a point to get my bearings quickly, to take things in right away, so as to minimize that embarrassing, halfassed look & the wobbly movemetns of the fresh or frosch unfoliant. So I made mental notes.  A blurping sound.  Make that repeated blurping sounds.  Everything blue, dark blue.  Seems to be raining.  Yes, I can hear an immensely constant rain, but I am underwater. Now all of these observations were problematic.  I keep staring at the little sewn-in dial of the foliator, but of course it was just smiling 000000.  I decided I must be in someplace illegal‑‑this because of the blurping sounds.  Blurping sounds had been made illegal by the Sound Movements of Daadaasmo 3, 5, 7 & 78, along with  ahost of other "uncivilized" and/or "degenerate sounds," which I am not allowed to mention, as they exist like succulent strawberries, I mean like eggs of evil, I mean like the devil's eyes outside the fabric of this story.  They are therefore & of course Not Aloud. So there shouldn't've been blurping sounds.  But there were no "illegal" places either.  I must therefore be nowhere.  Blurp!  This was not effectively orienting me. Neither could there be rain, for there was no rain.  Not illegal or disliked or anything‑‑just no rain.  Insufficient moisture, inappropiate self-contained egosystem, contrary to established air currents, regarded as unnecessary hazard and/or luzury of the few, not designe din by those ancient engineers, no fans of rain, they. Maybe they were incandescent red lizards dancing on the surface of a sandy sun. Nor could I be underwater, for there were no bodies of water in Uxtentse City, other than the sealed vreetanques. You can bet I kept swatting that dial, trying to get something other than zeroes, hunched over it as if the dial would solve my troubles. I'd made a bit of a mistake here as to getting back, which doubled as a stokre of genius as to hiding from Dy.  For the handbook they gave me says quite disitnctly & in crystable syllablines, There is no folding out of zero.  If I was getting uot of here, it was through spatial transportation. By the same token, Dy oughtn't to find me here, especially if I held my breath a lot & tried not to think. I got out & around & found streets & other creatures.  Also green fish & wavering seaweed.  I was in one of the No Sectors of towan‑‑something I'd never heard of but am an expert on now.  Here there were no coordinates, no records, no citizenship, no strexx to the other xexx of the world, no names, no connections.  It was raining (& blurping) all the time on the surface of the water overhead.  It was a corridor of repression in the moonsized mansion that was Ux. It was one hell of a nifty hidyhole. SUBSYLLABLE NINE OH THREE or VOMITING * HERE Reetby Wareet pulled himself out of the etergel with a sucking sound.  His face came out, & it had a quiet, satisfied look to it, as if this was a man who woke up every morning to do the things he most loved. It must have seemed just seconds ago that he'd exploded the last vloid, been debriefed & tucked away.  Estimating 12,289 vloids, his enitre life of some forty or so days must have been a nonstop orgy of vloid-blasting.  He must be very good; he must fele very fresh; he must be addicted' & he must not be as smart as he looks. For Reetby looks very smart.  He looks very smart & a very dar crimson of a red. "I bet he'd look pretty under infrared," whispered GreengGord One, trying to lure me into talk. "Or else he's be invisible undr infrared," added GreengGord Three on my other side. One: "Now there's a thought." Three: "Yea.  I think vloids see in infrared." One: "What makes you think so?" "Oh, I don't think so," says three.  "This guy told me, when he was weeping & sobbing & sucking my dick & shitting his pants in his cell." At this Three was knocking the bach parts of my head toward the fornt part of my head, mushing my face to my head, & halfway through or so‑‑Im not sure, I wasn't able to record it precisely; I wish you poeple would leave me ALONE... Let's say, somewhere round Subsyllable Nine Oh Three, where the waters thinly trickle on the banks of stone, next to those big, indeterminate, seminal Druid thin thing thingds... Anyway, somewhere along about or so One starts smacking the facial part of my facially wet face back towards the back, compresisng & rummaging & wellnight rumpling the back of my head, so there emerged a rhythmic corrective back-and-forth swaitting thing.  These were very silly guards mocking & tormenting me. "Well," swat-swat-swat-swat, "what makes you think so, little man?" "Not sure. Either something I've read or the glow in her eyes" I was saying. "Yea, that glow..." & unrecorded one of them was saying as they hit me with the Big Charge.  So I was lost awhile, dancing round & really shitting my pants this time, & more or less bouncing round at the ends of thre,long gold chains, whilst One & Three grinned & pulled the chians, gently, eagerly, to keep my trajecory straight. Reetby rose above all this as he stood, for he was a giant as he stood, for Reetby along with his intensely murky redness was redness was also was very big.  By the time he got done standing, all the fun below had ceased, & we all three (I to the extent possible in the headgear they'd hobbled me im) gazed at his rocky face above the chiseled cluds, or else his chiseled face above the rocky clouds, or or else else his chiseled face (that sounds about right) above some other kind of clouds‑‑maybe the sor tof thin & wispy clouds that puffed out of ol' Reet's fridigaire. Seeming in Olympian manner repleased at our newfound calm, with blue metaphorical rhetoreticalizers cleaning up the shit that had been metaphorically flung up there, mussling round, scrababbling, mushing it in their mouves. Disgusting, but ancestrally necessaire. Reet's heroic chest swelled visibly & intensely before he spoke‑‑even if he spoke one word‑‑as if his meanings, like the blaggerweits of Baroggomn, required vast amounts of air to keep them alive. He also engaged in a lot of prepatory preening‑‑or at least it looked like preening, rubbing apprecizative palms along his pecs, recs, dex, blex, & tritissimus lateralidorrsili‑‑which are these big muscles the res tof us don't even haveor want, & in general arranging his posture & clothes, etc., clothes etc. clotehtecs ectlcothes. "Etc.," he coughed.  Blook slook form his mouj. "Food," he said after a good deal more of what it is not legally possible to vall "vomiting" (& I'm not calling it vomiting * here), spliced from the memeory, spliced from the heavens here, spliced from the icy fire. It didn't take long.  Reet landed in perfect two-point pirouette style with his back (delibertaely?) to Dyovylid, bobbed in slough-moughtioughn, whie she tried to fire up her act, piruetted in a distinctly feminine style (buned into the genes? a "stylish mockery"?), & blew my sister to pieces. It took viscous ages for the cheers to ripple wide, & when they did, those cheers, did ripple to the edges of the skyey wide, they turned like children too exhausted with their delightful pray to end it, turned & rippled back, & so on, till the entire city oscillate in reverbritatory cheeriossiocheers, little frags of Dy bobbing themselves around. (She was still conscious through all of this.  I knew.) SENDING IN MEDIOCRE MEN I have never denied that my next act began as a suicide attempt.  The prosecutors have posed it as a ruse & turned the surviving Uxtentseans against me.  This is sad... Stupid old Reetby never left off posing.  He was all hyperalert juts & jerk, with this fantastic demon arms abob in the air & his fingertrunks splayed, his great thighs legs spraddled wide & his brutally chiseled features (or beatifically crystallized, in an other universe, or groesquely blown-out in mama in anotheverse, or crudely crayoned in in a sociopathic universe, or dripped with the ichor of birth in one your dead mother's contless universe, or slashed like the wrist of razorblades in etc.‑‑these layers just go on & on.  We're still peeling them off, senidng men in. We've lost all our good men, & are now sending in mediocre men to fish the goodmen out & will soon be sending in our louisiest goddam men to fish the fishy mesimen ous, who have actually degenetirated to lousy fish‑‑slugfish, pugfusch, mudwumper flusch.  We'll never read the end of these concentric universe‑‑singular, red, paradoxical, defiant of time & always saying these demenaing things about time, who returns the favor, so we have here in this concentric haze of balls quite a war against losing time) jerking so instantly back & firth that he Reet he Reet-he seemeth like the Polyfaced Godoroth of Vilc, whom even I can't help but worship in my snazzy fashion, sneering at my life wormed into books unread sneerless in another dimension I care not to relaize. It may be he was suspicious.  We could speculate on this all day, & the day would be right back where it started, right at the crystal white idiot face of dawn, just as if we'd never started, & had to start to speculate again. Yes it may be Reet was tinking, which would throw him considerablough.  It may be he was thinking, most excellent warrior dat he wuz, Hey‑‑this was way too easy, way to fast, way too easy, way to fast..., & so on, in the virtually recidivistically recursive incremental way we have come to know as a haze around the halos of our eyes, the so-culled Rezzhaze there there there. The circular plat he stood so daintily on lit up like an antique fluorescent bathroom light, with spickles & stuggers & splotchalotchaholips of blue.  Hypertriumphiant Reet stomps on it like he's atryin' to turn it on!  He stomps on it, I swear!  So help me, Reet stomps on the entrapment plate & causeth it to light up in filigrees (a Dyovylid touch), then burnt into blue, producing her greatest work of art. That Statute of Reet! It was then I made my constroversial "suicidal" move Let this be stricken from the wreckard, Yournoh.  Let the dtirkcen record be tended to by the smitten.  What I am meaning to say, Youronoh, is that this need be smitten, er, swicken, ah...so as not to rend the sleeping jurors our of their blue subconsciousness through which they fail to see the day, in which their cavitatious minds grow wise, etc., is what I mean.  Youronoh?  Hello?  Am I so alone in here there is no one to tell me I am infinitely alone? of hopping, in a rather jolly fashion, envoetrwyitthhisntganding, to where {words reconstructed here} Re's left Ret's leftover heet & Reet's leftover heet & ReslorheandReet's leftover heet & Re'etover heet & Reet's leftovr heet & Reet's leftoveht d Reet's leftover he aneet's leftover heet & eet's leftover het & Reets leftover heet & Ree' etov et & Reet's leftoverhe & Ret's eftover heet & Ret'seftover heet & Reets leftver heet ande's leftover heet & Reeslftovrheet a Reet's leftover heet nd Reet's leftoverheet & Reet's letover he n Reet'sftover heet aReet'eftover heet nd et's letvr e d sent up its hairtouseled remicles of red in what everyone du sussed as extralethal fumes‑‑not lethla fumes, mind you, but really super special extra leth all fu mes into which I, uh, hopped delicatedy, soaring lithely & rather stylishly or the intensely dismal disk Dyovylid'd lured him too. Face full of red fumes, face disitnegaring wth & in & of & to the fooms, very exciting, very dangeorus here, very veyr very very wordless here.......................................!................................... ..........................................................!............... ........!....................................................................... ........................!....................................................... ...................!..................................!..!..... .............................till I like an extinct doctor of olde pulled his Reet's sides his Reet's open sides open, pulling his back apart with a massive statielctrix influggs of éja-vough cough-cough hough-hough chough-chough xuff-xuff & crawling right in. I was Reet now.  How ZAT for suicide, Yuroanerses? @@    COUNTLESS COMAS or AMPUTATED OFFSUCH Of course I couldn't move, but this wasn't bothering me & bothering me right now, as the wounded back sealed over me, healing me in, & I was getting ready to go down the tiny black & rather wobbly little circular stairway gyring down to the Room of the Circular Lights or Room of the Disks or control room, because I'd seen places like this before, or memories of places like this before came back to me in this event (with suicide wiped from my mind like a hot scirocco breeze), or more precisely, they were these memories of memories, possibly not my memeories at all, & posibly not real memories (who is to say? & who remembers to say? & who rememebrs who says & who says who rememebrs & who?) & hoo but artistic filigress implanted by my sister during one of my countless (some say remember to say infinities of) unrecountable comas see or commas C. She'd made a statue of my mind.  I don't know if she'd uh figured me blending into Reet, stellareet, but I reckon so (& remember so, but must aways reimind my membranicng reiself to ignore all memories ignore all memories ignore all memories.) Anyway, I was looking for the starcase or stairquace & trying to push in deeper, but the innerds of this dickens were filled with ghee, or clarified flotational bodystuff not unlike your ghee, & this was not...what... Instead I really was Reet, standing on Dy's pedestal & being applauded.  My lawyer says to clear one thing up‑‑& only one thing‑‑so let me clear one (1) thing up, after which nothing (0) more (+) will ever be clarified.  Satisfied?  K?  To wit: my perceptions were far clearer as a statue than they'd ever been, & my thoughts, too.  I didnlt have to move, & this was very comfortable.  This supports the theory of my sister making things quite comfy for me, my sister seieng me coming, my sister arranging for me to become somewhat of a thing like she, my sister snapped like some brittle plastic substance not disgustingly all over the stadium floor. It seemed to me we were surrounded here by ambivalent applasue, flowing forth or flowring froth form ambivlaental paws.  They were applauding the hero, now statue, Reetby Wareet, for saving the City of Ux.  They were applauding Dyovylid for outfixing‑‑or parafoxing‑‑Reet. & some were refraining from applause for the selfsame reaosings.  & some say there were remembered some who refrianed from not applauding for reasons which they claimed to say their own.  This I do not believe, but who am I to bleev? Yeawellanyway, a lot depended on which of these wavering valences was going to come out right ouright‑‑the one favoring keeping meReet eternally qua sanctifiedish statute ofeet, or the one (known colloquially as The Other) flavoring the slipping off of the gentle swish (o yea!) the slissing goff of the genial zitch (uh-huh) thethe hissing auf auf der genital clitch, thus setting Mereet meFree to bereet for a time again, till, preusmably, time to sleep & then time to zap your subsequent vloid or so. The switch own the day.  He was their red hero after all.  & they were thinking of extricating me, if only to proceed with the punishments which had even the babes in their energy forests licking their liddle lisps at the thought of beracking me. But when the switch was slid down & the blue filigrees frayed, when the switch dipped into its silent slit of nothingness, connoting, never crying, OFF, when the switch was by our nameless mayer tapped, when my shattered schwester's suspiciously convenient off switch (hey‑‑Dy was famous for the recondite obscuirty of her off switch; no one ever found her off switch; many a turgid article hath beb rut on the sunjek of her "amputated offsuch," so this big convenient muckerother was redoubly dubiust) was offed... Eyereet decompryzed unto sand, unto ruddy motes of red, unot Martian dust. With me aibnosairdde! UNOT MARTIAN DUST It was not easy to sweep me up.  Us up.  Now with each of me the size of an Absolute Mote©, with the tautoccasional half-mote or half assmote, & figuring, oh, let's say, oh, about 435 pounds of the late greet Rate a-and another 27 pounds of me slipped in the back (assuming the math works that way if my weight is retained as an aspect of reality once inside, I mean,m once I am inside, or was inside, there to shatter too. My narration shows how self-involved I became‑‑a phenomenon listed in the standard Discogopticon 336.117 as acute motosis, apparently common in other realms, but unseenun heardof in what's chucklingly culled the relams of Ux.  I didn't think about my considerably less-shattered sister & what they were doing with the ieces of her, or even howe they might be separating her from me, if indeed they were etc. Difficult clean-up.  Lucky I had no sense of time‑‑or more precisely as I hate to be precise my sense of time waft over the motes-o-moi like a gritty smell, a goddam smell, a backbrain-burning drugged-up psychoactive sociopathetic bloodyold smell, i.e., & so my sense of time could no longer tell time (sliding up its little sleeves in incalculable cyclicals & making that dumb face, practically swallowing its lips & its eyes practically swallowing the old high-school generate watch unwound for eonic centuries as each mote crane its neck forward, duh?, like a loop of some interminabobble kindless kine...). They had to use pilques to sweep me up!  Yes!  Pilques!  I mean it!  Yes I do!  Yes!  PIlques!  Pilques! It was exciting.  Trust me.  The pilques were black little mote-sized Uxeans (at least they were dreamt to be Uxians, which made them Uxeans in the great, reality-begetting Uxean DreambUxean DreambUxean DreambUx, known as "The Great Uxean Book of Reality-generating Internexial Phase Three REM Phantasmagoric Dream-mock-mechanismo Ismofabricanto Ontononto For Short" for short or short) crystalloxed in ombor slabs & leant up against the dander-woolly walls of the dripping great greycaves down below since before even the dead could fail not to remember un.  They looked like black dots, see.  But everyone who brushed the dander off the danderslabs with his sleeve & thrust his face into the amber-gryx sensed they were sentient‑‑merely immobilized, awaiting some ridiculous, laughable purpose for which to call them yawake somehow. Somehow.  Well, they were acitvated in point of fact by chronosensor servomechanisms sensing the presence of sentient red dust, sentient red dust, that was me, that's me to flow out these black little microscopic vergions of ourselves. It was they that cleaned me up.  I did not clean myself up.  That's some sordislander, the slandersordious import of which too slandorius for the stand to undermine. Yea they cleant me & swupt me & balled me all together & cucked me into ona dem doublebuckettrucks© and...and....trans... pore...dud...m...o......eye!... I could see everything because I was a prettymulch eye.  I mean I was nothing but eyes, & when I say whatever I said I meant to mean each mote was singularly I, I mean eye.  So eye saw quite well, thank you veddymucks. So...at first I (we) think like they taking me to a hospital, except we have no hospitals.  Hospitals & the concept hospital uninvented back in Daadaasmo 22a, known as The Time of Bad Ideas, as doctors, thus taking care of the thought I or we am having to have to have had to have been having about taking us to a doctor had. No, they took me much better instead.  To a place did they thus me take.  Instead.  It was better, Methinks, Inc., because it existed, & it is, in the space of Generality where the gentle fog etc. better to be swept up & taken to a place than I mean that "exist" than rather than than be uncermoniously‑‑or ceremoniously, for that madder‑‑flanned into a trasahcan of unreality, in the trashcan of unreality, in the trashcan of metaphors of unreality in the trashcan of metaphor in the universe of unreal metaphors in the unreal universe of metaphors in the metaphor of metaphors, than. Where were we?  Oh yea (& get this)‑‑they took me into the mint buildings, unto the mintgreen towers, unto the great flexing windwaving towers of euphoric mint in the dustmintmins of grint.  It was not easy for them (I saw them you undertand, but in gl*nts‑‑each of my little bitty eyen good only for a gl*nt) to transport me anywhere, laughing as they were.  Soehow this fantasticand-I'll-admit-twasfan-tasticterm zuv-invence stuck the allviewing puxtent puvlic as intense.  I mean funny.  I meant hilarious. So they more or less laughed me into this verdant-fumey abode of the laughing gods, the  happy, mintsnuffing, alien gods, the secretly agoraphobic gods who uxed their healthful intenrities in the eyescraping towers of green that so flushed their verdure through the turnks of the chaors trees.  I woulda laughed to butcept I was red dust, Martian redeyed dust, an accident of dust in whc hthe minty gods were interested, possibly to the point where breath turns into choking & all reflux stops. MOUTH OER ANUS I am sworn to break my word about the secrecy.  I mean, I signed a contract of secrecy in green ink or nik on the inside of the minty towers which (the cpontract) was then rolled into a thick & clausefilled tube & crammed into my mouth (choosing mouth oer anus), clauses & all (some dangling clauses gathered up in numble fingers & stuffe din round the edges of my lips streched to their utmocksed orgasmicity), & set into green flame, & smoked, so I would forget. I can't imagine how you undid all that, but my hat (unlet's it the top of my head (IT IS‑‑IT THE TOP OF MY HEAD...THE TOP OF MY HEAD IT OFF!) AAAAAAAAGH!) be ough to you. With a massive cinch the colors changed.  The air, the sounds, the raggedness‑‑the very uxistentse of my old world changed.  To my surprise, the colors were all of the tribe of blue, with just a bit of green arounds the tengy idge of their metaphoric eyebrown, lashes which magnified which lashes wish magnified become the singular tree falling in the forest of an unremitten world‑‑a tree with a brilliant green trunk, you see. Perhaps, seeing this from the polyperspectives of a gob of dots, I exaggerate.  Perhpas I apologize.  I do apologize: I apologize to the extent that apology is deemed necessary in the hearts of my green victims.  It is thus the first apology on a sliding scale since its invention in the mid-80s on the sunless planet earth, cradle of pollutive religions, diarrhetic beliefs in Christ, carbuncular imges of your vergion merries (vergiun!  like she didn't know her way around the barnyard‑‑foh!), idiot bearded loongods, pustulant popes, bilious bibles steeped & meeming in fircative bigotrydon't get me started please. OK, perhaps I exaggerate, as I was trying to say before THE WINDS OF THE EXPLOSION WHISTLED THE RIPPINGS OF MY CLOTHES RIGHT off...quite...quietly...quitely...quietus...quiteaous, but certainly the laughter ended with the shattering soundwall of that cinch. Everyone inside seemed very clear about their singular duties.  Normally, I'd say some of them were faking it, except their duties dovetialed & coordinated & meshed (etc., etc.) too perfectly.  Unless they were all faking it. That's it.  They were faking it.  All of them!  Ah!  I have convinced myself‑‑better than masturbation, what? Here's what they (unh! UNH!) faked: brows furrowed into foreheads & foreheads qurled entwo sagital crests, SC's crunked into brown wads of Very Serious Thought, they dumped me forthwith into this small chamber, like a homonoid trnasport chamber, had there ever been such a thing (i.e., had they ever worked, & not just left one hundred billion billiob homoids with substances like egg on their face, satdning in brillolit chambers howling but sending no one nowherem, there being, in essence, nowhere to go to go), with The Usual Clear Glass.  They dumped the bulk of me, then quickly & with undue seriousness placed the remaining crumbs of me-crum crumling of-me crubs into the nonport chamber with large wooden tweezers, as if I were a dab of photographs dripping in sleepy chemicals or sleeping in gentle chemcos or sleazing in risky kremikoze or ripping in tweezing jemikloes or jipping in jeezing remigoze or slipping in jeezy demigauze‑‑till they got me all in. Then they pumped out the air & pumped off the gravity, so's I could float & see (& I could really see!). So, floating in my chamber, I got to watc hthe sternly furous activities‑‑the gathering of *'s limbs, the overlords (& you could, if I may, tell they were overlords by their one-foot floating off the floor or their one-floart foating off the froer or their one-flute flouting auf dem flueur) with their clipboards blinking with airy signs signing OverLord!s supervising the placement or plates meat of * into a similar foatfiel, only hers vertical, so the port of her body's be lying down, her case I would imagine being a good deal simplilar to meen. I believe they were lighting me up a lot.  They were energizing the dots of me a lot.  I was of many mind about it, but I sensed they were charging up the warmth of the times of the dots-o-me dotz, in preparation for, I hoped, refusing I mean re-fusing I mean re-infusing me I mean me-me. & shining some steely lights on my supine sister, too, as they placed the snapped porments of her splenters in the form of a jingskraw puxxle of *. While I believe my belief in me took subliminal shape in the lights they were objecting me too. A COUPLE OF PATHWAYS TO A SMILE or FOLLOW-HOWEVER-SNORT These guys were serious.  