Hellalula

Hellalula

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 15

Tom Bass

YOU ARE HERE, the map says.

Countless fingers have traced the spot, a boil, angry and nagging.

YOU ARE HERE has been massaged into a centerless white dot, concentrated and contradictory.

Everything indicates that Toby Pleasure is indeed here—finger mushed against the map, feet spread at the very point, head gathering a sense—but a white deleterious space occupies the place. The missing information of the peeling dot will not help. But in that negative space of the dot, the smear of white invading the print and glue laminated on paper, there is a description of the outside and the inside that fills the space in between—and nothing else should concern him.

“Holes are a quest for meaning, holes are a center with no center, holes are where one disappears,” he aspirates. He turns to the city behind him, its armpit, its smelliest, most erotic part, a synecdoche for heaven and hell on earth. Cigarettes, piss, sensimilla, vomit, needles, spit, bottles, papers, razors, semen and skank are scattered from gland to gland. It’s an enormous clew of hair, twine, jute, yarn and hawser, knotted and bound together, a Gordion knot that will not unravel in the maze, for it has no beginning and no end and is fit for the sword.

The exhaust of humanity mixes with the sweat of traffic. Fragments of wet conversation blend with the horns. No one seems to object to the unrepentant odor. Necks and knees perspire into collars and creases. No antiperspirant can purge the stench. Neither spray-on Apocalypse nor roll-on Armageddon.

A phone box is a refuge—the door seals the chamber, banishes the noise. A kaleidoscope of sex is arranged above the plastic shell of the phone, decorated with the religious lexicon of punani for hire: Yellow Fever, Brown Town, Trans Fan, For His Eyes Only.

People squat in gutters, duck into offices and rush the booze; people squawk in cells, chomp in restaurants, scrutinize what’s on offer. People are so hermetically occupied being people that they are unaware of being subject to influence, desire or sense. It’s public: a knot, a coiffure, a belt, a stocking receives a touch, a primp, a cinch, a dab of nail polish.

They secretly smell the armpit, its musk. They think it has no effect, but it’s an aphrodisiac, like money, and the transaction depends on the mood of fickle nose and wayward pocket.

CCTV records the success, the diesel-flavored smog and the people clad as marbled Stilton or incorrigible teabags. Bins of teddies and Beefeaters litter the streets. Neon lights: blink Fuji blink Coke. Homegrown sounds emerge from a quartet of buskers passing the cup in return for three-part harmonies, syncopated claps and human beat box. Earth First travelers chant around an iceberg rescued from the Artic. An aborigine plays the Stones on a didgeridoo. PETA and the Animal Liberation Front release rabbits, monkeys and beagles. Punks secrete various sharp objects. A man swallows fire. The Family competes with the Scientologists with popcorn and candy-floss, trying to mollify anyone with the soft, innocuous strains of revelation. Steel drums resonate somewhere with an Oasis cover. Anything can happen. Nothing is prevented.

A young man proffers cards from his stack of promotional leaflets; his baseball cap is askew due to his abundance of wiry wig-like hair. A beard dangles from his chin. He distributes the flyers with a single hand, adroitly clutching the flyers between shoulder and ear. Toby flashes a smile of recognition, but he cannot place the puzzled, sly face due to his own distracted anxiousness.

“Is this a friend?” he wonders. Would he acknowledge one anyway, on so important a day?

He moves on, his eyes reading over the flyer that advertises neither religion, credit cards, insurance nor kink.

“Animal Society. Meetings every Sunday in Galapagos.”

The text is elaborated with the structures of chemical bonds. It’s intriguing and secures a place in his pocket.

A bicycle ticks by. A cane taps the gum-specked surface of the pavement. A woman walks a bouquet of dogs, a pooping, diddling, yipping, sniffing knot of trouble reading the streets for good piss messages. Down an alley Chinese hoist birdcages into the air and commence Tai Chi among the skips where no one will trouble them. Coats dart in the pigeon-colored shadows.

“Let’s hook up, and I’ll tell you about all my birds, bunnies and fish.”

“You want it that way? I’m not really interested in cute stuff.”

“Come on.”

