Complete Stories (91 page)

“The mighty ellipse. What about the other three?”

“The catalog is a fat, old, cloth-bound book, like a Library of Congress catalog volume. His cover is brown and he has an eye and an arm on both the front cover and on the back cover. His shiny brown eyes notice me watching. But mainly he’s focused on the woman he’s helping. What he does, he holds the edges of his cover and spreads them open like a flasher, showing his store of information to the woman. She starts giggling as she looks at the flapping pages of the catalog. Not a rheumy giggle, but a light, clear giggle. Just about then I glance around to see if anyone else is seeing what I’m seeing. But, no, they aren’t. In fact everyone around me has stopped moving. All the world is temporarily silent and frozen: the homies, the tourists, the streetcars, the cars on Market Street. Nothing is moving but me, the crackhead woman, the ellipse, the catalog, the meter, and the vibrating plane. I’m witnessing a secret miracle.”

“You’re living right, man. Tell me more about the catalog. What was the woman seeing inside?”

“Well, I scoot a little closer to her so I can see too. Each page of the catalog is a picture, a picture of the things she’s thought and seen and done. I can see her younger self inside the pictures. She’s eating barbeque, going to movies, laughing with her friends. It’s like a catalog of her life. All the bad stuff is in there too, of course: the rip-offs, the beatings, the hospitals, and the jails. And when I look closer I can see that the pictures themselves are made up of smaller pictures. Like mosaics. And the little pictures are made of even smaller pictures etcetera. There’s this branching fractal catalog thing happening. The pictures in the pictures show other people doing the same kinds of things as the woman. I’m in there too. Everyone’s good things and bad things are inside of everyone else’s catalog.”

“Like we’re all the same.”

“You got it. Now, the meter is the next one out. The meter, he’s like a big voltmeter. He’s got a black dial face with a red needle swinging back and forth and two brown-and-white eyes set into the dial. He reaches his hands out and touches the sides of the woman’s head, and his needle goes swaying back and forth with her feelings. The woman is staring at the needle and watching how her thoughts move her feelings up and down. At first the needle is just slamming back and forth, but in a minute it calms down to where it’s mostly vibrating nice and even in the middle. She’s still watching the catalog, you dig, and now and then she sees something that makes the needle jump. The woman likes it when the needle jumps, and she likes it when it calms down afterward. She’s practicing with this for a long time, but there’s no rush because the world’s time has stopped for us. It’s like the ellipse has detoxed her, the catalog has shown her about her past, and the meter is telling her about peace of mind.”

“Did she notice you watching her?”

“Yeah, she glances over at me and smiles real calm and easy. She’s like, ‘Ain’t this a trip?’ And then the vibrating plane starts doing her thing. The vibrating plane is a vertical disk facing us. Her eyes and arms and legs are attached to her outer edge, and her actual vibrating plane part is her big round stomach. The plane is rushing forward and backward like the head of a bass drum, only with much bigger oscillations. The plane pushes right through the woman and me, and then it pulls back out in front of us, and then it does it again. Over and over. When the plane is behind me, I feel totally merged into the world, and when the plane is in front of me, I feel all separate and observational, the way I mostly do. The plane is vibrating at maybe three pulses per second, and I’m feeling it as this sequence of One / Many / One / Many / One.”

“How do you mean, One and Many?”

“The vibrating plane is showing us the natural rhythm of perceiving things, you wave? You merge into the world and experience it, you separate yourself out and make distinctions; you flow back out into unity, you pull back and remember yourself; you sympathize with everyone around you, you focus on your own feelings—the eternal vibration between Us and Me, between One and Many. The teaching here is to understand the vibration as a natural and organic process of the mind. You can’t stop the vibrating plane. You can’t stay merged, and you can’t stay cut off. You’re flipping back and forth forever and ever, with a frequency of like I say maybe three cycles per second.”

“And then what happened?”

“Well, the ellipse, the catalog, the meter, and the vibrating plane all hold hands with each other and start dancing ring-around-the-rosy in a circle around the woman and me. We smile at each other again, and she stands up, all healthy and ready to live. And then the sounds of the tourists and the homeless woman singing and the cars on Market Street start back up. I see my wife across the street coming out of Nordstrom’s. I cross the street and I meet her.”

