11/2-7/1998 g.g.Ashbrook
Lenard’s spleen bag was almost filled, just a few more to go. Ranger Rotodel-Talbalo skated up to him on a chessboard sized platform and craned down his malleable pixelated face on a nine foot neck, and stuck it right up to Lenard’s ear and whispered, "Do a good job boy. Make sure there’s no pieces laying around to disturb the ladies. Take the bag and get your chips and get some greasy food to eat back in your hovel and try to be quick about it." Having said that the officer continued on his way, scanning the general public for contraband in fifty spectrums. The auto clean scrubbers on his cleaver arms working like swarming bees to remove the red and return the finish to its original luster.
"Get an upgrade," Lenard said, "Your complexion sucks my ass. Punch card antiquated fuck spark. Something of a lotus flower you are."
Roto stopped and came back and pulled out a four barreled shotgun and waved it in Lenard’s face, "excuse me?"
"’excuse,’ you? As far as I know you haven’t acknowledged any of questionable things you do routinely as being even possibly "wrong," so I guess I don’t really understand your question. As much as I wish you were really asking that I doubt if that’s what you mean, and why are you waving that thing in my face."
"Just repeat what you just said."
"The only reason I would do such a thing is as a courtesy, that is I have no legal obligation to do it, and I don’t like you enough to be courteous to you, so... no." and his grippers clamped up a kidney and arched up and around his back and put it into the kidney bag which he never got much for. "If you shoot me, you’ll blow up faster then you just scooed that foreign diplomat for having tobacco on him that wasn’t FDA approved. Your neural net will probably be erased tonight to satisfy the public relations claims from the Netherlands to keep the story out of the press. A few more trips like that and your whole division won’t last a week. Do you doubt that there are thousands of Blacked-Out screen C division cannon’s pointed at you right now?" Eight dishes flipped out of Officer Rotodel’s back and scanned the buildings. "Yes, technically you were in the right, he had contraband on his person, anyway I’m tired of talking to a computer. It would be different if you had a soul. Then you might realize why killing is wrong. I wouldn’t even kill you, even though technically your not alive. Technicalities are only good for getting you out, they don’t put you in the right in my book. I just wouldn’t give you a gun. I’d teach you how to juggle. Maybe fifty or a thousand years of seeing children smile would cause something to click in you that SecNet hasn’t predicted. But for now your a digital ego trip menace to every living person you go around waving that thing about and firing with a perfect hit record at everyone and anyone who passes any kind of blip across your sensors. Anyway, I have to go. It’s really been great talking to you Roto-18, I hope there’s a heaven for pieces of shit like you because my money goes to your being erased, even though I don’t see the point of it. Your only doing what your told to do. I guess symbolism hasn’t left politics any more than pop-art. But you’ll find out. See you."
And with that Lenard walked on, fetching and flinging organs to satchel, and the cop just stayed there for a minute. He wasn’t thinking. His processing of any finite data sets was almost instantaneous, but still he didn’t move. He slowly put his small cannon away and appeared to be slouching a bit as he moved through the square. Even though he hadn’t read anything about it Lenard had seen it a thousand times before. The people who programmed those beasts put in responses to social criticism to either assuage or win the sympathy of the public witnesses.
The officers scanners were still going, tracking, searching, a tell tale scale tipper for anyone who was up in the air over ‘con.’ At the end of the street two old men were in an playful bickering argument over a chess game and upon loosing one of the men stood up and waved his brass electro-plated hollow cane at the other player, no doubt a friend of fifty years who he just couldn’t beat. Lenard had seen them playing at that same spot off and on ever since he’d moved to Boulder. It must have been something about the cane because Rotodel perked up from his programmed depression quickly enough and with five arms flying he zoomed across the square and grabbed the standing man by the neck. He squeezed and the man’s face turned red, his eyes teared, his hands grasping desperately at the arm which he had no hope of winning over. The clamps continued. One eye popped, his jaw blew from the socket on one side exposing eighty years of caps and fillings and a few spaces just empty, finally the head popped and bounced a few times rolling out into the square where venders parked their stalls. The hat vender ran over and quickly placed a towel over the head, and then she ran back to the small crowd of customers. The clamps opened and the body flopped to the ground where it leaked out quarts of fresh dark and oxygenated. The officers face appeared as a smiling showman’s on the flexible screen with a face in all directions, showing glistening white teeth and a repeating eye-wink. "I hope everyone is safe now," it said. "Is anyone hurt?" It asked, and looked around and scanned around for responses. There was no reply.
