[16.ix.23.b / #NL001AA] First, you’ll have to learn how to hold your breath. and wet your whistle coz this one’s going to be a scorcher. time to go deep : swim to the light ,,, ain’t that right, Peter? / If I were to refer to myself in the third person , to create verfremdungseffekt , or what the French called “distanciation” (stay shuned so say tuned) , a Brechtian term : “our threepenny opera stations work to make things strange” ,, c.f. Bowie in Berlin. / If one isn’t carefree … (and by “one” I’m calling myself out for more — what I’m going for here is the recovery of that Saturday afternoon feeling of the theatre in the round when Claudia and her older sister (sinister) Camilla the Murderess and I would explore the costume rooms deep in the dark heart, in those hidden places when the director was out having a smoke. Theatre people. The magical darkness of the let’s pretend — changing costume alts

about myself coz what do I really know about you, you, you ??? unless you are me in the future    , O.o.M. is your memory slipping or have you managed to stay sharp? Just hang in there (get it?) until your escape plan D arrives : I’m recovering from a massive epiphanic hangover, a hangover of epiphanies, an intoxication of revelations : I can see those Twin Invisible Cities from above and the River, oh the River!   my opera has four pennies and it floats two boots! ,,, but still I’m an alien , a man who fell … as alien to my past self as … the boy [ who never ever ] wanted to grow up    write it ten times:   (all of the above)   never ever be a writer who is read, better dead the read ,, but the [I’m not so old yet] man whom the boy became, a man who suffered from a slight adumbration of dynamical morphology, that man became the sort of writer who writes not to be read, but to read ,, that is to say if one rushes through and you think you know where we’re going, you might miss something.

a little like a giant wardrobe, eh Claudia? eh Camilla with the sharpest knife strapped to the inside of her soft, supple thigh … reach for it … if we go just far enough / what we learn is that coordinate points are material and they exercise power through suits/skins and the mind/soul forgets, overwhelmed by sensation. “I’ve been so many people. How could I have forgotten?” / she said to me: a desert is a place for wandering, for getting lost, but also for finding Oz (an interior Promised Land).

a note concerning … (found in one of the author’s notebooks) : How much time and eyesight I’ve lost pouring syrup over atlases, encyclopedias, histories, almanacs, newspaper archives stored in that bright room in the Cimarron public library, travel diaries, gazetteers, etc. in a bootless effort to discover the exact whereabouts of “the celebrated invisible town of Leadworth.” Not that it really matters since all my autobiographies function through denial : this I did not do! / Sometimes it is necessary to play tricks on one’s elf of the shadows, one’s silent fairies and forgetful gnomes. (oh say can you hear the jingle of the santaman cometh? saved for Book 2)

Today, I’m thinking about Jonah (in another life). Tomorrow, I will think about Job. Yesterday, … all my troubles seem … ( don’t be afraid to be sharp like Oliver Nelson : use Lydian chords ) Jonas being a variant form. Not the belly of the whale guy, but Jonas, the time traveler (twice hanged or hung, as the case may be). This morning when I was preparing to venture forth … (it’s tempting sometimes to cut and paste, but I resist all adumbrating temptations) … what I’m referring to is a kind of “play” upon a stage ,, it is “my play” since I am both playwright and actor … Alas, poor Hans Rico, I knew him to be … (this can hardly be called “work” right?) What do I know of work? I could tell you stories, but you should really talk to my friend Martin Eden. Am I right in calling Martin Eden my friend? Have I got a new ending for you! Martin Eden will tell you that work is what turns humans into beasts : no offense intended to beasts ,,, makes Jack a dull boy, n’est-ce pas Emmanuel? career as a writer (a shining example) : “He channeled his passion for writing in two different languages.” / Do you (reader) assume that the writer (me) is writing a disguised autobiography? What else do we writers have to go on? ,,, describes himself as “a realist belonging to the realist tradition” — and what does that mean when it’s tidied up and placed neatly into a magical blue box? is this social realism he’s talking about? and if so, what about all them roads into Faerie?    those horny fairy toads … when I was a boy, there were countries in this world that once had actually existing communism ::: so why was I … well, I know why, I’m just setting this up … Martin Eden told a story once about how, when he received a letter from Trans Galactic Navigator, he thought there was going to be a check inside, and with that check he was going to turn his life around, a check for a hundred dollars (which might not sound like a lot of money, but this was before hyperinflation so a hundred dollars was worth what ten or a hundred thousand is today : cherry u-pick) ,,, for about five minutes Martin Eden thought that he would no longer be an unknown nobody toiling away in a squalid garret … yes, it’s a requirement for a writer to spend their early years living and working in a squalid garret … and you might be right in thinking that Martin Eden was some chicken counter, but no, that ain’t it … when you’re that down and out, you grasp at any shard of irreality you can, no matter how sharp, no matter how deep you’ll get cut and bleed later : we don’t need to magnify life’s disappointments for comic effect

FACT #252: In the same year that a German physicist working in the Swiss Patent Office published four … count them four !!!!        Picasso would paint the portrait of Gertrude Stein, an exiled American writer   … pigeons, pigeons … alas

Once, Martin Eden and I were … well, I was the one drinking a pint o’ bitter and he was sipping coffee, black coffee, and he said to me : “So many writers are writing ever more autobiographical novels, but they are ever less personal , in attempting to be real, they have instead fallen into the trap of the ever more irreal : because it’s one thing to write what you know and quite another to know what you’re doing.” Ainsi-soit-il, mon frère! / that is to say, when I was repairing to sit at my writing desk and do pretty much what I’ve done every morning for the past twenty years : to play (around) ,, I was looking for an excuse to read more deeply, to read again and again what has already been read, so of course, I bought a plane ticket, a nonstop flight from New York to Budapest where I … 

at first I thought I would impress you with a series of coincidences, but what are coincidences when stacked up against the wall and covered over with a dust cloth? And even if I confessed that I have an obsession with books of over six hundred pages … well, what then? are we not sliding toward the limit of the total number of plateaus in this vast desert? / the spirit of the library guides me to open any book at random

EXHIBIT A: we can never really know or completely understand the motivations or what motivates? What do we really know of the pain and suffering of others? Our own pain and suffering, we know and from time to time the odd idea enters our head and we aren’t sure that it is really “us” who thought that idea coz we (the rational side of ourselves) has to be coaxed and convinced that when the number is in the ascent which is to say U.P. … what did Bernardo Soares write about the suicide? the person who finds that old length of rope in the garage and a convenient rafter and a rickety old stool …

EXHIBIT B: The notion of becoming a pirate … perhaps for a short spell when he was a child folding paper boats he imagined that he was a pirate, but the actual fact of becoming a pirate … when wrongfully accused and condemned, he was cut down from the gallows by pirates and revived before he expired. He was marked for life by the experience because the pirates had the forethought to work red ink into the wounds cut into his neck by the coarse hemp rope.