They all looked young.  Their hair was jet black, but may have just been paint painted plainly on their little scalp skulls.  They was short.  They was androgynous‑‑some with tiny lumps in the groin, some with little swells in the chest, but it didn't matter.  Nothing matters when you never smile. I was a wise cloud of dottles, & I knew these little technicians couldn't smile.  Oh, there wasn't much breath beneath those tight white coats; amongst those laced neurons existed but a couple of pathways to a smile.  & no pathway back. This meant this: meant this meant: that if perchance one of them should, say, glanxe, ay, at, y, another one, & their faces painted with absolute coatings of white buck should, as the metulacrum whirrs, crack a grin that would be it‑‑not only would they both crackagriun, not only would those grins stay cracked & painted on the albinio desertio of their respetivo fallace, not only would the grin spread like a prized virus kept so long in its vial eveyrone forgot the damned thing (the vial) was made of glass & the grin cracked the grass, & the grass grew like cracks of Heavily Baked Sand over everyone, whereupon every one would harden, the cracks possibly fall like glaze off the window of a glowing pain to a crop of prefect young skulls, each & every skull turning almost in tandem toward me, rather frightening me such at my sand grow white & precipitate white forming the poor faceless pile of a formless skull, notr even a skull, of course, but the white pile of powder you get when the sentence you exhale pulls out all your breath your white consciousness the consciousness of the white entity next to you, the prana from the plate of noodles the white entity next to you had ordered and was trying to eat, except he has no mouth, see, the mouth grinned a grin back in the pretemporal "Age of Quoted Grins" & was ha ah lost a! in volcanic furor with the grin, the grins, not to mention the unmentionable skulls turning to grin at the leftover powder not even dust even anyevenmore, but a powder as close to weighltess as dead dead powder can can be‑‑before the thick door (as heavy & gigantic as a green safe) uncinched like an ancient cryptogram with enough blue thunder to pulverize the techs who degenerate to a much looser, much richer, much more variegated powder valuable enough apparently uh-uh-enughh-hu-hu unuph for the as-yet undefined because as-ey unperceived being to pause in its progress & pause in its progress toward me yawning toward me to bend down meticulously to sweep up, bag, & pocket the motes of the dead-short-servants, containing, one might, speculate, valuable chemicals the processing of said valuable chemicals hereopter tobynome as the S.V.C. possibly being the primary function of the youngsters, now long-dead in a metaphor that ran out of breath ages ago & now propels itself, if that's the dream word or the dream of the word or the word of the dream of the word on pure & purest ether, as et whirr, before pocketing the stuff and‑‑kicking countless robes casually lifting in whatever weird air was air was thair‑‑moseys on up to me. Now perception deifnes this guy.  White haired and‑‑more importantly‑‑fluffy harred.  None of this panted-on-the-skull but.  & smiling.  Bemaing. Old & wrinkled, but positively gnarled with grins & chortles, relatively bouncing with inner chuckles, a marked emotional contrast, one must note, to the laughless halfassed pissants powdered in the airless metaphor above. White stethoscope, obviously made for finding hidden hearts, & fingers thrust in pocket in the grand maniere. "Hm," he says his professional little snort followed, however-snort-folow-however-snort-follow-however-snort, by echoed tracers of microsnort...probably not what he'd intended, not that it isn't premature here to impugn intentions here & a nameplate which keeps trying not to be read, a purple, shy nameplate, which however, in its nudity, flashes DOC PHOTRE DHORTE. Glaces halfback over his shoulder at the reckless carnage above & says‑‑his voice more a suave whisper than a shout, "Quite a metaphor there." I shrug.  You should see a powder shrug, by the way.  Come to The Powder Museum in Suth Ventral Naggug sometime & see how a powder shrug.  Yea, I gave him the ol' powder shrug, "and he laughs."  But I needn't say "this."  No need to say "Dr. Phorte laughed," when one need only stipulate here at the intro here at the intro here "the doc shrugs," I mean laughs, "after everything."  Absolutely everything.  You might well conclude‑‑& based on that cnclusion, go on to say‑‑although I refrain (no thanks...not me...neverthoughthestuff...no no...) "Photre Dhotre was enjoying existence to the hiltest." Let's review, shall we? "And he laughs." "This." "Dr. Phorte laughed." "The Doc shrugs after everything." "Photre Dhorte was enjoying existence to the hiltest." Pause with doctor nodding intelligently.  Let me tell you, this was the most perspicuously intelligent nod I'd ever seen‑‑powdered or noa‑‑beside which, as in The Nod Musee up in North Anterior Nnagg, where all nods nod side by side behind the absolute nod gloss of the painless glazz, all other nods have been idiot nods up to now, where the intelligent almost of God doth bow. "Are you through?" he finally says‑‑& with that, I am! I nod emptily, & let me averr, this was empty...Nod Musee...side by side...stuffed nod up to now. "Not quite," I confess, & the good doctor pauses & waits for meaning, like the phrase good doctor, waiting eternall for some sort of clarit of meaning, with none comeforthing fourth. He laughs (whooops No need to say‑‑sorry).  "Hell of ametaphor up there." I clear my throat‑‑& let me tell you, powder...throat...musee. "What's wrong with me, er, Doc?" "Just 'Doc,' or 'Photre' or 'Phorte' or 'Photre Dhort' or 'Pho'‑‑but not 'erdoc'...never 'erdoc,' son." "Sorry." "'SOK.  Anyway, Mr. Wareet, it's megametaphorization, a common side effect of powderation‑‑which is what you've got.  Oh yes," & snaps with a laugh whoops his fingertips‑‑which are just spraks, not proper fingertips‑‑& the tecnhnicians "spring" back to "life"‑‑painted hair & serious & all‑‑just as if I'd never ground them to a powder metaphircally. Damn!  Look like none of my ole tricks was gonna to gonna-work here! Dr. Phorte shakes his head & laughwhoopss.  Then, rather than clarifing things for me imediately & possibly advancing the plot for you & me, or the great black engine of the plot as invisible as the unconscious desires that suddenly wake you up to climb the tower & start shooting off the tiny heads below, he commense to mess with me. Like sitting on a stool in front of the chamber & wafting his hand back & forth through me as you'd waft your hand through fruitflies on a summer night too sensually at ease to sigh & roll ove rinto the next, equally sensual,  summer night.  Back & forth, back & forth, his arm going through what I thought was the glass of the chamber but which must have been a field, like a glass field or something, holding the powder but holding back naught the arm of the character moving his solid arm. And, of course, giving forth a nasty little chuckle of fun with each flustrsation of the cluster that was me.  It hurt, it traumatized me, so he had to keep dong it, back & forth‑‑waft, waft, waft‑‑almost endlessly, virtually forever, on the figurative edge of time, & when I say time I mean real-time, though that this dark point this, I mean tha,t remained to be seen.  I mean, the realness of the time remained to be felt and/or seen. & so the doctor's arm become part of my being for a long long "time." "Hm!" he'd laugh-a-gurnt after each pass through, for such a long sickle of psycholes even the androgynous techs felt an impatients they woulda had-they-thought thought dead, shifting from one foots to the others with surreptitious glanks at one another & another surpriing thought‑‑e.g., that they wantedta FUCK‑‑exacerbating the air somewhat. Causing the doctor to wheeze through his nose.  A few million passes bakc & forth of passes back & forth until he stopped. "Quite a case," he mutters, though we all know this not true. THEORY OF WHY They were shining some very rosy light on the body of *, but nothing was happening. "Hm," said Phorte again.  "I expected that."  Then he turned to me & blurted something out.  "We're trying to bring her back to life," he said, his pwn face turning rosier than the light, "to find out how she powdered you, Herr Vareet." "It was a good trick," I thought I said, using the tiny trick of thinking in speaking ("spinking-in") inReet's voice, which involved shrinking down inside Reet's red voice box andout shoutingout outinout throughout itout. But as always, Phorte leaned back, his fingers interlocked between his knees & tilted his head at me.  It was, as the kids say, a fishy look. "But then," he said, clapping a hand on Reet's big knee in the abrupt change of subject that always followed the looks.  Hadn't he seent he tpaes?  Didn't he know I had crawled inside of Reet? Or did he know, & was keeping Reet animate, trying to figure out how to get me out.  I was an unreal fly in the ointment of this theory of why. "But then," he said again, his head poking on an infinitely extended net through the net through the cloud of ascriptions there, big goofy grin upon his face.  "Let's get you settled in." My secrecy on these matters was contained in the tiny green tablet the court has seen fit to crush.  So now I guess I can speak freely, at least within the withering spheres of court. All right, the Mint Towers were a beautiful blue inside, no straight-up walls or flat-out ceilings but blue drapery-like cloudy sorts‑‑miniatures, I think, of the fabulous blue clouds of Norrut‑‑& I do use the words "blue drapery-like cloudy sorts" with care, each word quite-possibly-low-dead with ex-plo-sives by sem-an-tic sab-o-teurs, as they were miniaturized atmospheic phenomena & not artificial drapes or anysuch thang.  Yes, the minty towers teemed or toomed with such expensive effects, so in the unlikely case you've been wondering how Uxtentse is so poor: this is where the money goes in, flowing in the form of energy into the little "pores" our then-geologists, then-studying these then-mysterious then-mountains of grune, had long noted, without having a clue as to whatwas going on. I can blurturt urt nurt: those were moneypores! I feel better now, your honors.  Thanks for shattering the tablet of my dreams. Where was I?  Oh yea, floating in the blue amtospheres inside.  These towers were set up to absorb money, & absorb they did, their very walls made out of‑‑not the usual second-hand ripped-off ringworld foundation material copped form a universe of words many lightyears away form this‑‑wealth-absorbant materials.  The ages had gone & the ages had passed, & perhpas things had gone a bit too far, perhpas the folks inside (& I will get to the folks inside (the folks inside await you with their glowing eyes (in their lightless world (of glowing eyes (within eyes (within eyes) staring at you & thinking) How am I ever going to work my way outof these parentheses?), or indeed, is it even necessary) or desirable) or possible) trying to escape, as I think I implied) form those glowing eyes) teeming with a bit too much too wealth by now, such that extreme, inventive ways of spending more & more money had been developed for every little effect, for every vision, feel, atmosphaire‑‑everything.  You could write a whole book if not a holebook on the bathrooms for instance, & another book on the expense of the bathrooms, & still need yet still another other book‑‑an initially epty book‑‑just to abosrb the welath that would flow into these discussions of the bathrooms‑‑not the bathrooms themselves, let re-me mind-you, but the aforementioned hypothetical books on the wealth of bathrooms.  This even suggests there was so much wealth flowing into the bathrooms that, once made aware, you had to write a book on the wealth of etc.‑‑a book full of etceteras...which expklains the library, which was so stunningly stunned I can't talk about it till the court heals me a bit, or lets me go. Little joke there, Uronnors. So every effort was being made to invoke the surplux of welath that kept flowing in, as the desperate poor folk in their tin scrapey skins outside kept more & more frantically tring to generate, if only to understand why it left them so fast, which brings is back again to the Theory of Why. Many a condensed floor, formed of filigreed gold & condensed, with many a vertical corridor of no-gravity (a most expensive propoisition, that.  many a race, as well as many races, are forced to leave no-grav to the light & lofty words of science fiction noveldomes, d\simply because these race & races race never develop the wealth-aborptive systems necssary for development of antigrav.  It just takes lots of money, see.  That'll do it. Now were these here corridors simple, still tubes of float (they had some of those down below‑‑those tubes of flow), but‑‑in further anxious & serious attempts to spend all the money threatening to crush the life out of them‑‑all gasses & amtospheres & meories (& memories) was pumped outa them & non-inertial fields placed around them (don't even ask about the price!), so when you flippe dinto them (the corridors), you flipped to forever so fast you rememebred nothing for a while, so expensive naturally memory-transporters were built & acitvated & then hired at top wages to transport your memories (remember?) so you didn't emerge an idiot from the crystalline-dustmote-glowing-chambers of the tubes of transport taking you form one floor to another in the plexus we know as The Green. INTRICATE TINKLING They like walls‑‑particularly blue walls‑‑so they bent space a bit (nothing serious, you understand‑‑just bentit a littlebit) so as to uh accommodate many more walls & many another wall & also many a wall. Judge: Yea well, wasn't it easy to get lost in these mintgreen towers? Me: Better you should say it was impossible notto get lost. Judge: You putting word sin my mouth, young uxtor? Me: Aye, uronnor. Judge: OK.  Good. Case dismist‑‑just kidding (haha).  Case dispersed unto mist‑‑bet that's what you'd like to have to happen, ayyoungux? Me: {no answer} Judge: Anyway, so didn't these people get lost? Me: They did, you ronnor. Judge: & so how did these uxeans get back? Me: {splaying finger out of finger in a finger pie}  Get back to what, yonnor? Judge: Uh‑‑to their rooms? Me: Hey, you don't seem to understand.  You don'lt seem to've grokked what I was tryna say.  There are billions of ux in these buildings, sirs‑‑billions.  They have to stay lost. Judge: Ah. Judge: Mm. Judge: So there were no expensive silvery devices of various sizes & in absolute configurations designed to, say, lead these unforutnates back‑‑there being, as the reocrd will indiocate you just fucking said {STRIKE THAT FUCKING!}, no place to return to them to to? Me: Oh yea, there were many such devices.  Ten for each ux. Judges: Whoa! Me: {nodding} Yea!  But like I said, they tuned the space of the splace in upon itself like some kind of hyperembedded ultraintroverted selfreferentially compulsively narcissistically impassioned sentence if you call that a "sentence" turning in upon itself, or his-or herself, until the words glink like crystal mirrors in which can be seen all the other words, including entrspective micromodules of the very words looking, as it were, into the mirrors of the other words, at which point the point of consciousness, grapsing at last its place within these infinities of points, thinks, This sentence is a lie, at which point... I am contempted for court, on with story of story in story. Walls impluded in themselves so as to create all this extra blue wallsaplace.  They liked their walls, these Minsters.  Ohyeand they liked chandeliers, too‑‑or these great things that looked like the talking chandeliers of Lisho (or was it Sveebareeg?), so these psychedelic merry-go-round structures tinling everywhere combined with the great ventilation shaftes & the howl-caverns & the wind-tormers & the interconnecting hypertumnels & the winds therein withim caused an intricate tinkling to follow you round, just an intricate tinkling trailing you everwhere you go, this intricate twinkling in your eyes & ears & this intimate tingling felt within the uxean version of proprioceptors gauging the movement of the Ux verison of muscles in the uxvcersion of limbs. & that's not all.  Not at all all!  They also all had these accommodoting oval pictures floating over all of their many walls, & of course they were the most expensive pix developable, hyperpix containing in thesmelves the digitalated datas of all pictures that had gone bfore, or after for that matter or between for that antimatter, so I use the worm accommoating because these pictures would like try to figure out whatt you wanted to be looking at when you were looking at, or into them to see what they were, only to find what they were was utterly & tobally a fucntion of what you remembered or imagined or fancied you imagined you'd venture to remember to want to see‑‑something like that‑‑so a look into one of these sometimes OVAL sometimes EXTREMELY LARGE always DEEP pictures was some sort of visual wreslting match, involnig (on your part) successive intercraningsof the cranial nex, sometimes but not often even a thurxting of the face into or even but not at all often through the glaff into the workings of the mind of the working picture, a bit like trying to suss your features in a featuriative fevers, with the squinting & the modifiers & the drem. So these were goregously expensive pictures, each one, needless to say but necessary to think, trying to outgrow the others, except for the the solipsisitc mirrors with regard to no one but the rock agonizingly kicked by the silver toe of Being trying to prove the existence of his own, but proving painful in the wise & for the nonce & in the guise of the nonesuch rise of wray of ize ovaze. THE ROOM OF THE BORROWED BOW or 5) THE LOUD & CONSTANT ROAR OF THEIR IGNORING We attending parties along the crushed planes, called crushed-plane parties, where I was introduced as "the reconstituted Mr. Wareet."  These various appartments were compressed vertically, by some version of the diminfoliator, so they looked like little gremlin figures from the series of (illegal) squat children's toys, & this confused my reactions. I was duded up in some sort of white suit, either the mint of fashion or some kind of humilaiting joke, like I was on display.  Certainly they never spoke to me as if I were wuite right, but that may have been because my eyes just kept darting right & left with the rock-slam fury of a psychotic soul fleshed into an engram & with the metallic electircal taste of evil intent on his mute little evil little tongue, or rhythms like that.  That & the dots of sweat.  Sweat in livid red dots like some fresh skin disease, soon to be all the rage, or most of the rage, anyway, certinaly much of the pain an the hatred & the anger eaitng my brains when I first woke up each time just like the time befor,e the pain getting more & verbal, therefore more & more indelible, so incurable the doctors foaming round me like cute littel bubbles do but cluck their tongues till the air is fueled I mean filled with the whiteness of their clucknig little tongue,s which have as I think I've wanted to imply fallen out from excessiv clucking. That & my tendency to rung my fenger under the constrictive bow of the noosoid vibrant collar Phorte I-will-not-call-him'"Doctor"-"Phorte" or his tailors or his dressers or his servants or his butler(s) or his maid(!) having seen fits to fest me, to where 1) there are fingermarks under my collar, 2) the limitless collar hath stretched to the hooplike limits of the laughable hulahoop bow of the room of the borrowed bow where these parties taking place in the maze of space or the spaze of mace in the party-place, 3) many finger has broken up like nothing so much as a cheap eraser breaking down into hystful tearferics at the sight of the line, 4) I have turkey-streched my head clear off (a) with friendly-faced partygoers handing me up my face from their dwarf heaven, masky smiles along the width of their cinemascoptic fazes, b) with Phorte apporting the elbow of my funnybones & whispering, c) "Hsst!  You all RIGHT?, d) which I was of course, exactamundly not), which hwas hard for even the most devout guest to ignore, & (e) finally), 5) the loud & constant roar of their ignoring. So. REFLEX THING OF A REFLEX THING It was hard to spot the pretty women, as they all looked like great crushed seeds, & even the most chamring smile was frightening.  Frightening, too, were their questions, which seemed of a cheery & technical nature, i.e, what were my thoughts on the origin of vloids?  Did the origin of vloids go back before me? before Uxtentse itself?  How did they manage this turning-into-plastic-trick or plastic-turning trick or PTT?  What, precisely, woke me up?  Why was I red?  Did I plan my trademarkTM, swift destructionDN of vloids©, or was it some reflex thing of a reflex thing (don't look at me (I'm being rheotircal here, as I know you can't look at me): that's what they said.  They said, "reflext thing of a reflex thing."  I couldn't speculate as to why, caught up with my red survival, & I don't want to speculate now, now that I have, have all the time, timein the world, world to speculate, speculate on anything I please, please mind your head leaving the "crushed space," "space" empty, "empty" space, "space 'empty,'" "'empty "space."'"  STOP LOOKING AT ME!!)) tha just happened, surprisngly?  Was I in fact conscious or sentinet at all?  Hello?  Anybody there {laughter}?  What was that laughter, & whence this bosession‑‑like was I attracted to vloids or to female vloids or to femlaes in general, & what the hell was I, anyway, being so red & all? I would nod mysteriously, my nod in the veritically comprushed splice looked very mysterious indeed (but I would see myself hearing them walk off to chatter to their friends, & each & every time of the umpteenth times they performed this specific action, always perfectly the same, they would whisper (behind their backs), "He's an idiot," & reply would be, "He must be a machine, a trained machine," at which they would look at me amazedly, then smile & wave, & I would smile & wave & nod mysteriously, nod the comprushed looked mysterious (but would myself them off chatter their & and time the times performed specific always the they whisper their "He's idiot," reply be, "Must a a machine," which would at amazedly, smile wave, I smile wave nod, nod comprushed mysterious would them chatter & time times specific the whisper "He's reply must a," which at smile I wave, nod mysterious them & times the "He's must," which smile wave, nod them times "He's" which wave, nod times which, nod which, nod. Wave.  Nodwich wave. "You're making quite a splash," Phorte would chortle, giving me that funnybone squeeze, which played hob with my posture, to ther extent my spine metynymed into ribbons & bows & snakes all aquiver & shimmying gloze‑‑& I'm certain as you are reflectively certain tthat the grip that made a considerable bugger surpleyes than my word-concrunching figurative consmileabovebelow. & so it go, to kurtly spake. THIS MEMORY MAY BE ONLY A JOKE OF MEMORY As you've probably noticed, then forgotten, & then noticed again & again in repetitive cycles which hwill heal someday, this Dr. or "Doc" or Doctor Photre P. Dhorte was "a {scintillating} halo of negative personality characteristics surrounding a core of wormy brilliance"‑‑this from the Uxtentse EdStax Multiphasic Personality Capacity Inventory, which, despite its grandiose name, () was nothing more than a collection of blurbs (consisting of 500 microwords or less more or less) sketching in nasty, excoriating terms the personalities of all Uxtentseans, living & dead (only the dead blurbs get nastier‑‑longer & nastier!‑‑till, after, wet lettuce say, O, 40 or 50 Daad, your descriptions are 1) infinitely long or infinitely ong, 2) of infinite pass or mass, 3) flat as a pancake, front to back, 4) & 5) too drippingly acidic to read, much less touch, mush leff suss.  The UES-MPCI is perfectly accurate as to Phorte however, which is quite impossible, speaking from the gardens of green logic.  The solution to this conundrum comes from the formless, black-and-white etchings of the Uxtentse Action Sphere, a completely objective rendeirng of each action of each person living or etc. in Ux‑‑a record which doesn't change with death, except for the negligible slight shrinkage rate at a rate of shrinkage rate of "half-size 100 Daad," so by, O, say, let's, ah, so....1000 leafy Daad your UAS'll be 1-1000 size. A red dustmote, forsooth, & that should tell you something there.  If it weren't so dead, so tiny & dea,d so infinitesimally tiny & tiny anddead. So-dead, as they say, the Action Sphere doth make it clear the perversive Phorte, reading his own UES file (illegal!), just up & decided a daad or so adaad ago to edit his personality (by modenr medical means) into the logical meidcal means sketched so wary acerbically in those nasty fliles, til by the time he met me, the etchings were clear as barbed wire on the sunless Desert of No Winds (in our dark, rumored Southern Hemisphere, though this memory may be only a joke of memory)‑‑& they corresponded, flaw for flaw, with the satire in his soul ok. So, having said that, here's what the dangling bastard said. He said, "Hey.  