IDOTANIA: ONE OF MANY / A COLLECTIVE SEA OF HUMAN RETURNS TO CELLULAR UNCONSCIOUSNESS
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The-World-Is-All-That-Is-The-Case
The Hypnos Aparat, nestled at the base of Jonothon Imhotep’s cranium, tilted imperceptibly into the underconscious, nudging his mind forward and back toward non-null conclusion.
The present moment chimed.
His eyes opened. The world streamed in. He knew, somewhat, what was what.
He had been waiting, slack and patient, as was his habit in the between-times, between cases—when waiting was the only thing to do. The Aparat was connected to the net, and the net was threaded into the Dazine, systematizing quantized consciousness into a seamless, unified field. Recursion was inescapable. Everyone knew this, or at least, knew of it.
So there he was.
Blessed as such, he offered his internal evening absolutions—to everything, for the necessity of things—to a perverse black void, just in case.
He sat back, stretched in the cheap stayroom koshi-kake of the Fillstation, kicked his feet out past the sterilized room slippers, then folded them sloppily beneath him. He poured a stiff ginsui from a carton. His eyes clamped shut as the passage folded in on him.
The passage was confidence. Confidence was the passage.
Dull. Mysterious. Ache.
21:02. That meant the door would open in precisely nine minutes, give or take. There was no explicit human experience to confirm this, but like all beings possessed of the Aparat, he knew it in his marrow. The door would open. Another case would give. He would take it in. He would take it or leave it.
The process would proceed.
Glass-slick sweat embalmed his skin.
Phantoms whispered through his cerebrum as the rancid super-ego rationalized his lack of productivity before the coming case. Nine minutes wasn’t nothing. The thrum of mecha-nature demanded efficiency.
Thought was confidence. Confidence was thought.
Mad growth in infinite sectors was gospel. If it bleeds it leads.
Fragments of Terebi-Talent quips echoed through the mirrorstream, touting the state of the corporate futures field—pulsing jargon, bouncing back at him. He tuned it out.
The ginsui fizzed through his veins, then drained. His eyes remained shut. No scanning, no maddance of information processing.
The Fillstation room whispered through the Aparat, inducing him to produce and provide internally. Soft. Inevitable. The long-suffering hum of synergistic labor.
He held out as long as he could against the bubbling well of sensation. He felt the invisible hand of potentiality audibly hum around him. He inhaled deep into the diaphragm, started to hum back low, pantomiming pattering nu-jazz drums.
The inclination field eased off. The Aparat did its work.
If a tree fell in a forest and Imhotep wasn’t there to see it, then everyone knew it didn’t matter to the void whether it made a sound or not.
(It didn’t.)
Or at least, he thought it didn’t.
Or at least, he thought he thought it didn’t.
A terrible grope of implant-induced imagination pushed out the quanta of what-will-have-been-at-some-point, the inevitable impulse toward the what-will.
A chorus drumming or so, and the door opened.
So did his eyes.
The Aparat never fully closed. Never fully opened. It did what it did—blackboxing a barren world into a synesthesia of vibrant propositions and corollaries, catering to some and not others, locked within the nether node of a deterministic biological blockchain—the I WANT of the organism.
Imhotep’s individuality was subsumed by the mechanical.
That was the case.
WHAT IS THE CASE:
IMHOTEP – CHECK EXTENT SUBSTACK REPORT – MAIZURU CHI-HO, UNRESOLVED NOUN EVENT.
AYABE PHILLIPS – NOSTALGIA LEAD – PARTICULARS PER POST HASTE JONOTHON SUM ACTION.
THAT IS THE CASE.
The mirrorstream blinked the directive into existence at once—tight, wound, succinct. A timed and timeless infogestalt.
It always stung a little when the Dazine used his proper name.
Even though he knew—
To them—
He was them.
That was the case.
————-
The phosphorescent gold of Maizuru’s suburban zone streaked through the window, coating him in its sickly glow.