EXHIBIT C: and this brings me to Jonas, the time traveler who penetrated the forbidden zone and for his transgressions was hung until … that’s the funny thing about time travel, when it’s your time, it’s your time, but when it’s not … it’s hot. And forever after it seemed as if Jonas had been saved indeed by friendly pirates.

Having heard a story about an asphyxiation artist ,,, the clock is ticking    countdown , not that I can hear it, but I can feel it in my gut : the image of a boy wandering through the woods and encountering a door which he circles , a complete three-sixty, pondering rosa and figuratively head scratching and yes! the boy thinks to try opening the door and low down and beholden unto some unpredisclosed lettered plan ,,, a discovery! (and it was there all along … gee whiz / but it took a lifetime of work, the boy was eleven : fishupsticks and clustered ,,, just like riding a bicycle built for … Tucson, Arizona ,, hiding a silent sea) in 400 mowers , moo-ers and shakers, assaulted and pepper cornered .::. “my” facts to wall / It’s true : some of it might be nonsense up until the point at which you match sticks. Ten. Consult the broadsides ,, Oz (it is written) is such a Marvelous Land : we have here before us the officer of the Nova Proclamation, an albino Queen dressed in a floor-length, glittering, cherry-red dress , her feet (which you cannot see) are bare, her head (which you can see) is shaved : Camilla, is that really you? With a sweeping gesture, she says to me, Regard the spinning suns as we sail through the endless day. What lies before the Children of the Evolution is a steady progression of nightshade sticks and

Combien j’ai douce souvenance / Du joli lieu de ma naissance

— Châteaubriand

[22.ix.23.d / #NL001AA] oh, it’s one of the girls , at the edge / through the hedge , if you give us everything   he and Melanie would never speak ,, the woman sitting next to me (on the flight to … ) (with the knitting needles / I made some offhand quip about General Jinjur and sa armée de voleurs d’émeraude … I spoke French with my grandmother when I was a little girl and became the translator in the Scarecrow’s court : who am I?      [  ] a pub quiz        [  ] I didn’t give it all away        [  ] there’s a good girl / She was tall for her age … ) asked me how … my eyes widened … “I most certainly do! / over the hills and through the wood , we will give you everything    of the matter (about which they would remain silent / hidden gems [roses] ) not after what I said … Any landing you can walk away from … how tall is that?

the violence inherent in the system exposé : why the violin is rouge ,, a harvest moon  )(   remember the tar baby      /      Above the planet, thick as a dream of falling timbers , I don’t want to ride a stuffed pony , any observer worth their weight in feathers would have sat idly by and bye burr dee bay bee … to have been eternally skylarking / a spate of useless forgetting always precedes the land sliding past on a bronzed tea tray at sunset (a tragic futility) : the world below them was dying like the inside of a vast smooth stone (a magical utility). You too would stare in dumbfounded awe as the deserted country slid by .:. The Lilacs, I said Goodbye to her under the lilacs, the invisible yet enduring lilacs .:. the entire landscape slid by at once (it was the 400th dawn) as if suddenly shaken by the weblike wings of giant subterranean vampires awaking from a sleep of a thousand and one years. / to grandmother’s house we go , everything in the attic … including what he’d done to her in secret (my only defense is that she made the first move : open sesame) betrayed a treacherous anxiety / What he had done would have been considered a joke in thirteen counties          look (it) U.P.      A throbbing pulsation guarding the gray outbreaking and oncoming storm : the sky (through a timid shroud) shook through the emptiness , shards of rock splitting asunder. But I know her face.

Out of place: a cause of looking back? at the age when the first third is easier to remember than the middle third and forget it … the last third .:. must hurry, I’m in a rush. The active life is a form of suicide. slow down and live, my friend. I would never have asked such a question at that age, but when presented with the via positiva he said : “To exert influence is to leave home.” Then, the via negativa : “To rest brings us home.” (the only place where one can both go into and out of : more on this curiosity …) The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything! “Is life worth living?” / It seemed like a joke at the time, Douglas Adams’ other book about words : The Meaning of Liff and the Monty Python movie : the salmon paté !! / No, I’m not contemplating suicide, though when you are young (why speak in generalities or ginger)? His dream fantasy of selfexpiration were not a death wish, but a life wish, a to be loved wish, just how much do people really love me? if you love me … come to my funeral ,, will you come to my funeral ??  .::. today is the Last Day .::.  (what a childish idea that they would shed tears, even a single tear) his/my dreams of the afterlife corresponded (a pen pal) with the donning of his/my “tornado shoes” (a special kind of boot designed to carry him/me to zee Other Zide and back just like his/my girlfriend Dodo { née “Lydia”, as in ‘love for’ }, somewhere in time)  : sing it again (!)  / No, I’m not … it’s just the most important philosophical question, it’s the first question that one must ask if one is to say anything truthful in either rhyme or meter oh lovely Rita  … meat her made …

A bedtime story :: Once upon a time … the Magus discovered a loose nail in the floorboards of his castle. At once he sent for a flute and proceeded to bash the head of the poor defenseless little iron nail. Stop! Stop! cried Ozma. What is it this time? the Magus asked. That’s not how you do it, said Ozma. Allow me. And the Magus handed Ozma the flute and she began to blow into and through the flute and from the flute issued forth such a wonderful, melodious, mellifluous melody that dozens of tiny blue and yellow birds alighted on the open window sills set into the castle’s granite walls. Suddenly, the Magus grabbed the flute from Ozma ,, the colorful bird dispersed. The music died awake, echoing. And thus spake the Magus :: No amount of blowing through that thing is ever going to get this blasted nail back where it’s supposed to be.

