1. The Fool

time hitting like the end of time
waiting
in God we fuck
spilling metal
it was the Red Sickness that finally did it

It was bound to happen from the start... "Sometimes they come back"... is this a Stephen King novel or is this my life? Somewhere in New York City a man stares at the blood on his hands and wonders how it got there. Fast-forward...
If it ain't fast it ain't worth a damn, after all. Carbon monoxide poisoning works on the direct neural implants... because we ALL have the implants, you see, and if we take in too much cigarette smoke or car exhaust, we REALIZE what's been done to us over the past [xx] years of our life and our mind, stunned into despair by the revelation, makes our bodies die. There is no truth and gods are sick. Gods sit on the wheelchairs of Mount Olympus playing dice games and fucking goats (or illusions of goats). Holy taboos my ASS.
It really starts to heat up while I'm in Iowa with my girlfriend. We have accommodations at a local hotel, and the bellboy keeps leering at me like I'd actually bother to fuck a no-brainer like him. "Sex," my eighth grade Health teacher says, "is the means by which the species constructs all its pathologies." She was anemic, too, like all the girls that have thrown themselves on my doorstep in gigantic acts of Kim Deal worship.

Back in the midday shadows, Kim Tryster has blown a gasket. Her car sits, unnoticed, on the shoulder of a road midway between Atlanta Georgia and Chattanooga Tennessee. Holding out a desperate thumb and banking on her Natural Good Looks she waits for a psychopathic mechanic...

I woke up with a start. It was about six in the a.m., and my girlfriend, asleep on the other side of the bed, hadn't felt it... but I had. A tremor, a slipstream projection of thoughts unwashed in the Unholy Consciousness (mythic THIS, he says)...
I lay there for about ten minutes, unsure of what to do.

...Erstwhile Metaphor, the most powerful magician in all of Egypt, was boarding a plane bound for Scotland. A language barrier cause some small confusion midway through the customary pre-flight armament check and he was delayed. This delay caused, in the eventual sense, the end of life on earth as we know it. But that's a story for another season...

On a train bound for London from some town that shall remain nameless... yes, the cracks show through. On this train is my friend Orpheus Sicculum, reading tarot cards for a bored anemic girl who hails from France, the bored anemic country. Her name is probably Natasha or Estelle or Gabrielle. He draws the two of pentacles and outlines her ultimate success (failure) in any kind of business venture; she shrugs, lights a clove cigarette, and begins to regale him with stories of bare-backed teens and unfiltered bong-hits. She's incredibly attracted to him, you understand, because he's A REAL MAGICIAN...

Back in the hotel now we're high as kites. Dare-built teens, lost hijackers, my guitar sits black and silver in the corner and L, smiling, laughing, says "We should practice for the show..."
I'm not thinking of the show, of course. I'm planning...

Orpheus calms himself down with a shot of tequila and gets off the train, immediately heading for Contact Point X. The bar's name doesn't matter, nothing matters in this case. It's all artifice. He sits down opposite Robert Dramamine.
"You're late," Robert says.
"Bit of a mix-up in India."
"Anything to do with the Sun City Girls?"
"Actually, yeah. Some thuggee in a white robe was trying to kill us... I had to stay underground with my Burroughs novels til the smoke cleared."
"Magicians have their little tricks..."

And again back in Des Moines I was finally realizing what time it was. Holy Christ we only had twenty minutes to get to the club and set up...
L leans over and kisses me. "We have to hurry," she says, "or else Tom and Ersatz will kill us."
Cancel my subscription to Rolling Stone, baby. We're superstars now...

Over lights and deacons preaching of a love aesthetic (and a God romanized), a helicopter hovers. It's got the secret of everything inside but no one, not even the pilot, knows this.
The secret of everything (her name is K) jumps out and activates her parachute.