Psst‑‑lower your forehead, bub." Which made the microleveled rooms seem indeed what they were more or less indeed‑‑e.g., the tall apartments of creepy rich folks, with unofficial levels of too many knickknacks in the air like books in a laddered library, & handsome dowagers & aquiline moguls everywhere, & their incredible kids fresh out the phosphor bulbs of Teen 23 (bulb of the rich teens) picking their way through the stuff, addicted to stuff, fasicnated with stuff, unable to take nor they hand know they ayes off the ancestral, parental placental goddam stuff, hence with the fingers of children growing everywhere & so so-dead and-so, & beneath the bloody children squat, thicker amtospheres of brown in which ugly gremlins played, & below the ugremlinys atmpsheres almost like chalk, stale & the color of formaldehyden flesh, & below the chalk raid streams brimmed & breeming with detritus desultoria & needle fish moving so fast they blank themselves out, & only below that stream moving half as rapidly as your streams of tender light, the polushed hardwood floor, which only your big bare (toe) could recognize, I mean savor, I mean repeat, I mean replete, I mean admire. ("Like our floor?" ("Yea.  It's...nice." ("So you can talk, Mr. Reet." ("Not really.  & that's Herr Wareet, chum.") & a further slow flowings of floors. Lest the recent readjustment of my spatail-referant flame prane pame render me suddenly comfortable, the better to charm my way quite oyt of here (which was my uppermost, obsessive thought blinking the other poor darkling thoughtlings out with its gross neonic throb or gropes menomnic fob or or gopes reomnac sob huh huh), Phorte kept sliding up behind me, doing his goose job on my poor, hugely vulnerable elbow (& he was a doctor, let's forget), & interrupting whatever first words I was poised in my great redness to ugger & whisper in mock-friendly mock- conspiratoriality: "He's only here for a while.  See, Mr. Wareet the red hunter here's being like held together by 1,373 individual forcefields.  He could pulverize any second."  Thus preempting me, you see.  Thus forstalling any successful effort on my part, you'll have noticed & forgot gorfot in "the eccos of the grot," to speak even my first sad word. Just as well, as it might well've'n "I am not Reet!" TOXIC READ-OUTS These were only the blue zones of the Mint Towers or the Unofrnuds Towers.  These were not the hot & hideous "red-party zones" in the thick loins of the tors below‑‑a place where would oviously I beeen invisible, what with the rosy red air & the ruddy flowers & the big ruben women with their sighs just as smooth as a sigh runs wide & the rubescent flowers & vermillion leaves & all, the real party zones where the well-heeled illkept unkempt youth of the intense tower universe burnt out the smoothness & the sweet sheen of their flesh, squandered squirt after squirt of holy liquids, drew gasping in volumes of toxins with read-outs toxic read-outs coming out much later, in the pale & ahsen Hospital Zones, not so far above the apanaic apartited zones as you might imagine, all of the zones being crushed to the stayus of papyrus as I wrote above, but there was no letting me get down there.  It is only because, while I was a powder I could aborb any & all educations‑‑as a fasicnated & compulsive Phorte proved by experimentation on the uh magic powders of my self hehe, that I know of these things. Know I too I of the white zones up at the top‑‑the zones, I fear, that have produced you, O great an dincandescent judges spearing in the air my flitteirng soul, etc. So this modest soiré, mackeral-crowded & sewid though it be, was an affair of dowagers & the late-grey grate-ley midsome aged, not an exciting thing at all, & with no sex to be found (except for some mutted muters of unalyzuble sounbs beneath the floorboards as if some of the guests‑‑through no doubt great expense‑‑had transforme dthemsleve for a lark into mating insects to be found only by & actual lousy prying up of the boards, where they & their infinite porgeny would scurry legless fro), & a lot of doilies & doilylike things & old cabinets covered in doilies & doili cushions & curtians & the general music of the doil to be heard eard ard rd.. I personally harbor a hidden, contrabad, frbidden thought to the effect of this: I personally thought the doc had complete control over my imminent & much-promised decineration, or repowderation, or reconsideration or quustation, that he could time it & in point of fact make it happen any time, that he might he might even he have had like a control pod in his pocket which he kept fingering in distinctly pockert fisherman wise which, bynthe pressing of the proper button of the sequins of, could cause me to disintegrate all or in part & according to any old fancied pattern any old time he fnacy tatterned. This my energetic thought, fearless & rabid as that fat raccoon squeezing his banded ass through your ancient cat door, you cats long since gone extinct into transprent thoughts of fear. & sure enough, at some point where the party gan perfectly drooped, & during a lull in which my firm jaw was coming challenignlgy close to discoveirng the use of verbs, where verbes are figured as figuration of the use of fire, my big left arm powdered on the table, ssssthththth. & did everyone stand up! MINT PARITY PANIC! Phorte was having so much fun he couldn't hold up even the thinnest facade.  You could tell he had his whole spiel memorized, but only insane laughter came out, in the thick-charged atmosphere of the compressed towers cming out in the form of glossy, darkblue notes, glinting an dwobbling, while behind all those almost-ultra motes Phrte waved his little pad with the little hologram of my Reetby body©, & I sitting dismal at the trable with a heaping mound of particles my arm in fornt of me could see where he Photre he'd Phot'd pressed the button of my arm and, I guess, released the shields, but none of the partygoers could have it, for they were having a famous mint parity panic, having during the coarse of unevening prepared way too many drugs & served up way way too many a silver platter of pills & tose out far & away much too many handfuls of angel dust & ghoul-fust & gremlin-dust & faerie-lust into the special organic frames about the faces of the guests, so everyone's equivalent of heart was bursting, & they were slipping on the aofresaid thick liquids on the floor, whilst randy little bugs popped under the floorboards in the act of pulling up their pants, & the children were immediately slaughtered (this was a custom of theirs‑‑not for us to be too judgemental, or judgemental at all for that matter, or even sentient for that manner, or even in existence in the caves of the matter), & they bruised their oversized, gaudied up PARTYHEADS on the NOTES that were CASCADING from the LUQID BLUE MOUTH of the HYSTERICAL Photre Bhotre Dhotre (fullname) Photre, who'd clearly been doing up some drugs in his magic lab himself‑‑or more accurately, having drugs done up for him in the shelf of the laboratory where he dwint hisself down (which is a far far better thang than your vouted Vuor Reducers) & sat splayed on his butt invisible in his own damned lab & wondering what the hell was going on. Only in this scene here, this panic party, he wasn't shrunken visibly down, which one doesn't do at parties (see What One Doesn't Do, Chapter 6, "Parties"), but simply a dewy veneer lacking depth, which has always struck me in the chops as being exceedingly appropriate for Photre.  The lack of depth I mean.  I think you get what I mean in the act of getting in between get what I mean & what I mean. Photre he love causing party panics, and, to be fair for a moment, the minty partiers love they those panix, too, as they'd slip out leaving their consciousnesses there, inside the gutted rooms which could never be used again except by the Rukkers (more below), so they'd emerge from the suites in the full flush of translucent amnesia (ah!), their lives a jolly crane shot high over the flushed-out caches of their dreamy heads, & they'd have no idea where they were or who, etc, & this was evidently‑‑radical though I suppose it sounds to you outer-Uxster-huffing-huksters‑‑the Full Life of the Mintgrune Towers (batend bending). Here's where I changed my story.  I lied at first, taking undue egotistical megalomaniac credit for what happened next, but now I'm teeling the truth.  I lied to you, uoronors, & now you must trust me twice as much to get us through these trials of trials. It wasn't I, but the red warrior Reet who‑‑in a movement so mathematically smooth, so unphysically perfect it's had our craziesit polymaths giggling every time they look at ti, like the killer joke that decimated the Rysegik, Galcakutor, Rives, & Mrett sectors‑‑the poor devils literally laughing themselves to death, digging their own graves laughing & falling face froward into said graves laughing & pulling dirt in onto themselves till there was just & there was just their naked faces laughing to the last gob of dirt bobbit i' th' mouf (A-hilk!)‑‑chucked the table aside & swept the powder into the loose-tailed sort of tacky 70's orange shirt Photud made him wear, using his minor arms to more than almost compensate for the missing powdered arm or mipasromswidnegred, and, sealing up the shirtsac sac, kicked the remote from Photre's hand, taking the hand with the kick (I think wish-deliberate, enk?) such that hand & rmeote & rmeote & hand orbited in the fuggyyaire and, dure to their mutual rotational velocities, separated, Reet copping the pad & tucking it into the veryself selfsame samedamn damnsame sameself oversized pocket of the very Shirt of Condignity he had ong, swung other leg uner Phot's legs so he swank unto the brog of the murcoid fluor with the upstrimming fishes & the bugs pulling down their dretzes & the chinky hardwood sliveirng up his Photre's falling Photre's ass. Then Reet walks out, taking care (& this I think the only movement in this belle ballet flambeau which could be called gauche, or, let's be clumsy, blunt‑‑but this is just my omniscient opinion, one amongst the endless onionshells of opininos puling out in this last great fever of our racial lives within lives within lives within lives, if I may pine it xo) to bring his consciousness with, & we see him the penultimate to leave the room, looking smug, having by this escape somewhat possibly healed the vacant wound of his recent humiliation by the vloid vicatrix as she was almost known, & casually heading downdown GOD KNOWS WHERE... GRANDARBREMERE or GERM-STRATEGIES(red shadow here) Where does a red man of mythic proportions hide, in the hollow of an endless, dripping tree trunk? A question we've all asked‑‑but for Reet it was real.  Fortunately, the halls of the Megabradbury were not halls.  They were luckily unlit.  In a strke of good fortune, no one but Reet with his two little marvleEyes© could see, he in the infraheat could see. No one walked these unwalkable halls because, as I said, they were not halls.  & you might have heard me mutter up there (in the red shade of the title or the red dust of the afterburn of the longdead title gone nova long since stripped of its title, which for a title‑‑particularly a red title, a title red as reet, a reet title, forsooth‑‑is to be striped of everything.  Everything.) something about the soothe & oozy drippings of a great tree truk or the ichor trickle of the all-great MOther of Trees or the lightless phloem of the grandarbremere, casting her red shadow over allover manner of underdegenertae beasts living underside. All manner of engenerate beasts unside‑‑for only a degbeast or DB would live inside the lightles hollow of a tree, however hold, bowever billenia bold, however the moeoverlordly goddess of all trees‑‑the mother, as you've no doubt in piount of no-doubt fax notedoubt, of the greetrees, the mothertree capable of sifting out fossilized yet phosphorescently fertile seed, great loose pods the size of Niloqunk Berries, but with tough brown leathery hides, plastihides evolved over such trillenia they have earned the designation hyperrtech presse into their foreheads like the last band of the concetrate-stations about which more down a corridow dripping w ow low elow below the forced, bent, spent, deadish corridor of your forehead. Or as I like to call it, "brow." ...and those pods also lacking the soft bodies inside, with no bodies inside whatall, with only packed hypergenetic aterial aching to be ACHINGTOBE let out LETTOUT (or maybe thoft bodies that never gel or thoft bodies remaining just the thought of the affinity of plants or maybe bodies actually parasitized by these possibly-not-so-propoer grees, using the clear bodies, in this theory, see, to draw out information, sucking not so much the life as the knowledge out of them‑‑you know: genetic plans, germ-stategies, special machiavations, top-secret secret-draws of hidden methology...the animal smarts plants have envied since the sad day they first tasted water & opened those lordly plantses I's.)...but climbing out of this lofty tree of purple-branchéd prose...What I'se trying to say here ere l'odeur du sap bore me a way, was that the "hotel" of the manystoried purpplposed "Mint Towers," & hence, the mint towers themselves were Oivaza, the Mother Tree, in which many billions of Uxtenseans did "live," premuch forever & pruch with gaugueless appraisals of encrimp-ed space in which to bauch around‑‑these Ux being not the creme of their viewless musings but more like the serrated scabs of the low-de-lo, the scum of the hollow ball or dregs of the fissure or cavitatious neer-do-wells in their fungoid drippy well. About that fungus.  From the point of view of, say, a red-lensed monster loosed in distractless metaphors of tractless slangory gew, the mother gree was an overstuffed grot of funguses‑‑to his fatally sharp eyes fungi of such polybranchive varieties that it seemed each trunkless shadebloom or Blümenshad of pleated mold was a nation & a species‑‑nay, a world‑‑unto itself, never to be repeated as he wandered on, druv plump mad by the droolupping saps.  But from our loftier, more articulated view, without the mildews & the scrothblough ducting up our eyes & aggravating our noses so they multply (when our noses are aggravated I'm afriad they multiply) in gradn-grotesquerie, obthwarving our views, we can see that the mothergree actually ran quite clean, actually haerbored any of this lowstuff plantlow lifestuff lowplant bloagh at all. So initiate Reetby was wrong. But it certainly did drip with sap‑‑of that we can all agree, thereby keeping our world‑‑which would seem now to have been dominated by nothing more than an opportunistic, though godly, tree‑‑& by nothing less than She. Reet, who you'll recall can seet, unlike everybody, look down, & see he has a motherlode of shinnying to do! "ACCIDENTLY" "GOT" "KILLED" Shinnying down one dumb metaphor after another, till he becomes the Cardinal of the Caves. From this liquid phase come the images for which I'm known‑‑the wondrous hypnotic, "Devil" oplorbs of Fenk Klegenek.  Excuse me.  One moment... Psss pss psssss ps ps psssspsps psssp pss pssss PSS! My sexy lawyers stroke me to a spire, suggesting that I stop more often to exoplane myself.  So: an oplorb being a sort of tridimetrical painterly affair into which you can coruscate, your nerves following the strokes of the brushstrokes, your nerves getting sweat with the bright brushstrokes, your nerves lighitng up with the chemicals they the nerves have always been missing, so you have your vast amounts of public herding through the Heraldry Museé, running not their hands but the white white nerves of their quick-dissol lute "hands" over Kleg's rubescent gardens, in lorb after lorb, or rather lorb w\ithin lorb, excuse me, painting after painting of me based on the engrams that were imaged as I tilt down the downy mossy shafts of the xylem of the mother trunk, becoming quite good at my movements, gaiaing a following of peculiar, quasihumanaoid women & cocksucking fags, replete with their finefine fur, wanting to mate with me. & let me tell you, that taught me some mighty good moves! I killed myself twice.  NO, it was twelve times‑‑I killed myself, or "accidently" "got" "killed" twelve whole times (I always get those two numbers mix xed dup, gosh darn it!) dangling from them falling vines.  Endless blue, dreamy, sapsticky clumbeirng vines, vast overarching swingvines with their lofty attitudes, inverted parabolid droopvines slick with the dew fall that passeth for rain here in the interior (for it occurs to me now that I had long repressed-repression that it occurred to me then I was now, meaning then, in the interior, meaning the heart or central trunk of the mother tree; here I hadn't know the towers were a tree & I hadn't known the tree was the mother tree (suggesting that Uxtentse‑‑our whole world‑‑was nothing more than a coveirng for a tree, or possibly a sort of seed for some sorta megaflorical dichotree‑‑notto be mistaken for dyko-tree, from the old cartomb of that name) & now here I was, swimming to my ear in the flowing sap, a happy man, a double man, a hybrid man, a combine edman,a somewhat pinkish man, if truth be gnome & if gnome begone, the combination of red-Reet & white-Meet producing this ludicorus shade, like that bloody pair iof underwear I was forced to watch & wear), loopvines you could see through if you pressed them to your eye, which needess to day I did, impressing their emprent in my eye so they would always hold the surface of my eye, which one can alzo look through but never SEE through, see, massy fibrous clusters of endless vines‑‑cradling my falling torso like a great ruddy cat, this plexus of boughs providing the answer you might have been hoping for, back before those parens gouged forgive me your more-metaphoric-eye out of your less-metaphoric eye, man, as to why I was not killed that two times I was killed. Or jurymany. So the famous images I need not & will now relate: Me standing over my drizzling sister's table with the pieces of her (so oer-rischly wrendered by that obsussiff Ffengk!) discrete beneath their pale eternal beam. Me with some portion of her body (no one will say which; certainly gnot aye) tucked tightly under my armpit as I carookedly crimbe through near-lightless quasimodollities of vine, & you can see when you reach my eyes if you do not die before you reach my reach my eyes that this is a man without a plan, a desperate fellow. Me seated thinker-fashion beneath sumptutous warm blind cataracts of vime (Psst pst ps pss psssst! vime being the sap or the ichor of La Mer de Gree). Me crashing part after party‑‑& you can feel in the electric-ouchy texture of Fenk's polysfumanic blushswoax that we have here or had there an obsessive hassling a group of obsessives: they could not more stop their parties than I crash parties than they stop parties than I crash than they stop than I than they than a. & more Fenk protraits of me during those sappy years... BLURRDIO'D ARTIFIXIO'S or GRUBZELLGO The many funngly verisons of me the doctor made, forming me up like dry clay into comical giant eyes, ameboid buns & breasts & thighs, great exhilerating red insects, a bif stopwatch, crude‑‑even childlike‑‑simulacra of Dyovylid's best remembered works (as her worst remembered works first, then her better-remembered works, then her well-remembered works, & so on down the spiral zon, immerged in the purple whole of forgetfullness into which all things eventually gek) done up in the tables of the clay (need I say ("red clay")?). I think not. Shots of me with vacant thought balloons sometimes above my head, sometimes draping back like a cape in dynamic postures, Fenk being quite enamored of blurrdio'd artifixio's, sometimes thinning out so's you could imagine maybe one incredibly thin, long long thought strinigng out behind me, or in some Fenk being incontintentally prolific cases, luped stoopidly uver my juttin' joar, this set encloughing works you were spozed to stick your own thoughts into, an old trick, an empty trick, a trick every but as thin & vacant as the deblooped plastic bubbles of these opalorbs & which onchildrenly intofel. Me posing by the metacuboid *, like an ape trying to suss it, me aping around that great silver cast of the ages gaking facials at my mere. Me rescuing * in that eciting ESCAPE FROM THE TREE OF DREAMS, holding Dyovylid as you'd hold your weightless bride clambing over the threshhold to where the real blood lies. Me the big hero of the youth zones, with flashy cameras & lurid write-ups, vast sneery broadcast put-downs from critics so full of sneers their horsey little lips fall off. & me mucking about some of the morer claustrous vibes I mean vimes int the Upper Basements, or Lesser Roots, beyond whoc no one but sightless (yet sentient!) grubzellgo, & getting some of those fngal discolorations I still yet even jetzt memahora have‑‑the only cure for wish being a repodweration in the late doctor's lab. & I'm not going back to that... ...unless of course of course God or yoreonors send me there. I praynot. The inevitable oplorb of me posing for Klegenk, which I never did, but which y'all appear to think I did, proving my thesis that these protaintings or positraintings, these chromoplantlings or cremedepantwings done by this Fenkakleg were controlling our minds‑‑or more specifically, lopping great gobbets of themthe minds off in an ince-cream scoop of mind, & that everyone, meaning you, should stop indulging yourselves i.e. losing yourselves in these addictive portraits. The portrait of my face‑‑you know, the really big one, the one rated "unacceptable to kid," then later rated "unacc to adolesc," then "unac to ad," then quote-UN!, not that this stop tangybrothy‑‑the Glorian Dray face with so many magnifcient magnified pustules & pools & sworls & swollen carbuninkles, so many shockingly gorgeous blots & dollops & hairwires & scarriers & unguent planes of blackpored skin in the form of great undulant dry fleshy valleys from the Reencraing deserts of the sun, the sun being Kans the angry blue giant‑‑in which I am clearly & audibly evidently adverbally crying to myself Why do I bother to skeak these swings, there being so very vostly scantling neurons left to womb to skake? & more portraits still‑‑the "silver portraits" in which, for reason best left to the critics hoping on the griddlepan, every damned surface look likt it hab been chrome; the golden portraits looking like fine proud & carven gold druid-toothy-stomes... THIS EMPTINESS OF EYE Endyah crawled out of one of these very portraits‑‑one of the Basement or Foundation Decology, the ones the children are forbidden to watch & yet, like mushrooms, LIKE NOTHING SO MUCH AS VIBRANT LITTLE MUSHROOMS, cannot help but watch.  But more of this later, where later equals never, where never is understood as the pale (not white, not "vile," certainly not as the court wood said dead) unpigmented lily-things floating in the volatile black liquid of unknown chemistry or unknown genetic origin or unknown unknown etiology, where etiology is understood ha ha ha ha ha as the birth of "babes of the Unknown" in the liquid-filled, fancied polygrottos of the brain, where brain is figured as the bottom of the pool, & where pool ah ah ah ah be figured as the crop of lies God told you just before He Ha Ha woke you "up," where up does not figure but sits in shade silent,y, figuring itself. Up to my knees in the paddies, I'd reached one of my many lowly stages, & hell, hell, I begged that artist not to do me then, not to do me in these color, not to sketch this up even in the vacuous palette of his mind, but he was into this "micropalettal period," featuring the avoidacne of shape, the avoidacne of color, & featuring (though the book never ,mention thisnono) the most lowlife pallid scum of a "subject" to match this emptiness of eye. So, pursued by the diamond eyes of the pleximok© of Fenk bobbing along masslessly in his crystal bubble, I was sort of scraping mitt mein Incisorn de rhizomes off de rempulobes o de smaller tentacroils o-de mos' subliminal paraplantoids reachin' they stringy holds into ze sweetly fetid fumeholes oo-ze-upperroots, where at that thought I mean life I mean moment I moment I mean lived I mean thought no sentients had ogne before‑‑only the toads, only the great & flat white toads, only the unknown undertoads, only those great (& surpresisngly smiley eyes!) spraddling critters of the icy skin slitting their toadly ways just below the gog menisces of the quagdreck indited above, only the friendly & somehow bighearted, albeit dreamless, perhaps because so dreamless, toadfriends & toadpals who surrounded me in naked buddlike curiosity, I think, though no one has either corroborated nor analyzed nor even snuffed the potent white poder of my sotry, yes the Potent white Pow der of my Sto ry‑‑& Fenk that bastard won't open up his "privileges" files to help (artists!), not that we've asked him, not that we can find him, not in fact (culutral note here1:) that we even know who we are nor know who our artists are, our artists (2:) existing as mere bubbles bobbing about on invisible paisely riffs of aire, but more of that blow. In the splintering of brainwaves these delicious rhizomes induced, I sloshed along in my great, once-red, fung-stained body, my blongings (one precious chunk of my sister-vloid!) stuffed into the air of my armwhole, I knwo naught how‑‑when out from out from under from an immensely broad & notably thick albino albinily pop this pure white girl, so thin I want to say boneless hellyes, allow me to say boneless hetre... "Boneless." Ahhhhhh‑‑thanx.  