The Aparat whispered to him:
Gangly, powerless god.
Move. The world will make you, as you make it.
Something was wrong.
A hurt in his head.
A phantom strain behind his eyes.
And soon, the room slips were exchanged for sneaks.
The bare chest for longclad.
The room spat him out.
Eyes gleaming gold.
His Muji nicovape slid into his palm as the corridor digested him, expelling him into the street proper. The first drag of vapor softened the evening. The Aparat nudged him:
Nutriment. Correct. Right.
“The right game is a hand clapping, and I am a foot.”
He intoned lightly.
Turned no heads.
Tapped no heels.
Did no dance.
The Aparat gave his words weight.
He felt appropriately unsafe.
————-
The Maizuru railstation pulsed ahead.
Businessmen. Businesspeople. Businessthings.
Synthetics. Evening nihilists. Kyoto fufu. Marketing entities.
Each a proposition bundle, snaking through the station like plasma through capillaries—filing into confidence salons, bopping barrooms, cleaning auto-facilities, and so on.
At first, all faces were confused and confusing—a sea of idiosyncratic unmeaning.
Then, the Aparat hummed.
Some became more interesting.
Others, less.
His mind rose to the networks of lapidary happenings—calculating, intuiting.
Everyone was the same.
And at the same time, there was no one like him in the entirety of existence.
And at the same time, he did not exist.
On. Off.
On. Off.
The game played through them.
But the ginsui had worn off.
So he ducked into a Lawson-Tetra-Farm, plucked an Ozeki One Cup from the shelf, walked out past the chiming automaton’s thanks for his wireless patronage.
Soon it was open.
He hit the vape and found a dimly lit ancillary node street, moving slowly, open cup in hand.
The nihonshu filled him, as was its function.
The crowd parted.
He wasn’t worried about where he was going.
“Not in this economy.”
In a certain sense, he was already there.
In a literal sense, he was already there.
He stared at the barroom ahead.
NIC’S BAR AND STEAKS.
The sign said it was Nic’s Bar and Steaks.
So he believed it.
The thinlong staff-san didn’t open their eyes at the bar as Imhotep stepped inside the narrow nouveau Bei-steakpub. The chime was hard to hear over the music was simultaneously too loud and not loud enough—a kind of skittering vibe-pop with raucous endo-horns punctuating artist AI objective melody into the Thanatos consumption drive.
A deep faux-wood plastbar bisected the room.
Three or four beings abided in the wings, but Imhotep could not personally be moved to look.
Dull, sway, gag.
The staff-san was probably twelve step future-tripping, lying indolent on a mainland grambeach, thoroughly not present, engaged in a game of hide the ego.
Imhotep passed the thought of the antique corkscrew in his pocket through the archway of the mind, idly envisioning violent the prospect of bringing it through his or the young waif’s hand to see how things would algorithm out.
He dug his hands into the coat and spoke through the Aparat.
“Excuse. Just me. Company. Short order.”
The staff-san asked nothing.
“Business,” he said. Unurgently.
The staff-san gestured him over to a part of the bar that appeared uninhabited.
Soon he was sat, wondering who Nic was—or had been.
Vape in hand.
A chilled beverage, which turned out to be Deutsch Radler, inhand, being imbibed.
Very good.
He didn’t notice them when they walked in but felt his consciousness express not a single iota of seltzered surprise when the hag came and sat down next to him.
“Ayabe… Phillips,” he said after a beat, checking the short-term memory confluence by the childhood feel of Indonesian cotton between his toes—a sensation that had never existed then or now, yet helped Imhotep focus when he had to recall anything more than eight minutes back.
He played the tape.
Vitamin B12.
He was gratified when they looked at him: tired, sadsack, droopy, dull, and in no way surprised.
They were a thing of gray that the Aparat told him had no place in the world.
They told him that they were not Ayabe Phillips.