A few people were crying and there was this feeling of wadayado(?). Most people got up and left, cursing to themselves and waving their arms before they broke down themselves, crumpled wherever they’d been standing. "What is the problem?" the office inquired. "There’s no problem," Semni Dinkole said. "You can go now, officer." And with that he took another sip from his cup. The officer roved around, sticking its sensors in people’s faces. It shot out a clean up beacon into the grass by the stop sign on the corner and began to leave. Lenard was waiting on a bench, jotting down notes on a napkin and watching the people walk by, and watching them react. The officer went to scurry off to him to remind him about the beacon, as if Lenard could have missed that yellow strobe. But when he was crossing the street he lurched to the side all of a sudden. He made several lunges forward, but he was caught on something. He scanned around with his crane neck and saw a thick metal cable that had been clamped to his arm and he followed the line by sight all the way to the base of a telephone pole. Then he stopped getting readings from the sensors on his back. The feeds just read static. The head looked around, which now was its only source of data on what was around it. His battery levels began to drop. The machine sunk to the ground as its hover pad faded and switched off. It lifted one of its arms to clip the chord which held it to the pole, which took a while because it was going from reserve. Its visual then went out too before it made it through the chord. It had no way of telling if it were through or not, or even if the signals were getting to the arm at all. But it kept sending the signals to twist and clamp down. Then all of a sudden all it’s sensors came back at the same time. It rose up into the air as the power came back to the propulsion unit. It followed the line back to the pole, and about half way there it found a small box which was on the chord like a cyst. Rotodel rose up forty feet over the roofs and crowds of people and looked down. Aside from the people it was only aware of one thing. Ice cream. It saw a few people walking out of a shop with cones and cups in their hands blocks away. It zoomed down and went up to them. "Ice cream?" it asked. The people stopped and looked at eachother. Rotodel hovered there, with arms sticking strait out at the sides. He saw a pig go by between himself and the people who had the ice cream, it was hauling a cart with an old man in a bathtub waving and blowing kisses with a lamp shade on his head. And the pig went on around the corner out of sight. The Officer stuck his head out towards the people and they jumped back. Then they smiled and looked at eachother again. "Did you see that pig?" The officer asked. And the people just walked away. "Hey?" he shouted out. One girl turned her head around and laughed, and whispered something in the ear of the girl who was walking next to her. Again ice cream showed up on his search and report directive. It moved toward the doors to the ice cream shop, but the doors were far too narrow for it to get inside. He went over to a boy sitting on a bench. "Would you tell me what flavors they have in that ice cream parlor?" he asked. The boy looked at him and asked, "What’s wrong with your face?"
Show me your clothes line dreams. Call me your tow truck nanny. Borrow a billow of pillows. A cow pasture with rolls of bedding in bails. Tafeta. Ozark. Napalize riflemen picking their noses and playing hang man for French tourist dictionaries while below them, underneath the towering walls, the parapets and flag poles, down to the ant people imperceptible, there are figures selling figs, and daffodil highways yelling cannabis hooray. There are pickles in tubs, hoagies steaks and subs, cats walking with balls of twine around their feet, a definitive selection of the worlds finest shoe laces.
It was one of those unicycles in which you sit in the middle of the one big wheel and there’s two little wheels that come down when you park and when your going slow. No wander they called it what they did. He was going down a road kicking up dust and throwing stones off into rows of corn. And she was laying on the roof of a building in down town Swailow, there was a band playing and there was the wind blowing and she had a green sweater on and was drinking corn chowder with sea scallops and lump crab meat out of a stoneware bowl and when she looked up she could see out on the coast it was dusk and the whales that had been fitted with luminescent body suits that changed colors at the command of the whales’ brain like the real skin of cephalopods; squids and octopi, danced. She wandered if giant squids could really get, or kill, hmm, sperm whales, the way she always saw in old drawings. There were as many whales as seagulls, and the ships were taking off and splashing down past the break line back where some people, Murry had one, had houses on pillars hundreds of feet down, there was this one pink house, it didn’t make any sense to her. On one wall of the box which housed the buildings air conditioning and heating units, kids were painting a mural of bicycles dissecting ponies on sofas in a barber shop. It made her nauseous. The band was playing something chill, a fiddle, a guitar, a stand up base, drummer, soda jerk, man with dental floss, and when she laid back she could see above the building old people playing sky hockey and pushing eachother into clouds and there were cupcakes falling out of their uniforms. One with pink icing and jimmies had fallen onto the roof earlier and exploded into bits of fresh strawberry foam. She didn’t understand. Once someone had tried to explain why they had all those cupcakes but they had such a bad case of the hiccups that someone called an ambulance, even though they knew the person didn’t need it. She’d never seen the person who’d called the ambulance before or since. She stuck her chin up into the air let the wind chill it until it got too cold and she buried it between her knee and her shoulder. Her beeper went off.
