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9.7
The TV mind connected to her insides through its tongue. It was a great source of our heroine’s frustration. It created expectations that rarely could be met. It felt the need to judge, instill neurosis. It was one of Faulkner’s human hearts in conflict with itself. For one whom people would fall all over each other to assist, the only limits to desire were those in her own head. Mostly it didn’t help to have them, but this was an occasion where it did. The bifurcated tongue instilled a khanate in the innocent, which found expression if the limits of desire were lifted. And so the vision of the sick could be fulfilled well into later generations.
Emotions are immortal because they are so easy to pass on, without education. The spear of force will slither through the ages, picked up in turn by anyone who’s felt it. It has too much advantage to be gained. Emotions in others removes choices from ourselves. And the whole thing is expanding, man, accelerating too.
There are calls, and they will go unheard. She already did not hear all the ones that went to her, as protectively shut down as she would become. All this was occurring at the speed of light in neural flashes in the brain. She wished she could shut off certain inputs on demand, thinking of the grief she saved by becoming authentically deaf with plastic in her ears on public transportation. Which she’d only been on once since she rode the school bus as a kid. An old fat guy with mal intentions, although there were empty seats, had sat down next to her. He spread his legs, crowding her, so that she scrunched herself into the smallest portion of her window seat, and he jostled her with his meaty elbow, in every pretext for touching her in ways that left a bruise. She’d been too frozen to get up and move. There was no room for her legs to pass, and it would have meant her lower quarters passing by his patchy bearded face. As her stop approached, she contemplated staying on and just catching the next bus back, but as it seemed hopeless he’d leave before her even then, as the bus stopped, she jumped up and clambered over the empty seat in front to get away. She hit the door fast and ran until her legs were stone and sides were heaving fire, in case he was behind her. He was not. She never rode the bus again.
In Scottsbluff she was far from the first person to deploy those close to her like pieces on a board. Much of it on her part was subconscious. People wanted to do things for her and at some point she would wonder what their limits were. There were times when she’d been drinking that she thought she could start a war between two countries, in the correct circumstance. If she got into the court, she could make a mess of the intrigue, even end up with her firstborn on the throne, in addition to wealth, lands, and her own army to direct from private chambers. Heads would roll at her intoxication. She wouldn’t mean it meanly. Providence deigned it entertainment for her. There was gay amuse in pitting underlings against each other. It let her sit in judgment, and when some intercident conflict resolved in her favor, it gave her added joy. Life was interesting.
Men will structure their lives around the element of surprise. Its pleasure is an otherworldly jolt. There is an attendant rush of power. Even our heroine felt it. It was like besting the universe that up til now had often bested her. Included was a sense of control. This bugaboo within our psyches has been responsible for some wonderful decisions throughout human history. She was ready to exercise that instinct during lubrication. It was like setting a rigorous challenge for herself, to find new lines in morality and ethics. Such ambition was recursive though. The results would change her.
On the other side is the mind’s ability to justify anything. It has vaults of signed checks and every one is blank.
Yea men were earls and dukes to her, on her way up to a king. One who slayed another she would let into her bed, just to try it on, for novelty. The mental construct had to be royal for the specialness she felt. The next time she would deny them all her bed. Just once she’d let a strapping farmhand grovel his way into her, for the thrill of lower class taboo. There were only so many options, and those before her had already mapped them all. She resented limitation. In fairness it did not confront her often. Perhaps she lacked the creativity to make a unique go. But there were marks to make on what she had.
At times she felt she was a source of goodness. This was really dangerous, and was widely known to get a lot of people hurt. But she could claim anything as for the greater good. Military history was built on that. Only the unprovable could defy such a slant.
She wondered how long before she’d mold the world on grander scales. Another dangerous thought. We adjust to fortune quickly, then demand it for all time.
9.8
At closing time the men will sway out of their local. Soon they will be snoring while they metabolize their poison, furthering what we already know. They took account of their powers on the reg: there was much to check against available supply. As soon as they figured out these calculations, they ran them incessantly til they evolved their own independent voice inside their head, with the same chatter as anxiety and retribution, armoring the ego, and meting out incorporeal justice. It could get quite hysterical in there. Pans were banging, flatware thrown.
A scribble is the opposite of a mystery. First she would be judged, and then they’d send in her replacement.