That Ayabe Phillips had said she was catching a ferry. Getting out of the zone. Moving house. Flying the coop. Running scared. Jilted lover. A mineral deposit deal done offshore in the mix.
He asked how they knew her.
Pachinko, they said.
That is, they played pachinko every night, though the hag was playing out a long shiseki family drama, and Ayabe Phillips was playing something else.
Something real.
The game was happening, and the happening was the game.
The hag told him that Ayabe Phillips was a nice girl and hoped she wasn’t in some sort of trouble.
Imhotep hit the pen and did not laugh at the joke, as he should have.
But he was on the clock—passage was confidence, so he thanked the hag for their time, gave them the syntax key that let them know the meaning-laden passage node had passed, and stepped out of the steakhouse into the brisk, chemicalfumed seabreeze evening.
As the passage moved, he began to feel at once and within the Aparat that curated wind.
The steak was derelict on the bar.
He hadn’t eaten a bite. He had no memory of ordering.
He had everything to live for and nothing to pass over in silence.
—————
He hit the vape continually as he strolled in the direction of Maizuru Bay, clocking a FamiMa EatIN Space to imbibe product and bide while he waited for the Aparat to reveal the next game of the hand.
He felt the ache behind the eyes deepen.
“Of all the bays in all the shores of shores, this one is certainly one among many,” he intoned choking on vapor.
It took him less than a sixty of carefully pawing at the Te-table in the EatIN Space to find out when the ferry was due to concourse.
That’s when he felt it happen.
It started off small.
In the back of all that was.
He walked out to a cherubic chime, it came. It came with
The impossible complexity of grain of the concrete seawall berm that teed around the premises.
The non-procedure configurations of the tetrapods breaking waves.
The smell of rotten milk and lab-chicki vomit in an alley rank of crypto urine and
Vale finding him with the bag around the head.
The promulgating diatribe-laden cacophony of a Bou-nen year-end party heard through a window of a passing abode.
“Allergy! Allergy! Allergy!”
“It’s not!”
The size of the moon.
The heat in the cheeks.
The scrape.
The gone-ness of everything.
The feeling of ground and foreground and here and there.
Salt beads on the tongue and something called Elmo’s Fire in the brain.
Imhotep felt the panic.
He couldn’t.
He knew he was on the clock.
But he also knew what was coming.
Or at least, could know of it.
He snap-decided, started back and back to the way back in the direction of the stayroom, to go to ground, to bury himself as deep and long as he could, as the absurd luster began to be slowly drawn away from the world. The case. The world. The case. The world.
There again was the crowd, and every face that he saw became him, and he became every face that he saw.
His legs were propelled by the concrete as he pounded pavement on his way to a something that he couldn’t name. He was the thing.
He cut through the station, hobble-descended the staircase, moving deeper and deeper into the bowels of the thing, allowing himself to be swallowed whole by a long history of things he had no recourse to and no knowledge of.
For the first time in thirty-four calendar trips he began to hear a voice in his head.
A single, solitary voice.
Outlining what he was doing.
It was intelligible.
And it was frank.
Fully alien.
Dull.
He reached behind his ear.
Pulled his hand back.
Spotted with blood—a light pink goo, not dry.
He turned left.
And then right.
Moved past himself in perpetuity, feeling the glances from himself as he passed himself.
He felt around for the corkscrew.
Thought of taking it to his face to see what was underneath.
He found a public Benjo, went inside, heard the wet sounds of something biological happening, and saw the wet face of whatever he was.
Something came out of the stall.
Dank. Rank. Wafting death.
It said something to the room in a collection of sounds.
Imhotep thought to look over—to see if it was the hag.
Couldn’t do it.
Looked at the shoes instead.
New Balance fin2057 novelty mid-mill kicks.
Fiendishly clean.
Sparkled up at him.
And just like that, he knew.
There was no way for the hag to be sporting such kit.