“What about the crackhead woman?”

“When I look back she’s gone. The vision was true.”

============

Written in January, 2002.

Horror Garage
#5, 2002.

My cyberpunk pal John Shirley lives fairly near me in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2002 he had this idea of helping someone put together a small press anthology whose earnings would be devoted to a fund for helping drug-addicted mothers and their children.

I don’t normally undertake a story for so abstract a reason as altruism. I write a story for more personal reasons; typically there’s some emotional state or tech problem or odd situation or real-world vignette that I’m obsessed with, and the story is an exploration I feel compelled to carry out. But John shamed me into promising a contribution.

And then I got into it—I realized that, given that this was to be a guaranteed publication, I could really do anything I wanted to, so why not have some fun and write something completely surrealistic. Of course then the fund-raising anthology project fell through, but five of the stories destined for the anthology ended up in a special issue of
Horror Garage
, an idiosyncratic magazine edited by Paula Guran.

The title and epigraph for my story comes from line seventy-three of line Allen Ginsberg’s epochal 1965 poem, “Howl.”

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,

I’ve always loved this long line: those four items makes such a surreal, Dadaist assemblage, and as a mathematician I’m happy to see an ellipse in
the
seminal Beat poem.

The images of the story came to me in a moment of inspiration as I sat on the sidewalk in the sun at Powell and Market Streets, near where the tourists line up for the trolley. Junkies and con men were going by, and I saw the four items of Ginsberg’s line as characters, as if drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Williams—and thus emerged my story, a gift from the muse.

Although the line from “Howl” appears as I quote it in both Ginsberg’s original
Howl and Other Poems
(City Lights, San Francisco, 1956) and in his
Collected Poems 1947–1980
(Harper & Row, New York, 1984), Allen introduces a 1986 variant to his line in
Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions, Etc.
(edited by Barry Miles, HarperCollins, New York, 1995). Allen’s “final” 1986 version of the line goes like this: “and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalog a variable measure and the vibrating plane.” Ugh!

In a footnote of the 1995
Howl
volume, Allen says, “‘Ellipse’ is a solecism in the original mss. and printings; ‘ellipsis’ is correct.” In the same footnote he relieves himself of a minilecture on his poetics as derived from Céline, Whitman, Pound, and the divine Kerouac. And at the end of the footnote, he blandly drones, “phrasing in this verse has been clarified for present edition…to conform more precisely to above referents.” (pp. 130–31).

I wish Allen were still around, so I could argue with him about this. I’d insist that his original muse-spurt was of course the correct take, and not some thirty-year-later version that the author has tailored to fit some theories that he’s invented about what he did. I’d argue that he’s mistakenly letting his lit prof side supplant his mad poet side.

I did once have the good fortune to meet Allen, while visiting the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, on the 1982 visit that inspired my piece “MS Found in a Minidrive.” I told Allen about how much “Howl” had influenced me in high school, and then I said, “And what I want from you, Allen, after being hung-up on the beatniks all these years, what I want is your blessing.” And real fast he whaps his hand down on my head like a skull-cap or electric-chair metal cap
zzt zzt
and “BLESS YOU” he yells. I wrote more about this encounter in my memoir
All the Visions
(Ocean View Books, 1991), which I typed on a ninety-foot scroll of paper, emulating Jack K.

George Bush doesn’t sound as mean and stupid as I would have expected. Or maybe I’m just in a frame of mind to cut him slack. There are three armed Secret Service men here in my bedroom-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters.

They’ve been here for about half an hour. I’m mentally calling them the Boss, the Trainee, and the Muscle. The Boss and the Muscle are wearing Ray-Ban mirror shades—they’re living the dream, true Men in Black. They have guns, and if they want to, they can kill me. I’m polite.