Pal-lid near-albino of an al-most flesh-less girl‑‑whom I la-ter comes ta NO as an act u all WOman, but who gave this first imPRESSion of being this like wet, one might say "fresh ly-dead" were not long-dead more a-pro-po-de-O! girl, Endyah, so curious about me she gave every false sign of being ecstatic to see me, as without thought or even reflux I reached out the fingers of one hand (that's right‑‑the rest of the hand & the arm staying behind, in sudden crazed chivalric issant politesse) to pull her weighless onto the pad. So.  Endyah lits squeetly (in a pearly squat of tiny, comely buns) on the pad as I, unable to snop, keep grazing. THE BLANKETS BEING or THE LONGLOST TEXT OF MEMORY "Reet, right?" says Endyah, pulling on the hem of my dress.  She could do that, of course.  She could like create the material she reached out to pull on; she could create the food she reached out to eat BUT THE FOOD WAS TASTELESS, explaining her boneless, I mean fleshless quality, like the anorexic soul escaped from her fatty body existing just as pure etheric bone; so it was (embarrasingly, every instant of this being lorbed by fanatic Fenk, using his new "motallic time" techniquependent panding till the end of time, so we have plenty of {contraband} lorbs of me, deliciously detaile,d of me wearing, over time, the dresses that Endyah spun round me with her childish need to grip & the nets she cast over my face so as to kiss the net & the bag she'd put my head‑‑& sometimes our heads‑‑in with a singple swim of her almsolate palm {nothing like a white spider's tearless palm either, Mr. Desobit "Slandermander" Progg!} the better to whisper with & the Ridiculous Blue quilts she dilt so I could sleep, quilts made of material so fine of course I never felt them, they being made the blankets being made of the same substance as sleep, & were so perfect for sleep. I interrupt this sentece to add: But of course, we were sleeping in the subbasal swamps‑‑so what's with the blankets? I paused in my toothsome digging to look down at her, the hem of a dress more lovely than any life could weave, the em of a meory dress, I be be be lieve. "Not really," I said dizzily, wiping my mouth.  Thing about this eaitng I was doing.  I could never start.  Eating, I mean.  I mean, it was just like an absolute period held betwqeen me & the act of eating like a small glorious globe of perfectly polished white, the perfect period of white.  So I would, it seemed, "find myself eating," whereupon hwreueopn hrwueoeno rhuwoeneo ruhowneoe urohnwoee uornhowee ounrowewe onuorewew it became just as impossible to start as it had, in that breachless paraverse universallel, bend to spart, "Naww‑‑I've heard of you!" she said, now pounding on the small luminous landing strips her pounding on the small luminous landing strips was creating on my calves. I sat down with a sigh, so damned glad to meet somenoe besides those fearful cum hostile "partygoers," young & elseor old, I well-night turned into powdser yet again. Instead I plops down on the sagging pad with a sigh, my big sad almost topsizing the pod of the urn, my vast sigh almost bringing lights of sighs to the great dank unknown cavern of the roots we were in, the same legendless cavern down which lightless sighs the tree, its fall not only unheard but figured to a great white fluffy feather bed the descent to whisch would make no imaigned sound in any wise.  I sits down next to the girl, the fungopoid bouncing like a low-grav water bed. "It's complicated," I said, words a little awkward in my head, to say nothing of my groggy moauve.  "It's strange." She plays with the deliquescent socks half-sheening on her toes.  She waits. I look around, realzing as I look aroun I have neevr looked around‑‑not only not in this place but in any place; I've just never done that‑‑& relaize I have never realized anything before, to which I had of course nothing to compare, me having never before compared, all of this leading to another heaivng sigh. "This must be quite moment for y'all," she says, gently stroking the cat that forms before her fingers on my arm. I nod with choking, eager stupidness. After some more waiting, I start to explain, taking Endyah, who never did tell me her name, so I am just postulating the name of her name, through my weird fusion with Reet, the murderer & now savior manqué of my sister, my instant powderation, the introduction of that Dr. Photre Dhorte into the text of the memory of the text & into the longlost text of memory, & the depowdering & the parties & the whole incredible business of the tree. "What tree?" she said, spinning the platinumball that formed on the nail at the tip of her finger as she raised it for the formal interrupt. "This," I said, gesturing with my face all about, preety much unable to move (the usual side-or after-or alter-effect of the rhizones I'd been aeatin' when the scene bezang'd).  "This is‑‑a big tree." You should have heard the laughter there!  Silvery & sweet, toxic as mercury flowing down your damned electrical gullet, mad as pain & long as the first outsrtech of time & contemptuous as the auhtor's parents & comparative to a lot of other things, the as-ing of which there is not time.  I am glad Fenk coulf not lorb-op that! "Yea well, like it or not, it is," I say sullenly. & beautiful Endyah makes it it all all right right as as she always does, consolingly patting the great bristle of spines the approach of her touch makes to my back. I guess she never touched anything ever, huh? LARGELY EYES "Not really a tree," she said suddenly.  I'd been asleep.  * Endyah loved to have ideas so bright they would wake up the rootland creatures (largely eyes) during the cycles of the night.  She would rouse deep-sleeping me by 1) shaking the great horns that would form over my head when she reached into my head, 2) gripping the End-forged mindformed bindformal beams rising out of my eyes, disturnablig my drames, 3) grabbing the end-solidifed dreams themselves, which was most disturbing, 4) pounding on the plates that formed over my pecs or recs, or 5) pulling the medusa-snakes of hair croiling form my head. "How not a tree?"‑‑I would start speaking before waking, so I'd have to be briefed on what I'd said, an embarrasisng procedure. She discussed Oivaza of the Mint Towers, just as if she'd always known, so I figured she had access to the ed-chambers, or to something just as good, to load that delicate little skull with knowledge. "And how did you evolve?" I said. "Not evolved‑‑designed, 'to service the root-structures of the mother,'" she said, moving her mouth very formally.  Then she half-nodded as my half-thoughts rushed over to her, not even takingti me to occur in my mind, so anxious were they to nestle in that eggshell brain of a skull of a hidden pattern of similes of her of hersto her.  "You need to be delicate to do that," she explained.  "Delicate & pale‑‑almost bloodless." "I see." But Endyah looked supremely skeptical. GRANDILOQUENT TRANSISTORS UNDEFINED In my unread affadavit (see "Unreadable Affidavit of the Unread Readable", I have said that but not how or why I recall playing jattslak on the pod with her, listening to the chatters of the outworld on the aurio (defined sometimes as a sound device, consisting of two shiny black disks & a weird, delicious white energy in between, other times defined wquite differently, other times still time blaring on in grandiloquent transistors undefined, but anyway) which this little inagow (which seems to be the species or whatever assigned in my mind somehow somewhen to her) seemed to need dinning constantly, so I was in a you-sprize-to-know sense much more unhappily in touch with "the outer ux," as we'd hoot over the aurio, than ever before. We were playing, slapping down the wet & leafy platens in the prescribed manner, observed by the eyes of the gameloving toads, & at intervals reaching over to SLAP THE ABSOLUTE LIGHTS out of one another, which‑‑despite the use of these clips of the use of these shots of me slapping that little lady clear off the pod, sending her white ass skipping o'er the water or whatever that still-un-an-a-a-lys-ed li-quid down thar-var, skippiong to a vibrant song to which I swear she giggled, & I further swear, here in this sudden, dreamlike fever of a deposition, they musta "edixed" "aus"‑‑was bloody-well how you damnwol played  jakkslat, man...I mean, that's how you goddam PLAYED it, see?  We were just playing OK?  I personally believe you have all been somehow implanted to believe I was slaping her around.  I mean, of course I was slapping her around, in the tehcnical & merely physical sense...but those were the rules.  & howacomb nobody shows the virtual cornucopia of scenes of her standing up & lustily slappin me?  standing up with verve & gusto & flair, as they say, & a depth of pleasure, & really sending some vibrtation sknocking through my pad, if not actually moving me at leasat creating duplciate echolaic echechoeoeses of my thoughts such that my thoguht were cheefully & inanely chattering amongst them"selves" for several seconds ere play could begin‑‑a shorter time,g rantred a shorter time, than it too kto find her & revivie her, when possible, & fish her from the paddies, but a substantial time nevertheless, I'm told by the guy no one but me can see with the time there.  I rest my arse, yorontore. Then, too, I got treated in kind, did I not, when this great, pale-turquoise monster slipped up from the dreamless pool, mumbled something improvasory yet sincere about being Endyas' mate, & commence to (& this so sting it remain in the present, tense as effer) repeatedy slapped me off the pod? This was the figure documented if yez can call that that in Fenk's silly "Ogre Series"‑‑the ridgy Oglavert II, now officially bathed in the narrative, Oglavert (II?  II of what?)  who looked as he himself was forced by some gas rising from the angry rhizomes of the angry roots to say again & again, "thrice the barky fight-machine you-Reet ever be."  & he said this awkwardly‑‑his mouth always slipping over the words like a child climbing a slippery, lying, sleazy, sneaky, shifty, & bluury-wavering slekgungtree, as if his neurons or whatever they had down here were never designed to do much talking‑‑but with feeling.  His nerves or etc. may never have been etc. for feeling either, but he was nevertheless & defiantly full of feeling, the great lanky muttonchopped bastard.  I don't think anything could have stopped him from that.  There was this great, female, hysterical soul inside Endyah's husband (if husband he war.  I mean, I can't say that for sure; I can't make that a bonaffafidavit part of my affabonadavitifide; I can't, no matter what's done un tome; I cank; I mean I never saw them squeeze one another's hand or pat an ass or squeeze one another's thighs or tough an almost touchless hand upon the pining swell of genitals; I never saw their genitals, despite the rumors & the stories & Fenk's ribald "Swingey Series‑‑I mean, none of us could have swelled up like that & not been struck down in midheat by those razor-wing tyylyybats I forgot to told you bout; their genitals, so far as I can see, & if you wish for me to speculate, you-on-her, were smoothly processed out of the wholelife-phase, suavely edited out (& who knows, if I may speculate a little further, a li'l deep'r, maybe into some other mobilorb or fluxlorb dealing wholly‑‑either * or clinically‑‑with genitals, or maybe with genitals spliced to the groins of the stars or strapped round the waists of the pantywaist stars; it's really not my area; may I stop speculating now?), and/or the glances subtley swung away & the angle of acquisition always engineered "just so," so meaning just so as to cancel out any view of...you know, perhaps in an effort to forestall precisely this kind of unseemly & virtually onanistic, parenswelling speculation, OK?  Anyway, if these two were married‑‑which was the word that came cranking lumbering crookedly & cranking lurily out his hand-made maladroit mouths, & never denied (though never either seconded) by, uh, the little lady‑‑I never say any of the sexual aspect of it), which all the barky skin & dichotolydinous strength in the Ux couldn't hide nor keep from gibbering hysterically out. Sorry about that paragraph, messeurs.  I see it hath spritzed all over your stately robes, black bibs & bowties & all, & I respectfully repress my giggles here to ineffectually paw at this polyparenthetical metaflorid, malsimilated wordstuff drying so very quickly on your stately chests. Or bosoms, if you will. But‑‑in a shocking departure from the inked-in shtick of my character, I digress. THE SO-CALLED MOORLIES Most people think I lie once, then tell the truth, but the truth is I remember things wrong then remember them right & have to relate them all over again.  The second memories never change, so they must be true, unless they are the so-called Moorlies, which are generally thogught to be the unchanging stories of our race.  But no one reemembers for sure. The true memory, then‑‑or the moorlie.  About how Dyovylid blew apart.  I haven't mentioned the engaging star patterns, the exoglow, the fever of significance, the portions of foot that struck me on the cheek, branding an image of her on my cheek & causing me to go quite made‑‑hence my entrance into the redlife or reetlife or rootlife or redgree. I lied, I mean misremembered, my meeting with Endyah, too.  She & Oglavert were there from the start, & they didn't appear‑‑I come up onem.  I rise from the heavy wawa the wawa supreme with a lilypad of sorts upon my brow foresorts & spew a trickly spume of water into their faces, which cleng like white dew or, let's face it, cremewhite cumme to their faces, & which they were at agonizing pains to wripe off, & their therefore instant hate of me hatched out their initial fear of mudsters from the sump, as they thought of me long before they forgot that falsee thought & came to think of me as this misremembered friend, clutching a portion of his sister exed to his groid. & the rhizome eating?  I wasn't eaitng rhizones, of course, & the image of the memory of exactly what I was eating have never come back‑‑a blocked, decurgitated memory, I guess, but whatever it was I was eaitng they was taking to tell me I wans't should oughta naeat. "That's poison, friend," said Endyah, while her husand nodded nobbily & tried to croka along. "These?" "Hell yes." "I've been eaitng these for weeks," but I tosse dit down. Endyah looked quite relaxed; the O, standing awkward next to her, looked undecided about everything. "Takes a few weeks to hit," she smile dwith the easy smile of the nymph who knows you are konwing that she lies.  We hit ti off, & even O plunked down on the pad, sinking the brashly pad‑‑but that's another story in a parallel universe contemptuous of this universe thinking of it (our universe) as its (this, I mean that, parallel universe's) mere dumb imitative parallel. The parallel universe sniffs, & mutters, "Ha!" The vi energy got high & smarted sbillig ought into the chambrers of the aires.  I mean, Og was cranking it up past where the trigonometirc tables suggested the glaze table where my martyred sister her frags lay could disperse, hence we had vi dispersal, which took, first, the form of the apotheosis of my sisters part,s such that every last shard glowed, & it seemed (but was not) that my every sister lay in each of her cosms, & I stood there, my face quite beatific as Fenk's longest series, The Vi Series, corrobs, rather like a stupid man, my lower lip thrust happily aught, picking up piece after piece of Dyovylid as if she were a series of fine dorap-points that had to be gathered up. Then, as relentless Og cranked up the vi even higher, great clambering sheens of question marks hung up in the air, perfuming the air, & I remember having the designated thought: This has GOT to bring her back!  But of course, your vi have never not got to anything begot. MIGRAIMIMIGRIANE?GRAINE!AINE "It's dank," I was hissing into my hand, but the hand didn't click or turn a darker blue or vibrate gently or manufacture quantities of little birds in the bird-relams of illusion or any of the things it was supposed to do to show it was working. Maybe the damned hand didn't work inside an illusion.  Maybe I was mutteirng too low.  I shook the hand a bit, whispered "Hey!  Hello? This thing workin'?" whereupon my head was filled with the most shattering violations, I mean the most electric violence, or rather the quintessence of hyperviolins‑‑yes, that's it‑‑so that my head rotated very rpaidly through every possible circutation of its circumambulations, my eyes meanwhile (this had been verified; my eyes have been verified, if not that god-dmaned hand) skewing themselves in a great oscillic roll, & my mouth down below growing through permutations of clay, cavernous dilation clay, grye wet opaque & stupid gaping clay‑‑& in the midst of all these highly deliberate manuevers (gives you some iotea how shattering bad that migraiMImigriane?GRAINE!aine was; this one was way beyong howling) I was subtly & carelessly tipping my hand by fanning my hand propeller-fandan-handago fahandshion till it whupped dup quite breeze, till it raised the long hippie hair of the disguises of the Endyah & The Oag & began to send the always-wet {igments of Klegenek's opulent oplorb-strokes drawing like great sneering lips from their surfaces away, leaving the grey bonedry clay or the gray bonedie cley of the surfaces of the shapes what underlay the illusions were were trying to sack here.  I was in fact whiirling the hand so fast it looked disitnctly unnatural, distinctly merequremical, & the substance of the hand moving so fast amongst those close-packed illusory molecurles (made of core of course from chimerions, subquarkian fubsparticles forming the "matter" of mirage, dream, halluciantive childhood, faceboits, drame-e-wreengs) that it thag hand heated & fired up & molted & turned rubescently, excadescently afire turning every color in this lob we were trying to cozy-in in the murcuseum into a sad little pink-nosed rip-off of red. "Hand hurt?" says Endyah casually, reaching out a thin anemic hand as gentle as a neuron which the hand was never meant to touch but just to have the effect of threatening to touch‑‑so far much worseworse than a touch! The above paragraph floating at my naked face in the peculiar lorbizisch aire casing me to tuck the hand not into the cloaklike folds of my skin the color of coak, not behind my writhing .bak, not into my special armpit-sac©, not even in my mouth nor up my ass, but into my groin steaming & setting fire sparks to the greaming groin! So you can neermagine the molten wad of plastic the verves of my voices guttered out as I gromptered, "Naaaao!?" & here, or rather there, or maybe here, or neither here nor there is where or when or never when Endyah cut me some slack, turned with (I think feigned) feigned disinterest aside, (I think feigning) a feing of abysmal interest in the gaudi moldulasians of the cheek of a great big puffblowing cherub sphere by her head there, placed conventinetly by her little head there. & then O-II cracked me into three thrillion pizzas with a singular tap attack may bat. ""I think I've foun something," he said. "Impossible," the resurrected pieces of me firming themselves form dead powder up the antigravit floor were some time then to say. "No really," nodded O, crouching next to me, running the fine sift of his fingers through my sand.  "Come & see." Bloody damned hand! BUGS THE MOTHER DEVOLVED These rootrealms were not the Shangri-La the luriloorbs lorp.  There was, first of all the humidity, which I think was generated in the great gree cavity for the sake of visual appearance.  Same with the luminous vines & lillies & deep-sea weeds flourishing in that pool.  They, along with the thickly-bristled droplets of dew, produced some of the marvellous sweeps & double-cascades of pale blue light, the ultraviolet shimmers seeming like vague sfumatoed faces, the hazy green textures ocnstantly (& yes, delightfully) creeping up on your temples,. there to touch your temples & thus, through the magic of piezoelectricity or something like that, stroking you up full of pale green thoughts‑‑thoughts wich, by the way which, by the way thought thesmelves cooreless.  I mean, these thoughts had thoughts about themselves, & were in fact self-deluded.  This bifurcation of psyche in turn created a great turbulence of sleep, so these colorless green ideas slept furiously.  Sad, I know.  But none of this comes through in the oplorb video, now does it? & that humidity sat upon you like a great soggy toad, likethe great god Soggy Toad, or Yuck, or Whuffah!, they limply pretended to limply pretend to limply worhsip here-a-sogga-here.  So this was no picnic, despite the psychoactive rhizomes & exhilerating foodstuffs always wafitng on the ripples of the strange black pool right into your hand or like some psychotically nutritious cotton-candy, but with the flavor of cream, wafitng into your mouth even as those afloreluded deliquescent light effects wafted through that thin spot...right there...on your temple & in your tmepled & into the colorless thought of green food in your tmeple & of course into the furiousl green sleep that was pretending not to going onbe there. Some place I'd slipped down the splitry vine unto!  These poepl‑‑Endyah & O‑‑swee tthough they were, were...lacking in some way as I've sure you'll seem.  They were high-lore senitnets envolved in the belly of the mother gree, so there was something Moste Potently Missing in the sidling little translucent slides of their respective make-ups or makes-ups sas-at-wore.  So one felt peculair.  NOtuncomfrtable, & not without a great deal of almost prmiscuously free-washing love, like some mythical haven of hippies lazing naked in the pollenated green ultramarijuana breeze in their long-tressed laughing "disbelief of breeze" for which they remain sung still by the poet, Pangar Malldomieze.  Yea, you loved 'em, & they count shape your heart into countless amsing phases, & they in short had utter control over me, working me like one of those puppets with the hands of the master in its guts, & me loving it & rolling & purring & eating it up, ofttimes literally, me a big pursey Yum in a great red thrall in the imminent Rudes of Doom.  So it was like that in the orbits of the social sphere. As for the much-vaunted fauna, sure, everything evolved there accordng to the specifications of the mother gree.  But as my monograph, "Bugs in the Lower Yorbs of Oivaza: A Corrective Analysis" (Gree, XVII, 2.18, 4-44) lays bare with its shamleess, widespreading, languid, gravid graphs so sweet you could eatem, it was, if not a bug-infested swamp at most an improved bug-sump, full of enormous, improved bugs the mother had made‑‑massive, pale, fleshy creatures, more like revolting faeries & elves than bugs, revolting Victorian faeries & god-damned elves, wearing little vests & tunics, cloaks & rusky peasant hats, bugs who argued with you & gave you a rough time & had an attifude‑‑syrong & big bugs, too, & possessing money‑‑verbal faerie-bugs lighitng on your arm & alway swearing, after you'd tried to swat them or brush them casually off, that they'd never intended to take a bit uot of oyu, that that sort of feeding was lost in the buggy swarms of their ancestors, had been gently eked out of them by the mother tree, waving her limbs hypnotically and, I think quite sexually. Yea, you'd swat them‑‑I'd swat & brush them, anyway, jumping form my toadstool seat & my stoadspool suite & prancing from one foot to another‑‑& they'd grab your arm, & with their fierce little faces give you such a look!  They had beautiful faces‑‑faces to love, faces to die for, etc.‑‑but they were always scowling or mugging uglily.  So like I said, these citters or varmints ud grab your arm real hard & get ugly & hang tough even as you turned your arm into a vibratory burr trying to rattlemaugh‑‑& then they'd bite you!  Then‑‑using your panic (OK, my panic) as an excuse.  Rubbing the salt of insult into the crevasse of injury, they'd introduce themselves, in a truncated, insectivoid way, announcing their names (e.g., "Galfeloas," "Rettinin," "Brayleiough," "Brap!"), with a weak half-nod succored by an equal half-smile, so everything stops just for an instant (& we are dreaming not onoy in color but in present tense, & dreaming in parentheses (like (this) REM) of REM) ofsweet REM, & then the monsters tuck in with their tiny mouths‑‑by which time you were stunned & abashed & weakened by attacks of all sorts of sorts & form all quarter of unknown quarter, & these suckers'd have their fill. While Endyah & O, acting like savvy natives, would stand round watchjing with this achingly sad look on their face, just one look they'd pass (with a cool, suave, Harlem globswatters chucking mo) back & forth form one another, sometimes tossing it underhand, sometimes slipping in behind the back, oft spinning it on a finger ere propelling it in some unknown fashion lost in the greybrown reygrown hysts of mistory of the animal slums where these techniques somehow, against nature, grew up, back when nature was against nature, whack bay when.  