“All right,” he says begrudgingly. “At Galapagos. It’s not open yet but we can meet—I’ve got the run of the place.”

***

An alarm buzzes in the liquor store. The booze is behind bulletproof glass. The mescal between the Kahlua and rum. Outside, cafes, boutiques and galleries, ethnic restaurants, chic watering holes. Dealers, homeless and immigrants fester among the culturatti here for vibe.

He pushes the steel door, crosses past the reflecting pool in what was once a garage. The beard is on the zinc bar. So’s the hat. The organizer of the Animal Society steams a pot of milk, delicately maneuvering his sole hand. The espresso machine shrieks like an eagle.

“I’m Pop,” he says.

“Toby.”

“Weird moniker.”

“Better than Pet.”

Pop laughs, swallows. “I’m sick with sick.”

“Me too,” Toby says. He winces. Delicate. The wound between his legs is sore. He dips a flute of local croissant into the stern white milk. Pop stabs the foam with his pastry too.

“Drink. You can’t be that sick.”

“I did.” Pop eyes the taps.

They laugh and clasp waists. No one is here in Galapagos.

Pop stretches.

Toby grunts.

Pop touches his tonsure, exposed now that the baseball hat is off.

“Outfoxed me with that beard.”

Pop returns Toby’s brown gaze. “You’ve got to be wicked cool to sport a beard.” He jams the baseball cap on his head and pulls at a Marlboro. “The world has woven a cage around us, huh?”

No, Toby thinks, not at all.

Pop requires a degree of introspection. He’s an artist. “Escape is an impossible, desperate task. We can drop off mountains or kayak across the ocean or circumnavigate the globe by balloon, certainly. It’s a desert, but one with too much.”

“You’re sick.”

“Guess so. No turning back. But I’ve got a remedy at home.”

Toby and Pop walk to a scabby warehouse, climb the loading bay. The black iron doors clawed from use. No bell, no indication of how to get in.

The door creaks; it’s ajar.

The hall is filled with bikes, ropes, motors, wood, fans, canvas, tools, buckets, grease, tarp, wire, bales of clothes. An egg-like car carries them up. The array displays less numbers for up than down. Is there a bunker below, a series of corkscrewing planes?

The top floor is made of books. Books cover the windows, the floor, the walls. Titles and authors are laminated, glued, stacked, paper rescued from oblivion, reused. The walls dividing the space are old paperbacks, multiplied in mirrors that are buried in the exterior walls of books. They look like carcasses of burnt toast. The freezer is open, bursting with frozen blood and frozen wax. Two blocks wrapped in plastic—one of peat, one of felt—also suffice as chairs.

Pop settles behind a monitor, his tonsure just visible, tucked behind the horizon of equipment.

Codes animate in the space. Strings of numbers and letters crawl through the air.

A large cube is installed in one portion of the floor. A small pond and fountain rest in the middle among latex plants.

“Alula,” says Pop. “This is Alula.” He taps ENTER, rises. He’s wearing a cowl. “She’s my queen.”

Toby turns to shake his one ivory hand. Pop’s stump wiggles amiably.

“Looks like a square to me.”

“That’s it.”

Big latex sculptures of what look to be plants, Triffids and other Geiger-esque forms, sway from the ceiling and walls. Silk-screens, lymar prints, slides, text, globes, satellite prints, beamers, super-eight loops, LEDs and LCDs are all valorizing the space. Every object is confusingly draped in moving, bipolar images that have been recorded and rendered. A cistern on the roof has been adapted into a camera obscura; it’s mirrored into the room. Reflections of people move on the walls. They could very well be insects.

“Do you want to meet Alula? She’s quite friendly.” Pop gestures to the cube.

Toby steps over the lattice and into Alula, white on the outside but black on the inside, deeply black. Fields of green, pink and orange amalgamate and merge into a greater shade of blackness. Two cats on some natural hit of ecstasy purr in the light apertures of the cube. Woe and anxiety wash away as the shades of darkness respire like the bright pink tissue of a lung. Toby feels like a compass enjoying the pole where all lines and direction converge. All Pop’s images intersect here in the apex of the cube and he’s blasted with digital stardust. The entire world seems to be confidently within reach.