Maybe it was the hag.
He had not looked beyond his peripheral.
What did it want?
The steak.
There was no way to know.
Soon, it left.
And he was alone with.
The organism.
The IT behind the eyes.
The sum of all processes.
The thing laid bare.
The barroom last night.
The bar last night.
The Izakaya.
It all was coming up to him.
Every night was the last.
Last there was the smell of vape tobacco-hash oil and farts.
A group of Kaisha-boys laid out in the toriki.
The falling limp to the floor.
The sick stick of it.
The skittering, withering way of footsteps slinking away in white loafers as his view flipped right angle.
The blood pooling from the indolent sucker punch, carbon fiber rendering his Aparat exposed to the air, slowly fizzling away.
The oxygenation came in to degrade the bounds between the cerebral sheath and machine-learned techno-bone.
Imhotep only had to stare into the eyes of the creature in front of him staring back to know what had happened.
The thing in his brainstem was dying.
And with it, everything that ever could possibly be.
He was all at once a part of the universe, sputtering, closing his eyes against the grand terrible majesty of everything that was and would continue to be.
The corkscrew was out on the faucet table.
Water running.
Eyes taking in IT.
IT mouthed what he thought to himself as he thought it:
I am the void, brought to bear,
along the foreground hair
on the scalp of a king with no name.
Cover my shame
with no one else to blame.
Of this I partake, of my own due request,
this stream of consciousness
to which I absolve the rest.
My kin and kind
pay me no mind.
As I struggle in form
and fade to stone.
Blank and abject,
brought asunder
by birth and happenstance,
perchance to reach an impasse.
I lay at the will of Dazine,
the Supra of this world,
all that is the case,
for which I will forever embrace.
The world within worlds,
of which occluded skills I lack,
and the perspicacity of a quack.
What brought me into this world,
the nothing within that will take me without.
And stark, all nothingness,
of which we are devout and OUT
INDO
NESIAN
COTTON
The Hypnos Aparat, nestled in the small of the back of the cranium, made an inclination in the underconscious of Jonothon Imhotep, pushing the mind forward and back to non-null conclusion.
The present moment chimed.
And that he was awake and knew somewhat what was what became evident.
He had been limp, waiting, as he was wont to do, in the between times between times when he had cases, as was often the case, he thought.
Blessed as such, he addressed his evening absolutions to everything,
for the necessity of things,
to a perverse black void,
just in case.
The cases of capitulation never quite got the synapses over the threshold
into any length of prolonged inactivity,
but it was a necessity to fill out the things that needed filling out in the world.
He sat back and stretched in the cheap Japanese stayroom koshi-kake of the TOUYOKO-IN,
kicked his feet out supra of the sterilized Japanese room crocs,
folded them sloppily up beneath him,
and poured himself a stiff cranberry vod,
his eyes closed stiff as the passage folded in on him.
The passage was confidence, and confidence was the passage, he thought.
Mysterious. Dull. Ache.
The passage was 01:02, which meant the door to the stayroom would be open in exactly twelve minutes, give or take.
There was nothing explicit in his human experience to confirm this, but like all beings possessed of the Aparat, it was something that Imhotep knew in his marrow.
The door would be open, and another case would give, and he would take it in, then take it or leave it.
The process would proceed.
Phantoms chased down his cerebrum as the rancid super-ego concocted a rationale for the loss of productivity before the coming case.
Twelve minutes wasn’t exactly nothing to the thrum of mecha-nature in the world,
and thought was confidence, and confidence was thought.
Mad growth in infinite sectors was gospel,
so the imperfect impregnation of impressions,
hallucinations in thought,
Terebi-Talent-Talk-Ted quips on the mirrorstream,
at the state of the corpus futures field,
bounced back jargon replete
as he stilled himself.
The cran vod fizzed out of him,
then in of him,
as he waited.
His eyes never opened.