So I could tlel they warn't sincere. SPITH or THE GREAT FORGETTER IMPLANTS OF ADZOORD Those "years descending on the shaad vines" were actually months, & I actually went up sometimes.  I mean I actually climbed these tender vines, thhickly-pressed, & reach the sun regions or filament regions, where the vines turned crisp & yellow, & where some of the symbols one thought one hallucinated down in the thicker regions (where dem suckers plumped transparent & where you did find yourseelf pressing any eye or two right into the pith, into the pith, the pith, spith, thinking you saw (or heard?) "strange synbols" (or homunculi? or faces?  or what?), & the lower regions of the darker gruuns, where some poor slobs stuck their folish heads dep int the plinth, never to get themthe heads out‑‑ever again, which explains the many oplorbroughs of trunks growing out of the massive subvimes in the swumpy gruunlonse...dead & desiccated bodies with no heads, as the vines I think I'm explaining ate the unexplaining heads) burned into ashocre clarity, became homonoid ashes dancing in the fimamental sun, blinded where you were stunned, creamted where you were sunned, routed & rousted out where you were brought to a fine bright sweat & then dimmed to a gruey grey powder where the sweat had exiyed, & rendered in the yellow light as it filtered through the great wax windows of the mothergree dome sentient, rendered sentient where you were dumb, in a deadly combination of dumb & numb, represetning so much more than the rhyming of the words, which I think adequately expliques the cheshire corpses leaning at their ease against the rattles of ribs of earlier, huger corpses, leaning their great empty grinning head in turn in hhead sin turn against the mammoth vacant bodies of what must have been some kinda souls, & so onwords, & adequately seems-me-too to exonerate my ass from murdeirng them. It is safe to ignore me, kids: I hardly murdered anybody. So anyway, dancing symbols in the sun, etc., & I really climbed up there.  Fenk's lorbs show this.  Fenklorb'showthis, & it never ceases to amaze me how the same prosecutorial jerks who use many of Fenk's great ops to convict me dismiss these other, effervescently exonerative lorbs, as having just been "cooked up by Lorb." You can't have it both ways, U Ronorz.  I mean, you can‑‑I know you can, but you reslly shouldn't, should you, rootless sirs, mesdames? DON'T ANSWER THAT. Yea, up is the first thing that spriggered ind by mine.  Climbing up's there very first thing I dood‑‑& I dud it so very swood that we have little memory of it.  Certainly my memory was burnt out up there there there, leaving only the memory that I was up there‑‑like a capacious amphitheatre set up specifically for the Great Forgetter Implants of AdZoord‑‑filled with the dancing symbols averred to in the verda bove, a dancing represetned by this little bouncing-pea meaning round in sumb smection of my brain which, alwaysthe sectionfeeble or febble, vaped immeidately on the dancing of the surds in the filamental sun. & then I fell the whole way down.  Nordid I pause for more adventures in the party relams‑‑neither thoseparty realms of the elders nor those lower down of the sunken young, neither in the incubaros kept so hot in the bellyelly blow nor the higher basements which were mere game basements to my eyes, as the stars streaked by backwards as in negative warp noodge, nor anything till the great sad vines grew so thick, not to mention so very slick, that my hands, sensing palpable impossibility, lessed loothe & fanned in the atmospheres so thicker than air, & I engaged in "free fall," which was much too slow to legitimately earn the name of fall but which had such great clout with the gods of wood that they managed just to stuff their great horned hooves into the soft bag of fall, & when I say fall I mean word, & when I say word I mean the utter fall of words that came when I fell, & when that sluggard "fall" thrust it's gostly hoove into the dying fall.  Enough said. DOVE-A-FLUOR No one is more disgusted with Fenk's green rooms than I.  When I first punctured the sporey hide, strugglnig my way inside, my nose stretched itself out & curled in a complete circle, so my voice for the rest of this movie sounds compressed sentinet & vimmed with personality like a truncated goddam child & vaguely unhappy at its lot.  NOw that's dis gust! No floors either, I noted with distaste‑‑not that I could see, the green fuzz covering the globus, the etherthin sphere lying just outside the actual tissues of the eyes, the globus which are, I think we can agree, the most imortant part of the eyes, except that they're not part of the eyes (& don't ever say to them they're "a part of the eyes"!  I'm warning you, child‑‑don't!), but anyway, I could feel the absence of floor.  I mean my toes kept poking down-down, down-down, & finding no parcel nor partita dove-a-fluor, & this absence of expected force sent wriggling little griggles up my spine & through the various bulbous organs & mucoid tubes, casing me to emit the classic "Ieyik-yiyiik-eeyyeyye-YIK!" gurgle that Fenk, had his ears not been stoppled with fluzz & his brain not thoroughly ollenated with the stuxxm must've been highly used to. "Just take a seat," he said absently, his head lost in his latest lorb, his voices storted by centuries spent in panick, growing panick, as they shuttle down hall upon hall of the shafts of the byways of the hyperlabora doreacorria doors of the imagination of the borgesian maze of the lorb substructure, thoroughly lost as sound will get within the meniscus of the most cerberally thin possibility of getting lost, like great blampling sings scraying THIS WAY TO GET LOST, which, being mere lovely vibrations like the vibrations of silent kittens vibraitng with the simple size of the accents over their eyes, not to mention the globi sursurounding their elaborate soundless (eyes), before theythe soundwaves can get out & rush across the room to my big green ears. "And have something to eat," he says, his sneerless undertome even more abstracted now, as he continues to shove his head into the foyndations of the ball of the lorb he is, evidently, working on. Though I think he was feigning.  I could tell he was feigning, folks, by the fibrllatin' spraddle of his legs, by the shopworn look of this lorb he was goosing up up goosing was he lorb was up goosing he was up goosing he, which, had it tad it been a new lorb or a lorb-in-progress lorb woulda been mugh more vibratory (like those kittens) & spanking (like those kittens' eyes), by the absence of either food or chair (this is impossible, right?  we are talking impossible here, right?), & by the godless air of hilarity all around, suggesting types of drugs of a type of drug of a type herefour too un noan, & by other things I am abjured not to reveal jess yay. So I'm floating in this great green gob of his, this gravless greenroom of this overpaid oblorbist here, this adoring pollen sphere or pollenatin' spore of the decadently manipulative artiste, by this virescent clown-zone (there‑‑I've said it) fuzzing the features of your poorless face with lumescent lifedust extraordinaire, painting your face as the survorbs tell in the gospers of a clown. Fenk lorbed all this, too, of course, carefully altering himself in the lorbs so he looked like some chubby kid in shorts who shorts who must still be in school, an innocent pudgemuffin stuffing his face with h\the tasty blue sticks, who everyone thought & still thinks & will go down the curveless streamline of time still thinknig but which I DON'T THINK broze absolumient no desemblance to the maestro (but which, to pour out my theory like a great polycolored vial of lorb-curd-ough© in the proximate shapelies of mine gusts, I thought the think was a wepwesentatium of himself as The Little Boy, in strinct kaping with Fenk's self-indulgent autosymbolism of whisch I blutch touché), so my ungainliness has been known to & felt up by all. Damn. But I wiped off my face & eyes & pulled various rapidgrowing pluglets of guff from my fafe and‑‑gravity or no, weight or nough‑‑sized up the place. Mama's little pet, indeed!  The sweet & spoilet favoride of the mother gree, insweed!  Once you allowed for the dust (in elaborate formulae of emerald surlocution), this was one hell of a plush plasche. THE FUCKING GUTS OF THE ANYMUSE or VISUAL SHENANIGANS People ask me, "Whattaya thinka Fenk?" & they say, "I'll bet youre insanely grateful to Fenk for all those rich oplobrs, for eternizing you, etc." Fenk!  A rusty little toadstool of a Kremp, so squat he could not bend but only toddle like a parodically thick, detumescent dick, a par of ick lily SLICK....DAY too MESHent DIQUE!, who for all his cosmopolitan airs (i.e., having been to Makkorloc in the elegant white orbs, having had his lorbs skewed at the Mema Convection, that great cube of a hub of the dense generations, boasting "virtually all species boasting neuralistic apparatus or parallel paraphenalia" {lush translition}, & being by his own repofteated swelph-retort the toast of the seven clusters) HA! & pince-nez sans nez was only this shade-grown species, not quite fungus, certainly not animal nor plant, in a parallel universe of evolution prescribed by the manifold tiny white hands of the mother gree, creeping through the coils of the helices of the genes of the Nether Sector of the Ether Ector, who for all his genius & considerable brains, was from my owne haughty poin-de-voo or poeym-todo just some spliced-together forulation of brilliant muck, who regardless the transiminent refulgence of the mother chart imprinted in him or on him or of of him was in his flesh, & hence his essence, even his goddam "artistic" artistic "essence," a poor lymouldered waddling shuffle of a toadstool, possessed of infinitely fine hands, infinitely fine yea artist's yea yea hands that methinks had nothing to do with him. Check it out: I've never told you this: you are anyone & I've never told you anyone you this: this dwarf‑‑& I don't mean middle people‑‑spent a lot of time popped out of his green field of inebriative pollen scooting over lillies after me‑‑pursuing me, like some school-floater ogling the piuns of the little girls, only he reached barely up to my massive red knees‑‑knees, in case I haven't pinted out, the contours & the fluxions of the ancient gods‑‑those old Titans, Prometheans, & Sagittarions who went on to star in all those tittery sitcoms back in the Lost Interstitial Centuries of Gnox, those blue centuries the exact capability, I mean sagacity, I mean structure, of bright blue elongated bloons‑‑the kind you stretch into organs of animals, not the naimals themselves or the faces of the animules nor the lines across the infinitely enalrged goddam faces of the animews but the fucking guts of the anymuse. So you had this waddling pimp pimp waddling after me, pretentious great lense pasted to the slabs of the faces of the protions of his nose, where nose is understood as an abrtact compspriuct, & not something you could, by any braille, trouve across the bloodrusted blitherboord of his concaveun gainly "face," shuffling up beside of me & behinds of me, brimming with artfully phrased suggestions for, uh, things I might do‑‑that is, places I might go, or even considerations I might consider by which to get myself upstuck in some hugely visual shenanigans he could whup up to anorb, youknow, his suggestions made in deliberately small, turquoise, near-subliminal words, & made again & again, always so artfully, so if, for edsample, you awoke at three a.m. in the lugubrious drivelings of the corerooted swamps to feel the pressure of his voice (not to mention his strangely luminous face, mottled spockmarx & all), you couldn't, as you wished, launch into a tizzy, slip into a hissy snit, whirl into a duckstuffing high dudgeon of indignant outrérage, because, well, those words were just too nicely turn\ed (see the well-carved arabesques on the filigree of their flavor!), & the most you could do was the least you could too was to pat the little bugger on his head, with maybe a sashay of that head into involvutions retracting to the involuntary innards of his great uncircumciséd "neck," & settled back to sleep, which sleep'd be filled to the blue vibrations with the sibillance of his wisps. So you can imagine how many "nicely 'visual' things" I got me intoo theyrne.  Uronores, I submit that my behavior during this time‑‑which me & my lawyers & buigraoher & mythographer & hagiographer (hired) descrimbe as The Times off the Fenk En Thralldoom‑‑was none of my undoing, I mean one of my inwooing, I mean‑‑hell, you know, completely a function of that rumbpled little prick.  He was vary presuasif, as I tink me rhetoric hath glome. I submit my behavior. I submit to my \behavior. Ah. THE BLOODLESS KNOWING LOOK OF THEIR CIRCLED EYES When we'd crash the parties up on the glass levels, I knew Photre was shadowing me.  I knew he was down there mongst the dripping basement vines, hiding behind one or more of the many layers of mist that cloaked around you, so you felt overdressed & bound, mummied & cocooned‑‑but you couldn't make him out.  This was where I learned Photre was the "master of disguise," whose disguises had disguises & disguise disguises has disguises & so on, unto several spheres out, each one of them almost perfect almost disguised itself as the master of gdisguise, so you just couldn't know.  Everyone said this or words like this (such as ekke, meletorp, kezejiek, or fiss) causally, with the bloodless knowing look of their circled eyes.  I think they were trying to be blasé in place of being knowing in place of being strong in place of being free in place of being gods in place of being Lucifer in place of being Lucifer's tiny, transparent little mocking mottle of his God our God Luc's finger puupet like this translucent little capering worm like the stuffed doll-gods left in the straw-filled, dry Greek attic like the stirngless freedom of limpness like mighty laughing gods like the all-knowing crystal brain stashed in the attic beneath the leafy fronds like the suave & muchly-fucked whore with his eyes coolly wringed in blues trying to act so calm at the bottom of the soul of well. Up toward the light, the light of his disguises‑‑I mean the disguises hePhotre wore rung wround his disguises, known as his polydisguises, disgussed in the masquey paraguise above burned off in to much drier layers that would crackle a bit, & become visible, so you knew he was there, & you knew he was being followed, & you (meaning I) knew he could turn you (I) into dust at the pump of a butcheon, & this torturous awareness would've made you (!) nervouse were you not already "flipping to the gills" at crashing these parties in the civilized zone‑‑you & your motely palsies. The Motley Palsies we were never spoen of‑‑big Oglavert II in his perfectly-white tux, looking I must say stunningly handsome for a mutant; his woman-girl girl-child child-fuck fuck-white, the bloodless Endyah Oneme whose breathtaking, boneless perfectness looked distinctly less hot up there, but still she was "something" to "see" awaft in her polyether "gowns of nudity," which would tend to reach out & rub you to fluidity; myself, the erstwhile Whatsisname, now known (& (worse) thought of) as red Reetby Wareet, the vloid assassin, now retired or  malfunctioned or buried, or maybe just refusing to go to bed (after all, he couldn't be more than a few years old, counting only wakinmg years, right?  He was this big red infant, ight?  This beg red killer infant, now powderized, ght?), wearing a stunning leather ensemble (which, less fasce it, these middle-aged matrons warmed by their rich proximity to filaments of sun, found insanely attractive, as evidenced by their ill-doumented moves upon my clad red or rad cled body in the compressed & narrow shadowrooms between the wide beaming partyrooms of the polyspatial suite of the wingless windless ringless limnless glaze planes) put together by his friends from toygh mushrooms stuffs giving up their hides almost willingly; & of course, goosing his way along behind him, Fucking Fenk Klegenek the Kremp‑‑Fenking Funk-Flegink Krem, the voiceless mottle-face one, with his emotive little ridge stuck in the crack of my warrior buns, frenking Flenk l'oplorpeur obsessé, bringing up the rear‑‑my rear, anyway, a feeling I was coming to deeply love, by the ray‑‑but behind the whle unreasonable venture, pushing me up with my entire gang, risking capture & experimentation unto powderature or worserature, into visuo provisios, he'd said with his brown embarrassed grin. Photre?  Plainly visible as a shadow murking the nether wall.  I was impressed, along with that other bundle of emotions I have failed so failed has I utterly to try to refrain to eye-descry-descorb OK?  It was, after all, easy to lose yourself in the mist.  Even I‑‑in my bright-hybred guise‑‑could almost do it, pulling, let's say, mantle upon mantle & cloak withiun cloak of cottonlithe misht about me, reudcing even my great fleshy presecne to that of a resty rub dopt.  Or so too did oft my off-flattering friends todoff their praising cuffs toshay.  The sweet miasma of the bulbzones the tuberzones the rootzones the subzones was devised by the mother for that, devised by the mother for that. But here everything was dried to an obsessive submicroscopic clarity of microcrack & line, useless pores shriveled to perfect pixellated clarity, the focus of even the most tenuous eye drawn up to something sharper than the blinding ink lines of Loone of the unimagined marge. So you could see the bastard, all right.  You coyuld see this crackly but nimble shadow, dancing the structures of the walls & turning itself to the side to share brief eclipses of invisiblility, sticking with you, watching you, & you could meaning I & my nervous happy friends could surmise this was Photre‑‑we could tell by the shadow's edgeless style. At first I kept waititng to be partially or wholly powderized, resigned to the doctor's umbral whim or imbral whum.  But as nothinh continued to happen‑‑till nothing itself became one of the gang of crashers, with its dark arms flung over our shoulders shading our flesh much closer toward nonexistence than it could & not be dead (so we were knowne sometimes as The Dead Crashers or The Dead Crashers of the Nothing Zone or, most famously, the Gang of None)‑‑I undewrstood that Photre was naked, that he couldn't bring much matter with him into his shadow warp.  In short, he couldn't bring his damn remote, his bloody pad, his frigging powderization pod. I'd've breathed a sigh of breath, had I the breath for relief.  But this was not to be so, & so. The doctor's lab O the doctor's lab was shimmered in a field, so the space within looked reduced into gelaitn, like an edible gelatin mould of a laboratory, & the area near the field was a sound-condensation zone. So we tried to be silent as we stopped & as we looked.  Noise would smatter the view like a follicking of depserated autumn leaves from the planets of leaves. Photre seen in the golden light shining on my sister.  The light funnels down from a black siphon like a black metal model of a Fuuripodist's head‑‑which may be, since they invent all sorts of things in the image of things Fuuriposeze‑‑& despite its rich golden color, it seems cheesy & meagre & cheap, & Photre's black eyeshade wrapped round his melting head doesn't help head doesn't help head doesn't help head doesn't help.  I blink, I mean I think the light mades it look like his head is melting.  I mean I don't think the light makes his head melt in reality. But his helt melts somewhere. "What the hell's he doing?" hisses Og thundersouly, his organ tones pouring down on my head in dark-purple noteshapes, shocking yet gratifying. & behind him Endyah goes "Sh!," then pushes her head through the fibres of his body as you would through the thicket of the gnopse of the watches of a reedy florest, & chimes in: "Is he studying her?"‑‑& her tones sprinkle like a spring rain shower, remicles of little notes (of a chirp-gren this time!) like a sprinkle of sprigs. "I don't know," I say greyly greyly say I.  "He's just looking..." We all knew better, & no sooner had I thrung mine owne broken-ashen notelets on the heap of noise we were making here outside the field of Photre's lab, than we saw mucb morer clearorer than beforer that Photre was zooming in on Dyovylid through an ungodly series of lense. "Hmph," said all three of us knowingly but very quietly knowlngly.  "Seeking the microscopic nature of vloid material," these words nicking up the clear glass of the eyes of our view (& we each blamed the others!). Photre seen at last pulling off his long long lense & peeling off THE GREAT FLESH GLOVES THAT WE THOUGHT WERE HANDS (& you should have seen our HAIR stand up on its endless ENDs!) & like an old gentleman absently gentleman pulling his shadow disguise off the peg & over his bowedown shoulders like a shawl, becoming gradually invisible as he leave his lab, but we can just for-the-sake-of-the-story of the sorry see him turn as he pop like a bubble outside the bubble of the field & flick his remote, fixing the whole damned lab in time. Fixing the whole damned lab in time! "And with the gold light still on, I notice," noted Og, & the other two of us, wishing we had had that fine fine line, nodod. FIRSTLIPS FIRST or CONTAINMENT FILIGREE Light shears," says Endyah through lips I think at firstlips first are uncharacteristic, but which on furstutherdy stufurdyther in the turquoise Bukk des Characteristiques‑‑a book written entirely in parentheses & therefore very hard to read in time & harder to retain in any time‑‑is actually Edhyah all over. Anyway, an unnecessay statement, to be sure, one she simply through in for purposes of exposition & to giv eherself a good line, after Og's great lie back there... Let's hear that line again, shall we? "Stand back, little friends," says Og, proving you can't go back, or at least you can't always go back‑‑certainly that you can't go back RIGHT NOW with Og pulling out the "light shears" the color of glass & with only a wimpy little warp of the ligt refraction, pulls 'em outa their black, shearshaped "shearerbag" (the function & the contents of which IZ've wondered at ever since the surgically inserted, retromoment they were first dropped onto our heads form into the plto) & pulls down his "shearglasses"‑‑actually great actually goggular optoptrices in the reverse reflaction of wish you can see the view from the eyeless view from the back of Og's head. Whichthe head, by the waywhich, grows "quotationally perspicuous," to use another Oivazial technical term for the goggled jury‑‑these terms thesesmelves, you'll notice, my sightless friends, are as invisible as Trilingular fish, these particulate semalucent wordforms I pull from outover eachover black little supbphrasial pouch, not unlike the shearsatch wondered in the loop above (see above above). And, if I might elaborate (I say, pulling now syntaxial phrasagions out of their spidery containment filigree) not only the head, not only Og's glossoggled head, but‑‑slow spreading ly in Relentless Capillarial Vein‑‑the whole body of this Oglavert II entire, fading out like a great muscular mash of clarified butter, if you will, & the last to go that wide yellow ghee of a grin indeegue, with just some bright silver glimpses of artilleraries amelt like those silver 'snowflakes' of Villurdoa, I averred to (in another novel, now that I recall & breathe & recall & BREATHE & (re)CALL!)‑‑after which he's quite invisible, his movements seeming to make a great growling like those monsters of the id I soar as a kid, & with similarly impossible fingerprints on the powdery ground. "Fingerprints?" I say dully & Endyah pulls my ar aside, & the arm, rather than coming neatly detached, uplles me to her sid,e for which I want to thank ther arm but CANNOT THANK THE BLOODY ARM. "You mean footprints," she says.  "Better stand clear," pulling me back even further‑‑I mean way back, I mean in to chapter two, where we pull out the great radio lenses of that chapter & focus & watch. "You mean he meant footprints," I stubbornly say. She sniffs amusedly.  'Who's he?" "Who ever said 'footprints,' Endyah." Even pats my shoulder here‑‑a light touch that hurts like the memory of abuse.  "You said 'footprints,' *." "Oh yea." Anywaway, & after having taken all this time to build up Og the Invisible‑‑who as you'll see by Exhibit Phi took time out form his busy calendar to run rounf terrorizing the inhabitants of the tree‑‑& the outer Uxtentse, too‑‑as this myhtical figure, shearing off all sorts of parts of people: shearing off a nose here, an eyeball there (eyes shear off in this prose), a pursey phrase there falling off to invisible scissors like an eye, lopping off great chunks & sections of flesh not to mention great ~ & ~ of the story‑‑paragraphs, fragments, sequences, plot deve,mopments, drafts‑‑till the wounded elements of this myth float in primary air with nio more support than a Grimingway dynalorb, where nothing is described & no one says anything & you can't hear anyone's thoughts, though you can tell from grandiloquent eyebrows & titles they are thiking much, & to follow along you have to simply think or think you think or seem to think you are thinking the same thing you hope to think grey Greminggway thought if indeed with his lightshears he thought at all in that phrasleess phase of existence sweeping like a think creek over the alphabets. & focusing our lenses back to Og, he aims the shears‑‑which have grown rheotircally massive, like the mouthings of Saturn just before he stuffed his kid's head into his godly crimson mouth, (possibly to hide from the similes) even more invisible, so invivisle hear here hear heer they really STAND OUT!