The Subtopian Issue Fourteen by The Subtopian

The Adventures of Vernon Q. Public by Eric Suhem

Subtopian Manifesto XIV. by Trevor D. Richardson I always save this little passage for the very last when we put together each issue of Subtopian. I do that because I like to take one last look around, kind of walk the decks and see what we’re all about. This month has left me with one singular thought: the system is the way it is because of us. I honestly had never really considered it until now. It’s just so much easier to blame “Them” or “The Man,” something bigger than you, something amorphous, faceless and easily scapegoated. But the truth is that things are only as bad as we let them be and that, in large part, our leaders tell us what we want to hear so that they can ensure we will continue to follow and support them. So the real issue is, we are wrong, as a people, because what we want to hear is wrong, what we are requiring of our leadership in order to maintain their position and votes and elections and all that crap is wrong. Change will only come from one place, the interior of the American people, the heart and soul of the citizenry. Our traditions are dated, our attitudes are selfish, and our values are bigoted, amoral, and short-sighted. We need to learn a thousand lessons before we even have a hope of judging the men writing the laws in this country. We’re the system, we’re the angry mob, we’re the problem, and only we can fix it. It’s a hard thought to hear and one that is new to me since starting this magazine, but it’s something we should all be considering. Not “damn the man,” but “How am I to blame?”

Be on the lookout for Subtopian Press’ upcoming release of

Collaborating with Angels Rob Lee’s photo-memoir

Summer 2013

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Colorado and Super Sunday

There is no better day to travel by car than Super Bowl Sunday. I had Hwy. 101 almost to myself from Santa Rosa to Crescent City. Eureka was deserted and the only restaurant I could find open was Big Louie’s Pizzeria, where, yep, a crowd was gathered watching the game. While driving I idly wondered about the (few) other people on the road. Patriotism has been woven more deeply into pro sports in recent times. Watching the World Series, I noticed that the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning is no longer enough. Now they were stopping the game in the middle so someone could sing God Bless America. No president fails to end a major speech any more by saying “...And may God Bless the United States of America...” Is that a rule, to say that? Does this mean God has not blessed the USA already? Doesn’t American exceptionalism rest at least partly on the notion that God is On Our Side? Why then are we still fervently begging this favor of the almighty? And why are we doing it at professional sports events? More to the point, is ignoring the Super Bowl unpatriotic? What anarchy might lurk in the hearts of my fellow motorists on this day of national reverence and glory? A grocery store in Canyonville Oregon: 9 deer heads on the wall along with a collection of stuffed whole dead animals. Raccoon, lynx, mountain lion, a couple different kinds of large birds. Of four women working in the place, only one of them is not obese. Is there a conclusion or inference to be drawn here? 1

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I’d never been to Colorado and never would have suspected I might go there for a date with a woman. Nevertheless I did this. Denver is an odd city, seemingly plopped down from nowhere in a flat, kind of bleak plain east of the mountains. Something about the place is not cohesive. One can see the mountain range to the west across a broad empty plain. Vegetation on the hills near the city looks sparse and malnourished, and I’m told that’s because even here we are near the timberline. Coming from sea level, I had the impression that there wasn’t enough air in the air. This must be why it’s recommended for newcomers to drink lots of water - a source of oxygen. There is, as in all American cities, some appalling architecture, where one would expect to find it, in the area around the convention center. A few of these monuments to architects’ egos even manage to visually get in each other’s way and I found a bit of satisfaction in this. If Denver has any cultural identity I did not sense it. There is an area where homeless people gather, and why they aren’t on the highway south with their thumbs out is a mystery to me. On the approach to the airport, there a sculpture of a horse, life-size or maybe bigger, in what would otherwise look like a vacant lot. The horse is weird and quite the local controversy. A movement is afoot to have it removed. It’s popularly called the Demon Horse and it does look pretty nasty. It’s blue, reared up on its hind legs. The mane is formed in horn-like segments and the horse has glowing red eyes. Strangest of all is that the sculpture fell on the artist and killed him. Our date took us to a hotel in Golden, a fake town with the usual tourist-oriented businesses except for the Coors brewery, which looks like an oil refinery. It was too cold to explore the town much, but if there are any good restaurants, it would be news to me. Everyone in Golden looks like John Denver. But on this day, all the John Denvers were dressed in Bronco orange because the playoff game to see who went to the Super Bowl was on. It’s hard to escape this stuff sometimes.

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the 99% are listened to each other, and they camped in determined areas to try to put a stop to social injustice. It’s an admirable thing and, sadly, it didn’t little more than inspire us. The Egyptian government fell, but it descended into military control. One giant leap backwards for occupiers everywhere. The Occupy movement in America was effectively dismantled and the 99% are still the 99%.

Do you remember that Occupy thing? It was almost two years ago that it started and, in some ways, it is still going on. It was, in no small terms, a movement of disenfranchised Americans, largely middle class workers and lower income types, speaking out against the tyranny of a perceived group, the wealthy elite in this country. They came together in protest gatherings, encampments, and via social media to try to make a difference, to get heard, and force the change they wanted into a reality. Do you remember Tunisia? Egypt? The same thing. People, normal people just like us, rose up through peaceful assembly to try to make

Well, it’s happening again. This time it’s going down in Canada and they’re calling it Idle No More. And, like before, it’s organized, admirable, and important. A leadership quickly developed following the hunger strike of

a difference. A leadership developed, people 33

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Rachael Johnson, the founder and writer of this particular regular feature in Subtopian, has moved on to new challenges and has, to use a familiar comic book expression, hung up the cowl. But the mission continues and the search for a replacement will likely be long, difficult, and bittersweet. Her insight was as keen as her journalistic sense for story and it seems to me that if she were here writing today she would have something important to say about the recent shootings. I guess, like so many heroes hanging up the cape, the responsibility falls to the next in line, the one nearest by, someone fighting the fight beside them. The cowl goes to me until we can find a suitable replacement.

still the 99% Theresa Spence, the Chief of the Attawakpiskat tribe and gelled rapidly via social networking. The issue had to do with the government of Canada trying to rephrase the treaty agreements with their Aboriginal people or “First Nations.” Without getting into the legislative nuances, it pretty much boiled down to the bureaucracy trying to require First Nations to get majority approval from the government before leasing out there land to businesses, malls, casinos, etc. In other words, though the land is supposed to belong to the First Nations, it was being regulated from the outside and that is not cool. So Idle No More developed and I hope, in this case, that history doesn’t repeat itself. I hope

to see this thing go farther than just inspiring people or becoming interesting news. Just one I’d like to see some real, lasting change come from one of these occupy-style movements and, if anyone deserves it, I think it should be the First People. But why is it that these things always follow this same pattern? How did we get here? Does it just boil down to the powerful trying to get more power? Is it really that simple? In any of these cases, going back as far as the peace movements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi, you have the masses, the “common,” a large but abused population 44

regulars demanding justice from the powerful. Racism, sought a group of slaves in one form or another slavery, economy, labor strikes, women’s rights, since it’s inception you begin to see things much “no taxation without representation,” the plight differently. First there were the slaves from of native people, war protests... isn’t it all kind Africa, (and let’s not forget the migrant workers of the same thing? The people with power do from China and the natives forced to work under more than just subjugate the weak, they feed on the boot heel of soldiers and churches alike), them. They use people like you or I as fuel for then, once Emancipation went down, the roles whatever kind of fires they’re burning. They were relatively unchanged. You couldn’t own use racial inequality, gender division, land slaves anymore, but those slaves needed work ownership, taxation, or whatever else they can and many of them found themselves working get their hands on as a means of enforcing a for the same people as before, only for a little stable labor force. That’s all it’s ever come meager salary and a corner of the property to down to. Nations require slaves and, in one live on as long as they kept working. The point form or another, the powerful find a way to turn is, the need for employment kept slaves working us into just that. We have to work if we want to eat, if we want to have a family, a home... all that stuff. How is that any different than a whip cracking on your back or a group of white men crossing an ocean and telling you they own you now? The threat is the same: you have no choice, serve or die. We are not free, maybe no one ever has been. And any attempt to change that has, in large part, merely shifted the trials onto someone else, some other group or demographic. I want you to consider a different perspective on the Occupy Movement. See, in

their same roles and, except for the moneychanging side of things, the roles were not too different. So then we have the Civil Rights Movement in all its different forms, not just racial equality, but gender equality, and much more. And what happened? People got day jobs, but they were entry level, low-paying, crap jobs with little promise of working their way up. This went for African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, and much more. Now, time has gone on and the market is supposed to be more equal than ever. So who are the new slaves? The young. The people that are required to go to college if they have a prayer of

the cases of Egypt, Tunisia, and this Idle No More thing you have a civilization fighting the injustice of their ruling party. But America’s movement was different and, for that reason, I think a lot of people shrugged it off as a “phase.” America’s movement was mostly young people who were, in effect, attempting to stick it to the man. The youthfulness of the movement and the lack of a clearly defined goal made it seem like a flight, a fickle movement that was following an international trend. However, if you consider that America has

a higher income than their peers, that go to said college and drive up massive debt, who then graduate with no real promise of employment because, duh, there’s a recession, suddenly find themselves in a hole they have to dig their way out of and they take whatever work they can get – service industry, construction, you name it. They work because they have to. The promise of glory after college and the corruption of an over-priced education line the pockets of the leadership while putting an entire generation into a position of servitude 55

regulars that “all men are created equal.” In other with no visible way out other than to work. In words, we’re stuck on repeat because we aren’t other words, the young are the new slaves and changing. We’re just shifting the responsibility the Occupy Movement wasn’t just a bunch of to a different people group, a different economic hippies trying to get out of work. It was the class, or a different generation. I guess what newest disenfranchised population rising up in I’m trying to say is that a free market isn’t free the manner of their predecessors. for everyone and it won’t be as long as our dream of freedom is the individuals right to be a Here’s the point. These movements are all the same because they are all symptomatic of king. Kings build kingdoms on the shoulders of slaves, always have, always will, and still are. this problem I am attempting to illustrate. The It’s time we realize America and the free world pattern of our civilization favors the few rather than the whole. That pattern requires poverty in doesn’t need kings, it needs families. Otherwise we’ll be stuck in this loop forever. pp some in order to allow for affluence in others. That pattern requires servitude in order to allow for masters. It requires failure in order to allow for success. There are jobs to be done that no one would willingly choose, but the disproportionate nature of our society ensures that someone, with no other options and with a lot of unfulfilled dreams, will see it done. The fact is, there will always be injustice and these movements against injustice so long as we live in a world built on attaining personal wealth. If that is the goal then there will be those who achieve it to the point of absurdity and there will be those who miss it to the point of tragedy. We are an imbalanced society, taking advantage where we can and turning a blind eye to the

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Arthur to

Brand

know

d o e s n ’t

anything

about

want him.

you He

believes strongly in the power of people as individuals and has zero faith in the power of people in large groups. He is suspicious often, angry a l w a y s , a n d d u m b f o u n d e d re g u l a r l y. He dreams of a free America and h a s n ’t

consequences. The Idle No More people are standing up for what they were promised and, like everyone that has come before them, the argument is simple: these things are ours by rights and you wish to change them so you can earn more, have more, and control us more assuredly. The voice of Idle No More saying the treaty grants First Nations the right to live how they choose is no difference than MLK saying we must live out the true meaning of our creed, 66

seen

his

lifetime.

I never set out to create a vernacular for myself or my work. What I mean is, the great ones had their own dictionary to pull from. Thompson had “the doomed” and “failed seekers,” Generation of Swine...fear and loathing. There is a tone to his work, a set of words he recycles throughout. Vonnegut had his favored tagline, “So it goes.” These men, greater men than me, created a contextual tapestry that they draped over their worlds like Joseph’s coat of many colors and it worked. Really well. But my point, lest I wander down a rabbit track of my own euphoric memories of favorite written words and the men that penned them, is that I am in danger of letting “Culture of Hate” become my go-to phrase – my “fear and loathing.” A few issues back I wrote a piece simply titled “Culture of Hate” and it was about my personal observation that society is growing increasingly angry, disjointed, unneighborly, and petty. I have always maintained that all you ever need to know about society can be experienced on the road. Just take a drive, you’ll see it all. The richpoor dynamic, the influence of environment over culture, the power of major throughways and trade routes on small town America... but on a more philosophical level, you can see human behavior 79

distilled to a fine napalm. We cut each other off in traffic without thought, apology, or consequence. We shout insults and hate speech from the cab of our car, impotently going unheard and unresolved. We speed, dramatically, aggressively, just to get ahead of our neighbors on the road, less because we’re in a hurry than a simple urge to be at the front of the pack. Then we slow down. These attitudes are indicative of the climate of our culture – a get all and get it quick mentality, and at the expense of anyone. That is what Hate Culture is, it is a cloud of selfishness, a habit of meanness, that we live in and have lived in so long we no longer even notice it. Moreover, the longer we’re in it the worse we get. It assimilates us, reassembling our personalities until we are one homogenized functional organism that only lives to efficiently ensure the timely arrival of each of its parts at their designated stations. Only it is worse than even that. If we were able to coldly see each other as cogs in the machine, bees in the hive, cells in a body – pick an analogy – we would, in a sense, be able to value each other as part of this vast American creature. There is a necessity in the machine that makes each of its parts important and necessary, and in that we might be able to see each other as important and, therefore, not in the way. However, we don’t do that. Look around you on your way home from work today, look at the faces, the behavior of the vehicles around you and the people within them. Everyone thinks everyone else is in their way. Everyone on that road, in this culture, wants everyone else to fall off the face of the earth. And the reason? We’re in a hurry. I gotta get to work NOW. I need to be home NOW. I need to get to the store ASAP! Everywhere we go we are in a huge rush to get from Point A to Point B and everything around us is an obstacle. Time is always running out and it is always everyone else’s fault. This is the foundation of Hate Culture. Despite the fact that our way of life has turned all of us into frenetic bees in a hive and this makes us less than human, behaviorally and intellectually, we still manage to be self-absorbed. To the individual, they are the queen bee and the drones are in her way. They are the pilot of the ship and the mechanical workings of the thing are not to their liking. Everyone manages to be an extra in the story while deluding themselves into thinking they are in the lead role. So, let’s look at this issue like it’s an engine. In an automobile you have thousands of working parts but each of them serves to enable one basic function: combustion. Fire creates energy which creates motion and the whole thing moves forward. In Hate Culture there is a similar effect taking place. In that machine you have millions of parts, but each of them are creating their own kind of combustion. Instead of spark plus fuel creating fire you have itinerant living plus self-importance creating...well, fire. Basically. Each part is in a big fat stupid rush to do its job and the belief that its job is more important than the others creates an incendiary way of life. We are always mad. We hate each other. We see one another on the street or in stores and it is all we can do to simply ignore each other, but inside we boil with pride and rage and superiority and judgment and dissatisfaction and the desire to eliminate the crowd, the competition, the human clutter. But let’s take this engine apart, let’s see what makes it tick. The fuel for this fire is obviously the way we live in competition with each other, but why is that? How did we get here? Didn’t there used to be a time when Americans cared for each other? I’ve seen it in movies, is it a lie? People would talk to their neighbors, they knew the people in their community, they would care about the repercussions of things and they knew what was happening and why. You talked to your mailman back then. You went to town hall meetings. You bought local, not because it was a cause, but because that’s what was there. The point, people, is that one component in the mechanics of Hate Culture is we no longer connect as a people. 8

Following this train of thought, the next question is why.

