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Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Sortmind Press
Type: Fiction
Pages: 216
Copyright: Feb. 24, 2024
ISBN-13: 9798224162178
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
Four absurdist novelettes explore revolution, espionage, social strife, cars, motorcycles, and horses.
Bumbling officer Marty Brimfeeler probes the death of a brainwashed terrorist in Houston. Five horses break out of their corral and reduce the city of Dallas to rubble. Hapless insurance executive Bobby Thompson proves his manhood on the mean streets of Dallas. Special agent Atoka surveils Houston on his nuclear-powered bicycle until software glitches trap him on a coastal freeway.
Excerpt
Space, Time, and Tania
Junior Year Drawings
At night, the walls of Marty Brimfeeler’s office were lined with hundreds of Mr. Salty pretzel boxes. One dim study lamp was on. Dried brown blood made the pages of Tania’s diary hard to separate. Marty poured another Pepsi from the little refrigerator. The air conditioner didn’t work very well, the room was slimy, and Marty sat in the grim leather swivel chair with his chest bare.
Marty looked up again. Beyond the illuminated square of his desk a little red light on the emergency radio floated in terrifying psychedelic blackness. It seemed that some genius locusts from outside the window had merged with the faint air conditioner hum to create a structured work of art … it was as if Marty were listening to a group of very spaced-out people as their voices tried to convince each other of very spaced-out philosophies, but fell back in laughter every time. It was so pompous that Marty had to laugh. A laugh rush. He lost his mind in it, then stopped. He was hearing the locust music with a different sense, the texture of it floated out like a wooden river, with symbols of pentacles glowing red above cities, spread out above the barren and hideous nighttime American countryside.
As he alternated between this series of auditory sensations and the scattered, elongated handwriting in the diary, Marty pictured Tania in her black MG, on Wayside Drive in east Houston, Texas, at seventy-five miles an hour. Her consciousness was rippling in white eels of motion and wind, as the oily humidity of the ocean boiled over Houston, carrying liquid seeds of possibility in the sorry breezes. He could feel Tania shifting that four-speed, could hear the mechanism clicking precisely into each slot. The scene locked in his head. Little boys on bicycles fled from her path. Beautiful, ugly Tania. Slowing down only enough to miss cross-traffic at intersections, and then she was accelerating, with a mindless deft slide into the next higher gear. Tania on Sixty-Ninth Street: Marty felt the engine turning over, felt each cylinder rocking, the distributor revolving, sending the sparks in, the shaped metal pieces falling together in the undisturbed order of insanity. And Marty saw the last stoplight she had run, the puddle of water she had raced at. Marty saw the Black Cliff that Tania saw, and he felt her relax behind the wheel, felt her guide the MG smoothly into the Black Cliff, and explode herself on the first handy lamppost.
It was Thursday night, or early Friday morning, a couple weeks after the Tuesday afternoon that Tania had died. Marty Brimfeeler looked down at his big tan trousers with the two black stripes running up the sides, pushed a dull spider off them. Marty Brimfeeler, Officer in Charge of Public Death at the Texas Department of Public Death on Alba Street up off Thirty-Fourth Street, reached over to a cheap portable stereo and placed Bob Dylan’s Planet Waves on the rubber turntable, set it moving, and placed the needle in the record. The music came out heartily. Marty pulled another box of pretzels from the wall, tore its top open and fisted out dry salty brown shapes. Crunched them. His mouth became sticky. His ears lost themselves in pounding music shapes. Mr. Public Death, as he affectionately liked to think of himself, could not properly concentrate on the matter at hand. Everything was distraction. This three o’clock in the morning was distraction.
“As Patty Hearst’s mother squeezes oranges to make the screwdrivers’ foam at the San Francisco moodies’ parties …” the first entry read, the sides of the page burnt, but this first handwriting was legible and refined, as opposed to the psychotic roaming fantasy loops and the furious digging desperations that were to follow …
Marty pushed the black mess away from him again. It was no use. He would have to retake Freshman English to understand this crap. Another entry: “The theory that my separate so-called ‘ego consciousness’ is the only possible consciousness in the universe--I do not mean this in a simple philosophical sense--I mean walking into an elevator and knowing that this is it, this is all there is. There’s nothing else, there are no ‘levels of consciousness.’ There is nothing hidden or mysterious about this--to think that there is, is delusion. So here I am, assembling little pieces of bullshit into larger structures of bullshit.”
In the light of the Dylan album, somehow this meant something. The two alternate structures seemed to mesh somewhere … it all tied in somehow … or perhaps Marty was just so full of energy that it seemed that he was always on the verge of a breakthrough. But then, what was a breakthrough? So much more nonsense added to the top of the pile.
“Whoever invented the ego was probably the world’s first mystic. Before he got it together, people were gorillas, egoless but complete assholes. Then this first mystic saw that an assumption about reality could be formed, namely, that a separate ego exists, and that this assumption could be used as a tool in understanding reality.”
Now what was that shit? Marty demanded of the pretzel wall. “There are two kinds of record albums: on the one hand, you have those which function as a present work of art, little pieces of bullshit into larger, such as Dylan’s Planet Waves. These albums do all the pleasant form-content artistic communication we have all grown to know and love. Then you have the kind of album which functions, in addition to the old arty expression shit, as a symbol of a certain kind of experience. As Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland so obviously encodes the LSD experience into a symbol which will make people who have undergone the experience recognize the fundamental acid perception which began it all.”
Was Marty on to something? It must mean … he flipped forward a few pages to another entry. “Experience of two nights ago. Cannot remember it.” What?
Marty listened to the realm of sounds pulsing up around him, from the four cheap speakers in the corners of the room self-wired by amateur electrician Marty. The corners were dark. The red light on the radio had gone off. Marty was alone in the Department of Public Death building. He flipped more, randomly. “Rows of mystical paychecks …” Or: “I feel encased in it, the four trees in the city park bursting vision--all over again--the globes of time--hanging over the freeways …”
Okay, goddammit. Time to get out of here. Marty pulled on his light tan Officer Death shirt, muttering, stood. No more foreign scholars, or loose interpretations that must always be retracted to please one’s foreign friends. No more of this. He had read it all a hundred times and it still didn’t make any sense. Marty grabbed his car keys. His eyes caught the last entry in the partially shredded diary.
STARTHROAT.
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