It’s funny the way fending for oneself is forced upon the tribal-oriented. This is another engine of neurosis. The world has been optimized for power, rather than our common mental needs. Emotion has no place in capital. Biological imperatives are divided into the shamed and the barely tolerated. Great scatterings of unfairness are thicc enough to form beds of matter on the ground. Our feet haven’t touched the earth beneath since we were kids. We’ve forgotten how it feels. Egos run their own variations on compulsory programs. We send out words like ram’s heads a-butting. Determinism keeps on fobbing off its rule.
The third dimension gives a width of options. “Probably won’t” does not mean “can’t.” It just means that reason is effective and participates in the decrees of fate. There’s always the choice to beg for liquor and to sleep outside. There is handiwork on handiwork bypassing one’s drab lineage back to antiquity. It’s stunning to still be fighting battles the descendants of Greek philosophy lost 1600 years ago. Why it’s enough to make a billion fatalistic misanthropes.
9.9
Our heroine and hero were both a-moseying that way. It was not ideal — studies proved happiness increased when helping others first — but it was certainly rational. Ten men cross a creek. One will watch his reflection in it, one will watch the fauna, one will try to catch and eat something, one will try to drink, one will splash water on his face and another will disrobe and bathe, one will try skipping stones, one will find the widest spot that he can cover in a leap, one will drop some trash, and one will certainly befoul it.
So much could not be custom. Hours asked our couple endless questions cause they wanted to be sure. She was made to navigate, not to be the pole star of some man. She’d already passed the phase wherein she tolerated poets. She used to accept their lines,to bask in distant admiration. Now she was in danger of picking a real military adenoid and taking his worst to prove that she could do it. She thought about applying the science classes she had taken as a kid. Some people, mostly impoverished women, made a living with formula cheesecake photos and an unrelated skill. Our heroine would never have to take an online route. She’d pick a brute to suffer under and to tame before she would go public.
Our hero never had to consider such a thing. He knew it happened but weirdly didn’t believe it, an example of his own dissonance.
Most women figured they’d exit the stage before such circumstance came close. The ones who made the other choice disdained them. Until they were really confronted with it, they hadn’t known the lengths they’d go to keep prolonging life.
There is comfort in making selves a puddle. There is pleasure in the totally relaxed. There is connection in unspoken sentences. There are heights.
She acted like others only insofar as it gained her extra time with her loved ones. Sitting home with her parents she was almost petrified. But someone complimented a show she was enjoying and then she snapped out of it. There wasn’t much investigating. Life could be a series of waking immediacies for anyone applying themselves to it. She had her art. Art didn’t do anything for other people or it even hindered them. They were self-centered, and for the self-centered, everything was natural. Injustice was abhorrent, but it was something at least that they could understand. Mysteries and puzzles did not hold the same attraction. Their suitcases were carrying their persons.
She thought that polite confidence should win her respect. But the possible relationship was standing on the side, already stopped. There were undreamed of scenes that would not be uncovered. She was not so comforted all the sallied time. Her earlier convenience made later happenstance confusing.
Now the deceased knocked and added their terms. She had to accept if she wanted a well supported life. This allowed for more exuberance. Then nerve endings would refuse her when she subconsciously wanted pain. This lady here knocked reason from its perch, letting it clamber back up only when it backed the play she dreamed up anyway. There had to be a chance. She was home now, trying to think of what she had forgotten.
10.0
Turning memory over to search engines will in several generations begin the atrophy. Those who never got over the hurt inflicted by loved ones will finally be freed of them without needing to be oofed first. The only restless echoes will be trapped in cheesy lyrics or else painted with a facile brush. The effects though are mirrored in the cities, in small nods among the desperate.
There was the look of over-excitement that suggested the wearer wanted something from the addressee, who was enjoying her day before the new wearer had walked up. The loudest person got the look. The world is this way, says the self-evangelist, trying to get laid. Insecurity and tribalism combined with performance ego to exclaim and defend some accepted position, always with the goal of conversion.
This is another thing that made people like her disliked by others — she was unconvertible. The loud would have to wait for the pretty good chance that an addiction would take her to rock bottom — then they could ensnare her, high-fives all around. Her pretty eyes were here, and now they’re someplace else.
How fortunate the past has been invented. It was always there, to be a refuge, there where it was forbidden that any others go. Even when a couple shared a past, it was divided differently between them, so its replay differed too. An image morphed like fluid. Zooming in they found it was just a tiny part of an enormous fractal. Every hurt feeling from everyone who ever lived was part of one fractal, and every joy part of another. Giving others joy dropped people onto the preferred. Nothing calmed them like a continuum. All those feelings of belonging activated. Our heroine knew this would be part of our hero’s struggle with her leaving, though she still wasn’t consciously aware of it. She’d cut short his continuum. Knowing him he’d be finding refuge in destructive alterations. She pictured him with new girlfriends. She didn’t feel jealous or possessive — she felt sorry for the girls. She felt sorry for herself too.