Easy: we don’t need each other anymore.

Haven’t you thought about it before? No? Well, I have. When things are fine we are a welloiled machine, albeit a chaotic machine, but still a machine. We have a routine, we know the rules, we show up where we belong when we belong there and that is about all there is to it. But when things get disrupted, when a disaster takes place or there is some kind of calamity, you see people stop acting like a part of that machine and act like the mythic good neighbors of yesteryear. You’ve all seen it before. I know you have, you’ve probably talked about it over coffee or beer or smoke. You say things like, “Dude, why is it that people are only decent and real when things are really shitty?”

But you never find the answer. You just say, “That sucks, man. I wish it weren’t like that.”

Well, here’s the truth, the plain, simple, easy to grasp, tangible truth of the thing. Hate Culture is the culture of being busy AND being self-reliant. Technology, money, employment, transportation – all of these things make it so that you don’t need anyone to complete the day-to-day ministrations of your life. In the current system you could conceivably go through your entire day without ever dealing with a single human being. You pay your bills online, you get in your car and go from one place to the next, you buy your supplies at the store and go through a self checkout lane, you go home and decide, on your own terms via Netflix or OnDemand, what entertainment you will watch, and any questions you have are easily unraveled via Google in the palm of your hand via your smart phone. And any problem you have can almost always be solved with “We have an app for that.” Don’t misunderstand. I am not anti-technology, I’m not a Luddite or anything. I simply mean that The Mechanics of Hate Culture is most easily supported by the fact that technology removes the necessity for community. I want you to really hear that, folks. Technology removes the necessity of having people in your life. This makes it so much easier to see people as a hindrance, an obstacle, rather than a support system. Which, furthermore, means that our cars, phones, internet, job market, competitive economy... all of it, is a well-crafted system that removes the humanity from society. Period. So, why is it that people are only decent to each other during times of tragedy? Because that’s the only time they need each other. That’s it. Hate Culture moves in during the quiet moments of peacetime, when we are all in a hurry to busy ourselves with the petty minutia of day-to-day life. Still, as galling a realization as this may be, there is still more. What we are talking about here is itinerant living. Making your life about the little parts rather than some grander, or even simpler, purpose. You could call this the “career mentality,” but I believe that the career mentality is actually symptomatic of a larger issue: we simply have become so inured with the system that we see nothing else. We have become complacent in the luxury of technology and the comfort of belonging to a job and a household and a taxable working class that we have forgotten the simple truth that we work to sustain life, not the other way around. Work isn’t the goal, it is the means to holding up the goal of a full life lived in love, community, and the quiet enjoyment of time. But there is an uncertainty in the abstractions of living your life and we have, in a sense, thrown all of that out in favor of having structure for every moment of our day and, in that structure, that schedule, we have certainty. Which is, in the end, all about control.

In our desire to have control of your time and your destiny, ironically, we have relinquished control of our spirit in exchange for our function. Life, therefore, has become about sustaining work. We are servants to money where, once upon a time, money was there to serve us. And this leads me to my next point on the topic of itinerant living: finances. Because money is tangible it offers us the ability to see, mathematically, how well we are doing. It offers the illusion of accomplishment and it comes with the promise of security. More than that, there is the allure of affluence. If you work hard, do your job, and are smart with your money you can have everything you ever dreamed of... or so they say. Add these things together and it is really easy to see how the once proud spirit of the human race has been subjugated by a lifestyle of cold function. We live the itinerant lifestyle because we are slaves to money. There are many types of financial structures in the world and all of them, in some way, contribute to the global economy. Ours in America, like other parts of the world, is designated as a “free market system.” We like that because it has “free” in the title and that makes it sound like it has something to do with Democracy. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Americans now associate free enterprise with Democracy even more than the rule of voter majority or representative government. Which could explain, quantitatively, why so many people get so radically uptight when you say the word “socialism” in regards to economy. The notion of abandoning free enterprise for socialistic philosophies, if you think of free enterprise as synonymous with “American Democracy,” is no different, to these sorts of people, than saying, “Let’s get rid of freedom.” Which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Here’s why... In a free market system we are all in direct competition with each other. There is a finite amount of money to be made and that means that every dollar I’m earning is a dollar someone else didn’t get. This, as much as technology, divides us from each other as a people and contributes directly to Hate Culture. Remember that analogy of the road? This attitude of needing to pass each other, no matter how recklessly, just to lead the pack is indicative of how we see each other in this nation. We’re racing and if we lose we die. If we lose the race we lose our homes, our families, our dignity, our pride and, I daresay, our freedom. This unwavering threat lives quietly, subtly unstated behind the veil of American “freedom” and “free enterprise.” If you stop contributing, stop earning, you will be trampled over like so much paved road. This means that the people that were once my neighbors in a bygone time are now my enemies. All of them. Isn’t that scary? But remember, we aren’t just talking about how our way of life divides us as people, that’s only part one of the combustion process – we were also talking about self-importance, the proclivity toward putting our needs ahead of those of others, as seen in the asshole shamelessly cutting you off in traffic and promptly slowing down. Let’s take a look at what we have on the table. Technology has made the necessity for community irrelevant. The promise of money, the American Dream, has made us thoughtless followers of the Dollar, mindless slaves dreaming of the promise of their own someday kingdom. And economy has put us at odds with each other in a way more chaotic and lonely than war. It’s every man for himself. So, with that in mind, it is not a great leap to declare that while we believe we are working toward our dreams and our hopes we are, as Hunter S. Thompson put it, “wired into a survival trip now.” Is it really any wonder why stress is such a common part of every day life? We are at war, alone, with everyone 10

around us every single hour of the day. You see enemies where you used to see upstanding members of a community. You look at people and, full of hate, see their flaws. You see their obesity and pimples, their pink, flushed faces and bad clothes, their slow, waddling gait in a crowd when all you want to do is get to the coffee shop before your lunch hour is up. You see obstacles, monsters, pointless aberrations where people used to stand. And why? Because you are living in a culture that says “survival of the fittest above all” and they seem unfit. Because, when all is said and done, our lifestyle has us fighting for that survival. Our survival instinct contributes directly to this attitude of self-absorption in America. It’s basically Maslow’s Hierarchy. You can’t think of others until your basic needs are met. Only, because we are constantly fighting for survival, our basic needs are never, ever met. Therefore, itinerant living plus self-important people equals an incendiary culture.

A Culture of Hate.

So what do we do? How do we change it? We have two choices: wait for that catastrophe that is so big that we need each other again for more than just one weekend of volunteering at the relief shelter for that tornado or this hurricane. I’m talking long term, essential human need. OR... we learn to build communities with each other and we do that in a way our esteemed head editor, Trevor D. Richardson, outlined in his article last month. Think smaller, not bigger. Globalization is not the right goal. Globalization divides people, on a large and small scale, and disassembles community. We need to look at building culture, movements, businesses even, on a small scale – a scale small enough that enables us to know the people involved personally because that is the only way we will ever truly value each other. It’s the only way to push back the Culture of Hate. pp

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David Renton is a church brat by heritage only. As a man he firmly believes in the importance of skepticism, mental and spiritual education without indoctrination, and is a conspiracy theorist only where the Catholic church is concerned. David is a struggling novelist and works a day job where he watches people treat retail workers like second class citizens and loses more faith in humanity by the day.

11 11

Omnibus, omnibus, write us a line of poetry up the long Dixon Road. See the squat business-park buildings with their concave driveways, their sad shrub rows swaddled in canvas. Look. All the windows here come tinted, like eyes with no souls. Watch a falling plane draw a straight line to the nearby airport. Its fuselage is so low you can see the winter sun ripple off its tailfin, as if sending you a message in code. See Bentley Warhol excreted to the sidewalk through your great hydraulic farting. Oh omnibus, watch him hopscotch over the sidewalk’s treachery, his hands entombed in his pockets and a grey hat on his head. He’s up to the gate as you pull away. He swipes into the building, clop-clops to the basement. It’s Fresh Hell Tuesday, and he knows it.

Fresh Hell was practically their corporate culture, and it seemed to always (and inexplicably) arrive on 13

a Tuesday. The most benign Fresh Hell Tuesday simply involved a name change. They had been known for weeks now as VWT Enterprises, which was far better than their previous moniker, Darkside VWT, which made them sound like video game programmers. Before that they were known as WW-VWT, the WW (apparently) standing for “Wild West.” But Bentley had also been through other, more malevolent Fresh Hell Tuesdays—the mass layoffs, the senior managers vanishing, the new protocols, the new strategies that seeped into the office firmament like gas. But even he was alarmed that Tuesday morning when Management came bounding down the aisles with shoeboxes full of thumb drives. “Everyone put these into your computers—now!”

-Seriously?

-What the hell?

-I’m right in the middle of a—

“Do it, people. Don’t argue with us.”

Management worked the room, passing out the small, colourful rectangles like licorice allsorts to each

headsetted employee. Bentley accepted this Eucharist from a fat, middle-aged supervisor named Phil. Phil, who wore the same style of golf shirt every day to cover his big grey gut. Phil, who didn’t even speak dev—he was just a project manager. He wouldn’t know his object code from an in-line CSS.

“Are we still taking calls?” Bentley asked.

Instead of answering him, Phil answered the entire room. “Yes, please continue to work the phones. You

are not on a break here, people. I repeat: you are not on a break.”

Bentley swiveled around to his small desk. The hesitation he felt was ancient, hardwired into his bones.

You don’t introduce a foreign object to your machine; it’s a rookie mistake. But the bosses were watching. So Bentley snapped the thumb drive into one of his computer’s USB ports, then released the button on his phone to allow an incoming call. His computer’s hard drive began to whirr and grind, and Bentley thought of ripping the device out. But then a tone filled his headset, followed by the crackle of a new call.

“Virus, Worm or Trojan?” he asked the caller by rote.

“Yeah, Worm,” the caller replied, his voice carrying a thick Ukrainian accent. “I am trying to implement

the WaxOnWaxOff.exe and the buffer won’t overflow.”

“Are you compromising port 314 or port 352?”

“The 352 on Windows 11. Look, I paid you guys $8,000 for this worm and I need it to work.”

“Okay sir, no problem. We’ll figure out what’s going on.”

Meanwhile, the hard drive below him continued its whirling drone, like a washing machine on spin.

In fact, the call centre’s air had grown thick with this melodious whine as each computer inhaled whatever 14

the thumb drive was installing. Bentley looked over the low walls of his cubicle to where Management had gathered near a bank of offices on the far side of the room. The shoeboxes were empty now and Management held them at weird angles as they put their hands on their hips. The panic was receding from their cheeks and they appeared almost smug as they spoke in low tones, proud of themselves for distributing the thumb drives so efficiently.

Bentley sent his caller a LiveMeeting request over icq so he could share his desktop. He would get to

the bottom of the kid’s problem. The hard drive chugged and chugged, then suddenly stopped. A small pop-up window appeared. Installation complete. Bentley had no choice but to click Okay.

Sing to me of commuter highways, the ravine’s varicose blight. Let those exits drain us like water into vast ceaseless suburbs. See the abandoned Catholic churches, the market research buildings, the government torture chambers with their ball-gags and Skinner Box maneuvers. I seek you, hulking apartment complex on the horizon, your one shade of grey. I seek you, elevator that takes me home. I seek you, I seek you—icq, the hacker’s instant message. The elevator opened directly into Bentley’s apartment, like a Lex Luthor lair. He arrived home to find his roommate, Redmond, sitting on the floor in front of the TV. He was eating garlic fingers out of a Styrofoam container and playing his favourite video game, Rape Her Now!, for PlayStation 5. Redmond, dead-eyed and acne scarred, would spend hours engrossed in the game instead of looking for work. Got a PhD? queried the console’s pop-up ads, which he ignored. Well, we’ll find you a job anyway! Redmond did have a PhD, in software engineering, and his hacking skills put Bentley’s to shame. “Any calls?” Bentley asked as he threw his keys onto the counter, a metropolis of filthy dishes. “No,” Redmond replied without breaking his concentration. One hand left the controller to raise the garlic fingers off the floor. “You want some?” Bentley could see that the cup of white dipping sauce had spilled, dousing the fingers in a sticky mess, so he said no thanks. Redmond dropped the container suddenly, his hand flying back to the controller. “Oh I gotchu now, I gotchu!” Bentley hung up his coat and grey hat, went into his bedroom, grabbed the cordless phone from its charger and checked the screen. There was a voicemail message. He scrolled to the call display and saw his father’s Florida number at the top of the list. He stuck his head out the bedroom door. “Redmond, did my dad call?” 15