“It’s like the edges of the universe!” Toby hollers to Pop.

“It’s a she! But I never thought about it like that!” he shouts from somewhere outside the darkness.

“Is she animal or mineral?”

“Alula’s the universe! Like you said. That’s part of the Alula experience. She’s alive.” Pop’s face looms out of the darkness and retrieves Toby from Alula’s ambiguous edges. He throws a blanket on his friend’s shoulders. He’s star-burned, bleached to black. Leaves of dead microbes fall from Toby’s round face.

“To understand Alula you have to open your mind,” Pop says. He swells with rhetoric about his project. “In fact, she’s already here.”

Toby’s skin is crawling with images from the beamers that Pop has integrated into the space. “You’re optimistic.”

“I have to have an agenda.” Pop’s fibers are wiggling.

“I like plants better, Pop, but Alula’s all right.”

“Acceptance is my strategy.” Pop’s earnest.

“Can I, like, rent it, rent the cube?”

Alula’s calling, broadcasting a seductive tune.

“Well,” Pos says, “I’m not going to give it to you.”

***

The long hall is busy with the hum of computers and other electronic equipment. Pop noodles with his machines. What appears to be a woman with hairy ears curses at a sampler and keyboard surrounded by percussion and guitars; an androgynous figure in black leotards and black face rehearses in falsetto. Everything is cloaked in another image that may change at any moment. That pen may be a cipher. That cup may be a number. That beer might be a code. Pop might be Amy or Dennis or Frank or Lulu. The effect is nauseous.

“You’d like a cup?” Pop intermittently pinches the mug with his stump, “Ginger tea?”

“Anything.” Toby groans, squatting on the linoleum floor, clasping a sheet.

“I moved Alula into the lift.”

“All of her?” The space occupied by the cube is now negative space, the white dot proclaiming YOU ARE HERE.

“Move the universe around a bit if you want.”

“Ginger tea.”

Toby is sullen and silent. It’s too cryptic, a jumble of subtexts, messages and symbols.

Pop ceaselessly chats to himself about his codes. The composite animations of spheres or tentacles court, mate and mutate like tumors. Pop is in a self-promotional mood. He hands over a book of his press clippings. The same gormless faces are in most of the photographs. “Alula again?”

“In a moment.” Pop’s a pest.

“You can come like that, in your sheet.” He defiantly cuts a stroke through the air with his stub, cracks the fridge open for a lager and Toby proceeds out into the corridor, along the walls made from books. He calls the lift. She clunks up. What was cold metal is now warm Alula, materializing before them: fountain, cats, water, light, lattices, Triffids.

“It’s splendid.”

“It’s the universe, like you said. I was looking for a larger theme for my work and here it is, the universe, something to really capture people’s attention. Shall we go for a ride?”

“What’s on the lower floors?”

“Studios, workshops, that kind of thing.”

Toby pushes the lowermost button in the egg and the Alulalift fitfully descends until she docks with her polysexual kin reproducing and sprouting in the cellar.

“I’m gonna make more Alulas over here, too.” Pop connects a tissue of tunnels, rooms and spaces from tarp. He kneels to glue-gun the different colored sheets together. Pop’s stump pegs down the measured material. He will join them to her and they will balloon in the Alulalality. Her skin is iridescent and unctuous like the wings of moths.

“Not too many people.” Toby trips on the sheet, his sole weapon in the Alulinth, who increases her voice as he goes deeper.

Some of her caverns drip amplifiers and speakers, others surge with images from beamers and projectors. Bats fly madly around the lights. A group of men who look like the members of Van Halen or U2 sip fluorescent drinks. Asians count rice behind a curtain. Priestesses in bird masks serve macaroni to a motley assortment of guests, who sprawl on beanbags and pillows; they sink into the replicating walls.

“Alula isn’t living up to expectations. I’d rather see someone grill clothes,” mouths an orchid-faced woman. Pop’s smitten.

Full of admiration, Pop needs to feed his bionic codes. They have quit budding, incorporating, bumping, sensing, changing, living. Instead they are gobbling the guests, who vanish, screaming, into the black and white holograms dancing in the air like bones. Is Pop’s investment in face-time a farce?