I remember the day I got arrested back in '88 it was. Like yesterday, seasick in the drydock of Orlando. A brief stint as a local celebrity; a writer, a reclusive jobless artiste... whiled away a lot of time in Denny's, drinking coffee.
But Tuesday came with ease. Night-time slides... pictures captured and enlarged to show detail. Sidewalks, midnight; versions of flowers and rivers and lakes. Trailer communities, mazes of Jack Rubies; all over bright, like the surface of a collapsing star. I-4 we used to drive along in the speed of movement. Excuse the scrutiny; now we pull back to reveal...
I'm sitting on the blue fold-out chair that serves as our couch. Bill was sitting on a stool near the window, staring out at a car being towed. Every now and then a joint passed between us.
"You don't even know what goes on at that level," I was saying, "you just have no idea. I mean, everything has to be PLANNED, right? Because we're in a bureaucracy. And in a bureaucracy, entropy is the natural state, because every machine no matter HOW efficient still requires energy to maintain. Right?"
"Yeah," Bill said, after a pause. "Yeah, exactly, that's essentially what Randall tries to show, that our ordered society has this NEED to just... break down and basically fuck up."
"Randall... sure. But I'm out of his scene, his game, I'm more into stability than that. I mean, that boy is going to get CAUGHT, and soon... he's not even aware of what he's messing with..."
"Sure... hey, here comes the daily crack shipment..." Bill pointed to a blue microbus which had the habit of visiting our neighborhood every day right around the same time. Yeah, we lived in the perfect place to romanticize criminal behavior, but it wasn't really by choice, you understand, we WERE that broke. But we belonged there, anyway...
After a particularly devastating toke off the seemingly never-ending joint, I continued, "So anyway, in a bureaucracy EVERYTHING that generates power or revenue or stability MUST be a planned thing. This goes without saying in CERTAIN fields... like zoning, planned road layouts, product developments, all the ordinary crap that gives shape to the societal energy pattern... right? So that must apply to EVERYTHING... countercultural movements, trends, musical ideologies, drug and literary subcultures... it's ALL got to be planned somehow."
"You are so intensely paranoid, man..." And Bill laughed.
And the door flew inward.

Orpheus orders psilocybin tea.
"Well, sir, is everything still proceeding safely?"
Robert lights a cigarette, looks out the window suddenly, as if recognizing an old friend, then relaxes. He stirs his drink, takes a swallow. "We lost it."
Orpheus, silent. Stares.
"We think the VWs got hold of it."
The scene fades out slowly.

Somewhere in a field outside Oklahoma City, a boy was bleeding to death from several incisions made in his wrists and ankles.
He was hung, upside-down, from a large tree branch, and his arms were tied so as to be pointing straight out from his body. He looked like he'd been crucified... upside-down.
Eight men dressed in black business suits, wearing black ties with one white stripe, stood around the boy. Their black overcoats flapped in the wind, stray, and each man's face was sweaty. Their eyes were wide open, pupils dilated completely.
In the morning, police found all nine bodies. It looked like the boy had bled to death, but autopsy revealed he'd actually died of a fright-induced heart seizure.
The same cause of death was determined for the eight men.

Now I was playing guitar, trying to impress myself in front of the audience. Everything was static and background; my focus wasn't on the stage at all, but on a man that stood near the entrance to the club. He was dressed all in black, with a crucifix around his neck, clean-shaven. He wouldn't stop staring at me.
But we were still completing the formulas, the motions were went through and it was still a thing of beauty, a moment of... well, never mind.
So the music came out, the patterns of sound... drifting through the cloud of smoke and the hormones of college kids.
After the show the guy came up and asked to talk to me somewhere quiet. And I knew I was getting back into the same crap in my past that I'd been trying to get out of for years...

K landed outside the circle of light surrounding the convention hall. The halo broadened. She abandoned her parachute and started to move closer, getting her camera ready...

Now Orpheus was at home, an expensive apartment in London, on the phone to America.
"Well, if the VWs have it, they're going to destroy it. I mean, that's a given at this point..."
Two men were seated in his dining room, drinking a strong coffee. "What if he doesn't listen anymore? What if he's moved on, or he's forgotten, or he's dead? It's been almost two thousand YEARS..." Young said.
"It's not wholly dependant on objective forces," Pan said. "You don't understand, the effort can CREATE the pattern. So if he's NOT still there, he WILL be once we try to contact him. We'll CREATE him again."
"Then he's just US?"
"He's not even HALF of us..."

I was in New York City, and for the time I couldn't remember how I'd got there...
I was wandering somewhere in Manhattan, near the post office I think. It was daylight. I was carrying a briefcase.
As I walked through the midday crowd I slowly became aware of a disturbing phenomenon. At regular intervals on the street, I would catch out of the corner of my eye a glimpse of someone who looks just like me. This started to happen more frequently, and I began to get longer looks at these... doppelgangers, or hallucinations, or whatever they were. It got to be too much and I ducked into a bar...
It was an Irish bar. I sat my briefcase down and ordered a black and tan. Two undercover cops looked up from their whiskeys. Gabber blabber woozle.

The door flew inward.
"Police! Freeze!"
I froze.