“Oh yeah. Your dad called.” “Jesus Redmond.” “Dude, I’m sorry. I told him to just call back and leave a voicemail.” His thumb was pounding the A button in an ardent, methodical rhythm. Bentley went back, settled onto the edge of his sagging air mattress, and dialed into the voicemail. He wondered whether his father would be in mid-sentence, as he often was, when the message kicked in. Message one. … and I wouldn’t have helped you pay for school, Bent, if I had known how you’d turn out. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? All those thousands wasted so you could be what? I mean, what the hell are you thinking? Anyway, call me. I’m back in Delray Beach now. You have the condo’s number. So call me back, you little shi— Message deleted. Bentley slipped the phone back into its charger; it chirped like a bird. He reached into his breast pocket and dug out the thumb drive he had smuggled out of the office. (Management had come around with the shoeboxes to collect them when the installations were complete, but Bentley purloined his and switched it out with a spare one he kept in his desk.) He took the device out to the living room. “Hey Redmond,” he said to the back of his roommate’s head, “if I gave you a thumb drive, do you think you could hack into it and tell me what’s on it?” “Sure. Just leave it on my desk.” “Okay. But be careful. It’s from work and I think there’s something really nasty on it.” But Redmond wasn’t listening. He was leaning in toward the TV screen. “Is that a nun? That’s a fucking nun! Oh baby, come … over … here …” ~ Oh preach to me, you pompous oracle, you winner of last century’s lottery. Go on, tell us how we should live—those of us trapped inside the economy’s stalled clock, those who rolled generational snake eyes. Bentley thought: Dad’s money hadn’t even been that much. Not nearly enough to cover tuition. The old man had once bragged that his own undergrad education had cost a grand total of $2,600, and this slow-dripped a resentment through Bentley’s entire academic career. So why was the geezer so surprised by how Bentley had paid for school? He rustled up more than a few botnets to sell to the highest bidders, and did some credit card skimming on the side. Sure it was illicit, but so what? Lots of kids did illicit things to mitigate their student loans. How many hot chicks had he known during school who had worked in strip clubs or brothels to pay for their 16

communications degrees? (Bentley had once taken a communications course but dropped out after it became clear the prof was going to make them read stuff.) If hot chicks had it, they flaunted it for cash. What was the difference, if you a geek with the right technical skills? And besides: it all landed him a job in the end, didn’t it? He thought about this on his long snowy commute, and at his desk as he took the first call of an evening shift. “Virus, Worm or Trojan?” “Yeah, Virus. Uh, my name is TroyBoy223. Look, I bought your CardSharker 6.1 about a month ago. It worked great, but I’m having trouble getting in to the access files.” The kid had a Southern accent, maybe Texas or Alabama. “What seems to be the problem, TroyBoy223?” “I dunno. It just won’t let me in. Look, I need to get at those numbers. The gov’mint is gonna make me pay back my entire student loan in—” The guy paused, presumably to look at his watch. “—in exactly three and a half hours. If I don’t get at those numbers, I am seriously fucked.” “Are we talking dumps and wholes here?” Bentley asked, meaning both credit card numbers and their PINs. “No, we’re talking CVV2s,” he replied, meaning full card information including expiration date and the security code on the back. “That’s double encryption, my friend. This is serious bidniss. You gotta help me out here.” “No worries. I’m gonna send you something over icq and we’ll figure out what’s going on.” As Bentley opened up CardSharker and transferred over his client’s temporary files, he noticed something strange. His computer seemed to be a half beat slower than usual. It was barely perceptible, but each command he made was followed by a slight, sticky pause and a quick flicker of his hard drive’s light. The call centre always had the fastest machines; it was a prerequisite of the job. But now Bentley’s computer had to think for a half-second before executing a command. He was convinced this had something to do with the thumb drive installation from the previous day. It had clearly put something on their machines to gum them up. Redmond hadn’t yet hacked into the device. Bentley would have to remind him about it. He finished uploading a new program, TrackFactor, to his client’s system and flushed out the older script he was using to get into the access files. “Now clear your cache and see if that worked,” Bentley told him. There was a long pause on the line, but then TroyBoy223 let out a whoop. “Bingo! I’m in. Ohh, thank you so much. You guys are the best!” “Hey, glad I could help. Call us back any time.” 17

“Will do.” Later, another member of Management strolled by Bentley’s desk while he was between calls. It was Graham, the senior operations manager. A tall guy, nearly as old as Phil, with hair in permanent waves and the thinnest eyewear perched on his blunt, technocratic nose. Bentley had never seen Graham smile, frown, laugh or shout. He always spoke with the same neutral lilt, like an android. “We were listening in on your CardSharker call from earlier,” he said to Bentley. “Great job. Nice customer service. That’s what we like to see.” “Thanks.” “Are you able to come off calls in about an hour or so? We have a client launching a DDOS attack on Home Depot’s website and we need some technical support.” “These script kiddies or the real deal?” “No, they’re for real. Their botnet’s about 150,000 strong. We want you to monitor the eastern Russian part of it for them.” “Okay, no problem.” “Thank you so much, Bentley.” “Oh, and Graham?” He turned back. “Yeah?” “My computer’s a bit logy today. Do you know what’s going on?” Graham’s lips pursed into a brief O, the closest he ever came to showing emotion. “I think a few other people were complaining about sluggish machines. We’ll have to look into it after you guys leave for the night.” “Does it have anything to do with that installation we—” “I said we’ll look into it, Bentley.” ~

Message one. … it was all about self-reliance, Bent. That’s what I’m talking about. We left you alone so you could stand on your own two feet. It’s what your puppa did for me, and I did it for you. But this is how you turn out? Really? I’d like to say to hell with you, Bent, but you’re my son. You hear me? Look, we need to talk. I have a golf game in about an hour, but I’ll be home later tonight. So call me. Let’s talk about how we can start turning your life arou— Message deleted. 18

Unleash yourself, oh code. Reveal to me your references, your sweet secrets in hypertext, your vast ciphers and endless rows of cryptography. Bentley disembarked from the elevator to find Redmond in the living room with three of his friends. They were gearing up for a Take Back the Night counterdemonstration. Their strange attire was an allusion Bentley didn’t get: They wore white jumpsuits tucked into big black boots, and had bowler hats squeezed onto their heads. Over his jumpsuit, Redmond was wearing his favourite tee-shirt, which read: NO MEANS buy her aNOther drink

Bentley kicked off his snowy boots and hung up his grey hat. He listened as the boys argued in fauxCockney accents about various new sex laws that the government had introduced. He went around to the coffee table and helped himself to the joint that was simmering in the ashtray. There were a couple of Bristol board placards propped on the couch—they read No means yes! Yes means anal! and Make rape a right!—and Bentley moved them aside so he could sit down. “Hey Redmond,” he asked when the conversation lulled, “did you get a chance to hack that thumb drive I gave you?” “Did I ever,” he replied, letting out a long, slow whistle and straddling the ottoman with his lanky limbs. “Man, there is some fucking crazy shit on that thing.” “What you mean?” “Well I didn’t parse the whole program, once I realized what it was. It’s total snoop, Bent.” “Really?” “Yep, and not just keystrokes and shit like that. This thing is malignant.” He took on a professorial air. “It can suck in whole quadrants of VoIP, instantaneously. It can suck in anything you upload to an FTP, even if it’s on a third-party server. You put a cat video on Facebook and this thing snags it and compresses it within three-seventeenths of a second. I’d have to download it to check its flow rates, but I ain’t putting that shit anywhere near my machine. I’ve never seen such an aggressive piece of snoopware.” “What the hell?” Bentley said. “They already put tons of snoop on our machines. I don’t get it.” “No offence, but I don’t think your company’s dev guys could cook this up. The code strings are too 19

complicated. It reeks of an outside job. An official job, if you know what I’m saying. I think your bosses might b—” Just then, the bathroom door off the living room banged open, and a fourth member of Redmond’s posse clambered out. It was Ken, whom Bentley referred to as the ‘learned’ one. He had a ring of black face paint around one eye and a huge rubbery codpiece over his jumpsuit. He pointed at its jelly-like mass with the cudgel in his hand. “Wait till their l’il glazzies get a load of these yarbles!” he bellowed, and the boys all laughed. Bentley didn’t get the reference. The phone rang. Bentley went to his bedroom to check the call display. When he saw that it was—yet again—his father calling from Florida, he let the voicemail get it. He came back out, looking to pick up his conversation with Redmond. But the boys were already piling into the elevator, pumping their placards and speaking their queer, tuneful argot. ~ Muscle memory is a powerful thing, with its marionette tugs on our limbs. Make no mistake: you are conditioned to be conditioned. But it seemed mild by comparison, when the next Fresh Hell Tuesday consisted of Management slapping down a new script for everyone to follow. Bentley read it over and was baffled—it seemed to instruct them to do exactly the opposite of what they had always been told to do. While Bentley never really believed it, the company had assured everyone it hired that its business was, more or less, legitimate. Still, there were things that employees were strongly encouraged not to say while on the phones: the job came with a lengthy list of restricted words and phrases. Now, it seemed, Management was ordering them to use these words and phrases as much as they could when on the phones. Bentley flagged down Phil as he walked by. “Is this for real?” he asked, lifting up the sheet of paper he found on his desk when he came in. “You actually want us to—” “It is, Bentley. Don’t argue with us. Just do it.” “But are you sure—” “Bentley. Just do it. Listen to me.” Phil steered his gut into Bentley’s cubicle. “You’re one of the more senior staff members now, so we expect some fucking buy-in when we introduce important changes to our business. It looks bad in front of junior staff if you’re throwing up resistance all the time.” “You don’t pay me like senior staff.” “Bentley.” Phil’s eyes widened, dragging his jowls upward. “Look, either you’re a team player or you’re not. But if you’re not, then there are plenty of guys on the street with your,” and he twiddled his fingers in the air, “qualifications who would be happy to have your job.” 20

Bentley pressed his lips together. “I’ll read the script,” he said. “Yeah,” Phil nodded maniacally. “You’ll read the fucking script.” Bentley swiveled back around as Phil ambled off, and took an incoming call. “Virus, Worm or Trojan?” “Yeah, I’m launching a DDOS attack.” Young guy. Late teens. American accent. “I mean, I mean, it was a worm, but I’m launching a DDOS. Seven different ports on Windows 11. But you gotta help—I think they’re fucking on to me!” “Wait, you’re …” Bentley looked at the script. Don’t say ‘compromise.’ Say ‘attack.’ “You’re attacking seven different ports?” “That’s right.” Fucking script kiddies, Bentley thought, shaking his head. “When did you download the …” The script said: Don’t say ‘product.’ Be specific. Say ‘malware.’ “… the malware from us?” “I don’t know—does it matter? Look man, I’ve got unidentified flow rates comin’ in hot. Could be CIA, could be NCFTA. They have my fucking IP address!” “Okay sir, I don’t want you to panic. I’m going to talk you through this.” “Where are you based?” the kid suddenly demanded, and then cut Bentley off before he could look at the script. “And don’t tell me Odessa, because I’m in fucking Odessa.” When asked your location, don’t say Odessa. Tell the truth. “I’m in Toronto, sir.” “Yeah? Well dig yourself out of your igloo and tell me how to pull the plug on this thing. The five-oh are practically at my door.” “Well sir, we can start by dismantling your VPN …” These kids today, Bentley thought as he worked. Can’t get their ducks in a row. Can’t see the little details right in front of them. ~ Message one. … and it’ll be a comeuppance, Bent. That’s a word you should teach yourself sometime. A great comeuppance is coming, but it’s not too late. So call me. Would you fucking call me? Again, you have the number here in Florida. So please call me as soon as you get th— Message deleted. ~ Dixon Road, oh Dixon Road, there is no poetry in a fleet of Shred-It trucks outside your employer’s 28 21

door. It was another snowy day, and he should have noticed there were no fresh tracks behind those Shred-It trucks in the parking lot. The fact that snow had climbed high around their tires meant that they had been there since at least the early morning, and this should have alarmed him. He went to the door to swipe himself in. His pass didn’t chirp, and he furrowed his brow at that. When he tugged on the handle, the door opened away. And that’s when the first eddy of panic swirled in his bloodstream. He paused at the top of the stairs but then descended anyway, not quite believing the doubts that numbed his bones and robbed his mouth of saliva. When he reached the bottom, he saw stacks of big blue tubs lined along the hallway wall. Like it was moving day. He walked to the glass door and saw there was no longer any nameplate there. Not VWT Enterprises, not Darkside VWT, nor any of the other names they had gone by. He knew he should have fled then. Knew it in his guts. But there was something reflexive in his movements now, a conditioning that took over his synapses, that made him pull open the glass door anyway. He was almost in a trance as he walked into the call centre and saw all the desks gone, all the computers. Happy fucking Tuesday. His coworkers were lined up along one wall with their backs to the room, Blair Witch style. He looked across the empty expanse to where Management had gathered at the other end. They were standing next to men in dark suits. Men who wore sun glasses, even inside. Phil stepped forward and took one of the dark-suited men by the arm. He had a clipboard in his hands. Phil raised a finger and pointed it directly at Bentley. That’s him, the gesture said. And the agent, whoever he was, passed his clipboard to Phil, and then rushed over to where Bentley was standing.

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Mark Sampson has published one novel, called Off Book, (Norwood Publishing, Halifax NS, 2007), and has a second, called Sad Peninsula, forthcoming from Dundurn Press, Toronto, in 2014. He has also published short stories and poems in literary journals across Canada, including PRISM international, The Nashwaak Review, The Puritan, and FreeFall magazine. Born and raised on Prince Edward Island, he currently lives and writes in Toronto.

dystopia

The prospect of writing about Dystopia in America grows more challenging with each passing issue. Not because it is hard to find something to write about, but because it is so damn challenging to pick one thing to focus on. There is another piece in this month’s issue entitled “Mechanics of Hate Culture,” by David Renton that talks a lot about Americans hating Americans and why. This idea reminded me a lot of the recent cop killer drama surrounding Christopher Dorner and the LAPD, the notion that violence begets violence, and also that desperation begets aggression – It’s Rent’s hate culture rearing its ugly head. Then I think about the divisions of our government during budget season, the partisan issues that come into play and interfere with action, the people fighting for one party or against another rather than leading us toward a destiny that is better for the nation – Hate culture again. I think about all of it, gun control, education, the hierarchy of failure that determines all of our roles in society... this whole goddamned confused country of ours and I feel like Rent’s story is beyond true, it borders on prophetic. Christopher Dorner sent out a rambling, borderline schizophrenic manifesto to multiple news media outlets prior to his killing spree and in it he detailed a childhood gripped by racism and fear, service to his country which led him to a career in law enforcement, and his time with the LAPD which brought him face-to-face with an attitude of violence, arrogance, and prejudice in his fellow officers. To hear him tell it, he wanted it to stop and, after pushing for change and getting knocked down for it, he responded like all desperate, afraid, and abandoned individuals in this country eventually do – he got violent in order to get heard. Now, I don’t want to go into this man’s story because everyone else has already done a way more thorough job than I feel like doing. I just want to say one thing and be done with it. Hatred in this nation gave this man an emotional repugnance to police brutality and racially derogatory attitudes from a young age. Hatred inspired the people around this man to kick their prisoners or slur racist remarks. Hate made the people who were wrong and called on the carpet for their wrong behavior to turn against the person who called them out on said carpet. Hate ruined Christopher Dorner, not only the hate in his own heart, but the hate that took away his livelihood, professional