Some of him was prevalent in other males. If she got where she couldn’t stand them in him, a person she loved, she didn’t see how she could stand them in another guy. She could easily see herself being used by rich guys, and when she got fed up with that, dating married guys, as she continued to get older, until the only intimate minutes she spent were on her wishes.
The hand that they were dealt before was no better repeated. It turned out just the same. Even when prior mistakes were remembered, and spotted right before they occurred again, so she could make the other choice, the result may have been better, but only in the short term. In the aggregate there was the same amount of pain in one life across the multiverse — the one where she died young had as much suffering as the one where she lived to be a hundred. It might seem that being long lived is better — the pain is more spread out, there’s more time for healing and acceptance ‘ere the next bout starts, and of course there is the gift of life. But healing and acceptance are easier defined than done. The longer life would also give more time to dwell upon mistakes and slights, to relive them yet again, and feel the worst of suffering whenever her mind should wander that way. Then there were the years of doddering. There was neither slowing nor reversing it. The lucky retain their mental sharpness to age 90 and beyond. Most do not. Either way their bodies become an instrument of stasis.
Nonagenarians long for when their muscles were pliable enough to be strained. Now they’d require an able range of motion that could allow them to tear a muscle in the first place. The humiliation of becoming a baby is obvious — totally dependent, unable to control or clean herself, relying on strangers for intimate and shameful help, pushed around on wheels and left there, unable to look beyond the sweep of the eyes, planted until someone thinks to turn her from one side of bedsores to the other. The indignities are bearable to those who have no other choice.
The circa fifteen years of dotage have the reward of generally diminished memory. There’s a trade-off between being the nonagenarian who stays sharp and the one who’s freed of the burden of the past, and all the hardship she has carried around, finally, without requiring the total passage into death. It’s something to become pleasant, present and unencumbered, a Buddha of the wheelchair set, well liked by the care staff, deaf as a post but with a strong sense of taste, able to mush up and like food, to delight in birds on lawns from one day to the next, unsure of how old she is, or who her parents were until she was reminded in a song of something they once did — then she could offer a few details about it, until she happily trailed off into quiet.
10.1
Once prudence created the option for hotel killings, where the perp would not be caught, they began to happen with some frequency. It never would have affected her if she had gone to a party there, one where a killer was among them. She danced the night away with her newly married friends in the rented ballroom in NE. It had parquet flooring and curtained walls. The PA had been hauled in by the tow-truck driver / DJ. There were skinny banquet tables near the back exit to the employees-only spots — the kitchen, storage, and utility stairs, painted a thick paint-smell green. The kitchen was frenetic. It served the restaurant, special events, and room service. The long tables had dun metal pans over bunsen burner flames with lids that opened in a curve. Spoons and spatulas jutted from their handles. Clouds of steam fled toward the ceiling. Waitstaff in white button down shirts, black slacks, black aprons, and black shoes strode about briskly in a series of near misses with their fellows. The tables in the carpet troughs on either wall were round, adorned with lace, avian centerpieces. She could see her spaghettied reflection in them. Food was brought to every seated chap at once. All faces looked down as the food was placed before them, like coordinated bows around the tables. Then they looked up in unison at their neighbor, anticipating oral pleasure, to be foollowed by core satiety. They looked for approval of the meal, which made them feel approval for themselves. Except one man had not looked down — he was looking at the people, indeed studying them. There was frankly herds of young women all made up in their special occasion clothes, of which our heroine was one, feeling fine with surplus beverages, holding council at her table, putting buttons on bon mots, receiving visitors, air-kissing, taking funny selfies, the clique waiting for the signal when they’d bass onto the dance floor all at once — their jam jackhammering the system, the overhead white lights dimming, the colorful spinning lights correcting atmosphere, timed to every drop. She took her friends’hips in hand and swayed together. Her date raised his arms in a slow stretch. Then they broke apart and she spun to face him. They both laughed in the release of what was unresolved. The clique was all mock sexy with each other. Their laughter drowned under the music. They had the observing man’s attention. The ladies danced exclusive with each other and well out of an embrace. They were closed ranks with each other. Exaggeration would intensify. Our heroine was guilty of discreet amazement at herself. The killer at this wedding would not get his chance.