I risk making myself (the fountains of my youth) seem wise beyond his (my) years — the old man who writes today sees both the mistakes I/he made as both blessing and curse. My inaction, my devotion to waiting (that great theme!) has become my salvation : if I’d acted upon my impulses then, I would have wasted my entire life in retracing the already well worn paths, the obvious deviations into which the seeker is channeled to keep him from discovering whom does the graal serve. / Before going back in time to link my travels with Orchid Black to the coming of the wild desert goddess … I will relate or fabricate a connection that will illustrate the peculiar nature of this revelation :: What I reveal here pertains to “the cavern of the seven sleepers” who for two centuries (a figurative number) dreamed the Forgotten Dreams. There are seven mythological systems each antagonistic to the others, but when arranged form a stable structure or even better which transforms and transforms , both inside and outside so that that inner space and outer space become transparent as fluid illuminated under the Black Sun. Before me is a text to which Wayne in the Wandering Years (1992—1993 was merely the first) had no access. The text of which I write is The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (Richard Zenith’s translation). In chapter 416, Pessoa’s narrator, Bernardo Suares, muses: “I start to wonder why our scientific age’s will to understand hasn’t been extended to artificial, inorganic things … why don’t we develop, along with the usual psychology of human and subhuman creatures, a psychology (for surely they have one) of artificial figures and of creatures whose existence takes place only in rugs and pictures. It’s a sad view of reality that would limit it to the organic realm and not place the idea of a soul in statuettes and needlework. Where there’s form there’s a soul.” Now let’s jump to The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life by Ricardo Piglia [p. 349] where the narrator (Renzi) records some observations (musings) after seeing Werner Herzog’s film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (“about the rock painting found in the caves of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc in the southwest of France”). Renzi writes, What we call art was given from the beginning in all of its perfection. The cave paintings seem to confirm Aby Warburg’s theories: there is no evolution or progress in the history of images. I won’t apply reason or logic to these statements just yet, but I want to hold two ideas in mind as we go forward: (1) a psychology of images, an inquiry into the soul present in form, is possible and necessary, and (2) the history of images is not a story about the development of the human imagination alone, but one of an innate imaginative capacity that perceives a whole reality not confined to the (artificially constructed) material realm that so concerns modern science. / And now for the seven sleepers in their cave dreaming their forgotten dreams (only traces of which adorn the cave walls) :: The lifelong investigation upon which I, Wayne Fogg, embarked is only one of seven systems (and even the number seven should not be taken literally). Each one of the seven dreamers dreams a world or some aspect or level of the world (or Worlds). Each dream is a system that generates (engenders) its opposition. For example, in opposition to the Orphic vision is that of the Apollonians. This note is for you, dear reader, this text/story presents an investigation of the Orphic Way. I do not insist that it is The Way. I could have fallen into the trap of a totalizing vision during that summer in X when I encountered the Muse for the first time or if it wasn’t the first encounter, it was the first where I recognized that I was dealing (communing) with angelic powers. How many muses? Count them reader: seven. If the Muse who spoke to me (the Moon-goddess) demands that I (man and a son of Orpheus) should pay woman both spiritual and sexual homage, then that is my charge. The Muse who speaks to you may demand something else and that is your business. Confusion arises out of the misunderstanding of oppositions. That’s all I will say at the moment. To say more is to risk getting caught up in a rationalization of a system. But what interests me more, and perhaps this is why I’m telling this story at this point in my (now) long life, is the exploration of a poetic grammar. The first lesson of which follows …

Thursday 1, 9:21 a.m.

The library guides me with its invisible [high magnetic] fields. The image I’m a gazing at is a werkplant ,, (I spelt werk with an “e” to show that what I’m doing is done with { the greatest of } Eees.) :: the werkplant is similar to an aloe vera (ours is called “monster”), but a much darker green, almost slategreen, the color of a chalkboard and the octopital [octopus + radial : optical] spears lie open, sprawling across the sandy ground. In the center of the werkplant ,, an eye or rose window (a splash of color to like the way). To the left is something unseen that is just as important to the werk. “It’s done in four part harmony,” I explain to whomever will listen. / If we hadn’t trimmed … no, trimmed is too timid :: this time we topped the tree, rendered it headless. The rootsystem is still intact, but no, last night during the … I wanted to blame the occurrence on the storm, but there was no storm, only an accounting. The tree was felled, an autofelling : fall, fall down. Half demasted. If not, it would have crushed the haunted house (which is the werk). The ghost that haunts the house of the werk. / No masterbuilder he, though he envies Odysseus, the oddman out. Russ Oddman. What if he’d been called Letterman : ? easier now that we have arrived in the future (which seemed so far off when we were still in the past). Am I wrong to think of Oddman as a poet? Odysseus is not the artist, no matter how many portraits we paint. And is Calypso the muse? Penelope the wife. A man must choose. But cake and eat it too? (unless we open the box, we don’t know whether the cat is …) Is this what The Diary of the Eternal Novel looks like after the preparation of the werkplant as an injectable substance? they rubbed red ink into his wounds ,, / He climbed the tower out of love and fell to his … how long did Bobby Wagner wait? (wait for it : !) forty days and forty nights ,, forty, the biblical number.    fort askew   / If we hadn’t cut the tree off where we did, when we did, it would have crushed the entire house whose occupants were already not very happy with me, thyself and aye! aye! Herr Cappy Ham, oh my Capuchin mi Capuccini. The resident couple retained hints of youth despite the effacements of time : I’m too young to be so old. All those lazy and hot afternoons at Highland Coffees, scribbling in the notebook and calculating the ages of the dead poets : I was giving myself permission to wait until … the last resort. The young old man or the old young man had a gray beard for his troubles (down to his knees) and his wife’s hair was a deep flame of red. Neither of them looked at me as I skirted past them and up the all too narrow staircase then tried to slip through an opening that was meant for a child : I hummed my favorite nursery rhyme :: ashes to ashes we all …