and military benefits, pride and reputation. There comes a time when pressed hard enough that hate is all you have left and this man got there. But he didn’t just spew his misery into a bottle and become bitter like so many others, he responded violently, dramatically, and even had a vision of himself as some sort of avenging hero. And within his meandering manifesto he makes a point that stood out from everything else – he was able to get his arsenal of suppressors, expanded magazines, rounds, and automatic weapons without a background check and across state lines. He said there needed to be more regulation, people needed to be checking on what sort of monsters were arming themselves. When you look at his statement there really is only one conclusion to make: people don’t want to see their right to bear arms altered by government regulation so they can go hunting or whatever, it isn’t about that, you don’t need silencers and assault rifles for a Saturday in the wilderness, you need it for war. The only conclusion is that people want to keep their weapons unregulated so they can go to war. The debates in our government following the Sandy Hook shooting have grown louder since Dorner and the usual voices pandering back and forth amount to exactly one thing: the sensible voices saying enough is enough vs. the people that want to secure the vote of the not-so-sensible wanting to feel like their hatred is well-armed should the time come. But why? Why do those people want that? I think some of it is just an attitude of feeling like a tough guy, the way people buy big powerful trucks and only use them to drive to their office job and back. It’s kind of that old “compensating” argument, you know? Still, others seem just paranoid enough to think that if the government reduces our access to military hardware then we won’t be able to rise up and start the revolution (never mind the fact that this is already a ridiculous notion given the fact that no matter what you bought at your local sporting goods store you’d still be grossly outgunned by the tyrannical government you dream of toppling). Your “right to bear arms to secure against tyranny” kind of went out the window with the advent of the A-Bomb. Still, deeper than that, I think there are those that just like knowing they have the right and the power to gird themselves for war against their neighbors and that, I think, is the scariest part of all of this. When you see footage like Charlton Heston saying “You can pry this gun from my cold dead hands” the issue becomes 25

dystopia

incredibly clear. NRA types are putting the death of babies, police officers, and even American leaders up against their own right to kill people. Period. Dorner’s rant was revealing to me in this way. His statement about it being too easy (to the point of being pathetic) to get his weapons made me realize that the only reason things haven’t changed, the only reason people are still debating this tired issue, is because a certain cross-section of our population doesn’t care who dies as long as they get to keep their right to kill people – and do it efficiently and quickly. Joe Biden’s call for change on the gun control issue, the right wing resistance to that change, the division, as usual, between right and left, it all comes down to one thing. There are hateful people in America and those hateful people are voters. Those voters represent power. And the people that want to keep their power have no intention of going against their constituency, no matter what the moral implications might be. Change will never come from the top because the top is too busy pandering to the lobbyists and voters that are resistant to that change. My point is, if we are ever going to get a safer America it won’t happen in the White House, it will happen when Americans put aside the hate in their hearts and demand that we do a better job for the sake of our future, our children, and our posterity. This leads me to another angle on this political division. You’ve probably been hearing talk about the sequester. “Sequestration.” And the current gridlock that’s brought about. The White House has proposed radical cuts in the military budget and a tax increase on the rich. Which, in even more blunt terms, is basically saying, “We want to save money by trying to kill less people overseas and we want to earn some extra cash by asking that the wealthy in America actually start contributing.” There is intense resistance to this, of course, because the counter claim to this statement is basically, “We want to keep killing people so we can keep feeling safe and keep earning the profits of war, and we don’t want to pay taxes because that’s what poor people do.” The point is, this sucks. And the reason it sucks, to go back to Dave Renton’s words, is we are a hateful, violent nation and our entire infrastructure is built on that hate. Hatred of the enemy, hatred of “the man,” hatred of each other, hatred of the poor, hatred of the rich... We can’t move forward politically, financially, or even peacefully because all

of our legislation, thought processes, and motivations are based on hate, selfishness, greed, and fear. The only way to save America is to let these things go, but that would mean more dramatic change than we are prepared to make as a people. Hate is easier. It is more comfortable. And, I daresay, it even comes with its own kind of satisfaction. It can feel good to hate. It makes you feel powerful. It’s no wonder then that the power grab in this country is so mean, is it? Think on that. But one thing is certain, if we’re going to evade Dystopia we are going to have to start placing value on completely different things, otherwise our socalled national values will lead us straight to the gates of destruction. I mean, hell, they already have. Kids are dead, countries hate us, our economy is crippled, our government is gridlocked, the people are angry or apathetic, and there is only one thing at the center of it all – national bloodlust. We have to be better. We. You and me. You want to know where change begins? It’s when we start deciding as a people to be better and stop waiting for our leadership to do it for us. They’re in the business of telling us what we want to hear so we keep voting for them. So do the math. It means it’s time we start telling them different things or nothing’s gonna change. Change starts with us. We’re the system, so when we hate on the system, we’re really hating on ourselves. And, I’ll be damned, there’s that word again. pp

26 26

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Trip Markham believes that a r t w i l l save the world faster than sci e n c e . Art is the true he ritage of any c iv ilization and outlasts the scie n t i f i c achievments of any ancient cu l t u re . He is a student of art and lite r a t u re at the Univ e rsity of Te x a s .

27 13

Science, Nature, & the Dream of

Utopia by Trevor D. Richardson 2814

I promised myself I would never do this, but

UTOpia

University just printed off a replacement ear that is ready for transplantation.

I can’t help it this time around. My Utopia installment this issue is going to be inspired, hell, pretty much directly lifted from an image I saw posted on the Facebook page “I Fucking Love Science.” If you don’t follow them, you

You read that right. “Printed off.” Using a

should. It’s funny and cool. Anyhoo, there’s

combination of 3D printing technology and

an upcoming episode of “The Subtopian News,”

injections of living cells, they effectively

the podcast that I run with my brother, where

replicated – to use a “Trek” word – a new

we talk about how everything we know about a

human ear. It is an enormous leap forward in

Utopian society we’ve learned from Star Trek.

the fields of replacement body parts and tissue

One of those lessons is that technology doesn’t

regeneration and could mean a lot of advances

have to be a potential threat and harbinger of

in years to come that were formerly just the

Armageddon a la The Terminator, it can be a

stuff of science fiction. To sum up the magic

bonding force, a unifier that we greatly need

succinctly, 3D printing works by heaping

in today’s world. Technology can make the

up layer after layer to create a shape. In the

survival of our species easier to maintain and

instance of the replacement ear, a computer

allow us, as a whole, to focus on bigger and

rendering of the patient’s ear was made based

better challenges – to “boldly go” so to speak.

on the opposite ear and a mold was literally printed off. Once the mold was made it was

Anyway, the links I found from that Facebook

injected with some collagen and a side of cow

page are all sure signs of things looking up and,

cells to produce cartilage, after the cartilage is

possibly, even the advent of the Star Trek age.

prepared it gets steady injections of the patient’s DNA to make it a compatible transplant and

Number One:

voila! New ear. The entire process has taken several months, but the doctors involved seem

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/

confident that the time can be approved upon

scientists-create-new-ear_n_2728612.

after their first successful transplant. What

html?utm_hp_ref=technology

this means in terms of society and impact and all that good stuff? People that have suffered

Scientists from Cornell

from an accident or are born without ears – or 29

utopia possibly even other extremities in the future –

sends the signal to the muscle group to which

can have them replaced by functional, natural

the prosthetic is connected. When successful,

appearing transplants that are, essentially, their

say in a previous example, the thought to move

own body parts. We could be looking at the end

an arm sent the signal to the pectoral muscles

of days for birth defects, loss of limb, or even

in the patient’s chest and the arm moved.

skin grafts. Which leads us to...

Which is, of course, extremely cool, but we are already seeing the development of the next

Number Two on our list:

logical phase. Not only is the possibility of a functioning, articulating limb now possible, it

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-

is also able to offer the wearer a sense of touch.

and-tech/news/a-sensational-breakthrough-the-

We are not far from a day when loss of limb

first-bionic-hand-that-can-feel-8498622.html

will no longer be the traumatic, life-altering event that it is today.

The first bionic hand that gives the user a sense of touch is scheduled for transplantation.

The operation taking place later this year will be performed by Dr. Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The subject is an unnamed man in his 20s who lost part of his hand in an

Yes, Luke Skywalker’s replacement hand

accident. An early prototype of the hand has

after his run-in with Darth Vader is almost a

already been tested on a different individual

reality. The hand is not only functional and

who reported a prickling sensation in the bionic

aesthetically pleasing in the sense that it looks

hand and had the ability to grip things and

like a human hand, but it can also feel.

move all of the hands five fingers in what has to be the most life-like bionic hand to date. The

Recent developments in prosthetic technology

hand comes equipped with skin sensors which

has already achieved the bonding of robotic

feed information through the wiring to the

limbs and the human nervous system. In cases

nervous system. It will be attached to two of

where a limb is missing the wiring is simply

the larger nerves in the patient’s arm, the ulnar

attached to the next nearest nerve and the brain

and median, and should allow for even more

is remapped so that a thought to move the limb

physical sensations than the previous prototype. 30

UTOpia

supports our belief that dolphins copy another

Basically, this thing is really cool and we

animal’s signature whistle when they want

are witnessing science taking one immense

to reunite with that specific individual,” says

leap forward in both the fields of bionics and

Stephanie King of the University of St. Andrews

medicine.

Sea Mammal Research Unit, lead author on the study.

And finally... In other words, the dolphin goes around saying,

Number Three:

“Todd, Todd, Todd!” Then the others are like, “Todd? Yo, where’s Todd?” Yeah, they’re pretty

http://news.discovery.com/animals/whales-dolphins/

much just like us. The similarities become

dolphins-call-each-other-by-name-130219.htm

especially apparent if you know someone named Todd. Dude’s always wandering off.

Dolphins call each other by name.

So let’s put these things together. Why did I use According to a study published in Proceedings

this for this month’s “Utopia?”

of the Royal Society B. when dolphins become separated from their loved ones they call out

Well, we have two near-miraculous examples

specific sounds attributed to the one missing.

of medicine making people whole again, first

First of all, not only are dolphins the only animal

off. That gives me hope because, in large part,

besides humans to use names, it was also proven

a great deal of our society is dedicated to the

in a previous study that they name themselves.

fear of death, dismemberment, or being a burden

They emit a particular whistle in the water, a

on our families. When I hear stories like this I

way of saying, “I’m me, and I’m here,” and,

always have the same thought, “If people could

in this newest study, it was shown that other

be made whole after an accident, birth defect,

dolphins recognize the sound and use it in

or even a war, then maybe there will be just a

reference to the specific dolphin who makes it.

little less fear in the world.” My next thought is always, “If this is possible, what isn’t?” Then

“Animals produced copies when they were

I get very inspired, hopeful, and start thinking

separated from a close associate and this

about Star Trek. Technology is often a divisive 31

force in this world. It has given power of a

UTOpia

pain, they need... and guess what? They have

choice few over the many, it seems to be used

names. Some day soon we will experience

for death and greed more often than harmony

a time when we see science unite nature and

or justice, and, of course, we’re all afraid of the

industry, people and animals, and cities with

robots rising up against us... but technology can

ecosystems. It will happen when we set aside

also make impossible things a reality. A century

tradition, old habits, backward conceptions of

ago no one could have imagined loved ones

god and country, and realize that everything

instantaneously talking to each other, face to

bleeds and we are learning ways to make the

face, from opposite sides of the planet. No one

bleeding stop. When that day comes we will see

would have imagined going from one side of our

our Utopia. pp

country to the other in half a day. The world is getting smaller, and that can mean either unity or fresh enemies and failed allegiances – each year

-----

our problems become everyone’s problems as society becomes increasingly global. Sometimes

it seems like unity is a pipe dream, like the world

Trevor D. Richardson is the author of American Bastards and the upcoming novel

as the world and its distances shrink the infighting gets more rampant than ever, but even

Dystopia Boy. He is the founder and editor of

as technology causes trouble it is also fixing it.

The Subtopian Magazine and a firm believer in

A day will come when people will find solutions

the possibility of Utopia and the power of human

to the world’s problems that don’t hurt the planet

invention. Creativity is the answer and Trevor wants to find more creative people to fill the

or anyone else, but instead simply heal, bond,

community that is Subtopian.

and inspire. That will be a great day and on that day we will see the petty differences of the past go the way of the telegraph.

Finally, we are learning more and more about nature every year and the more we learn the more we realize that the other earthlings on this planet are not so different from you or I. They love, they bond, they have families, they feel 32

spokey dokey 2 6 . B i r t h d a y passed. Not much to sh o w f o r i t .

Ba c kya r d too. Grass overgrown. Broken Dishwa she r.

2 6 . a t h o me with the parents. M o t h e r s l e eps all day. Father w a t c h e s T V all day.

Stacked dishes everywhere . Nothing clean. Ants on the c ounte r s.

N o t h i n g works. Mother sleeps in a c h a i r, I t he living room because s h e c a n n o longer breathe when l a y i n g d o w n . F ather is w orthless.

Fridge filled with leftover a n d rotting food. Dishwasher brok e n , mold on the wa lls, blinds br ok e n .

G a r a g e filled with garbage. 33 33

L i g h t i n the kitchen flickers and s p a r k s , s o we use the light over the st o v e .

f loor ma ts soa k it up. Only mone y ke e ps the wa ter o u t. Two sinks, only one wor ks.

L i g h t i n the oven burnt out. T h r e e b u r n ers on the stove don’t w o r k . C o ff ee stains on the counter. R o r s c h a c h test over linoleum, under t o w e r s o f d ishes, that we once ate fr o m , a r o u nd a table, now covere d i n p a p e r s, and pens, and boxes. A t a b l e n o o n e sits at now.

26. Not muc h to show f or it. A handful of years. I walk down t o t h e post office and check my po b o x , nothing or rejection letters. I w a l k home again. I walk to the gym . I work out. I watch for her to ca l l , but nothing. I ’ ll do a ll of this a g a in tomorrow, until I go to work, t h e n I’ll do that again and again, u n t i l I do my other routine. I wish su m m e r was here and when it comes I’ l l wa ste it a ga in. Sun quic kly go n e . 26.

B l a c k g a rbage bags filled with g a r b a g e p i l e in a corner in the back y a r d . N o m o ney for trash pick up . N e i g h b o r s complain about the smell i n t h e su m mer time. E v e r y t h i ng dirty. The carpet st i c k s t o t h e feet. Mold grow s up t h e w a l l s , a round the window sills. R o o f l e a k s around the chimney. Mo l d y t o w e ls left on the floor to so a k u p t h e w ater.

26 and not much to show fo r i t . I see others at my age and there l i v e s are coming together, marriage s and travel to other countries, a n d stability, something I’ve certa i n l y never had. Longest town I’ve l i v e d in is Vancouver, but certainly n o t the most I’ve lived. Can’t catc h much of a break, unless it’s th e breaking of the things I build, e v e n the words don’t come together l i k e the y use d to.