But first it's important to understand THIS:
First you have to know about a boy named Alpha, who came home from school one day a long time ago and saw his whole family dissected and laid out in intricate patterns on the floor...
And about a woman named Mary, who accidentally ingested LSD several decades before it was synthesized and had what is known as a "true premonition" of the sort that were always plaguing Nostradamus... on the basis of just ONE such vision, she wrote a novel that would have been quite helpful if anyone had understood it.
And to understand that an old man living on an island and eating psychoactive mushrooms was in fact the second most powerful magician of all time and is responsible for all this MESS...

So now we're relaxing backstage.
"My name is Reverend Job."
"You're kidding."
"Not at all. And you ARE Reverend Icarus?"
I started searching for a cigarette. "I was."
"You retired."
"Retired, quit, fired, something like that."
"Do you know a man named Orpheus?"
I couldn't find one anywhere. I bet Tom smoked them all... "Orpheus? You mean that acid freak philosopher? Never even read his stuff."
"I was told you knew him personally."
"I guess you were told wrong."
"Listen. My son was ritually murdered by what looks like some kind of LSD cult."
I turned. "Any evidence?"
"Eight dead members."
"What were they dressed like?"
"Business suits. Black ties with one white stripe. Black overcoats."
"All right. Jesus fuckin' Christ, all right. I know Orpheus, sure. But he's not who you're after. I know the cult you're talking about."
"You know where to contact them?"
"Sure. I was IN that cult."

Jiminy Shark was on his way back from a business conference in Malaysia. "Fucking scary country," he thinks.
The waitress, a dead thing, caters to his alcoholic needs and when the sun goes down he relaxes into moontown shivers of electronic desire. In-flight movie canceled, he extends his probes across the Internet, looking for his next big deal. His seatmate snores.

The door flew inward, and an hour later I was in a jail cell. Fingerprinting and picture-capture flew with the birds; I kept a sharp eye. Looking. Foreseeing. Words collapse in this grey concrete hell. Ignore the cliche for now and see...
Well, see me trying to hide my desire for a cigarette when I notice that one of the other boys in this holding pen has a pack of Pall Malls. He's big and grizzled and is probably a truck driver or a bouncer at a country bar...
"Hey. Could I get one of those?" I ask, too bored to let it go any further.
There's a pause for a few seconds, filled by the chirp of some far-off phone conversation. The words filter in quiet and slow, excuses, not needing any reasoning to be there (unlike us)... what we catch we keep in gold cups, crossing streams of consciousness to make it all worthwhile; "...transfer..." we hear, ghostlike, a missive from the world that we're now no longer members of; the world of freedom. It all collapses at once, you understand, when you're in jail...
The Trucker looks at me sideways, judging, guessing, putting together a psychological profile that's probably a LOT more accurate than a doctor's... he says, "It's unfiltered." Maybe hoping this would throw me off the scent...
"Yeah, I always smoke unfiltered," I breathe into the slivers. The shivers. The coma, the soma. The words, the words repeated and copied piecemeal from journals explaining the fine art of self-destruction...
He shifts a bit, and I see the balance of power in this room has gone haywire. Situation Normal, All Fired Up. A big Mexican who has, up til now, pretended to show absolutely no interest in our exchange, he slowly glides his hand back to what is probably some kind of weapon. Some kind of NASTY weapon. Jesus, all I wanted was a cigarette...
It falls apart suddenly, though, as the unfiltered is passed grudgingly from The Trucker to myself. Glad I have my own lighter...

She's still now, her angles quiet. Her gaze is sweeping with diligence. Nothing can stop it now...
Move. An inch or two. Move. Another. Move. Another.
This takes time and patience. She's sane. She knows how far to push it before she has to SQUEEZE it...
At the amphitheater's circle, now, she's already knocked out two security guards and is ready for a third when suddenly her shot is clear.
K gets ready to pull the trigger.

Jumping back and forth...
...but it doesn't matter anyway, because now I direct your attention to a penthouse in Manhattan. Yes, it's TRUE.
Because now you focus and see a slight figure, bent by age already but still quite... young? But now you see it hunched over a computer, typing haltingly, as a dark amber light casts gold reflections over the furniture, and the richness... the RICHNESS is seen through eyes that have never known a clean pair of shoes.
And the figure writes ON...

"I don't have to tell you that this is completely on the Down Low," Frieze whispers to me as we enter the room. "This kind of thing, this would really set us back a long way if they found it..."
I'm keeping quiet because I have no idea why I'm here. I don't like the look of the people here and I don't like the peculiar smell of the smoke in the air; not tobacco, not marijuana...
Ideas form electric; the door, the back door, the way out. The panic. But I'm committed already...
"Don't talk to anyone if they're writing. Don't upset the balance. If someone isn't writing, maybe go up and start talking. Maybe buy 'em a drink. But play it cool. You've got plenty of time..."
But I didn't... I only had that night.