‑‑at the fusion-cords of the field of the fission lab & POWERZEMUP. Sending out audible sparks & auditory ribbons of light in the approximate form of a shimmering musical grid & with points of pain playing the role of awesome notes & olfactory spheres, cubes, & other oddshapeed solid figurines into the thick air around the place. "Hope Photre's far away by now," mutters Endyah, & even though she does that, even tough with her fine while tail atwitch she is caable of doing that & in fact does do that & doe sit in fact, I'm taken a .bak & start swatting her with my uncreated hat‑‑just swattawsswattawsswattawsswattaw-sswattawsswattawsswattawsswattawsswattawsSWAT! for saying !TAHT I mean, why didn't this little genius thinkofthat before? "Knock it off," she says coolly, & of course you can see & can lean forward through this dense mensicus of goddam prose & tap me sharply on the shioulder & cause me to jump amusingly & hiss it in my hear, so now we all recall & therefore know, that of course she's thought of everything before, & no wonder she's so very soigné & boored,and could we now we please we go we on with the show? The forcefield around Photre's lab, which you'll recall if I poke you through the meniscus ~, puts up quite a show, I mean struggle, bleeidng some molten clarity all around, causing everyone in the nexus of the script to line up along the fasces of its plane & lick "their" lips, meaning "his & her his or her respective lips," wondering if the field will buckle or pull the whole skein of verbs into its hole. Well, tpyical forcefield, it does both.  I mean, there's so godh darn much force going round here, at this point in the lurch of imagination here, that it does both, it has it both waysm it eats its etc., & splits the universe int to, & everyone has to quickly‑‑before they sep ar ate t o  o    much‑‑deCIDE which hway to go, i.e., into the nexus of the shears or into the frag of time where the field finally buckles just enough, wouldn't you know, for us to scrabble our little arse through, with Og towering above & holding on, then pelling the loop in after him, thereby tying us in. "Whew!" one of us saysm but in the whirl of ebvergues ascriptions rove sans hope of wove. UNMENTIONED I will not mention the murkhole of black which formed like a great negative galaxy, but with quite an elaborate face, & quite a desperate personality, & quite a bit of charm, but with the planes of a single nanosecond in which to contact life, hence the tragic vacuum of life, so at last the weeping which follows O THE GREAT WEEPING WHICH FOLLOWS the slicing through a field like that of a lying field like that‑‑it not being guilt as has often been reflected back, nothing like that‑‑when the blade it hit the throbbing bolt of the empty lock. Nor will mention O's orgasmic twert, not a pleasure throb at all, but a grunt of the utmost pain which‑‑did it not, like old Photre himoldphotreself, pull oer its amnesiac cloak witin the aforementioned nanojot so when he looks up form his craft, when he opaques again becoming thoroughly (if a lot more greyly) visible, Oglavert II thinks those dark oily spox mottled crox hix faxe are beas of sweat from the heat of the convergant fields & not, as it is, the dense sweat of almost infinite pain, a sweat the smell & toch of I know well. I will not mention these, nor will I mention my not mentioning of some further, deeper these. SIXTEEN OTHER THINGS CAST IN THE POT OF BLACK DESISTENCE Photre would sneak up behind me in the most unlikely places & tap me sharply, twice, on the shoulder, right where a rich plexes of nerves lolls languid and, one must sya, defenselessly beneath the enervating liquid sun of the silver moonless beaches of the gold clouds metropolis‑‑regions reached (by bodies, at least) only through the plane-molecular skeining of travel in those membranous bubble-craft, but reached in a trice by the simple nerve gatherings, sensitive peasant families headed for disaster so assuredly they can but have but can have but these willfully innocent smiles across the dendrons of their faces qua par(distorted faces, of course; I'll say nothing of the ugliness of nerves, unlocking all that acrid pain through the tunnels of their glowing throats with never a thought of sparing the goddam host‑‑O NO!‑‑so put the pouting mention of this in the pot of things I will never mention & toss that pot, if you will, down the dark tunnel of pshchic Vuor reduction uction uction tion so we can finally wipe the beads from the beaches off our brows & BREAK OUT OF THESE PAR)entheses of pain, if you won't. So Photre's jabs fell on tender gorund, didn't they? like seed on a nubile egg or wriggling little helices ringing down the patterns of a just-imagined sky or like a lot of other stuff‑‑specifically sixteen other things cast in the pot of black desistence which, need I mention? I'll never mention {see APPENDIX}‑‑& it always got a rise, a little jolt of involuntary muscular activity which Photre‑‑hysterically jealous, I have convinced half of myselves, of my (OK, Reet's) warriorlike correlative plasticity of limbs worming together like mighty fluid rocks or something like that or to that effect or in any case to the ends of driving Photre to the madness of forsaking his disguise. I think he also liked my squeal & also I think he liked my squeal & always I sink like he into my squeals. But I got him.  I revengedim.  I used those very warrior reflexes the strangely insert & unheard-from Reet had so desoundingly failed to apprise me the workings of of. It was at a party‑‑not onew of those boringly crashable dowagaer affairs, but a ripsnorting, sparkfexted, sexsmear smorgasborged rambunction of the toady youths of the teenzones, with young girls hanging upside down on the lusty vines & young men leaping across all measure of space & some sort of music someone said or was it the drugs that was decoded from space or was it infested with space & a lot of kibbutzing & ogling from the white balcones‑‑they had these junglic, filigreed balconies the color of bonedry clay which is a color I keep coming upon in here, at odds with the frustrating intrusive buggery wetness of the place‑‑& with the usual grabbing of the crotch, not always one's own, & everybody chattering & doing mor & mor & mor & more & dope & eventually losing heh-heh youknow the generla consesnsus uh of the er separation of individual selves‑‑you know: the old dead-dreamt paraphenalia of names, specific cloths,genders, & with these things into the infolding vortex of "crumpled cellosphace," rules such as they was of behavior & boundaries don't you know... The sort of scene Photre, while desting in his inimitible fuddyduddiness, quite clearly recongized as the honking nest of a crabtree barangle of a chance to poke at me, which he of course idd. But I got him!  I finally flipped the mystery switch to the hoppeddupo rerereflexeths of The Hyperwarrior Who Never Went To Bed etc. & flipped round & grabbed the shitbrown little shirveldassed two-dimensional crackling shadow of a demimad pseudoscientist & cotchedim! UNO-HOO The lights in the lights in the crystal lab in the crystal lab didn't work, & time-flex© was in effect, forcing us to scrape up the most unsuitasbly primitive lightsources‑‑& against those sad muscular shadows!  So we were The Trio of the Moody Sfumato, a * painting of bright beaconed faces against a black as perfectly black & self-contained a black as the black of black against our (unseen becausee black) backs, the Og with a flickering torch of Olympian proporitons, so that eachwaft & wave of his great rod cast everything in doubt‑‑even doubt, especially doubt‑‑& soince he was the first (i.e., the last, in time-flex cogitation) to pull his weapon I mean light from the shape-riddled wall of the Icon Cave, where you go to get your stuff in time, especially your old-time stuff back there at the dwindling tip of the tail of the wincing little cave, gold drawings by the tiniest gods & all, for a time there doubt was very much in doubt, & you can ill imagine the well-imaigned looks the three of us maintained I mean suspained I mean exchained as our cerebrea shaped with the whame of the guttering flame. Then Endyah comezout with her beautiful long white candle which all three of us, though especially her, kept getting our eyes way too close to close too way, such that the flame was fairly licking up our nostrils & filling our heads with flame, & we all three, though especially Og, superscripting our indices through the dinky purl of flame, & lastly come out I I I with my sooty old lanthorn, inky & yellowy, removing much of the light of the rest & much of the glare of the rest, till the overall effect of this accident of psychic retrogression was of the surface of those great copper domes on the undulant shelves of the coral floors of the depthelssly deep "sleep seas" of Siipeelia, the seas that make you yawn just to frig about‑‑& this was the light cast on the rotten chunks of Dyovylid's body. Rotten? Haaa? Yes well, possibly the same malfunction (induced, I must say, though my pale & dwarvish lawyer with whom I've been making INCREDIBLE PRISON LOVE nonstop since inception of the trial & has thus burst forth & and thus burst 4th with halvedwarve babies of she & myselve forbids me andsmacks me & most exceedingly disapproves, by the damage to Photre we have all seen on the Damage to Photre series of goddam ops by that gogdam uno-hoo.) that played such hob with the lights has caused‑‑YUK! The once-so-pure & the once-so-crystalline chunk of my lover's body* was as slick as a hunk of raw liver.  It felt most unvloidlike or invloidiné or unvlöidlich & most fleshlike, which is not to say gutslike which is not to say gobbetlike which is not to say urpy coils of diriboslurm which is not to say ghastly faces of my dense desires which is not to say moist slithe caverns deanimant back to the swoils of time which is not to say drizzles of jelly in the precognitive dawn which is not to say portions of the baby clised which is not to say aborted baby sliced which is not to say portion-baby slit up a trice which is not to say babygobs divvied up for dinner which is not to say mouthfuls of raw babyflesh which is not to say the raw baby eats its upper lip which is not to say the eaten upper lip eats the brains of the fresh-dashed baby brain (laced with shit!) which is not to say hyphenated upperlib eats thought which is not to say thought eats words which is not to say not like anyone we can save. "What did you say?" somebody say. We blink & look around.  Me must've been looped in a hypnotic swell, & as usual AS USUAL I'm huhu "inclined" to punish the ruptured brown paper bag that is the current form of Photre. "Photre did all this," I snarl. "You always say that," answered Endyah in a very strange whisper, a whisper the natire of which I cannot understand, a whisper for these reasons casing me to make all sorts of faces of idiot puzzlement (& in that thick familial light!) at her her her. Og's poking the giblets, sliding them round on the table. "Something's wrong." "Let me speak," crackles Photre, crucified on the coat hanger I brought back to crucify him which (sorry, Counselor!) I picked up cheap in the timeflex cave of cheaps. "O SHUT UP," I say, but it's just a reflex now, & Endyah puts her fingertips lightly on my arm, which brings my buffalo rage to a massless STOP! (*and I don't mean Nimbol, my lawyer, here) UN IN VERSE The crystal globe that contained the perfectly white face of Photre's real thoughts burst into a dimpled, rimply, pumpled grin. "It worked!" he exulted, his voice breathless, then wendered even breatheir by the braathspaakers amplified his thoughts into the very thoughts of breath. "It worked, it worked it WORKED!"  He repeated, with the most beautiful thought-echoes paisleyed round, for these were acid speakers bulging like great testicular eyes to ewither side of the apparatus of the globular sphere, these were LSD speakers speaking the ancient language of merged identities, filigree, roundezvous, these were great & powerful ditheramps from Silssorro, the shadowy planet of speakers, where sounds grew up in the lightless hissing soundswamps & where there was so much amplified sound there was no communication whatsoever, which is why which is where why Silssorro's where your hardened solipsists go, to be deafened, to have their heads split, to be rent into taters of pain & pain & let alone. "What worked?" I hissed in a broad aside to Og's ribbidqage.  "Looks like she's rotted to me." "Idiot," hissed a bright, admiring, boyish-lit face of Oglavert, lit up as with the revelation of his fathers fathers, lit with joy & adulation & worship etc.  I dagged him in the ribs, but it simply blunted my silver elbow like solder mushed against a perpendicular joint a wiggling joint a wriggling cascading molting rippipplinging joinoint. "Can't you see he's made her organic again!" Og said,m shaking me a good 'un. In a chattering voice I answered, "He might've put her back together again first." Now Og picks me up right into present tense & enlarges his face to a sixteen-foot screen of a cimemanic face before me, shahaking me a bitsomemore & said (no emphasis added), "Don't you see‑‑he couldn't.  He couldn't, *‑‑this is the only way to do that." "Thanks," I belkieve I said, but it this statement is entirely a matter of faith, being in its incandescent whiteness, its candleflame brilliance of blightness, its timeless paradox of singularflmaing thought, its instillation of still ideation, its imbued pserfected perfectness (of which those lusty speakers are a part, I might add a part I might add I might a), the central tenet or transperience of the now universal Padovic Cult, which I like to shink of‑‑not as assassins & rapists & torturers & somewhat inept pillagers of the crystalline towns of a vaguely-magined un-i-verse with an emphasis on the un in verse‑‑but as  essential worshippers of me, only what with all that flame & staring & fixation & flickering, they don't quite know it, see, the essence of their faith see faiht see faith being that I made the statement‑‑all right, the wordlet‑‑up above. They have a very short bible they. Anyway, we perceive that less exultantly triumphant‑‑darker, more Ux-bound, denser-mattered versions of Photre, too many to mention, i.e., the saturations of black spheres in which the evil Photre's thinking Now I've got 'em by the balls, or the green orb of Photre the lifegiver in quiet blue tears within quiet blue tears within which tears revere his face speaking of worship incircular his own tears, I don't believe I wrote that, or the pure white Photre, which I rather like, in which no face is visible, as the faces of these multifold maniflowed "orbs of the doctor's aura" are all the same material as the material in the material of the material orb itmaterialself, pardon me, & they don't have anywhere near the speakers the ol' Goblet Photre's got, sowe have the essence of extrapolation here. Extrapolation HERE * moving through computer generated space through generaton after generation of vision, each vision beaming from the last, in what they call generational incrementation of * {geometric...?} vision. Yeawell, we perceive that Photre‑‑in there amongst the colored bal someHA HA HA HAwhere‑‑is gatheirng little globulets of my late beloved reorganicizéd schwester with his hands, much as a child might mightily ather mighty globs of mercury into his tiny little poiosned goddma hands, & (the literal, "real-and-solid" Photre, not that mesasphoric kid) pouring them into a bag. REZAZZ The contents of which, after hundreds of hours of painstaking gatheirng, are poured into a beaker which his poured into a testtube which is poured into a retort (snort!) SO VERY DEVASTATING it silence everything‑‑you, us, I, the ballsy speakers, till the next big breath of universe come back (waiting for breath...) ‑‑allof which ocnglomerated mesh of my wife, I mean sister, is poured right back into a bag, a black bag, a black plastic bag, a great fat unburped black-infested plastic mag, a massive bound-up hyper garbage back which Photre (seeming excited for a singular lasar-reason I misunderstand now but misinterpreted then as now) twists a little gold twister made of actual gold (made of the Last Gold In the Universe of Gold (I remember that!) which was itself ulti bound mately up in a bag, as I recull) & makes as if to hand it to me. "Fancy your wife in a bag?" he says, gesturing bag toward me. "Wife‑‑I mean sister!" cryeye, raising my elbow to mine arm afore mineyes & requoiling archetypically. Photre smiles with the smarmy self-assurance of the smartly self-insured, does one of those ghost nods of pure control, & throws the bag of my bride I mean over his shoulder, rubs his nose with a finger & giveth a drye sniffe, blinks blue lids twice reversing time rushing back to the medievals with the rusht of us entoe, rolls his eyes to the right like an Indian dancer of a perfect Indian dance rof the master Indian dancer rolling his or her (one cannto tell and‑‑Hey! onecannottell-onesOWNgederneither! & how one friskth himthelf! ey!) gently explodes in a diorama of blue, deversing time which moves forward WAY TOO FARR to the ends of time in a trice, at which perfect fulcum pointless point he dances, he really does. Bag & all.  Shackles & costume & crackled paper skin & the bag of my wives & all‑‑Photre dances, & here we never even saw him walk!  & what I like‑‑the part I especially admire (& you can quote me on that (dancing off the record of course) of the record of "course")‑‑is that, far from being encumbred or even having to overcome or transcend these accoutrements I have 1) made up, 2) soldified, 3) zazzed, 4) painted in their lifelike colors, 5) detailed, 6) rezazzed, 7) aged, 8) placed in motion fore yer Is, 9) zazz, or 10) rezazz!d, hePhotrehe! uses them, making them a part of a much greater, because much more complicated, because much more psychotic, because much more of the nature of eating the rotten flesh of the dead babies hanging from erotic mouths of their mothers all gone soaked to seed toseed. Yea so he dances around like this, & tosses the bag of flesh into the air & catches it in various aires, with various parts of his body even like The Great Dispitator he'll never hell-neverby, spraddling his legs, par exhample, & making it disappear up some orifice (not cunt, not asshole, some much nastier, darker orifice than these harmless baubles..) & and & popping it out again through crosseyed bulging fevercheeks, & so on, forever, this being as I have taken anaesthesias to blundought the end of time. Not to be mistajen for the edge of time. Then he gathers up the ladybag & we're back where we belong, I suppose, in time, back in the present with none of the foregoing having occurred‑‑please strike this from the record, Clark. & Clark DOTH. We blank blinkly & blique oblinkly at an oneother. "What were we saying?" "WHat?" "I, uh‑‑hey, WHERE'S THE DOC???" Well, gone. But not quite gone enough, as we hear his rabbit-pads ribbiting over the threshhold of the Coliseum Vine. "He's headed down!  Get him!" "No, up‑‑he's headed up.  Let's go!" Yes, but it's actually a long long long {edited out} long {editought} long {editaught} time & I mean time when I say longtime before we can actually, you know, uh, move.  We too stunned.  We stunned by the ahem rathe run fore seem shituation, & probably by some spray he's put in the air & maybe by the maybe-lgiths of equivocation it turns out that they were & maybe too by the stun-darts© big as clichés, lodged like lodger loggy in our ribs. "Duh!" is all is recorded of what we say‑‑& even this, I know for am entity somewhat faded of an afterfact, was dubbed in by some kidnly-eyed technician who couldn't stand for the folks at home & on the various million floors the million floors & the million floors to hear what we really said, it was so slovverly & dumb. THE SINK OF EVERYTHING I settled down in the root regions or the wet regions or the root-wet regions & took care of the pipes. "Huh?" everybody says. Well, the slush-pipes or the sludge-pipes or the undredged "lightpipes" (lightpipes! that really slays me!) or whatever sort of great xylical tubes chokes beneath the evergrowth of the underside of the (some say dead) mother tree.  I discovered those tubes on a drunk‑‑great escape pipes they were, "crawlraums for the lichened skeleotns of children," some would say, & "silt-holes put there by the mother engineers," others'd magine, or "tunnels‑‑just these big tunnels of a once-white material, once-white once-plastic once-starlit-cosmic ex-materiel, now that mucky green you ream from the innerds of your horn!" as inspired whitebearded men would shout, would shout in tracers out from the very vector of their shout, shout smaller & smaller oldmen in their beards shouting to smallers-out, like old men blowing eversmaller bubbles of themselves unto each more precious tiny men, something like that there. I discovered the tubes more or less by more or lesh shticking my head through the muckuk (seemed in the joy of delirioroot© a good idea like to swuk me head in the mssh), & since I was the only once who had both able body & capable mind down in these dank regions or nether legions or (I hate this) Loser Regions, it was up to me to clean them. So I was always up to my fine red shins, often up to my wine-thread thighs, & hell even in the swim-purgatorio ruppling ump mine rumpoled gneque, clearing & haulnig muck, sometimes in bathyskepts that Endyah (who visited me in a rarely trice) would say she'd woven, but which I & we & the entire gallery of fools on the filigree balcones they had at every fugging level here, & prolbotame still has, not to mention the winking Og in the shaodws there there! there! there! knew she'd purchased at Velocity Marts either in the City (known simply as "out there," sometimes less simply as "the Uxtentse Noen drame," by which I think they meant {corruption of} dream, unless of course of course "dream" be corruptions of drame; this coulda hoppeng; this kwudda-B) or in the pinky regionsof the wide outer branches of the mid-lower merchant levels of the bourgeosie boosie-twigs of the branches of the white white thoughts of capitalist ash fungi of the Edder-Tweegs, as the region was naught nome.  BUt I loved her, rare as she'd become, & I let her get by with it.  Taking infinite comfort from the fact that I could kill her with something less than effort any time she held the basket up to me. Or I'd haul the mucj in precious wheelbarrows, which were hard to find but, once found, impossible to lose, despite the sink of everythuing, or haul it in my goddam arms, or simply stuff my squirrilifiled cheeks & haul it thataway. I was a giant but quiet, menacing but saintly, psychotically disociated yet sapient little figure, dworféd in the monstrous roots & vines, my redness covered in muck, & my aura this vast reputation known from dry-tip leaves to sullen whispered baseless base of Oi as the guy whose wife was somewhere in a bag, was docombobulated pieces in a bag, & this great fame induced many to come to touch me‑‑though few dared, so I had legions of hunched & trembling figures with their glass faces warped into eccentric tiers miming the touching of their hands several inches from me, which gave me the quiver (I so wanted to kill them) but which I tried like hell to ignore, snuffing the much into my aires & warking ong. So in this wet predicament or redithermeant rumors musked up the vapry air that Photre‑‑known as the wizard with the bag of my lover's losseless flesh‑‑would drop by & I mean literllay DROP by & taunt me as I slaved self-secluded in japa away, splashing down, toching down, don't you know, & waving that bag at me, proffering the damned thing to me, popping ope the neck & thrusting the mesh up to my schnee (& saying in viscous vein, "Have a sniffa yer wife, Reetreetyreetareet?") & always outsmartng my hoped-not refluxes, goandd by the weir. Notice how Dyovylid had segued into my wife, like in some dream.  I was so ashamed. & it got to hurt that I was always seen & treated as Reetby Wareet, vloidicide extraordinaire.  No one seemed congizant of the mant clips clearly depicting me in the energy fields crawling into the supine Reetby's back.  It would stand to reason I was he, would it not? But no.  They apparently didn't think of this at all, & had they thought a tall they'd've thought he'd eaten me (can you beat that?  eaten me with his back?  Can you blame me for loving muck?  I think no one can), & had they thought that they'd've mourned me or maybe wondered about me, which they did naught. THE PLUPUPPYPERFECTNET OF PASS For a while, slim & casual in our smooth white suits, we were the absolute toasts of the tree.  We were in every headline, caught in every instant flash with a drink in our hand, a pointillist white dot of light glazing off a perfect grin of a tooth or toth of a grin or gleam of a whatnot on the sheen of a glim.  