A n d i n t he background, the c o n st a n t n o ises from the T V. B r o k e n g lass, shattered glass p a t i o d o o r. Vaulted ceiling. No i n s u l a t i o n . Heaters broken. Alwa ys c o l d , v e r y lonely.

26. And not much to show f o r it. Angry all the time. Punched the hood of my car and bruise d my knuckles the other night, n o w the y’ r e pur ple a nd swolle n. D o n ’t remember the last day that som e o n e didn’t try to sell me somethin g .

Wa t e r g e ts through. Only money k e e p s t h e w ater out. B a t h t u b , grim y, moldy, dirty, w a t e r s e e p s up or out or down, p o o l s a t t h e base of the toilet. Wet t o w e l s o n t he floor, covered by 34 34

what you gain when you realiz e t h a t you ha ve no e xtr a or dina r y use f o r wha t the y ta ught you in c olle g e .

J o k e s o n t h em though, I don’t have a n y m o n e y. Just 26 and not much t o s h o w f o r it. I’m getting lazy o r t i r e d , d o e s n’t matter which, the re su l t i s st i ll the same.

But what am I saying. I’m g o i n g back to college in the fall, for a very worthless liberal arts deg r e e . And if you wa nt to know why, it’s because I don’t know what els e to do with my time. Maybe I’l l get lucky and it will help me s t o p thinking so much, I hear colle g e i s good f or stopping thinking.

A n e o n paradise, and not in a g o o d w a y. Lights of red yellow a nd g r e e n c l o u d the horizon, mostly red l i g h t s t h e se days. A n g r y a ll the time now. No fu n f o r a n y one. Maybe I have a c o m p l e x , my neurosis are d e s t r o y i n g my self-esteem, mayb e m y r e l a t i o n ships are just recreations o f m y p a r e nt’s relationship, or m a y b e I h a ve avoidant personality d i s o r d e r, m aybe I use fantasy as a f o r m o f e scapism to cope with m y p r o b l e ms, as opposed to drug u se , w h i c h seem s to go along w ith o t h e r p e o p l e of my temperament a n d a g e , m a ybe. Maybe I have so me u n n a m e d c omplex destroying my e g o a n d se n se of self.

I walk down the road to the store and buy a lottery ticket, t w o actually, on the same slip. On c e I thought tha t a pe r son ha d to b e pretty desperate to buy lottery tickets, that their life had bec o m e so hopeless that they had to re s o r t to chance. I buy the lottery tic k e t and wonder now what this say s o f me . Angry all the time, so much s o that anger has now become jus t a habit. Maybe things would hav e been different if you and I wo r k e d out. I wanted you badly you k n o w that? Maybe if I had chosen to get my own place instead of m o v e ba c k home a nd buying a c a r th in g s would ha ve wor ke d out be twee n u s . You sent me many ads for che a p apartments across town. But t h e tr uc k e ve ntua lly die d a nd the c a r I bought is running but needed work and if I hadn’t moved ba c k in with the parents I would ha v e

N o , I ’ m 26 and getting older, fa st a n d d o n’t have time to think a b o u t t h e s e things. Truth is, I just fe e l b a d . I w i s h I were older, because m a y b e t h i n g s w ould be better, but I w i s h I c o uld stay young, cause n o t h i n g i s as powerful as youth, e x c e p t m a y be wisdom, which is d i ff e r e n t f r om know ledge. D id you k n o w t h a t ? K now ledge is w hat th e y t e a c h y o u i n college, wisdom is 35 35 35

b e e n s t r a n ded in Portland and u n a b l e t o g et to work and you w o u l d h a v e gone anyway. You’re a l w a y s g o i ng from something, it w a s o n l y a matter of time before it w a s m e , s o I beat you to the punch a n d a l t h o u gh it hurt I’m more than g l a d I d i d i t because unlike the rest o f t h e f u c k s you run with, I’m not g o i n g t o l e t you walk on me. So you c a n c r a m y our fucking imagined s l i g h t s . I f you’re alone it’s because y o u d i d i t t o yourself.

it’s that temperature inside, a n d m y portable space heater can’t ke e p o u t the cold when it’s in the thirti e s , and on really bad rainy days t h e roof leaks. When I go to sleep I ’ m either sweating or I can seen m y breath. One day I will move o u t b u t f or now I ’ m just 26. with noth in g much to show for it, except a knowle dge tha t only mone y

T h o u g h t I had something more t o s a y b u t I just ended up talking a b o u t y o u a gain.

ke e ps out the c old

… G o d I hope my writing isn’t a fo r m o f s e l f-therapy. What a choice t h a t w o u l d be? Happy and stable b u t u n a b l e to write or miserable a n d b r o k e n and a prolific literary k i n g … d e l u sions of grandeur. “ L i t e r a r y K ing.” N ot even close.

a nd the we t.

-----

2 6 . A n d not much to show for i t . M y b e d r oom is at my parent’s h o u s e . T h e electricity in it is fried s o I r u n l o ng orange extension c o r d s f r o m the bathroom to power t h i s c o m p u ter and the light and t h e h e a t e r, occasionally the TV. T h e r e ’s p l a stic over the hole where t h e w i n d o w used to be. It’s always d a r k i n t h e room, the heater is b u s t e d a n d the walls are stained w i t h s o m e t hing of a nature and o r i g i n I d o not know. No insulation, w h a t e v e r t emperature it is outside,

Despite popular misconception, Kirby Light isn’t real. He’s an illusion. He’s been published in various online and offline magazines and you can find his ebooks “Cheap Thrills and Night Terrors” and “No Solace for the Innocent” on the Kindle store

36 37

poetry

Jessica Morey-Collins

Holy Blood of Jesus Beauty Supply or Stockholm System Reaches Lower Latitudes

Imperialism swept over wetter sets of people, set new sets of ethics over finer ethnic lines, seeded square-peg faiths, blessed the messy with metrics and the displaced remnants of an assumed better-off, over the swaddling and sack-cloth they saw, what was perhaps the organic land-laughter that their eyes, finer tuned, were ill-equipped to list into. A veritable swaffeling: the Motherlands set their bloodline-blessed members across assumption conjured wants--the tree-named deities seen as a clear plead for reform, the leaf and soil sleep lain over with clipped sophistication, waste in the press of ordained language over truer rooted ways of saying water. Father lauds

37 13

poetry

from farther off, sends laws as long as echoes, irrelevant at their eventual lap-lipped wash over new lands. Irreverent to local length of day, Father flings new words, lays his consecration across airways tailored to their native cadence. Nations wake un-named, fated to an eventual embrace with jaded casemakers; someday they’ll raise their faces to the new god brought in on sea-beasts, call every son by a second name: Kofi or Kwaku, Adam or John.

Lion Faces “Courage is not the absence of fear.” “People complain about the grind,” says Mike with the half-smile of a former investment banker, “and then resent you for escaping.” I woke with no desk to set myself under, but a desiccant thump in my head, fully alive incommunicado, out and out, no one to the ones I know, one to the no ones who’ll never know me, vibrant in the one of my number, the un-with I shoved myself under. The little left of my wet given freely to weep, to chase the ache with labels (waste, decimate, dream-dead). Courage is the snot-slick decision to walk it off, have a coffee, give the day a second shot. Mike had a lot of fun in the Big Apple, as he lost his faith in the system. “Profit’s for profits, not 38 14

for progress, across the markets.” Nick talks about Canadian corn and dairy subsidies, and I’ve read that the National Institute of Health is funded by big boys’ clubs from the beef industry, and we all think our homes have hands deep in the pockets of Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Finance, and wonder what’s the benefit for us? so we opt to go alone to smell an adjacent brand of bullshit, Shanghai internet blockades, roads that require you to slow for flash-bomb pop pop pop the bureaucratic never no but opaque what the fuck do you do to function when without where the who is with the when it all, then nothing doesn’t 39 39

lend any hold so, ought I level my own nom de caché? Elmina Castle Today, the sun razes a wide courtyard, large enough to host whole battalions of the Portuguese, then Dutch, then British soldiers that once gathered there. In the center sits a boxy church, which now functions as a gift shop. White stonework braces the castle against the Atlantic. The fort overlooks a wide swath of water, hemmed with high palms, songed by sea-birds. Through a corridor marked with a skull and crossbones, gape great caverns, cut into the Earth by Portuguese masons. Wide stone halls with tiny slits for windows just below their ceilings, which send a thin shaft of light to the slick ground. The walls are light stone, except for a dark rim around the bottom of each room, marking the height of the collective detritus of the captives.

40 40

They would stand for months in their shared shit and menstruation waiting to be corralled into ships, or slipped up to the Diplomatsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; quarters, washed, displayed, perhaps raped or kept for a pet. The rest are herded through to a brief bright sun, onto the deck of a Westward settling ship, toward labor or toward crushing depth, from ill to ill, from mess to mess. Burst In 2003 Mom & Eric bought a fixer-upper on the fringes of town. Shortly thereafter, the hilly scrubland across the street was purchased by a developer, graded, and filled with pre-fab mansions. Coyotes howled in protest, pushed tight against the mountains. They wandered into back yards, along with displaced populations of bob-cats, mountain lions, and bunnies. Road-kill abounded. The new luxury homes sold at over 1 million. They were quickly filled with upstart families and casino-rich California Indians. They dug exquisitely lit pools. They rolled out sod and soaked it.

They strategically located palms and fountains. A procession of RVs, SUVs, speed boats, golf-carts, Corvettes, and other trophies rolled into driveways.

Seven years later, after dinner, we walk around the block

past brittle, yellow lawns. Fountains laud calcified epilogues of l

water.

Papers taped to front windows earmark foreclosures. We walk around one empty house and look through its windows. We catalog the scraps of life left by former inhabitants, tangles of clothing piled on the floor, half-empty bottles, a giant stuffed snake, a dress-makersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; mannequin head. The waterfall in the back yard is dry. A ping-pong table bends under the sun. A home sauna mildews inside its canvas cover. Stucco flakes away from the outer walls. Desiccated snails ornament the exterior; their pale shells lend them more protection than a flagrant bankroll. -----

Jessica Morey-Collins is a Southern California poet currently writing from Taipei, Taiwan. Recent works have been published in Poetry Quarterly, The Smoking Poet, Bellow, The Literary Bohemian and elsewhere.

42 42

“’What elephant?’ he said in the living room, hidden behind the huge gray form.”

-- Epigraph for “The Game”

I. Lottery

In some future America, after decades of TV

His name wasn’t important. Nor was his penis size, or that of his guns, or how many enemies he’d killed and eaten -- or any of society’s measurements.

He’d won the lottery, and that’s all that mattered.

The money, so much money. Some may have used it for vanity, or comfort, or the great

many drugs advertised on the clothing of young children. Some may have donated to God’s prophets, so that the world may be cannibalized to salvation. Others would have purchased the finest of slaves, as many as could be found.

He did not do any of these things. He chose that most irresistible TV show, The Game.

The first requirement was, naturally, a suitable TV. He spared no expense, purchasing

one so obscenely large, it had to be manufactured in his home, and a room manufactured around it, and special stabilizers attached, to prevent it from collapsing beneath its own weight. Its speakers were tuned specifically for The Game’s heavenly soundtrack, and were loud enough to flatten clothing against the skin. The light produced by it could blind, hence requiring special glasses. Those unprepared for its greatness might drop dead in its sight, like an unworthy priest in the Holy of Holies. Magnificent, his TV, fit for that which it would broadcast.

Next came his viewing apparatus. Constructed by a foreigner with a big name, it was a

giant metal throne, all spokes and welds and sharp edges, and large enough to suit its sibling TV. However, this throne was not for sitting: he would be suspended on wires, in a sort of traction, hovering there like a ghost. It allowed the maximum of comfort, and was designed for indefinite occupancy, which he intended. 44

And thus was his life.

Him, a hung fixture in that megalithic chamber constructed for his TV, left in a moveless

peace as he watched The Game eternally. Food was administered through a network of tubing, bringing him drug-laced liquids and the blood of lesser persons, as was ordained by all present holy books. Wastes entered more tubing yet, and a cuff over his genitals, this doubling as a pleasure device. Advanced machinery injected substances into his muscles and organs, in compensation for the movement he would never again perform, insha’allah. Little calipers kept open his eyes, with a robotic dropper supplying him tears, as to disallow even a blink’s interruption of The Game.

His own personal heaven.

Besides the godlike TV, his one companion was an aide, who assisted at all hours. He

kept a gimp slave, also, for relief of aggression and sexual tension, this too prescribed by God’s word; but gimps don’t count, no matter how loud their screams, Heshuavik 12:11. The aide performed all necessities, right down to morning prayer, and the daily Flogging of the Gimp, and ritual sacrifice of whoever was determined an Enemy. The aide’s name, too, was unimportant, as were her cybernetic augmentations. The lottery money would fund her forever.

Also, the aide fended off revenants.

Revenants, those pesky beasts! They emerged, regularly, from the Sewer Wastes, and

hungered for human face, and wouldn’t stay dead, and had a knack for figuring out doors and locks. No one knew what to do, other than keep shooting. Guns were general in the population, and the holy books were amended to sanction this, and then it was agreed upon that they’d always said so. (TV shows adapted similarly, with all figures brandishing firearms in order to normalize the practice, as had been done with cannibalism and slave-keeping and selfadvancement through violence, and the rest of God’s laws.) In regards to the revenants, the more contemporary prophets indicated them in God’s judgment, as supported by scripture involving the eating of face; traditionalists, on the other hand, insisted this applied only to the face-eating of Enemies, and condemned the others as heretics before eating their faces, also per 45

scripture. The man was concerned with revenants, if only because death would interrupt The Game. Fortunately, his aide was a good shot.

These things offered a perfect sanctity, in which he hung blissfully, and watched The

Game, and defecated into a tube. Only one thing spoiled the endless sunshine of his life: the break between episodes.

Calamity, anathema, apocalypse -- these were the words with which he would describe

that break, if he still spoke. Though mere seconds in duration, the break was unacceptable, insufferable, nothing less than nails in the skin. Upon sensing its imminence, he would break his catatonia to moan obscenities and cry profusively, thus confusing his robotic tear-dropper. The aide was at the ready with a fresh injection of drugs, but success was limited. The show’s fade-out was the sun setting on him, to never, never return.

But then -- a miracle! After those endless seconds, for him a grueling hell, The Game

would return! From the blackness would appear The Game’s masculine logo, and all the wonder and redemption the program entailed. For the man, glorious music would accompany this, heard only by him but no less real. Angels and saints would appear about the TV and his gimp’s cage, to harken the return of God and hope. The aide would gain a majestic glow as she fed him more blood.