The Trainee’s been doing the talking, he’s a guy my age, a fellow U.C. Berkeley graduate, or so he says, not that I ever saw him at any of the places I used to hang, like the Engineering Library, Cloyne Co-op, or Gilman St. His name is Brad. All the SS guys have four-letter, monosyllable names. Dick, John, Mark, Jeff, like that. I’m Wag. My dog made up the name.

Brad starts out by asking me questions about my Web sites, and about the FoneFoon cell phone worm, being vaguely threatening but a little jocular at the same time, the way these field-ops always are. It’s like they try and give off this vibe that they already know everything about you, so you might as well go ahead and roll over onto your back and piss on yourself like a frightened dog.

This isn’t the first time the Secret Service has come to see me. The ultimate cause for their interest is that I run a small ISP company called Dogyears. “ISP” as in “Information Service Provider.” If you don’t want to deed your inalienable God-given share of cyberspace over to Pig Business, you can get your e-mail and web access through my excellent www.dogyears.net instead of through the spam-pimps at AOL. Dogyears offers very reasonable rates, so do check us out.

The hardware side of my Dogyears ISP is a phone-booth-sized wire cage of machines in a server hotel in South San Francisco. I pay a monthly fee, and the server hotel gives me my own special wire, the magic Net wire, the proverbial snake-charmer’s rope leading up into the sky. You’d think it would be a big fat wire, like one of those garden-hose-sized electrical conduits you see at step-down voltage transformer stations in the cruddier, more industrial parts of town such as the Islais Creek neighborhood where I actually live, but, no, the Net wire is standard twenty-gauge copper.

Since I run my own ISP, my Internet access can’t be terminated easily. I put any whacked-out thing I like on my ISP, and so do my clients. And this is why both the Secret Service and the FBI are darkening my door, the SS about my Prexy Twins site, and the FBI about the FoneFoon worm that’s recently dumped sixty terabytes of digital cell phone conversations onto one of my servers’ hard drives.

The FoneFoon worm account is under the name of [email protected], and I’m honestly unable to tell the FBI who that really is. They want my sixty Tb of phone conversations for their “ongoing investigation” and I’ve been stalling them, simply for the sake of the innocents whose cell phones were hacked. Also I’ve been cobbling together a browser so I can troll through the conversation records for laughs.

In any case, I’m quite sure it’s The Prexy Twins, not FoneFoon, that brings the Secret Service here today. The Prexy Twins, www.prexytwins.com, is my online zine about the Bush girls. I have photos from the
National Enquirer
, rewrites of gossip, links, polls, and fun little webbie gimmicks like a rollover to change Jenna’s hair color. The site has a guest book where people write things in. “Fuck” becomes “kiss,” “shit” becomes “poo,” and the obscene “Republican or Democrat” becomes “elephant or donkey.” Good clean fun. Now and then somebody posts a death threat against the Bushes, but I take those off manually when I notice them, and if I don’t notice them, the SS phones me up to ask who posted them.

The SS guys came in person to my bedroom-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters two days after The Prexy Twins went up, just to find out where I’m at. But they could see that I have pure intentions and a clear conscience. I only do the site for—um, why
do
I run a Web site about the Bush girls anyway? Partly it’s to game the media and to garner hits. It’s a kind of art project too, despite the fact that even goobs like it.

I enjoy the feeling of having a smidgen of control over the news. I think it’s nice that the twins drink, for instance, and that old people get so whipped up about it. And, yes, I get a kick out of Jenna. She looks so nasty that I’d like to scrub her with a wire brush. Not that I’m telling this to the SS. Or, for that matter, to my girlfriend Hella. The less I talk to her about Jenna in my special slobbering Jenna-fan voice, the better!

-----

The June day that I’m telling you about starts foggy. My bedroom-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters is quite near the San Francisco Bay, in an industrial shipping district. I’m staring out of my window, watching the early morning habits of the local tweakers. A place called Universal Metals is across from my window. The tweakers bring scrap or scavenged metal there to trade for money to buy methedrine, which sends them scurrying out for more metal. Tweakers talk almost all the time, whether or not anyone’s near them. Studying the antlike activity of the tweakers can keep me occupied for hours—you can almost see the pheromone trails and scent plumes they leave behind.