[14.x.23.b / #NL001AA] // up half the night dreaming the unwritten and recovering the unwritable          two … a fork in the road, branching possibilities (I’m engaged in a bit of research)        Scenarios for a sonata in bee minor : the solitary traveler arrives, ostentatiously welcomed ,, “he is our guest of honor or offer (what does it matter??)” ,, if he breaks the rules … it takes one to know the exception : the solitary traveler (not a wanderer/drifter, but a dude with a lofty agenda : he’d almost brought himself to tears this time ,, not knowing where they buried his father’s corpse after … ) intervenes and untimely intervention, subverting unintentioned : there must be consequences and a contract. The scenario: the little boy fell from the tree, a bit of apple lodged in his throat … if he’d only minded his own bee’s knees !     she arrived in a bright glossy red limousine (unseen) , the chauffeur, a mock rhinestone cowpoke, six-shooter with a footlong barrel hidden beneath a bulging coat … most not happy to see you … “Allow me to introduce Mizz Ella D’Eath, Countess” (her feather boa constricting swallowing capuchin elephantitus) Dit moi! she said. (red lips, pale, pale skin, neither young nor old) : Tu vois, c’est comme ça, she said. Donne-moi ce qui est à moi. (and I stood trembling) The boy, apple dislodged, cowers discreetly behind the trunk of the broken tree (the only witness to the translation). Le joli petit garçon m’appartient. An eye for an aye, aye captain. Hesitating, thinking of his quest … I’m going places! (would he make the offer substitutionally? for the boy, to save the boy. an absurd solution, a gesture, throwing his cap into the wind. But I don’t want your soul, the countess says circling. There’s something rotten at the core of it, that stinks. You fill my nostrils with … here she blows jets of smoke. It’s the boy or… O.R. Let’s make a deal, a good old fashioned showdown on Main Street at High Noon. But I’m no gunslinger, the solitary traveler said. You could have fooled me … no, I suppose not. I’ll give you a week. For Target Practice. He assumed that he would be facing the chauffeur, her chosen champion, but N.O.! she had other plans. Listen and glisten carefreely. I’ve chosen my champion. She whispered his name in the traveler’s ear : “Oklahoma Joe” / You have one week! // start tape , press record

[2.vi.23: Friday] Just a few more items for my list: according to some sources Jonah, the biblical prophet swallowed by the whale, was the son of Amittai, a Galilean. In the rabbinical literature, one can find references to Jonah, the son of the widow of Zeraphath (a town called Sarepta in the Gospel of Luke, a village really, no more than a few houses at the top of a mountain). The only fact that we have concerning Amittai’s life is a reference to his death by hanging (literally “death by strangulation” according to the Midrash). Whether Amittai was hung in punishment for some crime or through some accident or if he took his own life is unknown. From the account in the First (or Third) Book of Kings, Amittai’s widow and orphan son were left destitute. This is their condition when the prophet Elijah arrives in Zeraphath, having been commanded by God to take refuge in that town.  Jonah’s mother (unnamed in the sources I have at my disposal) tells Elijah that she only has enough flour and oil to make one last cake for her and her son. After eating that cake, she expects to starve to death. Elijah insists that she make a loaf of bread for him first. Miraculously, the widow discovers that her barrel of flour and her bottle of oil are never empty. Despite having enough food now to sustain them, the young Jonah becomes sick unto death. Only the intervention of Elijah brings Jonah back to life. While the Book of Jonah is concerned with the story of the fish and the threatened destruction of Nineveh, one finds in the Midrash a story of Jonah, after having lived a long and righteous life, finding his way to the Earthly Garden of Eden. The angel guarding the gate allows Jonah into the garden where he eats of the Tree of Life, thereby avoiding his second taste of death.

Another hanged man that isn’t so lucky is Inspector Josiah Fludd of the Thames River Police who, as a result of investigating the disappearance of a little girl ( lost ) is framed for the murder himself and hung upon the gallows until dead … only to then be resurrected as a monster. It was Fludd’s story that inspired the famous novel written by the young Mary Shelley. The markings on the neck of the monster (bearing Fludd’s head) were thought to be the scars left by a medical suture, the connection of the head to a neck, but those marks bear the distinct resemblance to the hanged man’s scar and Odysseus’ noose of pain. Mary Shelley herself along with her husband Percy and Lord Byron belonged to a secret group devoted to learning the secrets of the Other World by enacting a Victorian version of Flatliners. Their first attempt fails catastrophically for the unfamous fourth member (whose name I don’t recall) of the necronautical crew. / The curiosity … what drives these people : what lies beyond the grave? What does one encounter beyond that ivory gate that separates the worlds? As Kwai Chang Caine said: In that moment one might discover that death is the greatest joy. Or as Peter Pan said: To die will be an awfully big adventure.

Scenes from picture books

[1.vi.23 / 14.x.23.c / #NL001AA] Under the guidance of the muse, Ulysses Oddman fashions his writing machine, nuts & bolts, screws and all, laboring in Calypso’s machine shop. That’ll never float, she says, hands on hips. Oh, but watch me : I got some techniques ,, invariant data and topological analysis , linear logic breaking straight into mathematics : this results in a sharpened line pictured ,, he never referred to himself / several times, my own part in this tale is small, but she opened her mouth as if to suggest :: Portals! illustrated in fine arabesques whose cracks begin with minimal displays of grotesque granite buildings, fantastic neoclassical , storied towers leaning Catalan-style (in some sense I’ve never left Barcelona : for this I am grateful) , gratitude becomes a simulacrum of the gesture that answers. Behold! The Incomparables! / who exceed the late venerable, maternal claws and the horrific pleasures of a copulating planet, doubly macroscopic : blossoms a coral rose