Momentarily, the man’s face would pull into an atrophied smile. Then the fresh episode

would unfurl, returning him to deathly complacence.

II. Ass-Shot

Stupid ass-shot bastard.

“Stupid ass-shot bastard,” Carlyle said to nobody, in the hospital bed he wouldn’t be

leaving any time soon. He could see himself in the TV’s dead gray screen, prone, the buttock’s cast cresting his shoulder like a sun. It was wrapped armor-thick, the cast, a camel’s hump. 46

He looked around, for the thousandth time today. The hospital room looked like a

hospital room. His gun and TV remote, along with the come-help button, sat in reaching distance, on a man-table. The slave was stock-still, unblinking.

It had happened so fast. One minute you’re sitting at home and not watching The Game,

the next there’s a revenant attack, and you’re pulling your pistol from your waistband and shooting yourself ass-shot. Stupid, stupid. Luckily, the neighbors had been on the ball and downed the revenant, or Carlyle would’ve been ass-chewed. The bullet had gone straight down, tearing a -- what’s the word -- a furrow, the bullet had furrowed his ass. A little updown trench. Men could war there. Come, war on my ass. Stupid, stupid bastard.

“Stupid bastard ...”

The TV was watching him, taunting him, from its own man-table. Three weeks since

quitting The Game, now, going on a century. The cravings were like broken glass in the eyes, and now this, alone in the world but for a TV and a house-sized ass-cast. It was four in the afternoon, so there’d be Game reruns on channels six and eight, or vintage episodes on eighteen, from when there was that ginch blonde hostess with the unfurrowed ass. Carlyle snatched his gun and considered murdering the TV, but instead just tossed the remote irretrievably to the corner. Take this cup from me.

“There. Take that, bastard.”

But this was no better, because now that bridge was burned and he couldn’t watch if he

wanted. What if the hours got long and the room shrank and he had no choice but go crawling back to The Game? Stupid bastard. Or too smart. He could always buzz that kid-looking nurse and get her to fetch it, though. It calmed him, having an out; but not for long.

From nowhere, the old itch reared up, that only scratched by liberal amounts of Game.

He’d opened himself to relapse now, and it was howling at the gates, the ass-pain with it, the two in league. The Game would divert him from the pain, also, along with the itch -- just a rerun or two, then a vintage with the blonde, and he’d be straight, would then turn off The Game for good.

But no. Sponsor. He needed his sponsor, Big Bill Finn, one of the counselors at Gamers 47

Anonymous. Bill would talk him through it.

The phone was on the man-table, beside Carlyle’s revolver, a big old skin-colored rotary

that could double as a weapon in event of revenant attack. Carlyle torqued around and grabbed it up, his ass-furrow crying out.

“Bill,” he said. “Bill.” As if Bill was under the bed.

He rotary-dialed and let it ring nineteen times, but no answer. He repeated this, then

slammed the handset. Agony.

So that safety net was out of the picture -- but there were alternatives, always

alternatives. Dope, for one. The pain was bad enough to warrant dope. He needed dope. When would there be more dope?

Carlyle scrabbled up the help button, and hit it more than was polite, was still smashing

when the kid nurse appeared in the room.

“Help you?” she asked. Her little-girl voice warranted a pat on the head.

Carlyle grunted, “Dope. More dope.”

“Not for another hour, sir.” The nurse drifted into the room, looking for things to clean

up or empty. So tiny she was, one of these girl-size women you could slide into and then spin around. The gun in her waistband was bigger than her.

Another hour. It made The Itch grow legs, leaping up to do the Charleston with the pain,

a Victrola playing. “I’m really hurtin’ here,” Carlyle said. “Can’t bump me up, just this once?”

“Afraid not.”

Carlyle leaned in. “Lick your pussy ...?”

She shook her head. In doing so, she noticed the TV remote in the corner. She returned it

to Carlyle’s man-table, thudding the slave’s knobbly back.

“Oh, no,” Carlyle said, waiving his hands. “No. Please. Addict. Game. Tempted.”

“I see,” said the girl-nurse. She put the changer in her waistband like a second gun.

“Brother’s in the same boat. Two years’ clean.” She knocked on the wooden nightstand.

Carlyle said, “Three weeks here,” and tried not to think about it. Three weeks and the

rest of his life. It was dangerous, counting the time. Big Bill warned against it. One day at a 48

time, and all that jazz.

The nurse retrieved her knocking hand, back to clinical. “Anything else?”

Carlyle studied her. So young. To think she would be the one to tend to his necessaries

and give him sponge baths. One look at his equipment, and she’d blush and call it a wee-wee.

Carlyle said there was nothing else, thank you.

The nurse had squeaked out the room -- when there was uproar from down the hall,

screams and slapping footsteps, things being turned over. Then the nurse’s gun was out and she was bracing her legs and shooting, flashbulb bursts painting Carlyle’s room. Six rounds, and it got quiet. She disappeared from the jamb.

“Revenants,” Carlyle said. “Stupid bastards.”

He shifted on his chest and returned to not thinking of The Game, which in turn

reminded him of The Game, and Bill and the phone. He tried calling again; no answer. The TV was smiling at him. Hi, Carlyle.

“Kiss my ass,” he said to the evil thing.

Outside in the hall, three orderlies carried off a revenant by its storklike arms and legs.

The corpse resembled those on the show -- for Carlyle, nothing less than pornography. He moaned.

***

Later, the kid nurse returned and pumped his good ass-cheek full of dope, but it lasted only a pitiful hour. The Itch itched. Night came.

Carlyle held audience with the TV’s reflection, tinted autumn by lamplight. Creepy

night-noises filtered down the ward: IV’s being changed, complaints being made, bedpans emptied and filled. A nurse checked on him once, and this one was different, a building of a woman, equal to at least four of the girl-nurses. The girl-nurse could’ve mounted this one’s head and controlled her like a tank. Super Nurse carried a cute snub-nosed revolver, which looked, on her, more like an elaborate toothpick. Carlyle both did and didn’t think of asking 49

for his remote. He ended up trading neck-craned cunnilingus for an extra shot of dope, but this one helped even less, by no means worth the expense.

Dinner was infant’s blood and the livers of third-world children, then eight o’clock

approached, Saturday night -- a new Game episode. It used to be Carlyle’s glory hour, like coming home. No longer. These last three Saturdays, he’d gotten in the habit of sexing his gimp come showtime, as a Replacement, per Big Bill and the other good folks of GA. And it worked, more or less, distracting him from being tempted. But his gimp was back at home, being fed by the neighbors, so Carlyle had no Replacement, no distraction, thus giving The Itch free reign.

As the hour ticked near, he envisioned the rest of the world, firing up their tubes and

tuning in, probably over dinner and a cold one. It brought that old sense of loss, like he’d been barred from the circus, perhaps listening to those inside laughing it up. He feared just that, actually, hearing other patients tuning in and tasting the fruit now forbidden to Carlyle damn it all to hell shit. It would drive him back to it, he knew. If it came to that, he would slither out of bed and dare hot coals for some Game. He fart and it hurt and this helped nothing.

The Itch reared up. Desperate, Carlyle counted aloud: “One, two, three, four ...” It was a

little trick he’d developed, a way to quiet the mind and rid oneself of itches and monkeys and their ilk.

“Ten, eleven, twelve ...”

Itching.

“Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five ...”

“Six hundred two, six hundred three ...”

The Itch was like those in the no-man’s-land at the middle of your back, except in the

brain, or maybe his very soul. Carlyle got to 1,213, and stopped. He tried the phone again, and let it ring nearly as high, then hung it up hard enough to ding.

The TV winked.

“Stop it,” Carlyle said, wholly serious.

The TV didn’t answer.

7:49. He imagined The Network rigging up the broadcast and such, those heated minutes 50

preceding a fresh episode. Distraction. He needed distraction, his gimp. She was a thirtysomething named Ginger, brunette, well-fed, tits here to Tuesday. Carlyle would save his spunk all week and then, at 7:59 Saturday night, put it to her, and it really worked. Magic. She would keep him busy until at least nine, if not after -- long enough to get through showtime, in any case. But, the hospital disallowed gimps, except those leading the blind.

7:52. Damn. He was thinking at least 56, if not -7. Got to stop with the clock, no counting.

“Count the days, and you can count on relapse.” Big Bill, fifteen years Game-free. Not the wittiest of witticisms, and too big for a sampler, but the truth was there.

7:55. Carlyle saw the clock by accident that time, while searching for distraction from the

clock. The TV was at it again, making faces and sticking out a tin-gray tongue. Carlyle swung to it fast enough to hurt his ass, but it had stopped. Still, he was wise.

7:59. Ish. He was off the clock now, via selective perception, staring at himself in the TV

screen -- was the mirror-him Itching too?

Noisily, a stretcher tumulted past the door and down the hall, fawning nurses and

doctors. Revenant victim, from what Carlyle could see. Again like the show.

When the stretcher was gone, music could be heard in the new silence, a catchy synth-

and-drum ditty: The Game’s theme. Carlyle’s heart jumped, in Pavlonian excitement; he hadn’t allowed himself so much as the music these three hellish weeks, not even a commercial for the show. He seized his bed sheet, the knuckles at once white.

Then: Just for tonight. I’ll just watch tonight.

The thought germinated from the floorboards of his head, and soon became Just for the

hospital stay, even more alluring. Danger in this. He’d tried the situational thing in the past -only every other week, only when he made a sale at the human-leather store, only during a full moon and when the tide was in and it was a bull market -- he’d tried the situational thing, and it was a disaster, so much letting the tiger out of its cage.

But this was different, completely, since he was alone and in pain and unable to so much

as ring up Big Bill for a pro-sober sermon. Justified, he was. Entitled, like a soldier getting laid.

Between that and hearing the announcer announce the night’s contestants, Carlyle’s dam 51

broke: the remote. He needed the remote, and yesterday, before he missed any more of the show. He grabbed the call button and pressed it Morse-code-like. When a whole five seconds had passed and there was no nurse, Carlyle held the button solid and cried out, “Hey! Hey!” But still no one came.

The fish sees not the hook, but its hunger; Carlyle saw the TV’s knob and its off status.

He lowered the bedrail and went overboard, landing belly-first on cold hard linoleum. Pain screamed up his derrieres, but it was in a universe far, far away. He silverfished forward, then his ass-cast caught on something, snaring him still. He thrashed and lunged out, but this achieved only offended muscles and a squishing from in the cast, some sort of grease they’d put in there. But still he tried, fixed on the TV and the knob and Game Game Game.

More show-noises sounded from the bowels of the ward, and Carlyle howled, “No-

o-o-o-o-uh!” The TV was back to making faces. Growling, he reached for the knob but came ridiculously short, the grease sloshing a sound like so won’t you as said by Donald Duck. He snatched up the call box and sandwiched it between junky’s hands, going “Aaaaahhhh!” and throwing glances between it and the asshole TV, but the box was useless. He pitched it away. The clock said 8:05. He shrieked a teakettle note.

His eyes flickered to the TV. “Turn on!” he commanded, putting actual will into this.

“Turn on, bastard!”

The knob moved, but only in his head. The TV continued reflecting the hospital bed,

now empty of him.

The mutant nurse squeaked past the doorway, her hose still out of true from when

Carlyle had pulled them down. She did not stop, for all his obscenities. It interrupted his tirade for only the briefest of time.

He tried to scrape forward again, miming swimming, so-won’t-you so-won’t-you as he

screamed, “On, on, on!” But he remained snared. His eyes burned into the demon appliance, a single thought repeating: Turn on, turn on, turn on ...

And then the knob budged. A tiny, insignificant shudder, but it budged.

Carlyle’s eyes whitened: it moved. It had really moved. 52

He thought Turn on, harder, and -- there! Another budge, further now, from ten- to

twelve o’clock and back.

Carlyle’s eyes bulged to Dangerfieldian levels and Turn on pulsed like blood, the world

becoming that knob, his toes curled and sphincter frog-tight and teeth bared to the molars, turn on turn on turn on -

In a mad burst, the knob clicked right and ON, then overshot as to fly off and clack the

floor. The screen faded in.

Carlyle used the last of his psychic energy to dial in channel eighteen, The Network, then

his face smushed happily to the floor. The room filled with the tube’s uncertain blue light, his fiendish smile giving it back. He gained an erection, putting a hump in his back.

Every time someone died on The Game, Carlyle said “Ahhh.”

III. The New Church

And so it is!

Each Sabbath, the faithful gather at the proud peaky building on the hill, to reflect one

another’s holiness until it is no longer a question. They come in twos and threes and families, receiving eagerly their handcuffs and leg irons, smiles unceasing. Human furniture awaits in the sanctuary, nude trembling slaves in accommodating postures.

A din of clinking and clanging chains, then silence, the lights dimming down.

The shackled choir baby-steps into view, soon leading praises to God, until the eyes are

glassed and the trance is founded and all volition nullified. Then they disperse as fast as their irons allow, Minister Barnes in their wake, at a pulpit outfitted with powders and syringes and ipecac. A bucket is set at his feet; a caged gimp is rolled stage-right. The Minister’s riding quip resides in a small slender vase which could be for flowers.

“Welcome, brothers and sisters,” amplified to godlike gravitas. 53

The captive crowd nods.

Sniffing and moaning as the Minister indulges, then the week’s message: The Game!

That iniquitous program! Men fed to the Sewer Wastes and the revenants, death filmed for sport! “So sinful we are, woe to us!” and Minister Barnes unsheathes his quip and flogs the gimp and resumes the pulpit, humbly, as only the righteous can. God frowns on our fallibility, God condemns our schadenfreude, God be praised for not sending us duly to our demise. The Minister raises the bucket, vomits enormously, and then sends it forth, a green arc flung into the pews at large. The flock accepts this gift as they had their shackles: smiling.

“God be praised!”

A roaring snort and powder gone. Then: “God commands us ‘Love,’ yet we seek only

sin.” The gimp flogged, unflinching. “’Holiness,’ yet we abominate ourselves and one another.” Vomit flying out to spatter the congregates. “’Humility,’ yet we indulge vainglory.” A rascally chord from the organ, the first of many.

“So I say” --

Floggings and insufflations.

-- “relinquish your wicked ways” --

The crowd stirring, spirited hollers.

-- “accept what is offered you” --

Much pacing and the organ screaming.

-- “and be free!”

Cuff-linked arms shoot up and the people with it, the organ alive, widespread patter of

small shackled clapping.

“Be free!”

And the ushers fan out, armed with keys, for anyone who might receive this gift.

“Be free!” 54

And the faithful rush forward, commencing a line, the keys turning and irons snapping,

liberated arms in enthused Y’s.

“Be free!”