His mother was cooking something on the stove when he got in, she leaned over to get the phone and he saw Jerry’s leg sticking up vertically out of the tall sauce pot. Jerry was their neighbors pet goat. He went back outside and kicked over the mailbox and got back in his Wheel and drove back toward the lights.
He hit the switch and the glass sides rose up enclosing the middle of the Wheel in a bubble squeezed thin in the middle, and he waited for the heater to warm up before he put the fan on. The road glowed a faint green and there were no street lamps. "Leonard Tickler," showed up when he logged on, the missing persons section always came up first for the city’s home page. He reached into a loud cellophane bag and pulled out a small hand full of strawberry and vanilla yogurt covered grass hoppers, and began popping them into his mouth a few at a time. He crunched away as the road zipped by. He set his browser to miscellaneous search and it came up with a live video feed of a man walking through a saw blade factory and speaking in Dutch with ostriches running around all the machinery. The man would kneel down and say something and then make a face as if he were outraged, and then he would smile and take out a tissue and blow his nose three times. He did this over and over for the different objects in the room. He put it on search again and it stopped at a live video feed of paramedics rushing out of an ambulance and into a hospital and through its halls with a canoe on a stretcher. The canoe even had an IV, and a giant green shower cap on the one end, and there was a sheet over most of the length of it. Then a logo for the American Milk Foundation scrolled by on the screen, followed by, "It may save a life." He logged off and the screen went black. He munched on a few more of the yogurt goodies and rolled the bag back down to preserve freshness. Was it warmer on the coast? Had the trees begun that bloom that on the front range is traded for big hard things? Was she still painting her shoes?
The town was always quiet after dark. The Wheel zipped down the streets and tipped into the turns, from the wide main streets to the bendy residential roads and weaving deep into there. He pulled in the lot behind that large blue building parked beside the dumpster and got out and went in the heavy brown metal door, it was unlocked, it usually was until about three. Ray and Dan waved hello as he shut the door behind him, they were building a sliding rail for a chair that could now move all around the house by remote control. "Do you mind if I crash here?" he asked. He walked over to the futon and laid out and closed his eyes. It was warm in the room, and the window was open for a breeze. He took a small glass jar out of his pocket and placed it on the table.
She sat back and let the bubbler rest in her lap. She stretched out her legs, a public transportation system where people all over the city were carried by belts looped under their arms. And she stretched out to grab her toes and tapped the toes of her shoes to her wrists. And she crossed her legs and lit the bowl on the other side this time, and laid back blew up into the air raised the piece, saw a bird, saw it turn its head, saw its eye which had less expression in it then she’d have thought, a glossy, a hundred feet away. The band was playing a song with a choir bell crew. They had break dancing midgets, and a two man act where they threw bananas at eachother but they didn’t have bananas and so they had to mime it, and smiled with gold capped teeth, where the caps moved along the teeth alternating like Christmas lights in a window rim in a drug store, so she assumed, but she wasn’t looking. A thousand ice trays filled in with glitter glue. A thousand oak trees were plucked and dipped in chocolate. Biscotti oak. With baklava acorns. Red ribbons for your knees. Rubber strap on elephant snouts for your elbows. Grandparents with maraschino cherries in their nostrils pushing snakes into the closet with garden rakes as the relatives pull in the drive way. When the door opens their son Ralmer comes in with a staircase stuck to the side of his face which extends out and down his side. His one arm and leg are just painted on the wall of the stair case. The stairs roll out and down and becomes entangled with the furniture when he comes into the room. It raps around the wainscoting of the room in a zigzag. And the floor is a slope steep drop down as the walls of the encircling stair case become wrapped like a funnel. But nobody falls. They may be standing at different heights but, grandpa Elmoy is balanced on the arm of the easy-boy which is half in the wall and every angle of it which is exposed extends in straight lines. When any two flat walls in the room touch, where they should simply meet and stop there is a new pocket of space. In some of these spaces the extended family (that is the grandparents and the parents and the childers) is watching TV. In some they are playing with the family dog. In some they are chasing a lama around the apartment. In some they stay single, in some they have mated, in some they have hooks which are sinkered and bated. In some they have post cards with greetings belated. In some they have blow-up requests they’ve deflated. In some they have green ears of corn on the lawn. In some they have green apples from where they come. In some they have glistening glitteret gems, in some they have epiphanies sprouting from stems, but in all they have now knocking at doors, with packages brought though they know not what for, and the clocks on the wall are all tick till your born, with a fly swatter whisk-of-the-cheek till you tell her something is ready, so take it off the shelf, buy it, put it in packing peanuts and let your reflection go maid carry it townward, we’ll be there in such short a time, we’d bring it ourselves but, you understand.