[2.VI.23: Friday / 14.x.23.c] Premonitions :: I follow the ghost of the Over Time Prophet as he hunts through the vanishing library , wood-heated dragons come and go ,, flowing along longitudes without resistance in a row, row, row : tapping the table to spell out ,, highly fascinating, I am interested in discovering rare occult works streaming rhizomatic growth to perpetuate monastic observations. He made discoveries ,, first person experiences (officially deniable since they are hidden in plane {sic.!} sight) though she never said those words specifically. His picture books : apparently unintelligible disorder will turn the corpse to find the power button ,, to see if the damn curator of this private museum (up on the ceiling, not) ,, his encounter with the text was facing toward the electron beam waiting for the thing to reboot. The narrator guardian, so to speak, of treasured picture books with gilt-edge lithography describes a system exhibiting a high degree of uncertainty : bizarrely painted butterflies trace unknown magnetic fields installing cropped constructions spread across mythic alchemical weddings. So he leaves his rented crime scene after turning a PR man in the field—though from what I read in The Ghost Lemurs of New Atlantis his milieu was encrypted in stereotypical crime-scene shorthand. For some time she stood (hunched over , a provincial girl lining a nest to contemplate wildflower fringes under the Alamo’s forbidding spotlights) and rubbed her sore knee : passion for her chosen work as though someone could not have then known that the cathode rays no longer flared, or that from kneeling so long next to the corpse (strangled apparently : digitally exploring the laced neck patterns) ,,, his necronautical exploration took him endlessly to the far fringes of ,, I listened, the volume of the sound was not ,, my guide of three centuries creates snowfields after broadcast (in the days when regularly scheduled programming still ended at midnight). The corpse of the strangled man (drawn skillfully on a laminated card as if taken from a picture book) ,,, remembering that episode in the history of civilization when revolution was the most beautiful word. Indeed, only twice the sound was too low for me to make out precisely what he said as the Over Time Prophet flipped through the pages for hours : if we are lucky, we will stare into the elusive blue gem of the electrical apparatus. One of them, a Time Agent, was able to bring back one of his picture books in the ten years preceding his last visit. This became the entrance state, an infinite black void of silence has brought one of them back to life. I had the honor of sharing her company at the ,, He emerged disoriented, despite his confusion, it was as if he’d been canceled : what was it like? she asked, what did you see? The injury was to the “Resurrection Machine” (so-called). Those rare visits were vivid and tinged with a sense of hanging motionless, waiting ,, a strange sardonic detachment / occipital : at the back of the head. He dreamed of a device that was U-shaped and remained undimmed in memory. Sitting for half a second between ,,, He bought a houseboat to travel the world. If his dead fingers would fit snugly around ,, smoking his pipe in the glow of the small black & white screen wired to improvised telepathic circuits. All this would pass before K. understood. Of course, he’d listened to his mother as every good boy does fine ,,, his cranium because everyone knows if the fireplace is hot enough … he talked as only a man can

Monday 5, 9:59 a.m.

[5.vi.23.a / 15.x.23.a : dimanche] This is the only way I know how to do it, grab hold of some passing log, if you’re drowning, does it really matter which one? / What I said to her is one (meaning me, of course) shouldn’t hold on to one’s ideas too hard, like the idea that literature should give up every element that can be done better in some other media like TV or interactive gaming (or role playing). Something about stories and telling stories … because I didn’t want to mess around with the industry of making a TV show or a film, TV shows, in their modern incarnation as longform multiepisode … the videoed novel : but as B.S. Johnson asked, why do writers still write stories? why do readers still read stories? Why do I still desire to enter into a story (serial novel/Gothic [time travel] romance) of my own? And if I do, how else will I document it aside from writing it? (it’s better to write something than to just stare into the bottom of your coffee cup … or the lint in one’s gorilla)

:: I was going to write something about that time I was in Boston (2019) and I bought a book called Storytelling by Christian Salmon, but then I remembered I’d already written about that in my Nova Letter for that year. What I was going to say was that, while everyday life may be a revolution, it isn’t a story … still we can make it a damn good one.

If only I’d read A Thousand Plateaus years ago … but I wouldn’t have been wise enough to understand what Deleuze and Guattari were saying about starting in the middle or what Charles Peirce said about starting from where you’re at and don’t pretend like you have to look for some cartesian mythical starting place : Trees have rhizome lines, and the rhizome [has]  points of arborescence. How could mad particles be created with anything but a gigantic cyclotron?

Obviously, I have resumed my journey (which involves a lot of reading). / I wasn’t convinced by what B.S. Johnson had to say about fiction, to follow him I would be giving too much up, like César Aira said, If you rely on memory, if all you write about is what really happened, eventually you will run out of stuff to write. the commitment to invention ,, why should I care about your lies? When I read books by other writers, I read my own stories, so when I read Ann Quin’s unfinished novel, The Unmapped Country, I imagined that Sandra was Lydia, the Lydia of “Part 3 of City of Lost Robots”, the unwriteable Lydia living in the rest home (we’ll get to that eventually, if you stick with me long enough : coming soon!!!). Why do I write my stories when I can just imagine them? Writing is a way of remembering so that you can go further. How far have I come since 1990? when the earlier versions of Sam & Lydia (Roz & Zera and Satellite 7 a paradise orbiting island) …

What I was reading was Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop. (okay, so I mentioned Ann Quin and Jacques Roubaud, so I should reveal the other vertex of the Authorial Triangle: Miklós Szentkuthy … let us begin with a chapter on love) and I was imagining again growing my own rhizome : which plateau am I marching across today? / What I said to her was that in the novelization there is so much more about even the minor characters, backstory yes, but also why it is that she fell in love with the director of the laboratory who doesn’t even know she’s … but why can’t he see it? homosexual? he likes men? nothing wrong with that, but could be awkward for her … And so when there’s nothing left to watch on TV, what do we do except retreat into the care and comfort of our libraries

:: What I’m trying to justify is not Kurt Wiffle’s three-pass system, but a three-pronged system ,, well, four in my case—it’s always four. B.S. Johnson says the remembered part is everything so stick to that and you won’t be lying. But why do we have to use the real names? The other two elements (parts) are the invented and the dreamed : is the imagined part any different? is there some multidimensional time-axis mapping that justifies a fourth element associated with imagination? Remembering is time negative, looking back, re-collecting and assembling : it’s the imagination that puts together remembering. Inventing is time sideways, but the sideways vector that sees what might have been or what might be. (So much hinges on discovering what isn’t known. If Adam wakes up on a spaceship or is sailing on the ocean blue …) Still imagining powers inventing. Dreaming may be a power all its own, but outside of real time, dreaming tips into eternity, disconnected from mechanical time. What about this? the discovered part : these manipulations, these processes, practices, observations, make it possible to discover what cannot be invented, dreamed, or remembered ,, so yes, it’s the discovered part that comes next.

He remembered the incident or accident (as it was referred to), not so much any more, but from time to time, he would think of his two ,, they weren’t really his friends, classmates, just kids he knew, kids he’d interacted with a few times, running into them between classes in the hallways, but they would have laughed in his face if he had … in which they were killed, not on purpose, but through negligence, the owners of the traveling carnival :: get out of Dodge (quick! fixed DBA). Some people argued that the town was responsible since there should have been an inspection of all the equipment. But there were excuses for even that. Still his two classmates (a boy and girl, his own age) never went home again after that … not home home, but maybe to Old Glory if there was an I’ll fly away of it (in the end). [#NL001AA] / Of course he hadn’t seen “the accident” he’d … no he hadn’t left the Fair Grounds, in retrospect he’d noted some kind of commotion, but there would have been lights and sirens too if he had … for weeks after that, he would see it (the accident) in his imagination (mind’s eye), what it looked like, in first person because earlier that evening he’d been on the same ride :: it could have been me, that was the kicker. But it wasn’t him. He’d been lucky, he said to himself. How many times? Is there a limit on such things? / The result was : later in life, long after the events of that **fateful** night, he remembered everything in detail as if it had happened to him and sometimes he would wonder how he’d survived the crash. Intellect, rationality, whatever it was said it was fiction, that he’d invented those images : but so intensely imagined that they became reality, **his** reality. mote & beam : they say the father hung **his** self