Never flitted about
in a maddance of information processing.
The TOUYOKO-IN room,
locused through the Aparat,
induced him lightly
to produce and provide internally.
It was soft and as inevitable as long-suffering labor.
He held out as long as he could
against the bubbling well of sensations of being below the belt ,
felt the invisible hand of potentiality
audibly hum under him.
He inhaled deep down to the diaphragm
and started to hum back lowly,
and pantomime long drawn out weeping.
The inclination field backed off
as he checked into it
and breathed in and out
as the Aparat did its work.
If a tree fell in a forest,
and Imhotep wasn’t there to see it,
then everyone knew
that it didn’t much matter to the void
if it made a sound or not.
Which it didn’t, he thought.
He thought.
Or at least, thought that he did.
He felt the terrible grope
of implant-induced imagination
push out the quanta of what-will-have-been-at-some-point,
something that inevitably led to the what-will
of the seat of intellect to work.
After a chorus of shaking,
the door opened.
And so did the eyes.
The Aparat never closed but never quite opened either.
It did what it did—
blackboxed a barren world into a synesthesia of vibrant propositions and corollaries,
catering to some and not others,
in the nether node
of deterministic biological blockchain
that could be called the “I WANT” of the organism.
WHAT IS THE CASE:
IMHOTEP – CRACK EXTENT SUBSTACK REPORT POST – FUKUCHIYAMA CHI-HO, UNRESOLVED PREPOSITION EVENT
Ayabe Phillips – NOSTALGIA LEAD – PARTICULARS PER POST HASTE JONOTHON INTO ACTION.
THAT IS THE CASE.
The mirrorstream was all lit up again as it had always been.
With the blinked-into-existence-at-once,
tightly wound, succinct directive
from the timeless infogestalt.
It always stung a bit
when the Dazine used the proper name.
Even though he knew—
To them,
He was them.
That was the case.
—————————————————
A Part of The Thing That Was
“What could it mean,” Imhotep thought gazing sadsack at the murder of type sprawled under the digitized screen light housing the desk at a time that smacked of 4:33AM and enough late night latenight to make any man question the notion of what early was.
Always darkest.
“What in the fuck could it mean,” he murmured, again, with half the viggor and most if not all of the ennui that could be mustered by the breath in and out.
And how had it come to this.
At such an hour as this.
There were a few things of which he was certain. One, he was ensnared in a semantic web of correlations and causations the general tidal pattern of which was downright. It was chugging- tugging at the brain and the rabbit hole at once. That was for sure all right. It was up right and right tight and the end of all that was was nowhere in sight and nothing left.
“A complete dick”.
The phrase haunted. It disliked the cut of his jib and he its. How could they know? What did it mean? Was it the state of the circumcision? The classification of a little Richard? The synecdoche of the statement was metonymy to the ears. The man was the ears and the ears was him.
He had to know less.
Typing at the keys slowly unfurled the ties of the proposition traffic flooded in the was and am and is sector of Jonothon Imhotep’s cortices as he began to puzzle apart the black box of the tidy semantum in full:
“The man was a complete dick.”
Not had, but was.
Was.
Imhotep was as guilty as the next guy of textbook classification of the codification variety, but it still was a shot in the dark as to why one would seek to differentiate the concrete of the man into the un-concrete by using such a blistering juxtaposition of mind glue. If a man was a complete dick then would a woman be a pair of pneumatic breasts? Would his father in-law be a full head of hair? Would Imhotep himself be considered a cut of a jib? He shifted in his chair and waited for something to happen and soon his Motorola Razor shimmied a little up at him. The void became itself as he picked up the thing swift with swift clack and spoke with authority:
“Yes?”
There was a kind of calculus to the silence. Imhotep focused on his breath and then forgot to as the void spoke.
“Imhotep. What do you call a sober hack.”
“Indelible-“
“All style and no substance.”
“So you’re saying I have style?”