And metal litters the floor, God’s children free to dance and frolic or sex their seats.

The Minister walking miles over the stage, hands cutting wild shapes, the gimp now a deep, Christmassy red.

“Murderers and fornicators and gluttons” --

“Amen!”

-- “druggies and drunks and abusers” --

“God be praised!”

-- “sloths and gamblers and doubters” --

Whirligig flogging and the feet stamping.

-- “I’m tellin’ ya’ll now, be free!”

Acclamations of accord, twirling forms, hands reaching for Heaven and what rapture

waits there.

And then only one set of shackles remains, on a frail young woman with unsteady eyes.

Minister Barnes fixes on her and quiets, the crowd with him, the bodies parting to allow him passage. The woman emits a rude horror, hugging herself, her man-chair untrembling beneath her.

“Your shackles, child,” says the Minister, in a new voice, his firecracker demeanor put away.

The woman nods.

“Ye are in bondage. Might ye not accept God and be free?”

Lip-licking. “But you passed these out ... at the door ...”

“Might you not accept?”

“I ... um ...”

Ushers at the Minister’s wing, sizable and nearing and showing clubs.

“Might you not accept?”

Her pupils dilate like the Minister’s.

“Accept.” A man, supplicant on his knees, a portrait of justified. 55

“Accept.” A woman, her skirts missing, the genitals red and glistening.

“We love you.”

“God save you.”

“Please.” Holy hands, humble knees. “Please accept.”

In concert: “Accept ... Accept ... Accept ...”

The Minister and his henchmen stand in grabbing distance. Their clubs are clean, and

look very hard. “Might you accept?”

“Well ...” The woman’s eyes appeal the crowd, the ushers, the clean hard clubs. “Um.

Sure.”

And a key turns and the Minister smiles and the flock by consequence, the organ revived

and laughing.

“Be free!”

The crowd and she with them: “Be free!”

IV. Garbage Day

The Game’s contestants were harvested from a parallel universe, via a mysterious cartel with which The Network associated only loosely.

They waited until garbage day in that other land.

As the real garbage men lay unconscious and bleeding, grinning imposters traveled the

streets, visiting trashcans to dispense the teleportation devices. The men emptied and filled and smiled, driving their borrowed truck. Then they were done and the traps were set, none the wiser but the wise.

The harvest commenced the day following.

***

Peter awoke and pissed and ate, the morning no different than any other. His wife Brenda complained about the garbage, so he hauled twin bags to the trashcan-colored trashcans, at the curb. When he removed their lids, however, it activated the teleportation trap, sucking Peter inside and to the Sewer Wastes. The trash bags dropped wetly to the asphalt.

Peter, screaming, thud shoulder-first into the depths, clanging metal. He arose lamely and

straightened his glasses, suffering the dark heat. Metal everywhere, grates and contraptions and flanged piping. Foggy orange light fumed up from the slatted floor. Peter could barely see the walls that imprisoned him. It could be no less like the suburban sidewalk of moments earlier.

“Hello!” he called into this hellplace.

A stir of echoes, calm hissing steam.

His eyes adjusted and he studied his immediate area, a riveted confusion which was

neither his house nor its driveway. He took off his glasses, cleaned them, and shoved them back on; the humidity was tangible.

“Brenda!” Peter called, stupidly. When this failed to materialize his wife of thirteen years,

he took two wary steps and peered down the Halloween corridor.

After a short distance, the pipey throat became a room much like that of his arrival, with

more dim pipeage and pumpkin-tinted light. Peter searched the cramped chamber and, behind a pipe in the floor, found a handgun. It was loaded. He secured it in his waistband.

For several minutes he traversed the bald gloom, finding nothing of description. Then: a

second, high-ceiled room, with a moist floor and an acrid odor. No sooner had he entered than a metal door engaged, sealing him inside.

He twirled to the door and tugged it, shouting loudly, to no avail. He pounded it bodily,

pulpy congs achieving nothing. As he shouted more, a small noise replied from the orangey dark.

He called hello, and the noise neared, resolving into an effluent language unknown to him.

Then the creature assembled itself from the shadows, egregiously tall and skeletally sparse. The revenant studied Peter with eyes not made for seeing, speaking old truths like some athwart prophet. 57

Peter was too surprised to scream. He drew his weapon and assumed the pose he’d seen

on TV and shot, the report roaring off the pipes. The speaking ghoul reeled and stumbled. Peter fired until it went down.

He kicked it and it didn’t move. Blood ran.

Adrenaline sent him rabidly through the room, avoiding the new corpse. A red-and-white

sign encouraged him to wear safety goggles at all times; another declared him in Sector 4-F. He found a flashlight in one corner, and at once clicked it on, producing a lemon-colored sword of light that he waved every which way. The metal walls were rusted and old-looking, like a sunken ship, their many pipes leading to nowhere but each other.

While traveling the room’s perimeter, he stopped by the door: a video camera looked

down at him, high up on the wall.

“Hey, hey!” he said into the cyclopean lens, waving the flashlight in a weird heliograph.

His glasses slipped down and he nudged them back. “Help! Hey!”

After the longest minute of Peter’s life, no help came.

In the back of the room, he found a narrow crawlspace with more pipes, forcing him

sideways. The gangway led to an unwelcoming chamber identical to the last. Peter entered with feline dubiety, his flashlight touching every plumbed inch. He backed meekly through the slender doorway -- and a door again magicked from the wall, shutting tight. He flinched and shouted.

Soon, more voices filtered from the dark, in that same lost tongue. Shaking, Peter turned

around: not one, but two revenants. They jumped for him, babbling all the while. He raised the gun and managed two shots before being overwhelmed, the creatures covering him like a blanket alive. Their mouths silenced only when filled with flesh.

As Peter reached his end, he noticed another video camera, watching him with its impersonal

black eye. The camera panned left, perhaps for a better angle. It was the last thing he saw.

V. Proposal

A night on the town. How marvelous.

Jeannine watched the sleeping streets drift past, grinning subtly. The closed businesses

oversaw her and Dillon’s passage.

“You look great tonight, honey,” Dillon said from the driver’s seat, spiffy in his

gabardine slacks and sport jacket. Throw in spectacles, a beard, and some tweed elbow patches, and you’d have a fine professor. His revolver was in a shoulder holster, out of sight.

Jeannine smiled amorously. “You always say that.”

“It’s always true,” Dillon smiled.

Jeannine looked back out the window, at the benighted city beyond her reflection. An

intersection neared and the car slowed, stopping under a towering brownstone that had been there as long as she could remember. Dillon was starting to be like that, she thought, a fixture of her life. They’d been dating for nearly four years now, almost 1,500 days; have anything around that long, and you start thinking it’ll always be. She’d met him during her junior year at the university, and they hadn’t missed a weekend since, even when a revenant had put Dillon in the hospital last fall.

“Be quick about the wine,” he said as they waited for the light, gentle yet firm. “Just get

whatever’s handy, they won’t care. I don’t wanna miss the opening.” “They” were Jake and Carla Ritz, and “the opening” was The Game, the TV show Dillon watched religiously.

“Yes sir,” Jeannine mocked, snapping off a salute.

“What?” Dillon whined, looking henpecked. “So I don’t wanna be late.”

Jeannine giggled, and patted his knee. “Yes, dear.”

The neon advertising LIQUOR crawled up the walk, and Dillon parked his Beamer.

“Remember, quick,” he reiterated.

Jeanine rabbited inside as if to a gun, her pistol bouncing in her dress pocket. She 59

grabbed the first wine magnum she saw, and was paid up and gone in a minute flat, faithfully quick about it. Dillon smiled when she piled back inside.

Jake and Carla’s was a few blocks away.

***

Jake answered the door, jolly and Italian as ever.

“Hey, the Bradys are here,” he said. He stepped aside, humming the Brady Bunch theme

and doing a little dance step. He enjoyed noting Jeannine and Dillon’s semblance to characters from the show, making it a running joke. They were sports about it, though, much as Jake and Carla were with Dillon and The Game.

Jeannine and Dillon made their hellos and entered the sedate apartment, greeted by the

coppery odor of bloodsauce. Jeannine deposited the wine over a two-man man-table. Dillon cantered into the living room, to the TV.

“Relax, Greg,” Jake told him, and shut the door. “Show doesn’t start for another ten

minutes.” Dillon was Greg Brady, and Jeannine was Jan -- and, admittedly, the resemblance was uncanny. Give Dillon a perm and Jeannine some earlocks, and they’d be spitting images of the two.

“Your clock’s ten minutes slow,” Dillon said distractedly, hunting for the remote.

Before Jake could repartee, Carla burst from the bathroom. “Jeanie-girl!” she said,

and the women gravitated to each other like celestial bodies, culminating in a hug; they got along pretty well. “Dillon,” Carla added in greeting, and then absconded with Jeannine to the kitchen.

Dillon mumbled in her direction and activated the substantial television set, its window-

sized screen blinking to life. Extending the remote like a gun, he flipped purposefully through the channels, settled on eighteen, then flopped onto the man-couch dominating the room.

“Beer?” Jake asked from the kitchen doorway. 60

“Yeah,” Dillon said, “but just one. We brought wine.”

Jake padded into the kitchen, and reappeared with two flourished cans. He lateralled

one to Dillon, then committed himself to the man-recliner in which he always sat. Jake and Dillon cracked the tabs in concert, fixed on the insurance ad playing from the TV. Dillon took an inordinately large sip, draining half the can at a go.

“Whoa, easy there, Dillon,” Jake said, and drew on his own can. He always reverted to

“Dillon” when Jeannine was out of earshot.

Dillon clinked his can to the endtable, suddenly pale. “Tell me something, Jake,” he said,

not looking from the TV. “We’ve been working together how many years?”

“Six,” Jake said astutely, and sipped. The two were lawyers at August, Bixby, and

Martin, of which Dillon held the last partnership. When it had come up last year, it had been either Dillon or Jake.

“And I’ve been seeing Jeannine for four of ‘em,” Dillon went on, still absorbed in the TV.

There was a flashy commercial for man-furniture, soon followed by one for drugs.

Jake said something patronizing, and Dillon gave him a somber, reproving look. “This is

serious,” Dillon snapped. “Cut the horse shit.”

Jake clinked down his own can. The endtable man flinched. “All right, all right, what’s

up? You popping her the question, or somethin’?”

Dillon answered with his eyes.

“Oh hell, Dill,” Jake said. “Really?” He was whispering now.

Dillon said yes, and took another super-sip. “Was thinking tonight, after dinner.” He

belched flagrantly.

“And you want my input.”

Dillon nodded.

Jake smiled. “Go for it, man.” He slapped Dillon’s gabardine knee. “You two’re made for

each other.”

Still looking scared to death, Dillon nodded again and finished off his beer.

Jake smiled wider. “Sure you don’t want another?” 61

The smile translated to Dillon. “Okay.”

“Atta boy,” Jake said, then finished his own beer and stood. His chair-man relaxed.

After Jake had again disappeared, a long, pitiful moan erupted from the hallway across

the apartment, perhaps that of a lachrymose cat. When Jake returned and renewed their beverages, Dillon said, “Your gimp was moanin’ for somethin’.”

Jake waved it away. “Yeah, he’s been bitchy lately. I’ll go feed him, later.”

Dillon sipped his fresh beer, belched again, and shot his jacket sleeve, exposing a real

Rolex: eight o’clock. Showtime.

He turned up the TV for The Game’s opening montage, which depicted various men

and women doing battle in the Sewer Wastes. A man scampered down a pipe-lined corridor, revenants at heel; a filthy woman fought one off and shot it dead; a man with no shirt fired a shotgun, the frame freezing with him strobed orange. Upbeat synthesizer accompanied a four-on-the-floor drum beat, music stolen from an exercise video. The montage ended with a decapitation, then faded into the show’s macho logo, THE GAME in steely letters. The music peaked and silenced.

“Got doubts?” Jake asked, again staring into the TV set. “About her answer, I mean.”

“Well, I --” Dillon started, but footsteps cut him off.

The women, chatting amongst themselves, filed from the kitchen and onto the man-

couch, stressing the three curled slaves. Carla made a face, eyes narrowing. “We interrupt something?” she asked, looking between Jake and Dillon.

“Just saying how beautiful you two look tonight,” Jake said, taking the reins. He sipped

his beer and sunk into his organic recliner, pleased with himself. It dissolved Carla’s askance, and she migrated to Jake’s side. “Isn’t that right, Greg?” he added, grinning.

“Indeed,” Dillon said, back to being a Brady. He wrapped an arm around Jeannine, gave

her an affirming smooch, and returned his attention to the TV, where the night’s contestants were being introduced. First was a bald, accountanty man with glasses, who Dillon thought wouldn’t last ten seconds, followed by a mousy woman in the same boat. Then came a burly gentleman who would surely win, and finally the token black man, the producers’ excuse for a 62

wildcard.

“So, what’s for supper?” Dillon asked brightly.

“Spaghetti and bloodsauce,” Carla murmured, smooshed against Jake. She unzipped him

and fished out his penis, stroking diligently.

“Excellent,” Dillon said, and the four entered a pensive quiet: the first contestant was up.

It was the froggy little man with the glasses, tinted snot-green by the night-vision video. The segment started with his arrival to the Wastes, him staggering around and yelling “Hello!” and “Brenda!” A Don Pardo-ish commentator supplied a voice-over: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Simultaneously, another low, hoarse groan sounded from the hallway. Carla gave Jake a

reprimanding look. “Did you feed the gimp today?” she asked, no longer jacking him off.

“No, I’ll do it now,” Jake bemoaned. He peeled himself from the man-chair, for the

kitchen, zipping up as he walked.

“The giblets’re in the fridge,” Carla called to his back, toying with a lock of raven hair.

The refrigerator smacked and Jake was back in the living room, a plate of assorted

organs in both hands. He entered the noisy bedroom and fed the offal to the naked old man caged there. Wet chewing noises followed, then Jake closed the door, muffling them. After putting away the plate, he returned to Carla and the man-recliner.

Over the screen, the accountant was shooting one of the revenants, making it a knobby

heap over the ground. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” the announcer intoned, answered by a stanza of canned laughter. The accountant wiped his glasses, then found the camera on the wall, like they all did. He waved into it and did weird jumping jacks, his flashlight whipping around. He eventually gave up and traipsed into the next sequential chamber, where a pair of creatures relieved him of his face. The announcer made a mock order for a pizza with no cheese, then the scene faded and the synthesizer returned, playing a few be-right-back notes. Commercials ensued.

“Ouch,” Dillon said. “Saw that comin’.”