[26.vii.23.a : Wednesday] That’s a cruel sentence to pronounce on a child. A/B option : success/failure, but outside the lottery .:. success-caret over ease-Z/failure-sunny-stick-side U.P. is mutually assured dissipation. Who knew what was the best? If you tell them : you can be anything / commending them to a life of regimented relief ))) we all step into that refracted sameness and spend our lives waiting … waiting for the fairy godmother to tap us into three months later / in midday thought the policeman (counterplanning). The youthful Karna dreams of a future in which he is a bespectacled fairy mouse. / When asked the question : Why did you leave your small town America and come to Babylon? .:. he always answered : Gravity brought me here and her twin sister Grace is the Ace — your Ace is Grace. … waiting for a morning glory that will never be coniferred. ::: when you say “most people” you mostly mean the “not we we we” all the way gnome sweet / and at that bleary gnome mint Mr Tinker buttons his coat since they were prepalpitating to go U.P.   which irked him   , that suited her temperament, to be trading in sameness. They both understood that in three minutes the terminal concourse would dissolve in Acid Februarys. / “most people” don’t think about language (preferring to select items from the available menu)   as material … if you have to think about it … mutually assured : with a copy of Walter’s The Thinga-ma-gigabite-me from Somewhere in sixteen massive sequential opera orations : it was … I could say or forever hold my peas. She went into the empty staff room to wait for her colleague, the science teacher … that “most people” don’t think period period period. It’s the third period that was the most difficult : breakfast was digested and condensed his stomach ached filled with void. I know that sounds arrogant and cruel, but … We all know Babylon is a prison : like in the third episode of that TV show when the prisoners try to escape only to find themselves in the frying pandimension calling the cattle back coz Farmboy left the barn door open again. That’s neither ear nor air stuffed into that crowd of witnesses. At least she would meet Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (which in later versions had become a … always within driving distance) I know that sounds … but I’ve lugged this giant crate filled with papers out into the yard so I could remember Pessoa’s trunk. The trick is to be quicker off the mark … I don’t intend to be arrogant and certainly not cruel, but where I’m from we don’t shoot skeet addles for bush yearnings. here’s a clue for you : if it’s on the menu , then everyone is doing forty to life.  ))) you think what you are reading doesn’t mean anything … well, that’s use to you now isn’t it? … the question is : what do you make of it? Neither he, nor anyone else in this vast terminus • he wouldn’t have to stand around in the age of waiting room. / Something to think about while listening to David Bowie’s Station to Station ::: Nabokov’s lectures on literature (and this is a direct quote : plagiaralysis / plague urinalysis) “Rereading is the only reading. Rereading is the return of the memorious — all those books of Adam — re re re do re me me me — do re read me — all the other books you ever read are right here, right now, within you (think about what). in one way or another / I don’t mean Toby is arrow gaunt [  ] (smith) or crew well [  ] (jones) … the phrases we use are worn out of all poor relations, have become heavy, weighted, pulled by gravity : see pee are / use your Ace Dodo. Start again. Rereading is the memory of every twisty passage that led you on the journey to where you are. This book never stops recalling books, that is our remainder : the old words are not weighed down with meaning, but an indicative function which (if we aren’t awake) will be processed machinically (a new word) … 4 out of 5 dentists rear chrome end neology as a sign of pathology. / What is the type of amnesia writers suffragette C.T. scan? The phrases we use … a calumet breathes with pale fire. The Kinbotes (kine boats / cob oats / cow floats / all of the above motes) will say that I’m leaving a foolish berry trail whipped with asparagus cream : instead I constructed a dream machine : totally disconnected (which is why I always wear a bowler and a raincoat + bumperchute). look it up in the dictionary for dream time : faking up is carted blue / the desk-sergeant’s expression booklet is tucked into his carry-on.

Sunday 11, 2:55 p.m.

[#NL001AA] This may not be necessary, but here we are. The idea of a trap (a loop in time saves nine) is a race of course (like a record, baby). In between I’ll write my own “Useless Guide” :: to what? I’ll be true /// to what (end) ?? and here (in these opening pages, I encounter ,,, on his deathbed that night, the inauguration of the Roussel Sobriety. Ashbery’s Instruction Manual, I called it ,, (look it up) which I will not reproduce here only to say that I too will write a guide book to an invisible city. not a republic of Dreams, but neither the slavery the asshole flag rumpeaters (missing tea this time, bag it) called democracy. it’s the other thing, that can’t be said because it’s the key, the way out. / A great deal of the books in this library are in French. Thus and henceforth I will study French with the primary aim of discovering a potential genre of fictional science.

We’re getting there : don’t hold your breath. Even after his recovery, the sense of investigating connections between dimensions of gravity undercovered a vision of mythology, of science and magic. without understanding the mechanics of magic, the illusionist was now disillusioned.

★

JULIETTE BRADLEY This is what you’ve always wanted.

ADAM MARTINS Is it? A poisoned chalice. (What if I discover that the thing I love isn’t the thing I love?)

JB At least we are together.

★

I’ve published over a hundred issues of this formalized constitution : it’s not how the pieces fit together than matters (well, it does, otherwise), but that something happens. / Adam Traveler had ,, how many weeks had passed ? Clean bill of health , check. The sound reflected differently now that the door was locked ,,, confused, Mr Traveler went no where : into the jail-house Mind of the One / these issues (sheets) formed a loose aggregation of nonstandard knowledge (eventually he would spot the small danger signs said to have a “Lovecraftian” aspect)                   The bookstore doesn’t                  the real work of writing  “my” novel                      checks his watch                           just after eight ( I am )          knowledge             was “dangerous” and that his fiction was motivated by accusations made against him that the “invisible city” (as he called) was a hyperphysical concept. The episode sharpened his practice of hyperstition.