News of Alula is spreading and more people continue to arrive, so Pop’s got more faces to talk to. Who will get the credit for the experience?

Pop pontificates to a crowd of edible admirers. “To join you’ll need to know the different ingredients: lychee or persimmon, saris or ponchos, mescal or absinthe, fenugreek or molé. The ingredients also might be talas or slang or intervals or skin. Diversity demands that everyone learn, manipulate, filter and adopt them. You’ll then need to understand polysexuality and be willing to consider sex with a number. Only then can you join Alula.”

Toby interjects. “A parallel universe. Is that what you had in mind?”

Pop’s loathe to admit it. He would rather baby-sit and care-take in his off-kilter, one-handed way—making sure that the light, fountains and music are coordinated, informing people about his work, dosing everyone with creation myth and the monster of suspended disbelief.

He’s distributing maps of Alula underlined with the slogan, “Bionic codes for bionic beings.”

Pop fondles the living data, his stake in credible lunacy. The codes and crowd multiply and feedback. Pop slobbers in his desperation to communicate with everyone. They respond to protocol and grumble at the aesthetic choices, grimace at the music, frown at the atmosphere, though Alula is very much in control. The codes swallow the critics.

Pop resolves to correct his voracious pets after checking the vibe-o-meter. He types at his machines, manipulates, cuts and pastes, runs programs, trying to breach his codes with the mislaid passwords to the Alula.

The horde cheers: “Pop the Compassionate! Pop the Merciful! Pop the Great!”

Toby ambles along a matrix of passages, the party just a hubbub. Alula has reproduced everywhere. Bad digestion. Triffids wiggle and sting. The walls seep acid and blare atones. Codes malignantly burp. The way is forward through the belligerent sludge and Toby finds a way to the Alula stop of the Underground.

Escalators rotate in a ceaseless toothy way. Signs point to the exit. The turnstile. The beeping machine. The green arrow. The flat lozenge of ticket.

“Go on.” Everyone whispers.

Trains rumble. Commuters mute. Men in orange jackets work the tracks. Lines of dead or living congregate on the platforms. Alula envelopes them. Alula scavenges and grows.

A tartan of arms and legs knits in the corridor. A rat picnics on a tower of Fruit Gums and a babble of chips. Spanish trill in Urdu to Tamils. Kurds seduce Nigerians in Turkish. Kalmykians recite the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Kenyans demonstrate Tae Kwan Do in Flemish. Gulf Arabs recite ghazals in San to Maghrebis. Jamaicans refresh their Inuit. Hungarians translate Beowolf into Swedish for the Fuegian Education Project.

Toby’s audio dictionary is jammed, overwhelmed.

A rainbow of cables swells outside the window. The train rocks past trusses, signal lights and switches. The third rail consistently twinkles. One of the windows is scarred with the letters KGB. Water trickles down its surface. Bleary passengers lunge for a grip or tackle a seat. No one appears to be overly concerned. Elbows dig into the rough texture of the checked upholstery.

Toby huddles between two carriages and curses a cigarette he has twisted together; both he and the cigarette are wet.

The train disgorges passengers at stops that deteriorate in legibility—bleached, deleted letters. Smiles, glances, sneezes, yawns, sighs, fidgets disperse. They evaporate through the turnstile. Pop has not quite pacified his codes.

Toby scans the stops, hoping to recognize a name from his travels—Alexanderplatz? Ramses? Puskin? Lavopiernes? Bowery? Camden?

Nothing indicates the train’s destination. Ghost stations, unpasted posters, scorched tiles and the crispy bones of laborers phosphoresce under the earth. The train seems to burrow under sands and waves.

Toby’s wet cigarette smoke wisps between the cuffs of two carriages for a roaring interlude.

The stop’s take letters, gradually dye with people and colors, but it’s not what Toby expects. Legs swell like yams. Arms sour and stink. Everyone’s eyes fatigue from the glare of the carriage lights. No room to sprawl, no chance to loosen the light bulbs and sleep under the seats in the luxury of yo-yoing darkness.