The void hung up as it always had. It had done this once before. That time had been now.
Ever thus to distraction? Imhotep decided to clear the head by sighing the mouth, picking up the feet, getting the coat and getting out the door into the grey world getting done outside. He felt it grow and slip around him like so many shadows in a shadow gallery and his breath breathed breathlessly into the cold grey night air airly.
The troubling part of the whole thing to him wasn’t that the phrase had been aimed at him in particular, nor that he was a private detective, nor even that he himself was and had an incomplete dick that had birthed itself uncut but a moment ago. No, the thing naggling at him was that he was a complete Dick Head. This was to say that he loved Dick. Phillip K. Dick. He loved Dick so much that he could scarcely go a day without getting some serious head. Head was what Imhotep called reading because that seemed to be where the action was happening.
So as his walked unfolded itself along the sidewalk and Dick abounded in the head he came to a stop at a four-way intersection with the cross street signs reading “WERE TO” and “HAD BEEN” and Imhotep felt very suddenly as if things were not as they ought to have become. The slow growl of traffic ground to a crawl as he watched it disappear towards the end of the current sentence that was running through his mind and then stopped as he reached into his pocket for tobacco. It came out freely and was made to be lit by way of a match held between middle finger and thumb like a benediction from the Buddha. The smoke plumed out like so many words as he crossed the street and disappeared into the florid past of what had not had to be but had.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“There is much joy in what you say,” the Sage said.
They were at a diner now. Apple pie and coffee and an ashtray sat between them like something sat between them and neither of them smoked.
Imhotep thought about that. Then he continued on.
“The pure absence of form to the proposition- what could it mean in the context of the thing being a part of the thing that was? It’s got me all tied up. Who is this man who is also a complete dick? Why the interdiction on the diction? Dick means Fat in the German. It’s all bobsleds and bob-ends Sage, you gotta help me see through this.”
“Who spoke to you on the phone,” the sage intoned in a way very much not a question. Imhotep paused and then didn’t.
“That was myself all Tulp’ed out. I leave messages for myself from the past to help clear my head when I anticipate that a case is going to really stump me.”
Tulpa Malt Liquor was a kind of liquorice flavored malt liquor that came in five ounce bottles.
“And did it?” this time a question.
“I never miss a day.”
“Yet I can’t help but bring myself back to the joy in the way you talk about this case. Surely there must be something there to it.”
“To it… or from it.”
The sage continued to smile. He never seemed to stop smiling. He had been smiling for some time and would likely continue to do so. Imhotep studied the apple pie between them and thought about that. Then he thought about eating the apple pie, gave up on the thought of eating the apple pie and thought back to what was in the now.
“That’s neither here nor there,” he said wincing. “What I do know, is that whoever posted this on the web is making an assertions that I can’t quite follow.”
“There’s more?”
“Oh, there’s always more.”
A Kyoto Klang
Go on klang caught in Kyoto among Gion and not.
Caught concertly content in the cultural crevasse within a country composed in ordered
thought. Well kept history composed, compelled and fought. Long tell of strife rife with
the breeze and holy winds of an almighty and right thought brought high by the by and by
and not. Kyoto sits softly, silently centered, set long abreast so well sought among the
bosom of valley run through of manifold alleys that breathe and do not. A matriced maze
made matronly by manner and morass of means and morsels fresh caught. Again and
again rivered sets, set apart from time bustling of concerned industry removed from the
cultured neither here nor there of tailored modernity well taught. A shining quaint quiet
hall on the hill of what is ensconced in what can be and what will be not. Kyoto thrums
and hums and chums of thick of veins pouring implausible of human beings drawn and
not to eel sleeping nooks and staid gold pavillions- punctuated by portents of paltry
passes of pacified not. Kyoto sleeps and weeps hot, caught with the sanctified knowledge
of hallowed thought brought to gorgeous silence among beautified haught. The silence
deafens and defeats only to promulgate among an evergreen rot. A tremulous façade
brought low and bitter sweet treated by tea teems with the thought of that moment caught.