He decided to go for a walk. The fact that so many ,, everything he read, everything he watched :: a sign of mad(e)ness ,, we’re all in it together so if the mirror is broken , how many fragments? the human animal is cruelly caged   Later, he would write, “Time is wind : debated since the inception of : the invention of a prison. ( The problem or block is the prohibition against rewriting & revision. If the text becomes ossified, then it is written on stone tablets thrown down from the Cloudcrofty Mount.) What he wrote in his notebook though was :: Mechanical time is a prison. this coinage refers to two different kinds of time travel theorists : bashers & swoopers.         Give a man a hammer                    or a pair of wings                   and he’ll discover a description of events                    each one of them right           each sentence being immediately identifiable       the difference between            Icarus & Phoenix Who cares about the general, the predictable : the what usually happens? (Why do we fall for/into it?  keep it in suspension    It’s like the G.I. said : fear for breakfast, fear for lunch, fear for dinner, munch, munch, munch. What he wrote in his notebook: the phenomena that interest me are those singular events , those moments of convergence which happen only once the coordination points have been dissolved              only once in the entire history of the universe. But which one? At any given time, there are three: ( I ) ( P ) ( H ) [there is a fourth too, the original, the one from which we dropped, of which ( P ) is the imperfect copy. #NL001AA

Listen to the sound of the sheets rustling (it’s ready for a reader) : write anything until the beeping stops. Light. A middle-aged man standing on the shore with his arms outstretched : in whatever words seem handy : his hair is a matted tangle, ( cliché alert : ) praying that the storm / the incident :: 

“the Incident”

In a large room , a giant hangar , a space large enough for ( able to leap tall ) the generator is in a different building : what “we” see is the control room above, behind glass, like the bridge of a futuristic space ship (you know the one) and the man sitting in the central throne is the Scientist who has conceived of the Machine. It took an army to build it, but he did what was necessary (blueprints, wiring diagrams, but the grant proposals took the most time, all that writing : lies, lies, likes, yeah eh!) just to get what he wants ,,, and what does he want?

The Machine itself wasn’t the time machine, but the Machine was the framework in which (according to his calculations) the tiniest hole would open up. A single photon would be shot through the opening and a fraction of a second *before* the same phonon will have been …

The single count on the photodetector : blipped.

THE SCIENTIST No, don’t. Wait.

LABORATORY ASSISTANT 1 (looking concerned) We can’t keep it open for much longer, if it …

TS What will it do, Tim? Tell, what happens if we break the chains of causality?

LA Then how can we certain of anything, ever again?

At that very moment the earth shook, the winds swirled into a hurricane force gale … 

★

dark curly hair hung damp on his bare shoulders. the end. when he’d finished, he must go back through          in the room, in addition to the lamp stood a naked woman looking at herself in a mirror , a half-glass of water on the night stand.             making corrections, rearranging sentences until             all the pieces and the chapters, throwing out things that                           this is the last item (time misspelt) colors danced shifted strobed on the smooth surface    light from the television screen        on top of the          he got out of bed and with his thumb sent a signal with the URC.

[19.x.23.a : jeudi / #NL001AA] What do you demand of these naturally converging illuminated ecclesiastic files, a museum fire sale? physical conceptions of an airplane’s cramped washroom slowly sinking beneath the surface, a promenade of memories? When we are done washing the test tubes they will dry neatly in racks. Behold! The womb from which the endless river casually flows from the future to make the patchwork jellyroll squares of a serial zine. These hidden rolls are the catalytic basis for the declension of exception, the very measure of surprise. / Remember the Watcher who stands at the gate of Logopolis to hold back the inrush of Ethernity into Time. The Watcher is clothed in white/black raiment ,, a harlequin who doesn’t believe in you, looking glass eyes gazing back at you ,, in white face, a black tear [symbolically “white” in this context is a promise, “black” (the other side) is a guarantee] his joking eyebrows partner with gossamer flights  : The Watcher bears witness to the unfolding text and attends the Last Day (for we know not when it comes). When the Fish falls from the sky, Ethernity enters Time, and through the Watcher, the Fish is reborn to awaken from his sleep. He is not alone. One swims time in schools (poetic colleges established to bury the secret in the center of the anomaly of excess: the stuffed bird text). We are approaching the Enchanted Cathedral to make things come out as they must. We must grab the talking sparrows and order one gallon of red, red wine : everything is permissible at the jumble bazaar. All the latest amenities, a small round stainless sink where you may wash your hands before falling into the horror of the dream … yes, Dr Chaver hunts for monsters and critics : laws are lines painted on roads between you and marina. Everything will be on display ,,, everything is at hand and it’s all crammed in on the run : no looking glass dark back of … but use extreme Lemmy Caution. At the washroom door: garden whistle farts singing a duet. A motto: we bruck no systems, no norms, no cybernetic definitions. Time travel is allowed by nature. One doesn’t need a machine wash cycle to trap the lilies of the field. I too am afraid of Americans. / Behind me the rounded interior wall of the commercial jetliner ,, before me a lonely stretch of beach. All this means nothing to those who lack the modernist context of interfacial informatics. The Time War is not about who controls Time and its lost roads, but about removing all obstacles — the cathedral walls are cut from giant blocks of frozen silence and erected on titanic slabs of fiery emptiness.

The Watcher’s role is not passive. He is not waiting, but waiting on. His role is the anticipation of the Aeon of Omega—the moment when all Time Laws are dissolved and claim the future in which we are free. The moment has come, but to swim, one has to learn how to move one’s fins.

to step down out of the fuselage and look down into the blue night, the sand glistening, the harlequin waits in the lobby of the Hotel Sophia : “Well, I told you how good she was. Her skilled reports refute rigorous time-law policies such as…” Undermining law, to maintain it over the tanglements of mythic fruit trees, requires a principle of variance, the anomaly of our shared reality / When I awoke the next morning both my bedside lamp and the clock had been unplugged. Indeed, my entire bedside table, books, notebooks, pens, pencils, reading glasses, and all!! had been draped in a reflective mylar shroud— one of Orchid’s experiments no doubt, but not to undermine her plans ,, it was my bedside table after all and an ex-sleeper needs to know the time and temperature (I know the number by heart, but we have appliances from such things now that the future has arrived), so I lifted the light mylar covering and plugged in the power strip. The light flickered on, the clock beeped a cheerful chirping jingle : all sevens and nines! Now, in the light, I saw Orchid had left for me a copy of The New Science by Giambattista Vico. I opened the book to the marked page and read: Children are by nature subline poets. When I was a child I paid attention to nature, I listened to hear the faint whisper of her voice, it takes a lifetime of listening to work out the first phrase and a lifetime is too short to read the nature book which is why the first bards for colleges. It’s a secret : you don’t interpret dreams, you interpolate them.