The carriage roof drips. Seawater wells against the glass. Seaweed slows the train’s progress. There has been a collision with a whale. Water collects in puddles, thick with soupy life.

The guilty are among the innocent: drug and diamond mules; vigilantes of machete, grenade and landmine; military men schooled by the West to eliminate rebels cum civilians; holy men calling for war from their pillows and prayer mats; politicians wearing belts of payoff, kickback and extortion; traffickers watching over their charges; nabobs and mandarins of the world order. Gringos with broad mustaches and Shell, DeBeers, Lockheed or RioTinto neatly sewn on caps inculcate the headmen, healers, chiefs, elders, ancestors and demigods. Gringos with RELIEF silk-screened on their shirts distribute millet, salt and fire, but it’s commandeered. Nothing goes where it might.

The Alulatrain loops on the vast circuit of the ocean floor.

The passengers’ faces are sallow and rotten. Only now do they fear something on the endless, rattling express reeking of the poor.

Babies, felt tents, saddlebags, blankets and cooking fires fill the carriage. Men gather on their haunches to gossip. Men bear the burden, each sent with village money to anchor a livelihood after they have sold their children to the anvil, loom or kiln for passage. Women follow a better life in a sweatshop, brothel or detention center. What indenture awaits them?

Handlers march on the platforms. The families are escorted into vans. They’re distributed down into the cracks where they will not be seen or heard from until payback, the penalty for insouciance and hope. They survive on chickpea flour and chilis, jerked okra and ducks’ tongues. No gas necessary.

Toby escapes the train at Alulagardens.

He enters a big glass greenhouse. It’s tranquil. He pushes aside the vines. Momma Empire sits among the plants of the gods, breathing and meditating. A group of editors (Carlos, Terrance, Timothy, Abraham, William) sit around her at a thick oak table in the garden reading manuscripts, working the slush.

Their time’s limited so they give each manuscript two pages. Terrance and Timothy hoot with derision. William howls because of his lapsed ass. Carlos supplies the chillums of grass and hashish. Abraham spits a mix of coca, khat and betel.

The table's laden with black food: truffles, peyote, oysters, black risotto, caviar, rose schnapps and one-hundred-day-old eggs. They eat from a bowl of dry black mushrooms on the table. They bound into the trees. They revel in the aqueducts and fountains of Aluladise.

They will break to a sweatlodge and lick one another’s sweat. Abe swipes at Will who shoots Timothy. Carlos buries Terrance in the psychoactive compost. They testify to their greatness. They boil iboga. They blow dust up tubes into their noses. They harvest ergot. They’re strung out. They pull one another’s beards and break one another’s spectacles. The pages of the manuscripts separate like snow. They are gods and lie to one another about it.

Momma Empire governs the hysteria. She comforts the gang under her skirt once the paranoia proves too much. She swallows an apple and smiles at the botanic chaos as the editors wind up her legs. Momma beats a mortar and pestle and gives Toby sachets of spice, herbs and bark, seeds and cores, pith, leaves and roots. But as she gives them to him, they slip away and dissolve in the broth of the garden. 

Commas and colons (codes) patrol the garden and snatch the gang away to the canopy: words, compounds. Toby is sucked up too.

Pop’s wired Toby into the universe, into Alula.

Pop types next to Toby’s sheet. He controls him, and titters. He puts a straw between Toby’s lips.

Toby sips milky chaj that tastes of cannabis. A grow cabinet glows from the corner of the room. Pink and blue buds sparkle, drying on the cabinet’s door. The kettle whines, perhaps for ginger tea. Pop whips the milk. Pop chops the grass and blends more marijuana-tea shakes with ice, sugar and milk.

“Never underestimate what you want for breakfast,” he says, leaning, revealing an octagon of chest. “That’s my motto.”

Toby can’t immediately answer, but sits in the slowed time of the bunga shakes or Valium, whatever Pop’s into.

Alula hums in the room. The two cats mew in the cube. The studiomate with the hairy ears curses her linguini marinara, “Fucking lubrication. Fucking lubrication.”

Pop wrap up cables, servos and electrodes, replaces slides in the projectors, reverses films and rewinds tapes.