She sat up, the music was over, there were only a few people left and they were standing in front of that long now sparsely decorated buffet table, draining the last of the punch she wouldn’t touch for a million dollars, ladling it into crystal glasses. But with the air quiet the space seemed somehow benevolent. The bubbler was still in her hand and to her surprise she hadn’t spilled even a drop. She poked at the nug with a fingernail and flipped it. Oh glee, it was nearly all green, nearly all still there. She lit it long and pulled the white cloud in until she coughed, and coughed, and took a drink from her water bottle and coughed about ten more times. And smiled. Cough. But lit by spark of flint, and sizzled it down lungful by lungful until the ash she tapped away. She corked the piece and when she stood up she tucked it into the pocket on the side of her pant leg. She tossed the one side of the scarf up over her shoulder and got out her gloves as she walked. And she went down the stairs to the top floor and ran down the hall to the lift, and punched it for ground level. She rubbed her eyes and looked out the glass as the elevator went down toward the street. And she looked up at all the buildings with their differences architecturally, and their vacancies out of practicality, or their signs of nightly activity, and there it did strike her curiously, where it was that he might be?
Did you hear what happened in town today and I’m not sure I knew the boy disappeared, not sure I went to school with him, not, but quite, lemonade, thank you, no thank you, so we were marching off to Broomly with our hats in our coat pockets, looking along the road side for low hanging apples, no slingshot would I baracade, mormon clap mormon billson stone cascades, full of When-did-all-shade, take it one more outing will you, Take it up closer to the road side would you, so they can all get out and play and step over that puddle, frothing, marmalade, toasty, chandelier, enrapture, goat skin, forthcoming, telepath, for entertainment, bailiwick, for old’s sakes sake, to the run, with the baron flush we go, to the snow, with the hurricane and steeple bells chiming as the wind behaves, chorus girls, with choir boys, call it one step I say two, up to the river mouth again, a trout with glassy eyes, caught on a wooden pole, and song I love you out the bellevue. Too tart, for a water snakes’ crush, too sweet, for the reeds behind the thistles and the brush, too slow, too win the race in all’s plain view, just the same, so when we go, I lean over and I’ll whisper when I say to you, that siding wraps around the ships like ribbons round a box, and candies fill the air like spots of fragrant chicken pox, and a weathered oar sheds skin to something younger underneath, and the muskets sing the falling ornaments to sleep. With old masks shattered on the pavement there a clumsy gate proceeds, a garden bath of lights "I love you," bathed in mysteries.
Under stop signs they stood, when the snow fall first of that season fell. And a car went by slushing that new sound for passing. And they reached out toward one another, reaching to the snow, catching uniqueness on gloves. And they wondered if they had ever met. And the street lights lit up so quiet, there with a beach of sand time, or the egg timer tipping, and the tea is steeping further under cover. He rubbed his eyes unable to recall the events of the day, breathing one way turned around the other, and her folded arms; could the sand box kiss? Is someone knocking at the door? Nauseous on a cruse? Should cough want when winter when bellll light night, Manhattan red behind a window, shouldn’t shutter stand up straight, a shiver. How did it go? With the lips was it? With buildings for teeth which in electric nights so well reflect, do not protest. With shore line gums we lick our lips. With sun rise lines we smile and with roads and tracks and sails we mumbled out our first morning words to one another. With night we blink and chug ahead in secret. By accident he brushed her neck in reaching for a flake. It melted and she started in a circle round a pole, to walk some waiting go sometime between. Their hearts enwrapped in thievery.