I mean we were big‑‑the whole trunk had to grunt at the passage of our bods.  Huge comic books sprung up from the water, & they were in solid dimensions, & they were all about us (especially me!), & we were seen to be incredibly intelligent & heroic & just a light touch sad, a pure & perfect little sad little adjectival quiver of hurt nobility‑‑that was it: hurt nobility‑‑giving forth shapely shape to our frothless lisps, & this naturally improved our posture, too‑‑all of this added on in the remix, dubbed in the post-production, by none other than the cherub-cheeked Orrotio Klegenek, sweet but essentiall crass son of Fenk, with at least twice the talent of his dad, but a feckless cannical as far as the use of his art is concerned‑‑& isn't this the always way with those awfully proficient kids, born to corrupt the talent of their dads, born to kill the grey old guys with their brilliant little dabs? (except one should {Biographical Note} add note add add + add, Fenk did not him die nor nary fade, but rather painted up an even greater storm, a veritable F5 suck zone of vertical artistic swirl, opping as they say lorp upon intricate lorb, moving like a great plastic onslaught of illusion toward his hypertaylored son (whose "fashions," I might interprose right about here‑‑well, right exactly here, in fact, as it turns out here‑‑were mcokeies of ours, where ours means The Hypnotic Gang of Three, as we were known till it was made illegal‑‑not by any entity or singularity one could sense nor think nor see, but just coming up in the swamp of the air, so with the next sniff of breath it was so) {end of note}), so we were interviewed a lot, & asked subtle variants of the same questions again & again, to which we would spin out radicually surprising, fascinating, & different ansers eac htime, the multifold & maniform intercontradictions of which are still being plotted & analyzed by the Nerds Who Care©. & the parties?  Tell me about it!  It was not so much that we were invite,d nor even that we were "always there" (which they always "said") as that parties followed us like the tracers of an acid dream, formed round us like those gold hyphyrian gnats that conglobed in the root relams round the slightes puff og light, so we were Party Central, we were the hub & the nub & all, with our every word & gesture hung on & utterly misunderstood, & our endless sexual escapades too hot to be even be hinted at, much less to occur.  We had no time to eat, I might add‑‑and, I guess, as it happens, I am in fact adding here‑‑so we became very slim & beautiful, if far too weak to chase Photre anymore. Who went off & got very strong indeed, eating methinks of the subvominal roots you can dive for in the soi-disant blubbering "punguent {boo-hoo!} pooles" & becoming as armored & stacked as the Ochre Hulk himself (the only comic character to consume more kids than me, meaning I when I say we), & utterly too much for us.  We sort of didn't care, what with the party like an hallucinogenic migraine round us all around.  The three of us‑‑that's me & Og & Endyah‑‑could barely make eye contact, much less work out together or trian, much less plan out brave new strategies to catch this cropper who was, it was rumored to be said, tossing gobvets of my wife over balconies at every turn. What did I care, I thought, but this little little psychological trick never had time to work, framed as she twas in the plupuppyperfectnet of pass. Then's when this new, superformidable Photre‑‑armed with an evil counterartist of his own, a wimp illustrator named Arar Threthus, the size of a genius child, sketching the painful etches of Photre & his invisible exploits‑‑adventures of an excitement so dense it would eat your limbs then, slowly in the stretch time of morbid fantasy, eat away the organs of your german vims‑‑& always snurking nastily through his little purple nose as he perched on Photres now-massive shoulder and‑‑where was I?‑‑oh yes, this Photre redux, this docteur nouveau, this flaming physician reborn of yore, or someone a whole lot like him...say, your Photre-dub or Photre impersonateur or or Photre poseur...took to appearing across the mother hole from me, leaning over the flimsy low balcony of the other side set up like the white metal of a baroque bordello corrupted in one's vacant new-orléan dream, and, sure enough, chucking portions of my wife off the side. At which the party would stop.  Notes hold like rocks in the staggy air.  Guests gape.  They look at me. Well, aren't you going to DO anything?  Sren't you going to STOP him? & many other deeper thoughts to this mand many other worse effects. Like I was going to swing across the chasm & swinge him upside the noggin, right?  Like I could move in this lousy suit, or coordinate my overlimber limbs with all this bloody root-booze inside of me, or move at all with my muscles so long asleep? "Yea, maybe you can get ona your comic books to do it," sneers Arar, whom I kind of like & hate the fact that I like & enjoy the complexity of hating the fact that I like & hate the degeneracy * {fin de siecle} of this enjoyment & savor the sweet taste of that degeneracy like a fucking pulpix sandwich & grow nauseous at my taste & feel somehow cleasned by thus feeling so sick & grow even paler & weaker at this clearly apthological form of cleansing & gain spiritual strength, or at least it seemed just as everything at some imaginary point or other "seems," from my bloodlessness, & faint at my pallor & dream I am strong in my faint & grow disgusted with my meaty strength & wake from the dream where I am in an evern weirder scene, as you might recall, being mocked by this small purple childlike dwarf of a gunsel artist tossing his sheets rising in the air even as the unbelievavly purple-black blobs of my wife zip down the mother hole much faste than gravity or reality would allow & in fact if I may use the word fact after all these words does allow. "You OK?" asks Endyah with a look, but everyone's expecting the three of us (& hell, I don't even see Og...could he be getting laid someplace while all this rhetoric's going gone?) to move in smooth coordination like fnatastic air ballet & hack Photre to pieces or something like that or even unlike this or that‑‑& friends, as I think I may have implied during that great green blizzard of implications up up there, we were not up to it at all. Too much partying's all.  Way toomuchpartying, y'all. Chuck, chuck, chuck, go the liverlike gibbets of flesh, & all I can say(cleairng my throat like a wimp)'s, "He's not really doing that. {Silence massive & strange.}  I mean, I don't think that's my wife out there, over there‑‑I mena, pieces of her flying dfown there.  {Vast professional silence; chuck, chuck, chuck.}  I mean, you know‑‑there's too many pieces of her to be real." Which, astonishingly, everyone likes, everyone seems to buy, and‑‑at least this one time I'm recalling here unless this be a dozen times conflating in recall‑‑the light goes down on Photre & his cackling boy & the party resumes again resumes. INORDINATE EYES or ASSOCIATIONS OF GREAT FEAR Then came my years as a peeping tom.  It was their own fault for starting all those rumors that I was afraid to leave the tree.  They drew up opages of my fear, making it a smooth blue beast of some quasiamphibious type & with inordinate eyes, its blue skin itching with figures & the figures symbolizing not the meaning of fear or Associations of Great Fear (to three of which associations I belong & was scared out of four & frighted outa five & scandalized outer fear) or pictures of fear in its titanic form in the stinging eyes of child or any of that shit but rather the good, fat-as-butter citizens of Oi displaying themselves shamelessly in their inner winders I'll descrive below & drawing up Des Opages Defear so great‑‑I mean laze-opages so great, it go wout saygoing that the fear was great‑‑they formed shameful opages on the skin of the great communal image of my fear.  I mean opage.  Of.  My fear. & anyway, I was of course fearless, amalgam as I was of the red one made for killing & my old self having lost too much to care (you get the picture (in the mirror (he(*)re) rorrim eht ni) you are the picture) in the mirror he?re, admiring himself as he scuttle up & down albino vines in such pathological vanity like this very prose, but unable, I, to cause my shapely muscles to move me, say, to the outer trunk, where a billion one-way windows secretly (blinked) at the Lower Orders as they crawled ("On such sticky legs!" the matrons cried then vomited, then cried in their vomit with vomit in their cries; I'm sorry I haveto mention this), crept unforgiven & wet up & down the centrla tunnel, peeping, as I was trying to say before I got <tidlestacked & sidecracked & wordracked & syntactizapped>, like a great & furry Tom, sometimes employing my onw eyes‑‑which eyes while eyes big eyes were yes no es great s shakes qua eyes‑‑sometimes emloying the various mechnaical instruments I'd score (disguised!) at the bazaars & in the conic volumuruums in which, somehow, all devices had been cast (the mother dis ap proves of de vices, son . . . the MOTHER dis a PROVES)‑‑like youknow long gogular bifurcative blackdicked thangs which so enhanced your view (or, more accurately, for I pains to be accurate inhere, made you like a child snookered by a disingenuous, chintzy goddam John & Johnson Catalogue toy yall'd waited centuries for delivey for believe your view was so enhanced) you like "craned" your <neck> in the classic liquid manner of enhance O yea the CLASS sic LIQU quid MAN ner of enh HANCE whereas they left you with fucking rings around your sudden ancient eyes‑‑sometimes emplying the eyes of others I had plucked out, the eyes down there, I've suddenly rememberde/sigh-dead, pluck off quite easily, like buttons you eat, with none of this nerves wired into your skull stuff‑‑none of that here. So anyway, to forge onward here, I was the peeping tom snookerng up & down the whitest vines, warm water almost always pyring over me, & me shinnying someheads timezup, somedowns timehead, & variously plucking out eyes & pushing em on like watermelon seed into the soft recalcitrant flesh of your frehsly dead lover's strangely fleshy head. I mean forehead. Another sentence of insanity runway!  But thus the words must be dreamt, & so I say boldly how I saw many a white & puffy body, many a naval I'd had no desire to see, many a gender I'd not even in this fever imagined committing, I mean sharing, I meant enjoying many an act I had no desire to know, yet was a shinnying slave to my goddam curiosity, or whatever dry shell of an empty insect cracked me there to go (Have we found the sense of this in the nerves of sense?  No?), & I was an exhausted guy, for this Reet had a big, basically uxestrial frame able but not fit for a life of le's phase it, squirrely clambering. & the orgasms, as I climbed!  Even more exhasting than the mass or the water dissolving little scriptures in my skein or the absolute basence of air.  Not to mention seeing all those peeling bodies & acts of erotic atrocity & generla decadent general shit in the Department of General Shit which was formed out of the data I snitched on them.  But that's another story, growing, I might add add add add, out of the endless intestines of this one like a mutant paraside.  Ugh! So, other stories notwithshimmering on the ruby Stove of Hell, I continue with my degeneration here‑‑albeit methinks a rather gloriuos one, thoug maybe not, though ten again‑‑& the rumors of fear which hhad me so NOT AFRAID BUT paralyzed (is to <NOT DROWNING but waving> as <but UNUTTERABLY‑‑nay, absolutely unthinkably DEAD...> is to) but unimaginably, nay‑‑practically WORDLESSLY (& that's a relief, isntit?) enriched...if not empowered by the subsequent op that made from my inevitable globule of thoughts, Sex & Death in High Society, which was I hastentadd orignally made only to remove the tumorous glop from the slipwwrays of mine ind, but which as wealth always doth demands I ride languid in my thorbbing gold Chariot V9 a smoked shaded enigma, tuxedo & all, in the weeping eyes of the crowd.  They're all on drugs, anyway, I reflect, & smile (& the crowd goes Awww! & reflects my smile.   We're all on drugs, down here.  It could not be otherwise no more than the moth's mad wings ignite could fluster notherwise.) PARENTHETICAL ON GENITALS "This whole place has got to be DESTROYED," I muttered to myself during the upsurge of a great swell party I'd thundered into.  Peple were so used to me peeping at their parties and‑‑though less & less persistently‑‑crashing them that they'd get their best genitals out & wear costumes the shape & color of our genitals which I hstnad are like beautiful turquoise lillies effluorescing in glissandoing sparkles of a giant whitedwarf dawn, with a good deal of orchestrated dripping drippling in the background of cut-out angel chorus blues, adding a bit of bottom to the band which consisted mostly of those hypersonic cleansing instruments of pure mercury vapor poisoning your BLINDFOLDERED EYES into blind littlelillie the miniatures of the so-called Great Lillies of God & God's Orchestral Suicidal Strings playing their pure sveet wibes across colorless rainbows of excandescent skies, & not the hoary pink wads you wave in your fazeless faces all about‑‑so there was nothing coarse or gross or goarse ercroash in this blinkered flaunting about; nor didn't it not smell bad neither; it was {repeat after me} all ve-ry SWEET! with the T-shirts widening like the flags of conquering stars, & the genital-logos flapping just like fucking, you will unh-unh! pardon me, & the great swatches cross the tow'ring crotch of jeans, so when the knees flobble in & out the pictorial genitals do a little dance‑‑all of this occurring without a trace of hormones, I might add, so it wasn't like sweating anybody like up. Except me, thurnking my goddam eyes into the binculars till they stretched out frowardly like the focused eyes of desire on a bitty boop & clunching my red red crosch with a great hammy hand (hammy but talented) & working my jaw back & forth, thusly: >>>, <<<, >>>, <<<, the molars too smooth & polar to be anything but sliipy erice, so there was not much sound but the slippages of time‑‑time, have I said, being a mechanism here, a fine white etheric sorta machine you can actually uh hear ah tick kink if you but will hold your breath & and & perform ona them motions that erases sound‑‑motions such as none other than the soundless grind of my dentifricks. O yea, I ewas fulla hormones, I was all worked up, I was the great self-oiling laughingslaught! So when I thundered through the cloth tarps covering the cloth tarps covering the idea of cloth covering the tarps of thought into these soirées (time clinking away in virtual soundless ossity all the time clinking in soundless all time in all time), it was with A Mind to Fuck, & it didn't matter whom or up what, & it certinaly didn't matter who got hurt or Whom Goth Urt‑‑in fact, the mare the murrier, as my friend Murrier the Mare never said to my unimagined imaginary friend. & these kid's'd laugh at having lured me once again.  They were so damned blond & pure‑‑so very ripe for torture or worse‑‑but I was wokring on how to destroy this place, blow up the guts of the mother ship & burn her out from her insides out, if this could be achieved.  Besides my distinct haha smelliness, I was a man with a vision, or an ux with a vu. And, with this thought in mind, I wordless & keeping it tumid but darkwith in my pants, I got up from the halfcreated part of the wordsplurge above & walked out, a man inspired etc., to the nearest glossy vine watervine lightvine whitevine dyingvine finevipe ine, swing out to the glasshouse clarity of the Central Trunk (O! the Cen tral Trun k!) & startto climbing me up. & up & up.  Repeat 1000 times: up & up & up & up. Thus up did I go, further & farther, lo, towhere the light got solid & shaved the cells off your very face like nothing so much as taking samples & the dryness descried defiance, & yet still 100 times more up & up I did clomb, a man inspetc. UNMENTIONABLE KIDS All this while I was aging rapidly.  Must be the tree, I would think & once I would think would have an "accident."  It was clearly not, as the song chants, "The Thought to Think While You're Aging in the the Arms of the Aging Tree, & in would come the accident crew. The accident crew with their white khakis, megahorns, caps, canvas chairs, lights, quotation marks, & gigantic shoes would show up and, uh, set up your accident, while you (you!) were supposed to stand by quiescently with your hands folded in front of your groin while they spent eternities (during each of which, you'll recall, I was aging like a flaming freyleaf in the needle beams of Frey, the blue giant sun of Frey, the fireworld I am dreaming of in & of this bubble here) laying out kliegs, spots, booms, backdrops, reflectors, refractors, prismachiators, reflective mats & Qobra Qables©, taking care to place the director's chair at the focal point of the "action," while pungent powderpuffs of ultraviolet make-up were applied to my face (& to other, unsung regions) & a goddang gallimaufry of goofy costumes were racked out & pressed against what would not be my sternum with considerative pauses ("hmmm...na!") be be whippéd thence away, till they hit upon just the right costume‑‑not Reet's customary rolled-up blue jeans, white athletic socks, black laceless shoesies & blue pinstripe dress shirt with its tails hung out, but the more formal Leathere Affaire, the famous black outfit for which I was well-prone as the accident known. All accidents within the tree were covered in quotes‑‑not surrounded in quotes as in the linear whelma of woards we have dehoarded hier, not merely {b{r(a{c{k}e}t)e}d}, as it were, in a pair of quotes grinning waving at one another like yokels from the far ends of the swiming party, but numb trimensional clouds of umbral quotebugs surrounding the scene, they being the bugs recoridng the scene & making the insect movie of the scene.  So accidents were quite humiliating‑‑not to mention {{({{}})}} here. "Damaging."  Unimaginably damaging. So there I am, in one incident a faded xerox of the last, staring almost translucent into the bathroom mere of a moirroining, grunting a little plexus of consonants through my nose to the effect that I looked fucking ANCIENT, man!, my haggard hand with its rootgnarled knuckles crackling against the dry & hyperrfocused skin of my ugly pouss with its white hoars & malevolent, whorling pores, & behind this gross facade the usualy symptoms, videlicit dizziness, stomach hurts, gnawing entities ion mine entrails, hard stuff stuck along poked-up cavities of nose, bloat, puff, black lump, incipient cancer, heart mucked up, no focus at ALL, dead breath, hands of hair clutching cuvilinear lobes of ears, teeth like grey quotation marks around the thought about to cause the accident in quotes above averred. Must be the tree, I think, or even the damned tree. & anything goes!  The skylight might spontaneously shatter on my head or tiles beneath my horny feet flip over or gravity itself fling me off a precipice (& believe me, there was always a precipice!). With the crew & the quotes & the make-up, & with as I said "and with as I said 'and with as I said' damage," unimaginable damage, & a lot of heartless amusement on the pop of the partulace (except for one or two beautiful blod kids, of course‑‑unmentionable kids I guessed, touching my face & sometimes even haulnig my sep ar at ed bo dy pa rt s back to the scene of my shattering.) Yesand here we come to what we have been coming to all the up to here: the multiafrious helaingsof Dr. Photre. That's right: Photre in a new charcater‑‑or, as I like to think, dandling myself in the loosuds of the tub, this fine young man playing to be Photre‑‑with amusing little cape & tights & uncharacteristically muscular thighs, swinging in in a sincere tributer to my own swingin' style, classic black bag in hand, would burst through the pain of quotes & patch me up.  Dr. Photre, folks. MIGRAINES OF INNOCENCE Then I clomb me further to the ultraviolet regions where all was this form of blue burning blindness, a sort of violent nothingness, a sort of sunglost irised-in realm of the perpendicular, a form of airless pureness, a smooth sterility, a focialpoint of filament itself almost touching the filament, a forward phalanz of kamikaze cells‑‑long brown cells like desiccated tulips leaves, genetically deisgned to plunge right into the sun... ...which is impossible, there being no sun, there being only Dysenidex, the plasma filament like a great migrating fluoresent tube hitting our Uxtal soil with its giant, fat, gastric photons of madness, themselvesall giddied up in purple raparound sunglasses & miniature photon-walkmans & photonic boomboits filling up their purple pointed ears, & those lobg cells I wandered off from making that last reach to touch the face of Dysenidex, & vap or eye zing right THERE!  only to grow back for more, this being a was-a-thing the miother tree had for the father filament.  They just kept doing each other like that, & with consequomitant flake-flails of dryleaf rain along the srtreets & the utter plains of Ux, a dizzy coconut lost in the purple blough... So here is where we find out what this great Reetby Wareet's made of.  Here is where 1) he die, 2) he survive, 3) he surdie, 4) dievive. 5) None of the above.  Reet reach the death-velvet regions, the bell jar O-zone, the rainless sear, the scortchotomy dire, the vaporless drear, call it what you will it is drier & hotter than the fractal deserts of Ku, I swear, & madder than the swearing arids of Feelalomu, & firier than anything. Hot, huh?  Yes well & Reet initiates matters by bursting into a great red flame {applause}, a flame, I my-tadd, proving exquisitely sexually extoxicant to the little girls watching in time lapse down below, a supernal smell rising from their pale blue negligees, & all this powerfully-built frame of ruby flame need do is GRIN & RAISE HIS HANDS to get a squeal so eager & wet it give their parents migraines of innocence for a week. I'm wondering if I'm committing suicide, or if Reetby's c~ s~, or if the conglomerate of the two of us is cs~, or of Reetby knows something I don't, or if it's just genetics‑‑like the madness of the leaves, the madness of the fire-lillies up above, the madness of those desirous tender rakefrails as they callem raining in elborate dismal dust to the dust to the brownness below‑‑just genetics, I say, we're walking into here. The red flame explodes & ReeI!tby blows into a great firework, scintilliant fat cherry bomb of the hyperregions, a pulsar pink, madagascar orange colored flakelit napalm irebomb of bltzough energies. Then the great flambation ends (& the girls fall asleep & the vision of their parents gradually comes to, but it will never be the same) & Reet stands there at the top of the ladder looking like nothing so much as a homunculus of glass or a statue of shellac or a prizewinging portraitof the great mythic brother of Dyovylid. Hey...The guy's gone vloid! I think there are some answers here to the whole problem cum question cum cum of vloids, but time seems dolefully limited tout, for one comes across Photre synonym-bathing here, or else crisp empty skin of Photre in crisp empty sunglasses, along with his lawyer, Alphonse the Insect, of course, or else the shell of Alph the Shell & everything not ust too hot to touch but too hot to dream of touching in the dreamof fire. Touch not that dream! MET & MIFFED Photre's undersea lab was a lichen-rind sphere pulled into a sort of bent & narrow egg.  Actually, its shape was impossible to discern visually, in the astigmatic blurs of this most refractory sea, but I felt round it as I pulled off armloads of crust, metamorphic detritus, & unnameable floor-fungi known only as The Fluorgi, a bold race now known to all the endless rows stacked up of the long-dead schoolboys (!spoow‑‑the boneschool boys or gapebuoys, the ones who died in the once-living school & therefore made it the dead school averred to up above).  As I descended to it, climbing down the invert moutntain of obverse, perverted gravities, bumping through great wide bagfish & tummelgnoze & feeleerioms & solid clusters of nent on their ways to the schools of nent on their way to Nent University on their way to the great things for which the great nent are always known to the Unknown Schoolboy (his grave that green oval smutched against the side of the Loraco Cliffs just a few miles south & a hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred miles straight down‑‑a vertiably crushing place to vib) & literally chawing my way through solid strata of grey strange dense most-likely mutated drab-tasting dun-pasted jellious morbid but highly exhilaratingly hallucinogenic mantles of adjectival smimebrape, & needless to think fanning & sometimes punching away those great wide-shouldered stingrays & tinglewaze & wideraze or ridewaize that looked to sting my waist but hadn't counted on my body, my red shield, my blodd my choice, my breath my suffocation, my cheeks my baloon, my word, look at that lab... Snagged against serious currents‑‑generally balmy but capable of any temperature‑‑amongst overgrown crests of murkred coral, tubule-fissues of turquoise stonesponge dimmed by the effluent crud, strange great pipe-creatures of delusional length (fat & squishabkeick!, like groffy tomato worms slurping cross the whitehot street of a paledoubt time when childhood was alive & the schools were living, but where no one knew of any of these any anythings). & this was my situation.  