The ghostly studiomates share a Garfield bong loaded with sensi. Alula darkens and grows silent.

“I’ll watch you next time. You got too close,” Pop says. Pop has already rendered Toby’s form and body, perhaps even his soul. He’s mined Toby’s data—credit card numbers, medical and tax records, birth certificate, driving license, phone bills—certainly enough to represent Toby as a cohesive whole.

He’s the next string of code dancing on the screen, the most frightening, dangerous thing of all, when fantasy becomes reality.

***

Pop squats and blows out the toilet. Pop bends into the mirror to brush and floss. Pop stoops under the spigot. Pop shaves his face and neck. Pop trims his nipples, sternum, armpits, nostrils. Pop gargles. Pop swallows multivitamins and B-complex. Pop looks at his tongue, squeezes a few spots and pulls rogue hairs out of his shoulders. Pop squeezes orange juice, surfs the cable and files his nails. Pop fast forwards to his favorite scenes. Pop is constantly busy and restless as if he were caged. Pop slips on his flip-flops, takes a towel, dons his gold Serengetis and steps on the roof. The urban beach is littered with toys and laundry, a herb garden, buckets of marijuana growing in the shade of the cistern, the camera.

Alula's boring under the earth with machines seemingly right below him. In the distance the city is distorted like bonsai. Intermediate space is a jumble of canopy and roofs, a railway corridor and its network of wires.

Pop salvages a banana and a bottle of absinthe between bites of cigarette while trying to unknot himself. “Just testing,” he explains as he tips water over sugar into the green fairy.

The absinthe doesn’t do much of anything in Pop’s greater appetite. He’s soon down in the cramped flat, bursting with Alula. Pop rummages for a thermometer and sticks it under his swollen tongue. Pop tunes a stethoscope to the roar of plasma and valves and then his churning GI track, barking like a toy. Alula is drilling through the earth, through the basement, and he can hear her through the stethoscope. Pop grabs his sphygmomanometer, listens to the force at rest, at work.

The medicine cabinet is clogged with paraphernalia smuggled into his tiny bathroom, sprayed with skin, bacteria, nails, fungus, scales and hair. He inoculates his rump, counts his corpuscles and sperm, calipers his skull, scans his brain, consults his pharmaceutical tables, seeking the elimination of his sickness.

Toby peeps through the keyhole: Pop’s hugging the sink. The tiny hole smells like bandages. He turns the handle.

“What’s the diagnosis, doc?”

“An attack. Something awful.” Pop retches dryly.

“Alula? Is she okay?”

“She’s a monster. What am I going to do?”

“Send them away. Knock on the door three times with a rock and send them away.”

“That’s amusing.” Pop smiles for an interlude.

“Answer the question about the monster.”

Pop heaves creamy absinthe into the sink.

“Is that it?”

“She's thinking man’s pussy!”

“Did you say that?”

“You’ll know when you see it.” Pop grins. “When they come over.” All in all, he’s macho.

Toby nestles down on the felt and peat blocks, pokes his fingers through the plastic, enjoys their weird earthy sophisticated texture like yurts and whisky. He flips on the television and Pop starts the porno in the VCR. Alula screws deep under the building. Pop flexes himself off while Toby necks it, too, looping it, before a siesta on the sheep bog.

Good smells billow from the kitchen.

People chortle and chat and splash wine on the picnic table installed inside.

The guests disgorge their intellectual occupations and adult diseases: the therapist, the HIV clinic, the theater, methadone, commercials, gonorrhea, kids, graphics, real estate, living hand to mouth behind the door of ambition and reality, a balance between good and evil. Pop is their hero.

Pop crackles with good humor and fusses over the asparagus and whatever else is boiling in pots and baking in pans. Half a lamb sears on the rooftop barbecue and smoke curls down the stairwell. A fire alarm is squealing, but Pop fixes that.

Toby attempts to insert some flavor and texture. He reduces orange juice for the whisky dressing.

Theresa, Samuel and Samantha make way for him on one side of the picnic table and soon the wine flows with gossip, rivalries, conflicts.