Carla tamped a cigarette from a pack. “You mind?” she asked the Bradys. She always asked. 63

“Not at all,” Dillon said, and sipped the last of his beer. Carla lit her cigarette and held it

luxuriantly, blowing spears of smoke.

Jake noticed Dillon’s empty can. “Another?”

Jeannine answered for him: “No, he’s driving. I want some of that chintzy wine we

brought.”

“She speaks the truth,” Dillon said.

“You don’t need any more, either,” Carla said to Jake, making smoke-words.

Jake shook his head in comic outrage. “Freakin’ gynecocracy here,” he said, appealing

Dillon and the TV.

Jeannine laughed. “A what?”

“Gynecocracy,” Jake said, now in a scholarly voice. “A society run by women.” This was

a shtick of his, throwing out the most arousing words in his extensive vocabulary. Jeannine loved it, whereas Dillon and Carla, who suffered this regularly, were unamused.

An Irish-themed soap commercial ended and the show was back, snaring the foursome’s

attention. Another few bars of synthesizer, and it was the black man’s turn at the Wastes.

Watching noncommittally, Carla took one last drag and then raised the left arm of her

blouse. With a sizzling pfsss, she extinguished the cigarette on her wrist, the wound joining many. The butt went in an ashtray. She lowered her sleeve.

“That guy looks like Bixby,” Jake said, watching the man wander the dark catacomb.

“Naw.”

“Yeah!” Jake came back, voice high. “Look at him. It’s in the eyes, could be his son.”

Dillon leaned forward, squinting ... and yes, he could see a likeness. “Yeah, maybe.”

The frame cut to the man shooting down several revenants, each in time-lapsed

succession. His weapons graduated in firepower between each transition, until he held the prized machinegun stashed near the end of the gauntlet. The timeline saw his clothing degrade in kilter, the shirt shrinking and the jeans becoming ragged shorts, an alphabet of scratches and contusions appearing over his torso. He looked like Rambo after kicking some ass, Dillon thought. After showcasing the black man’s victories, the show cut to a long, steady clip of him 64

in a pipe-pillared chamber -- presumably the scene of his demise, given the program’s format.

“Gotta check the noodles,” Carla said, and made for the kitchen. She passed Dillon, and

he smelled tobacco and cooked flesh. In the moment that she had eclipsed the TV, the black man had fallen victim to a five-strong company of revenants, the creatures pulling him apart as he lay convulsing. More synthesizer as the show gave way to a commercial for gimp leashes.

Jake tore himself from the tube. “So, how’s tricks with Jeannine?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Jeannine? Who’s that?” she said, feigning shock.

“Jan, I mean,” Jake corrected. “Jan.”

“Tricks’re fine, thanks,” she said, rosewater as ever.

“You still downtown?”

She was.

Jake gave an insouciant nod, then abruptly pointed to the TV, the BMW commercial

there. “Hey, look, there’s Greg!” he enthused. The man in the commercial drove a Beamer like Dillon’s, at peace with the world.

“Yep, that’s me, alright,” Dillon said flatly. Ever since the partnership, Jake made

constant note of Dillon’s choice of car -- sublimated jealousy, Dillon thought. It was all in fun, of course, but it still managed to get under his skin. He’d tried ribbing Jake on his Saab, but it wasn’t the same.

A guttural moan from the gimp’s room, like a lowing wind.

“Rodney!” Jake called. “Chill out.”

The moaning stopped.

Carla returned shortly after. She sat with her husband, wielding a paring knife.

“Noodles doing okay?” Dillon asked.

“Yeah, they said tell you hi,” Carla wise-assed, as she again raised her left blouse sleeve.

The cigarette burn was a little red tilak on the soft of her wrist, forming a set of Olympic rings with the others. Craning her neck, she used the knife to make several horizontal incisions over her bicep, carefully, perhaps carving her name in a bench. The show returned as she finished, and the sleeve rolled back down, a blurry red ladder appearing in the white fabric. 65

“How much longer?” Jake asked.

“It’s ready now,” Carla replied, setting the knife beside Dillon’s beer empty.

“Then let’s eat! I’m starvin’.”

“Not in front of the TV, dear,” Carla replied. “How many times’ve I told you.”

Jake said nothing more, moping. He pulled out his cock and Carla pumped it without

looking.

Just then, upheaval sounded from the streets below, shouts and crashes and a volley of

gunshots. Revenant attack. The four watched TV, without response.

“The show’s almost over anyway,” Dillon said to Jake. “You know the chick won’t last long.”

This registered with Jeannine. “Hey, she may win the damn thing, for all you know.” She

gave his shoulder a wimpy punch.

Dillon pointed to the TV. “Speak of the devil.”

The slender blonde woman stumbled into frame, now the victim of the announcer’s

zingers. In a knee-length skirt and a white blouse much like Carla’s, she ping-ponged clumsily through the passage, neglecting the handgun stashed there.

“You were saying, Jan?” Dillon said to Jeannine, sending her a shit-eating grin.

She gave him another play-punch, harder this time -- she hated him calling her Jan. “I

didn’t say she would win, just that she could. Greg.” He, too, hated Dillon’s nickname, and she knew it.

“Now, now, children,” Jake said from their right, red with drink and arousal. “Don’t

make me get Alice to come in here.”

This elicited the rare snicker from Carla. “Yeah, don’t want that bitch around,” she

snorted, letting off of Jake’s horn. She rolled up her right sleeve, made matching cuts in that bicep, and looked back to the TV, where the blonde was busy dying. The woman went down anticlimactically, her dress bunched up to reveal a lacy slip as a revenant gnawed off a leg. Jake said, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” but no one really laughed.

The show segued to the last contender, the beefy Schwarzenegger look-alike, foregoing

commercials. 66

“Ten bucks this guy makes it,” Jake said. He put himself away and again zipped up,

fulfilled.

Dillon made an aspirated psshhh and flapped his hand. “That’s just what they want you

to think. Twenty says he goes down like a chump.”

“Twenty bucks?” Jake challenged.

“Twenty bucks.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Jake shot out a hand. “You’re on.”

Dillon shook it. “Likewise.”

Carla gave them a disgusted look. “Oh come on, now you’re gambling on this crap?” she

said, bleeding.

“What’s an innocent wager between gentlemen,” Dillon said, and wrapped his shaking-

hand back around Jeannine. “It’ll pay for the wine,” he added with a smirk.

Another drumfire of gunshots sang from nearby, inside the building now, muted

commotion following. Eyes on the TV, Jake stood and removed a double-barrel shotgun from the closet. He carried it back to the man-recliner, broke it over his knee, and loaded two tomato-red shells. “Come on, you bastard,” he said to the man on TV, who looked to be faring no better than the previous contestants. The man scrambled around the entry chamber like the others, with the urgency of one thrust into the unknown. At least he found the pistol.

The four watched with building interest, the wager salting things some. The show

entered another transition-montage: the gigantic man slaying a total of ten revenants, growing divested and haggard like the black man had. However, unlike his predecessor, he bested the five-strong onslaught in one of the latter rooms, and, employing a pump shotgun, even took down one of the much-feared reptilians reserved for the final stages.

“Ready to hedge your bet, Greggy-poo?” Jake said.

“That was just one lizard,” Dillon said, unfaltering. “Let’s see him take on the three-

banger at the end.” 67

Tumultuous movement sounded from the hallway, just outside the apartment, mingled

with whip-crack gunshots and a female scream. Immediately after, the door exploded open, a penny-colored revenant framed in the jamb. It stared with glowing eyes, announcing strange paradoxes and ancient truths, unappreciated by the entranced Americans nearby.

It started forward, forced to duck through the man-sized doorway.

With one last look at the TV, Jake stood, joined the shotgun, and raised it to his shoulder.

He let the revenant come a few feet, then opened both barrels in a plangent outburst. The creature’s head exploded. It slammed into the door, leaving an angel-shaped blood-spatter by the knob.

Jake ejected the smoking shells, then poked his head into the hallway. Judging the coast

clear, he kicked the corpse outside. He shut the door but it banged back open, flaccid on its hinges; the frame was splintered and the latch wouldn’t catch. He secured the door with a brick kept for just this.

As Jake returned to the living room, more moaning sounded from the gimp. “Rodney!” Jake

shouted, and returned the shotgun to the closet. He sat, regarding the TV. “Now, what’d I miss?”

Dillon dug in his pocket and produced a twenty-dollar bill, Andrew Jackson’s vapid

expression mirroring that of the bloody man on TV. The man stood with several bikini-clad women, holding a giant gold cup filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. “Go nuts,” Dillon said, extending the wager. He massaged his ear with his free hand; it was still ringing from the gunfire.

Jake laughed, and pushed Dillon away. “Keep your money, for God’s sake. Was just

a goof.”

Dillon started to insist, but then smiled and crumpled the money into his pocket. “I

owe ya’ one.”

“You don’t owe me shit, Greg.”

“Shyster,” Dillon fired back, grinning. The beers were working.

The synth music kicked back in, reprising the theme, and the credits rolled, juxtaposed

over the new millionaire and his brides. Jake was standing the moment the first name crept 68

into view. “Okay, le’z eat,” he said, then clapped his hands and jogged into the blood-smelling kitchen. The other three followed.

The meal was wonderful, fraught with jokes and stories and drink, Carla’s bloodsauce

unmatched. Afterward, in full audience of the Ritzes, Dillon took a knee and proposed to his beautiful date, extending an expensive infant-bone ring in a clamshelled box. She accepted without hesitation, and the two kissed for full minutes.

Carla cried, Jake said “Prosit!” and raised his wine, and the gimp moaned until yelled at.

###

A.A. Garrison is a twenty-nine-year-old man living in the mountains of North Carolina. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of zines and anthologies, as well as the *Pseudopod* webcast. His horror novel, *The End of Jack Cruz*, is available from Montag Press. He blogs at synchroshock.blogspot.com

The Critic’s Critic

Oscar Season and Redundant Critic Picks by Tyler Fisk Before I launch into this I want to say that this was a great year for movies. There wasn’t really a single movie that was nominated for an award that didn’t deserve to be a best picture winner, but I knew Argo would win before the dust settled and the explanation is really quite simple: this shit is predictable. Now, that said, let’s get right to it, ladies and gentlemen. This past month was “Oscar Month,” meaning it’s that time of the year when we watch the same people dress up in the same kind of crap and walk around in the same place and watch the same types of movies win the same awards as years past. This is my statement for Critic’s Critic this month: art struggles as the formulaic trope continues to succeed. There’s always the same stuff, man. The “biopic,” in the past it has ranged from Howard Hughes to Ray Charles and this year settled on none other than Abraham god-dang Lincoln. There’s the flashy, colorful picture, the “Avatar,” if you will. This year it was called “Life of Pi” and happened to be directed by the master of the colorful picture, Ang Lee, the only man on the planet who found a way to make the Incredible Hulk incredibly gay. Sorry to my constituents out there who cringe at the use of that word, but it was, I daresay, grotesquely appropriate in this instance... There’s also the “little movie that could,” in the past it’s been flicks like “Crash” which was little only in that it didn’t pay a lot to its big star cast and dealt with uncomfortable topics and stuff, 70

but still it was the underdog. This year we got a couple of examples of the little movie that could: “Silver Linings Playbook,” which is that guy from The Hangover really trying to act, and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” my favorite movie on the list of this year’s nominees, but more on why in a minute. And let’s not forget how there will always be the movie about movies. Last year it was “Hugo” and “The Artist,” and this year it’s “Argo,” where a bunch of guys pretend to be movie makers in order to save the day and stop the terrorists and be all that they can be or whatever. And let’s not forget the gritty, “America kicks ass but we feel bad about it because look how hard life is out columbia pictures there for the troops,” movie. In the past it’s been movies like “Platoon” or “The Hurt Locker,” but this year we got “Zero Dark Thirty” which is about how a bunch of people executed an unarmed man but it’s okay because he was evil – I think it was about that, I don’t know, I didn’t see it. Maybe my favorite thing about this Oscar season, and I hesitate to even go into it because it might run contrary to the thesis of this thought essay, is that Django Unchained got nominated. This, I think, might have been the coolest movie I saw all year and I was actually proud to see it get some attention from the big wigs. However, Tarantino has always been critically acclaimed, even if it was just as the bad boy of Hollywood or the freak, the rock star, whatever people call him... he still has always been widely hailed as a visionary director, so this still isn’t that big of a

surprise. I guess what I’m trying to say is there just aren’t many surprises around Oscar time and that’s why I kind of quit caring years ago. You know which movies will be nominated as soon as they come out so you almost don’t even need to watch. You knew Lincoln would be a Best Picture nominee the same way you knew The Aviator would be or Ray or... whatever, you get the point. It’s like, somewhere along the way the desire to hit all the teaks, to be politically and creatively aware of all the types of movies out there, we severely limited the choices and selections being made around awards time. I mean, it’s been the same directors for years. Surely there’s at least a few newbies worthy of attention, but no, you have to pay your dues, you have to earn your keep, work your way up... the Academy kind of just sounds like another corporation where you have to be a team player before you get your day in the sun. I find it exceedingly dull. I suppose that’s why I’m hoping the winner will be a surprise, like the year Crash won out over Brokeback Mountain. That was a day that will live in infamy, because suddenly everyone realized that the little indie picture that doesn’t follow the rules, that makes creative choices outside the standardized format can actually achieve mainstream success. However, that was also the swan song for the indie film industry, at least for a while, because at that moment every big actor and big director was hopping on the band wagon and in the years that followed indie movies felt like a new genre, a new cookie cutter, and it lost all of its wind. But I wanted to see Silver Linings Playbook or Beasts of the Southern Wild win because, at least for me, it would have been a testament to all of that stuff I just said going undone. These were two independent flicks that broke the mold of the indie movie and, guess what? They’re best picture nominees for it. I think that’s pretty cool. It’s my hope that people might stop

analyzing successful movies in the hope of extrapolating some big secret for how to make a money-earning film. It cheapens the work done in that movie and it cheapens the work that follows. The secret is actually really simple, the successful movie told the truth in the way that was appropriate to that movie and it didn’t think about anything other than telling its own story. As soon as you try to mimic something else you’re automatically in shallow water. Period. Your work is going to suck because it’s not your work anymore, it’s a reflection of someone else’s. I guess, what I want to see, is one of these movies that dared to be pretty damn honest and original will win and tell the world of Hollywood and stardom that the only real way to make art is to “thine own self be true.” End rant. pp

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Tyler Fisk is an art student at PSU and an amateur juggler. He likes his dog and wishes he could carry on Gonzo Journalism but also knows it probably died with Thompson. He likes art but doesn’t like talking about it. He hasn’t done much as a writer yet, so this will be short.

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