Kyoto among Gion. It goes on and does not.
Go on klang caught.
—————————————–
WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING
I didn’t know what to expect when she walked in. All legs and a demeanour that would make you rethink any ideas you’d had about laws relating to what could touch what on any given afternoon and so on. Such as the afternoon I found myself in.
She was a shade of something and half of another yet something that I suspiciously thought might resemble something like me. Or rather something that looked like me- that had the essence of me-ness. An unexpected mix that made me expect a great many things about how she would be and what she would talk about now that she was in my office. I expected that something with how the grand old flag or society at large had treated her poorly would come up, but I could never be sure. The world was a grand bead game and I was but a bouncing ball. I stilled myself and strayed not beyond the basic nods- took careful puffs on a dying cigarette like a gentle thing of sorts while she situated herself. What would she see in me. What would she expect. Only time would tell.
“I expect that you’re thinking that I’m here because of a man,” she said unexpectedly.
I nodded slowly and decided to proffer- a verbal thing which might have been called “a freight of expectation” by a lesser man who was not me. The words came out.
“Well, hello mam, and my name is Jonothon Imhotep. Terribly surprised, yet enthused, to make your acquaintance. And unexpected.”
I coughed.
She nodded back.
“Celia,” she said.
She was right about what I was expecting all right. Half the women that came through my door were there because of a man and the other half I cant remember. She was right and staring, too. Staring right at me and trying to gauge exactly what I expected out of her, all right. She was trying to gauge as well what to expect of me as well as she looked at me with her eyes that resembled nothing so much as a glass bead game.
I nodded back- slowly this time- and decided to forge forth with the conversation. I nodded carefully and then spoke carefully.
“Well, Shelia, please tell carefully me what you’d like me to do for you,” I said as I ashed out my Camel Crush into the porcelain ashtray that I kept on my desk. I had made a habit of smoking Camel Crushes since not a lot of people expected a grown man to smoke cigarettes that had a ball of menthol flavouring in the filters, but I liked to keep people on their toes. I was like that sometimes. I smiled at her winsomlely like I did sometimes. I hiccuped a bit though not too much as she answered.
“Well I’m here because I’ve been wronged by a woman,” she said. She coughed with me as the smoke billowed around her winsomely. Classy, I thought. I decided to respond.
“And what did this particular woman do to you?” I said.
“Well please excuse my french, but she had relations with my wife,” she said.
Now here was something that I had not expected at all.
Smoke billowed.
“Do you need a drink, C?” I said.
“Celia,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
I walked over to the liquor cabinet and poured two good scotches. They were very good scotches in fact. Some of the best I’d ever done. “I know exactly what you expect me to say,” I said without saying by pouring the drinks strong, yet she unexpectedly kept on.
“I really don’t need a drink, I just need you to-“
“Have you ever heard of the Vietnam War, Cee? “ I said. It was two-thirty in the afternoon and I was a private detective. What did she expect coming into my office at this hour- a man as of yet unembued? At the modern witching hour? What was wrong with this woman? What was she hiding?
I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew that I would find out.
“What about it?” she said guardedly.
“It was no good,” I said. “And I expect that what you’re about to tell me isn’t going to be good either.”
I downed both of the scotches slowly and waited for her to answer. What was she hiding?
A thick sheen of incredulity painted her beige-ish face like a touch-up on a fresco by honest-to-god tin-horn 9th avenue Michelangelo as she looked up at me. Finally she spoke.
“I’ve heard that you’re the best.”
“I expect that you’ve heard that my costs are not exactly what one would call winsome?”
“What?” she said.
“If you’re a man of means in the world, never do anything for free. I expect to be paid five hundred dollars a day, plus expenses,” I said.
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Plus expenses,” I said.