Sam mentions Theresa’s vanity. Theresa warns him with her enormous Italian-Asian eyes. Her sister curls her wine and sips her hair. Pop returns that Sam is vain. Sam replies that Pop is arrogant. Sam tells Toby about crop circles and how sexy his dentist is. With a kiss Samantha shows him she is in love with her sister. Pop tells Samantha he loves her. Theresa asks Sam for a divorce and takes Toby’s hand. Pop starts crying and everything gets very confused. Drink and food conspire into tense grievance and hostile sympathy.

One side of the table acts irrevocably spastic, drooling, beating and petting. Theresa shows Toby her bosom and he licks it. Someone dons a flak jacket and camera and films the slobber and wine, crumbs and bones, ash and contorted faces that have been consumed in the course of the quasi-successful, pell-mell dinner.

“Nonsense!” Pop hollers.

He brings everyone to hazy sense on the picnic bark. They retie, refasten, reclip, reallign. Inertia carries everyone into the Alulalift. Pop’s finger deliberates, pushes the button for the exit.

They pull bicycles from the cluttered hall.

Bearings spin, pedals turn, lungs sing and take them into the night. Other ranks of riders gather like formations of red pulsing ships.

Pop’s guests veer into the darkness. Lost.

Is there some fun and company to be had, a desultory skewer of meat or filet of idea to talk to beyond their fleeting unit?

Pop stops and bangs cigarettes out of a machine. Pop snags chocolate croissants from a truck. Pop borrows beer from a petrol station. Luxury cars cruise the streets, moving like robots, enforcers.

Pop doesn’t have one but he looks at them: he wants.

Toby and Pop settle for a kebab shop; out the windows are whores imported from across the world, a necklace of strip joints.

Pop leads the way. Subways, tunnels, buildings, skyways, underground parking lots, boiler rooms, corridors—Alula. He makes an exhilarating ellipse on the heavy iron bike. They ride shoulder to shoulder, in the peloton, wondering when they are going to be caught as the memories surge out of the darkness, for Pop is quivering, afraid, afraid of the end.

Pop bounces naked on a trampoline. Pop strains his neck, unable to run. Pop barfs. Pop jet-skis naked. Pop spears. koi in the Japanese Consulate. Pop shoots at cars. Pop crossbows in an alley. Pop fondles a girl on a bus. Pop does motor-cross. Pop timberbashes in the backcountry. Pop pisses in a Jacuzzi. Pop buggers some ski slag. Pop in his underwear, his money tumble-dries. Dirty Pop. Pop urinates on the daylight. Pop shits again on cars. Pop rolls in leaves and mud. Pop walks the gauntlet. Pop, nailed to the river, growls.

***

Traffic stops in a long red impatient blinking ribbon somewhere on the highway as rescue workers scrape off some humans and cars ahead. Minimal trance ticks against the bigger broadcast of bass. The forest streaks with strobes: wilderness fest. Some drivers dance next to their cars wedged on the motorway. The wait prolongs. More emergency crews arrive. Pagan roars emit from the flashing woods.

Through the perimeter of trees, the glow of weird robot machines working, fighting, spawning under klieg lights. Dust spreads through the night, stirred by machine war.

The forest is a thin green barrier around the wasteland—cranes, yards, lots, buildings, pipes and smokestacks, enterprises in energy, chemicals, metals, materials. In its epicenter is a camp. Over the camp a flag flies; it’s printed with jagged black letters: V-O-E-S-T.

The causeway is bowed with spectators. People in orange flare outfits and goggles work in the circus labs. They release monsters into the Drome. Larger monsters burn and pinch, crush and shred. Along the causeway, Japanese punks, S/M freaks, strippers, people with snakes and tattoos and other underground riffraff wearing an inordinate amount of leather. They clamor with pleasure as the monsters tear one another apart and fuck. The thirsty contingent hollers: rodeo!

Sea containers form HQ. Machines are disemboweled, flayed. They perform rudimentary operations: slice, shoot, cut, burn, saw, compress, grip, mortar, catapult, pour, spark, hover, patrol. The team with the oscilloscope tests a malfunctioning droid. Other monitors and equipment glow among the scraps.