from below the heavy cathedral walls levitate as fish people bait hooks with bread, feeling their loneliness a blessing. We must be ready ,, when the Fish comes … the warped and rolling eagle flies against a pastoral background to the birthplace of a tiresome japanese warlord. The problem of time-enforcement is dissolved in the theme of paralepsis (a genus of barracudinas) in order to rule out the rule : everything that is important is an exception, a singular event.

his feet. At least he was wearing a pair of slippers. The slip of smooth sand, white under the inky gem-studded darkness ,, I will spend my days polishing a tentative prayerbook where nothing is guaranteed. The risk, the peril of the fisherman is that the wicker basket only floats by once every thousand years , if you are caught sleeping … He would have to get into both sky and water , waves rolled cutting diagonals along the gently sloped strand. The translation was done in various styles, to be recycled, reduced, and reused. Searching for some proper shoes, fortunately, a pair tumbled on the sands, released from the sea’s grasp. Boots! / I do not propose to publish … Perhaps, as they say, did he not publish because he wasn’t interested, it may be true ; perhaps he wrote for himself, maybe he had moments where he wanted to publish, but maybe also, after all, he thought that his works would not be famous (so what !!), he passed on fame (he laid low) who wants to live forever ?? ,, that’s all. Why he couldn’t have done better, I don’t know. But we are waiting for something very good to come from him…

He had difficulties in gathering material, with organizing ,, imposing form. He preferred writing to novelization. I never asked him : “Do you have something to publish? Why don’t you publish?” These aren’t the sort of questions one asks, it is terrible to hear yourself asked a question like that, especially from someone who hasn’t already shown some interest and even asked you : “What are you working on?”

[12.viii.23.b / #NL001AA] Albums like David Bowie’s Station to Station and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk … I remember the part, Rodrigo told me about it … my uncle, for Christmas (sometime in the 80s) gave me Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, the vinyl LP. And I didn’t know why he would have given me this album. I didn’t like Fleetwood Mac. Didn’t want to like them. I was probably twelve or thirteen years old, before I had a car. I didn’t even bother listening, never took the cellophane off the album cover. Why? Ignorance. I’d probably have done the same with Bowie’s Station to Station since I arrived at Bowie later in life (though I’m in the process of reinventing my unearthly childhood, so Bowie will probably replace the Beatles as the most formative musical influence. He wrote me: “... about Bowie, whose capacity to reinvent himself and to rob/mutate and collage/cut-up things—like his ever so Philip-K.-Dickian Major Tom in that song that leaned so heavily on 2001: A Space Odyssey …” & “... Bowie prophesied that the Internet was going to change everything, that it would have ‘exhilarating and terrifying’ effects and that it wasn’t a tool, it was an alien life form.” Yes Virginia, there is life on Mars. The question is whether the internet is a Novaform or an Omegaform: the internet is waking up in our reality, defining itself ,;, the internet has been colonized, do we cut the cord or fight … no, fighting never works, they want us to fight, violence they understand.

[20.x.23.b / #NL001AA] Her name was Orchid, Orchid Black ,, you might say that it was love at first sight, but this was before we woke up on the Space Ark and being too young for such post-pubescent recreations, I saved my love-at-first-sightness for Tabitha of the 100 Letters. Still I chased Orchid and she chased with me. We spent the summer at the pool, going underwater to see who could hold their breath for longer. / I’d intended to write a memoir, not to remember what happened, but so that it could always happen in different ways ,,, so I will write 100 memoirs et plus !! I could tell you a thousand different stories , sure there are some recurring themes, some familiar faces, and a line or two you’ll recognize from the chorus of a smash single by an 80s one-hit-wonder band : yes, Orchid, you are my obsession ,, who did you really want me to be?         If I could be Doctor Kronick, I’d want you to be my Nurse Blunt. I won’t tell you why this or why that : mine’s not to explain why, why, why, okay? (Take me to Galaxy 4 ,, a first request. / I disagree with the premise that beauty can be equated with virtue. Just ask Bob the (working-class) Enchanter , Tim’s brother.)

She knew all the escape routes. We would leave notes for each other, hidden in the pages of books. Once I tried to kiss her. She put her finger on my lips and said : “I’m not Tabitha.” / When I was in the sixth grade (this is was in March of 198—, after my father gave me my first writing machine for my 11th birthday ,, a countdown : ?), I typed one of our adventures and offered the typescript to Orchid as a present. This is the beginning of our alphabet adventures together, I said.

The Golden Apple

It’s no use searching the archive, you won’t find it. Not in time, not before the countdown is complete : 26 minutes … Tabitha couldn’t see Orchid. Why can’t she see you? She only has eyes for you. In the typescript annals of the alphabet adventures, Tabitha was the daughter of a professor of ancient Greek. The two of them had booked passage on a starliner bound for the outer quadrant. Something terrible happened : maybe a mutiny or perhaps a criminal mastermind had hijacked the starliner … the father and daughter were able to escape in a lifepod with five other passengers and a crew member. As with all such stories, the lifepod touched down on a desolate, but habitable planet with a breathable atmosphere and a gravitational pull almost equivalent to earth despite the fact the planet was half the diameter and was in orbit about a Brown Dwarf which cast a diabolical blood-orange light on the planet’s surface. At first, the refugees thought the planet was uninhabited, but in time they discovered they shared the planet with a species of spectral insect. Supplies were running low. Everyone realized that if they weren’t rescued soon, they would all die.

Our arrival on XZY-777, for that is what the planet was called in the official star charts of the Fourth Star Empire, was met with a combination of surprise, hope, and mystification. The group thought my brain was addled since they could neither see nor hear Orchid. She’s a time-sensitive lifeform, I explained, but they assumed mine was an overactive imagination. The stock explanation was that I had also been a passenger on the starliner and had crashed like them on the planet with a license plate number for a name.

— How far away is your lifepod? asked Gorda Tavik, the self-appointed leader of the band.

— There is no lifepod, I said. I came by the Road.

— What road is that?

— The Lost one.

I tried to explain to them that I was a schoolboy from Oklahoma and that there were portals to other worlds in secret parts of the public library, if you just knew how to find them.

— The lifepod can’t be far, said Gorda Tavik. How many others were on your pod?

— It’s just me and Orchid.