"You were IN this cult?" He's suddenly pretty hostile, but I can't blame him...
"For a couple years. But back then, see, it wasn't really a cult..."
"But you're out now."
"I'm out of EVERYTHING now."
"But can you help me?" Job is looking really pale and sweaty and I can guess that this conversation with me means more to him than anything else in his life ever has. Probably more than God, even.
So I show no mercy.
"No. Sorry. That was a long time ago, and all I can tell you is that it has nothing to do with Orpheus. Even if I COULD help you, I wouldn't... way too much at risk."
"My son is DEAD." Anguish and the unmistakable mark of Purpose on his face.
"Yeah," I lit a half-cigarette I'd managed to find in an ashtray, "and he's likely to STAY that way. You keep up with this, the next guy you contact might not be so friendly. Maybe you'd end up dead, too."
"But I can't just... sit back..." He's really got his panties in a bundle. I tried to remember what it was like to be that DIRECTED, but it's been way too long.
"You damn well can just sit back. That's what everyone ELSE is doing."

Another time, another face:
Sunlit in the afternoon shadows, there's a problem. Kim Tryster steps off the bus and looks around. It's dark, and the shadows are creeping... like the lost souls of a forgotten town. She stops a passing monk, his face hidden by hoodwinks...
"Do you have the time?"
It's time, it's like the end of time. It hits you square in the gut. "11:23."
Ah, the painful memories of varied waste.
After a pause, a lit cigarette flicking nervous and edgy from her fingers, she strides workmanlike into the truck stop. Her red hair is a beacon. All over bright...
Approached by depth perception. You know in a town like this. You know where you stand. She can't help but feel the strings and wires of outrageous fortune. All over bright. Christmas lights in November. The waitress a dead thing. Retreats back outside and waits for her man. He's late, and she's late, and the hour grows late. The hour crawls into slipstream consciousness. The hour is faded. Old. Tired.
A grey car pulls up carrying a grey boy. Zoom in: he's got on a harsh leather jacket and a worn pair of grey jeans. Makes its mark on his walk. Slow and anxious. Like the sun, like the auras of midday reruns. "I've been waiting," he breathes into cool wreathes of smoke.
"You just got here. You ain't been waiting for SHIT."
"I been waiting all my life."

"Fuck you and your prophesy. This is about FAMILY," he breathes into MY smoke curls.
"No. It's not. Unfortunate accidents. Like the soldiers say. It's incidental."
Job looks around for hidden cameras.
And I tell him "We're not in a movie. This ain't a fucking script. This is real. Where've YOU been?"
He can't help himself, and I see the marks of familiar surroundings on him. "Do you want a cigarette?"
He only hesitates a moment. "Sure. Sure, it's all fucking breaking down, isn't it? So sure."
I hand him one and shake my head. The last flickers are spotlights. The last image. "No. It's not all breaking down. As crazy as things are, it's not the end of the world."
He laughs, bringing some dark and bitter sound from his empty spirit. He laughs, abrupt and worthless. "I thought that's what you were into."
"No. No, not at all. Everything breaks down, eventually, you see? I'm not even talking about the weird shit. I'm not even speaking in terms of remembered fatalities and hope. I'm talking about CHANGE. It's gonna happen, it's always gonna happen. You can't stop it. No one can stop it. And maybe one day you'll find yourself terrified in the night, unsure of what the dawn will bring. Not even sure if dawn will COME. You can't escape. You can't lose. You can't win. No one can win. Because it's a collection of sides... it's not any ONE side. Not any one thing. Not any one change. You can't WORK. You can't DEAL. You can't find a way out because there is ONLY ONE WAY, and it's the way things are GONNA BE ANYWAY."
Job. Dim in the lamplight. "I can't deal with you. I can't get into this. I just want my son back, or some kind of vengeance for him. The wrong must be punished."
Standing suddenly, I grip his arms and look at him with white-plain pupils and the honesty of desolation. "This isn't about your son. This isn't about you, or me, or anyone. This is about the the CHANGES. The failing. Do you understand? The girl was given the little animal insight. Given it here, of all places, here in the independence of falling. And we do fall, every day, we fall slow as the laws to hang. Coincidences and murders. And she, alone, carrying a loss, talks to herself. Comfort in echoes of insanity. Do you GET IT YET? It's dark out there, no matter what time of day it is. It's always dark."
The look of horror on his face.