An audience mingles as a speaker lectures about the esoteric nature of machines. A bar for beer and shots. Radicals and artists in sneakers and T-shirts. They squeal and argue beneath the screens that replay a kill.

A metal stairway leads to a platform lined with flags, antenna and banks of controls. Controllers guide their probes into the blackness. Other teams are conducting counterintelligence. Drones circle, jam command and control.

A container strung with beads. It’s a betting shop. Punters cheer and pay again. A bank of monitors show the battles. They rub their greasy pocket money against their bellies and claw their bad skin.

Odds on monarchs. Odds on tuna or skate. Odds on cabinets and presidents. Odds on space. Odds on water. Marriage. Rockets. Smog. Odds on heaven, oceans and ice. Odds on conflicts to come. Odds on odds.

The machines roar out in the night; they hulk under the klieg lights for a moment to drop a carcass and then vanish in the flaring blackness. Corps run out to salvage or repair a wounded beast, spurting oil, fire, blood.

Aphid green images. Faces rest among the metal.

People are interred in the machines, fighting and dying in the privilege of their creations. The remote combat flows, spews in fountains of gore. Machines are plausible here, human.

Casualties pile up in the labs. The wreckage is redoctored. Volunteers step in to replace the performers. The machines march again.

People eagerly await an outcome, a survivor. Throngs of people mingle over the circular array of the HQ: the bars, workshops, stages. Toby teeters into the sprawl.

Spectators are devouring Thai stir fry. Organ riffs in the background. The chef is scented with brilliantine. He whacks a cutlet. He cleavers veg. Toby struggles for the next spice shot from the gourmand-naut.

Pop’s frenetic eye appears in the throng. He’s wearing a new red beard. He smiles at his new arm.

Megaphones mounted on posts call with the headlines of Monster Mash.

A technician tries to tape a microphone onto Pop’s chest. He buckles for a moment. He maximally slurps vodka from a Tiki mug with his new mechanical hand. He’s given a helmet too. Pop stretches his thumb and four fingers. He’s measured and weighed. He’s dispensed pills and potions to quell his anxiety but it’s little good.

“Sexy,” he mentions, surveying the females. Pop tongues at the air. He unzips and druggedly penetrates the air with his hose.

Catatonic, Pop is encased in a cockerel. Spurs, beak, feathers. The technicians are very kind and earnest to him.

What courage!

Toby gives him the thumbs up from his purchase on the scaffold.

The outfit’s ridiculous. He’s more twigs and muscle than machine. He stalks the perimeter of klieg lights.

He kicks up plumes of oily dust.

He dances and crouches like a boxer.

His feet sweep the air.

He flips and rolls, ready.

Pop destroys assembly lines and just-in-time delivery. He smashes the ranks, dodges spear, hook, net, arrow, bolt, magnet, flame, gas and beam. Plunders the wasteland. Executes his victory. Whoops on his wings.

He’s beautiful.

Pop’s fearful face appears from the helmet-cam.

Aphid greenscreen. Audio.

It’s muffled. Chortles, chokes, screams.

The cockerel hurls into combat, lunging, biting, leaping, spraying acid. Pop ejaculates over the wounded. Pop’s on the rampage, attacking noncombatants, referees, civilians. Pop disgorges vats of molten ore. Pop hobbles cranes. Pop tangles pipes and networks. Pop unstitches power and transport. Pop mounts a mountain of coal. He’s the grid.

Pop the machine can do, dream, become anything; it’s carnal, fingertips, ten of any tiny machines.

Fans and spectators are crowding in to praise the victor.

Pop is feted; Pop’s god.

Pop Pop Pop!

Of snakes, fetishes, droids, hands and stirfry.

The technicians escort him to HQ. Battles of yore are replayed. Volunteers pack the components and robots for the next event. Men in flak jackets edit the footage, fading and titling the present.

Pop is crowned.

Pop wolfishly stares at the packs of sleazy, aroused people. He lurches over the causeway, autographing, grimly smiling, in the care of a trophy freakbabe in a silver cowl.

The darkness is rising. The blackness is rising. Alula is coming to collect them.

“I love you,” he says and he slips away from Pop like anyone who would be a friend.