I mean, no one had ever seen this place before, except Alphonse the Insect, who was scuba dubing his way around the outside, doing some sort of policing, I mean gardenlike policing, I really mean maintenance or cleaning or checking things out, or perhaps acting in his soigné, puassuave way as some sorda lookought or guard. (I mean, wasn't that a swim-gurgle he was bubbling his lips into there?  In all the years since & with all the watchers & the gene-constructed & the gene-constricted theories, has anyone ever comeup not even once nor into his own dark head with a better explanation or even any explanation?  ha?) Anyway, I'm well pleased of course that I seem capable of adapting to any environment.  I mean, right from the dizzying outsmet I rearded this as cool, did I, & was right relieved that I could held my broth this long depth down to this deeproot seaswoop Particulate Matter City of the aquasmog or squaug. But one wondered: how long did I have? I saw the situation in a soggy flash‑‑more of a fluaoosch, I guess‑‑when I looked above & saw how every other creature I'd met (and, apparently, miffed)‑‑that's right, met & miffed‑‑had gathered its relatives & joined forces in a theretofore unheard of communilization of fish‑‑now known to every et cetera‑‑& created a perfect firmament above me, a veggie shield.  They were not going to let me chew my way out of this one‑‑oooooooooh no!  These guys were gonna watch me die.  Photre could plainly see me banging on the porthole, my cheeks puffed out like the fever dream of winds, & he was miming aleatory variations on the theme of aborption, a bright show now known to every dead school kid (woops!  I mean the schools are dead, not the kids.  These are living kids attending dead schools, see, dead schools at the bottom of the Liccem Sea, very much like Photre's orb on which we are knocking here. THE PHOTRE TRIAGE FROM HELL Seemed like my arm would always fling off into the muck someplace. "Got it!" Photre would sing, alternately skipping & cakewalking through the shin-high bog.  & he's hold that great red arm way up high, & all I could do was watch him with these doubly-enlarged, moist & breathless eyes which looked for all the ux like the eyes of admiration, but were just the popeyes of a red assassin-hybrid renegade who's got the wind whopped outa him after this fantastic fall (it was a Giger fall, during which the loftless fornds & the bulbouse veins & the stalks of the great inconceivable plants nameless plants that moved upward in einsteinian way as I tumblered in distortion (as if there were gross lenses or dented metal bending & inflating, crimping & constricting me, all the way down) propogated in fluid from the primal unrhymed forms of that feckless dutchman, so harrily scarey that I pumped my big shoulder soze to fall faster, which I swear I did), able to watch their savior tormenting me or their tormenter saving me. "Here we go," Photre'd cheep, spalshing up to me, apologizing in intricately small fonts for every little ruipple in my eye or splash across my face or accidentla kick to my groin or inadvertant crunch to my patella or a rapid twist of my ankle, popping the calcaneum, such were the little accidetns happen during the Photre triage from hell. By the way, the stringthings dangling from the pop-toff edges of my sundered arm‑‑be they capillaries or nerves or ripped tendons or leftover strings of muscle or some sort of coagulated blood or arm-snot or stump-boogers or wires or cables or coaxial metatonic form-resistent cables made of polymers so intrictaely subtle they had intelligence comparable to, say, the ectoplasmic mindbeasts taking over your face in the Muddle Ages‑‑were a different color every time.  I think, upon dew consideration, that Photre was Photre was slapping on some sorda pigment onto the ripped woundlike segments of my invariably-flung-to-the-hither-regions arm, & while one might say or intimate that this acrion was done in the interests of vitalic reconsturction, it would by the same token seem a bit surprising‑‑possible doubtful, no?‑‑that this paraprocedure would require at each juncture (or should I say DIS-juncture ff-ff-ff-ff-ff!) such sequentially variegated dyestuffs for what would presumably be much the same purpose, yes? Unless he was tryting out new dope... "In ya go!" or words to a blearier effect he would fect e wood chutter just as I'd pass out into quotation marks (while sometimes Alphonse the Insect with his black hiar parted like a perfect inkline down the middle would wave smelling salts in front of me, but it'd never work because I'd never breathe) & jam that arm back on, & then get down on his knees in the aromanic muclk & hand-stitch my arm (not to mention other limbs‑‑a big thigh, often as not, sometimes a kidney or full set of teeth hanging together like nightmare dentures of your zombie-aunt, a liver or a halfa-setta ribs or a belly bunton or a doze‑‑almost always by doze would flip right off; methinks it was some sort of safety device safety device to release device to release the pressure release the pressure of the fall pressure of the release the safety device to release somesort of thought of pressur eof the fall long after the fall) back on with stitches gnarly as CABLES & twice as thick ("Got to do a thorough job!" he'd sing, & "Can't afford a halfassed job right now, son!" or "Ng...ng...mp!") & so help me start singing at times, some lovely wondrous songs, memorable songs I have forgotten now, but remember the dewy feeling of them tand the rose they brought to my rising eye, & of course I did want to ask him if he'ld written that song, but it was not allowed, & "Therethere" Alphonse would coo. With a sharp hamrknoc slap he'd bring me round, pieced together after God-knew how many anaesthetic rounds, & I'd rip to my feet to kill him, feeling in pain & yet twice as limber, twiceasquick, twice as starong, but he'd be twice as garone. It has been rumored that he kissed certain wounds.  I must ocnfirm: he kissed my booboos, kissed many a booboo, make luscious love with his suctioncupped tongue to my various rubescent hurst, he drew down his loving throat countless mutilations & thereby made thewm slick, if never well (making, in fact, permanent miniature museum pieces of the in the permanent colection of his Museum of Miniature Wounds), & slobbered in apparent grief over many a contusion & sting & slash.  He did these thing, with apparent feeling, Alphonse behind him in his tux wringing his rubber hands. THE EBB-LIE OF OG or PARENTHESES OF SLEEP "Now Dr. Photre," I said, my voice as high as an insect's in this sunny air burning air gassless ultraviolet sterile perfect desiccant air, "I want this little uxean weasal extracted from my flesh." That weasal was me!  He meant me!  This hoarsefly croaking at the supine doc was Reet, revealing sentience for the first time ever‑‑apparently waiting till I was stunned, or waiting to gain this secret, special audience with Photre, or vitalized by proximity of the godless sun, or just turned on at Photre's behest (he had his pad of glowing buttons right nearby, thought the buttons looked like dark spots in this infinite light, & the pad looked like nothing so much as a tiny dab of nothingness like a breathless ebb-lie of Og (no relation), the god of lies, the unrelational god of dying lies. Little Alphonse‑‑looking all polished up in this environment, looking very much in his element (I understand he was a sun-bug or bulb-beetle or sunsect, I understand), looking nicely oiled & well-shaped & firm & happy & strong, behind carnival goggles the elephantine parodies of the sunglasses any decent set of eyes could wear, was trying to get up off his back (always hard for a tailored, exoskeletan dany like Al), was rocking rapidly & racking ropidly back & forth in a clickering dither & tossing his girlei mag azide & making some sorta shshing hishing sounds at me‑‑all at the same time, like some great sunlit Godinspired test of motor coordination‑‑& waving his limbs with an eerie gentleness, rendered e'en more strange by the flow-tracers & wave-augmentations of those selfsame waverings, each repeated glassy silouette carrying its own varinat  message on whatever message (if any) the original, long forgotten, never seen motion had tried if at all to inspire.  If. But Reet was not to be sidetracked or bushwhacked, much less sideswiped or hornswagged by this secondary insect assistant underling character type, this duded-up lab assistant of a distinctly lesser, artificial race, this multilimbed descendant of the damp logdwellers of the Moss Planes, this smarmy swarmless galoot of impeccable insect, this good fellow, this nice guy from another plane of novels, this silly moustachioed archaccented Alphonse, no mann how many phrases he inspired. "Dr. Photre," he says, stepping through ashes even closer through the goddam trackless ash, "I must insist you rmeove this puny parasite from my spine, where he seems judging from the slimey feel to've wrapped himself round the nerve column like some transpicuous Loodevarean snotworm, if I may, & return me to my whole, swashbuckling, vloid-terinating self, & put me back in my chamber (& back ah! into parentheses of sleep), there to await the next crystalline pest etc." He actually said etc., & I for one don't blame him. "A-hem!" cleared Alphonse moving cautiously toward me from the other side of the baking GP.  He actually said a-hem, & I blamed the little buggery gunsel down through the limb-strewn corrdiors of etnerity for that & that & that. "Psht!" Reet hissed at Alphonse, which had a gratifyingly powerful effect on the tuneless little beetle. "Dr. Photre?  Are you estivating up here doc?  Doc?  Hello?  You cocooned up here, Dr. Photre?  I've always wondered what species you were, not that I care.  But can you...remove...?" Alphonse made a lofty leap over the supine doctor, his curved & rigid wings buzzing into action.  But you'll recall from your questionnaire there was no air up here, so Alph's famous & much-touted multilimbed leap didn't fly so high, knocked in fact the doctor's great spectacles off (That's gonna make him mad, I thought, sucking my hero-god's great tumid cocklike spine) & collapsing into the dust by the dry ghost of our feet where Reet'd stepped neatly aside. "Doctor Photre," he now said with awesome strength & command, etc.  "Let's GO!" & he tapped on Photre's sternum, which collapsed like a thin clay castle, followed first in a spreading cracking as of the cacklings of a skull gone, as they say, quite mad, then in sand-flow fashkion, then like the finer white sand you find in the golden ashtrays of the smokin' Filliac gods, then like a dry liquid, if you can wrap your grey brain around that & that, then in a pop of podwer, like the Photre-shaped cavity wafted pollen through the air. But, as we've tried to redetermine redespite rerampant redundant recurrences reof reamnesia, there was no pollen & the was no air. "This isn't Photre!" said stupid old Reet, losing consciousness. "This isn't anyone," said a dusty phonsic vox fum a fafe fafedowng in du duft. WALL OF MUG Jealous lichen crep kepting over the glossy electronic eye of the porthole, & I rubbed my forearm across the tender lense to rub it clean.  It scoriated the bulging lense, of course, but scrept the lichens off the lense (they floated body before it-the-lense-it the lense, keeled over like a richly pregnant babe ready to drop her dam & clutched their bellies, faces too small for their unseen grimaces of pain & the unseen madness of the pain & the repressed blackness of the madness boiliing up, thanks to me, in the form of pain‑‑the lense catching all of this‑‑the whole scene seen as a product of Photre's volition, but my doctor {Photre} has advised me that I see everything according to Photre's voliton as according to Photre's volition, an affective disorder not named but numbered in PDSM-93a, & numbered & engaged & numbered & engaged & lit & projected & lit & projected over my head & delineated through the rays of Photre's pointer as I writhe like a gentle worm in my straitrapper sheetjacket whitecoat lightblazer wrap, but I am sorry to say I just don't understand; the contours & construction of my nameless disease the logic of which I am afraid to say symptom of disease I do not understand this too being a symptom of the disease, its symptoms being everything & its symptoms clutching their stomachs like appendectic fungi floating fore the screen) which quickly smoothed itself from the ratchet of my red-reety ruffboughing bloody forearm, the flecks of blood in the water like sickle-celled fragments of exploded stars. & there was Photre, not only fully aware of my presence & predicament (my cheeks bulging in more horrified comic fever bitter alarm with every breathless second in these sleepless deaths I mean depths down here), but savoring it to the fullest, even going so far as to sharpen his image in the glass & caper about in weightless fairy movements, adding a touch of gest to excessive gestures, an untoward periphrastic complexity with possible dashhood of whitepussed mimicrackery on the face of it there, a certain burlesque broadness which crushed tissue upon tissue of my delicate face against the convexiating lense & which I have never yet convinced anyone other that it was, other than some dead lichen there & Photre himgoddamself, & just to tap the icing on the polar cap, mugging to me, like I was his moronic fevered audience or dully clapping child, big foots stomping & a drool of appreciation, so he was in a bathyspheric sense "in my face," which I firmly believed was an entire porjected wall of a blue & starlit image of my face bulging out at the capering surgeon. Allow me to explain.  The entire nether wall of the lab (which we really are going to get into, don't you fret) was in its nether entirety an MR imager which doubled as an amplitude of stars, that is, an unecessary starmap in scotchgard blue Photre liked to protject behind his back, Photre having some sort of weird repulsive eyespots or something specked like crescent zits across his .bak, to give the illuson of utter spaciousness against the chambered reality, as it were, of being in a tank or hermetic kettle on the bottom of the silty cell-teeming polymolecular rootsea of the of the mother tree with this crazy red monster rapping on the hullaway, & this MR cum starimager he turned upon me, on my mug, creating in this wise the famous Wall of Mug which was I. I have seen it.  It doesn't look like eye but is most assuredly aye. & so there it was, I mean there he was, doing a doily dance for me in what appeared to be a very low-grav chamber, possibly full of our version of oxygen-rich liquid, by which I mean a blob of something richly breathable, causing also the gentle "flappingness" of the endless pleated cumbersome folds of his wrinkly skin, not to ention his clothes. & let me set the record straight: he was wearing clothes.  I deny my cold, I mean I deny having ever having seen the doctor ever wearing no clothes.  I kept my eyes closed when he ran widdoubt close. Anyway, (& I apologize for digressions like these, but can only say they are mandated by the somewhat marmoreal structure of reality here) anyway, Photre was, as the kids say, "up" to something there, & I had to suck the lense to my eye to see... THE UNIVERSE OF ANOTHER MIND He was wearing very fine, very silly paiseley-peacock clothes.  & here reality split, of course, venously, & either he'd been making the garage sales which are just about all they do up & down this ol' trunk again or the eye I'd glued my eye to tended to embellish things or the acute shortage of whatever in-most-branch undiscovered pale powder capturing the glint of infinite soi-distant suns in your infinite parallel uiverse isesises‑‑the foregoing applying, of course, only to those parallel, or as I feel it, concentric-spheric (like concentric eyes, see...) universises in which or from which there is or are parallel or concentric or fevered youknow-verses, or at least those cute little flaxen-faced universes with the frightening-smiley Bob or Maxey Crumb faces that have the thought of universes breathing in them, out them in them, out them like the pollen we use forthe pollen we use for oxygen, & then cast awya, like broken or frozen or spoiled or freshly-fucked oxygen (bet you've never heard that one before‑‑freshlyfucked oxygen, mmmmm!), & so on, into other bracnhes making possible the return of other branches,such as the return of your torutred past on that fevered morning when either the sun never came or the sun turned her heretofroe dark side toward you or she went nova like a bubble in the night (& by that I mean in her VERY OWN NIGHT!  Wow!) with only the gentlest popping sound to wake you from your last depressing sleep before the freezing even of the oxygen you use for pollen or whatever the fuck freezes like Gaudi beGiger stalactites frightening even the multifrightening Crumbs, if you follow me (wink wink) into stiff inverted doloricles (& believe me, trusting friend, if I could make the letters upside down here the letters upside down, I would...believe me...I would unless my mind, branching into the universe of another mind, changes its mind like the spy ripping off that morphing of his other face‑‑are you with me so far?  No? OK then, this: Photre (you remember Photre? that thin fine dandy dressed in the faggot's consignment fairy suit? that colossal coat alternately expeirmenting on your face from the front & ramming something up you from behind, & always with the stremaing of our ionic form of what you when you're sleeping call "electricity," here a flow of agonizing ozone, utterly useless for anything, known as cunt, which I know has caused some embarrassment betweeen our worlds, & war between not a few of our polyworlds, using weapons of electrical & cunt, i.e., ray-guns & cunt-guns & gunt-cuns & gay-runs, which is‑‑at least in a few of the smaller, more skewed-type, so-called parallel worlds‑‑sad, except in those even more into-a-ball of strings playing along, like invisible kittens, with the silliest strong theory you ever soar, wherein sadness take the form of ELECTRICITY or of CUNT, but not in those deadend worlds, not really, except those bearing the same relationship to the gay, swinging jet-setting world of paralella paraworlds as your coiled nephron to the effervescent, bubbling network of veins that has been seen & very well‑‑some would say "graphomaniacally swell" (can you say graphomaniacally swell? you can't? well then bend over, you little prick)‑‑evoked by that race of micrimicroscopic physicians I read the cilia of in the cilia book in the dream o the cilia dream once, then, none‑‑taking part in this parallel-world shit that has possessed the fever of our fafes here, but existing more like fetuses aborted by nature with her starry (& get gat-toothed!) self-referential "smile" in those where sadness itself has coagulate to comely electric cunt. Whew.  So Photre's enjoying the side of my cheeks puffing wide as a sight of beef & rotating slowly on the goddam Spit of Agony‑‑but that is nieter here nor there‑‑& my big red feet beginning to psin & my head beginning to kick, you could tell on the Screen of Retrospect (but that was neither here noredare) he was playing with me, dandling me, cooing & with the affection "normally" (I blish to say the word) reserved for your Mother of Love (but she was never herenor-ere) as they say, their voices weaking as they split down the corridor-adores neither ear nor air, & stretching out the time before, like the MoL, strangling me but that ash nor hear or blare, only Photre's version of strangling me, given the Law of Metaphor (as it were, neither sleep nor the dream of sleep or dream or the sleep of dream, as it were), would be (on that never-to-be Scene of Entrospect on the Entrospecton Screen the doctor used on the doctor in the bubble of the Entrospectric Screem used on the sketchy doctor of the Isolated Screeng) finally popping the hatch & snatching me in on beams emplying the mighty, little used & never recognized Power of Cunt. Forgb me Gob, for I hab swore. NEGCORREL Dyovylid was always acting like she knew everything I didn't.  She'd express this with a bap to the side of the head like the ancient Uxtentse soldiers used to flip one another's brains out, only she'd do it so it was merely excruciating.  I think she enjoyed the particular cringe I had as a child, & the almost infinite wrinkles that spread across my face like psychotic cartoons, rippling & rippling & in their typical way signaling one another feverishly, getting hotter as they went out, trying to escape the nerves, trying to wriggle their way like loose-slit nerves from the phrase anxiety of being caught, gaining sentience & thenof course pain & then this silly wriggling some drug-crazed animator drool din, in just the precise sorta overlong sentence who follows like a smiling fewmme fatale, with her delicously callipygous hips & hergreat black hat (but with the nasties swearwords running in fashion fetish round beneath that hat I'll bet that hat!), breathlessly a blow, such as the skull-booming one (blow) my sister (*)'d knocked me over with. Headblows can do these things, & I'd lie there for a minute, trying like hell to rememer the endless sentnece that came out soundlessy, not to mewntion invisibly, not to mention obliviously, forever out, for it seemed to me there, stunned let's face it by my one cruel sister, that all that information I lacked had been imparted to me‑‑but wouldn't you know, my poor brain just wasn't good enough?  (What brain, I think as my breath comes back as I think "Hello, Brain?" but am gret by a soleful echo of some deserted, quiet skull free now of its sickness of thoughts.  & this, too, I like * for. As for the nastiness, this was required for Uxtentse girls.  I mean, this was a tough place for any form of feminity, soft or clever or strong, so you needed such tricks, most particularly against you kid brother, who would now, gooseegg & all, follow you round. Actually I wasn't the "kid" brother, either.  I was many seconds older than she.  But I'll warrant I grew up at half her speed.  That's the only biological peculairity I have thought of, sir‑‑that untoward grow-up speed, as if childhood bored the heavens out of her.  That's unusual, yes, but NEGCORREL to former vloids, near as we can tell, & POSCORREL with many another girl in this weedy great shell of a turned-in world.  Nothing much there, I'm afriad & afriad & afraid. TERRIBLE HINDU THROATS or EQUATIONS OF THE THROAT Photre (that cad!) took care of me during my fever.  Photre (that green insect!) took advantage of my fever.  Photre (that invisible length of cable!) gave me a large orange pill.  It was during my fever. It‑‑the fever‑‑was so high they (someone‑‑don't know who; would you CUT ME SOME SLACK WITH THE PRONOUNS???) tossed me into the gutter into the Nether Pools into the Chill Rootling Turneys there where I can still see myself lying stiff & bobbing at the bottom, great terrific bubbles as violent as the suck of a trio of mean F5's as I boiled & boiled that trackless black liquid down there, forever changing it, never changing it. I was in a nice purple bed during this fever‑‑it was a colorful fever‑‑when Photre (that incandescent angel with beaming junky's eyes) tossed the white pill the pale pill the translucent milky pill down one or the other of my terrible Hindu throats (they're unbelievable aren't they? & that's precisely the point) which caused me to hallucinate sheath over sheathe of prevaricating embellishments over the grain of whatever happened, a crimson bloody pill straight from the forge of seethy Mars which caused me (have I said?) to hallucinate in weird vibratos, as it were as it ill, over the base tone of whatever life was sounded then & there (GO with me on this one, please) all beginning during my great "inverted fever" when I was known far but not wide as The Iceman & Photre (that seal!) with his whiskered nose flipped the icepill down my rinky gorge, as it were if it were not, which caused me to revise painstakingly‑‑& using my own bright blood for ink, straight from the very vein, thank you, Yoko, so I wrote & I wrote in arterial throbs & then bled out, like any writer, & then would begin, with a feverish shake of the head, begin writing again, revising foolish embellishments & bellish emfoolishments around the actual straightarrow grimingway text of whatever forgotten longlost mythic black & white "happening of the happened" as Schrutgart was wönt to shay with the result‑‑as these lines if you acceptem as lines subsume‑‑that my perceptions are instantly covered oil with the abstract kandinskings of expressios for example, of fears that were never there or even there's that were never there, much less feared, much less the black cipher of Photre inside the black pill saucering down the ~ cave of my meaningless throat, much less a grammatical construction void of meaning & utterly dependent on those full, flushed, florid Words of Meaning or Content Words or Ful Professor Words having just cribbed a jolly meal