She nodded then. She nodded as if the entire world had nodded at her for her entire life. What did she expect? And even more importantly, what did I expect? She and I were flies trapped in a game without beads that was as old as time itself. As for the end result of the game, only time itself would tell. Only time would tell.
She reached into her purse without beads after a time.
Only time would tell.
“Well if payment is an issue, I can pay you now, but I’d like to tell you a little more about what-“
“So who exactly is doing this to you, Ms. Sea?” I said carefully with a scotch in my hand my mouth forming the words. Expectations be damned.
—————————————-
THE VARIABLE MAN
“There’s just a lotta variables to it, you know.”
Jake’s rehearsed diatribe floated like a spectre over Jack’s cluttered desk as he stared in dumb and mute awe at the computer screen in dumb awe of everything dumb and awful that he had ever been in awe of for an awful long time. The man was coming. The variable man that was. And there was a lot to it.
That was what the email said. Anyway.
Jake had been talking about the standup game of course. There were a lot of variables apparently. People would laugh or they wouldn’t. People would be there or they wouldn’t. There was a lot to it. He had developed a routine that he figured could generate the right amount of laughs per minute to allow him to exist as a man that delivered a certain amount of laughs to people who wanted to have a laugh every now and again. He had a particular joke about his Korean barber. Jack couldn’t remember the setup but the barber was apparently very old. “Jurassic Park”, Jake had said with no uncertain amount of self-satisfaction.
There was a certain boldness to Jake, come to think of it. It was a kind of boldness that all standup comedians possessed. The only thing enviable about them, in fact.
But Jack was not thinking about that, no not even in the slightest. Koreans and comedy were the farthest thing from his mind. A single line from his diatribe had alighted down to the bold reality that could face a private detective in Los Angeles and there was, as Jack was loathe to admit, a macabre calculus to the thing.
As Jack pondered on the calculus of equations and things happening the phone upset the balance by ringing. Phones had a way of doing that, he thought.
“Hello?” he said into the receiver. He liked to answer the phone like that. The equation was simple. People spoke, and having spoke, often listened. He ashed out his Camel Crush.
“Hello,” said the voice on the other end. It was perfectly nondescript. It reminded Jack of the voice of a person that he had known long ago, but whose vocal quality he had forgotten.
“Hello,” said Jack again, this time more determined, “Is this a friendly hello from an old friend, or one of those movie hello’s, where I’m supposed to know who you are based on the artisanal quality of how you speak and you accent and so on?”
“What?”
“You know who I am,” said Jack imbued with confidence, “and what can I do for you?”
“Well, I think you know,” said the voice.
Jack didn’t know.
“Listen man,” Jack said, lighting up another Camel Crush, “I know exactly two things about most of the people that call around here.”
“Oh yeah?”
“One of them is Jack.”
“And the other?”
“I think you know.”
“Shit,” said the voice.
“Yes?” said Jack.
“What?” said the voice.
There was silence for a time.
“You’re the man from the internet?”
There was a silence that sounded like a nod to Jack.
“Listen, I’m a busy man. John Taffer and a Colt 45 six-pack got a train with my name on it at the residence so kindly hash out your business affairs or allow me some level of piece kindly,” said Jack, “otherwise I’ll be kicking rocks.”
“I’m the Variable man,” the voice said.
The words chilled Jack’s bones. It was as if he had been asked to explain what a derivative was.
“What did you say?”
“Sorry, I’m the Variable man,” said the voice.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You’ve heard of me?”
“Yes,” said Jack.
“Tell me what you know about me then.”
“Well I know that you’re predictable.”
“Like any good equation.”
“And that the only predictable thing about you is change.”
“The ‘Bama ran on that.”
“Who?”
“Change.”
Jack stared at his computer. He had fucked up. The Taff would have to wait. He pulled out the wallet.
“What do you want from me?
—————————————-
ジェイコブ·ヴェルー / jacobveloo 