“It’s an old story, the fight for love and glory, huh, Bob? It helps if you think of it as a game. Every game has a winner…and a loser.”

We live in the age of the loser. It helps if you think of it as a game, except, according to the M.C. Escher, demiurgic shadow-world logic of our shit-reality, the biggest losers, the most reprehensible, unethical, immoral, irredeemable, venal, compliant, low-life pieces of shit, those who have proven themselves to be completely bereft of even the faintest thread of moral fiber, as a consequence of being, according to any other era, absolutely spineless, godless nothings, get to re-write the rules of the next game. And every round, the rules get a little less fair and the stakes raised just a little higher, in order to remind you of why you should, for your own good, really, just roll over and die like a dog.

Whether it be our current president, the (allegedly) pedophilic, Israel-first rapist who has shit himself on video, diving us head first into a losing war, a completely avoidable energy crisis, inflation, and a food shortage, or his top guys, Rubio and Hegseth, Goofus and Day-Drunk Goofus, a duo of 2008-era frat rejects who lack the operational wherewithal to organize a gang bang at Sodom and Gomorrah, along with their cross-eyed plus-one, Kash the Gooner, to say nothing of Grandma’s Boy JD Vance, or the piglets at ICE, the blood-thirsty gravy boat-shaped boys of Texas, or the series of death-masks that have been paraded around as, variously, the Blade Runner of K-9s and head of the DHS, the Attorney General, and whoever the fuck this little shit was supposed to be, it is clear: we are being ruled by absolute losers, scared and ugly rats hiding in the crooked shadow of Jeffrey Epstein.

“Like rats in the piss-rain…”

And of course, opposite their side of the aisle, you have their fellow apocalyptic, Mammon-worshiping Zionists, liberals like Kamala, a woman with so little political vision that her only response to genocide was “more genocide.” Or the guy in California cosplaying as a serial killer, to the delight of his fans marching in the name of No Kings, who, after their little “protest,” can go home feeling good about having accomplished absolutely nothing, and, instead of demanding more of their representatives, will continue to blame those to their left, or act as if Trump is an abomination, and not a continuation of a cycle they are more than happy to support, so long as it operates in the shadows of respectability politics.

Among the cosplaying Philistines of the Left: Zohran bowed to cynical and bogus Zionist pressure by throwing his wife under the bus, AOC has proven herself to be yet another war-mongering psychopath with no spine, and Bernie is busy with Claude. If you’re waiting for help, you will be waiting awhile.

There is no opposition party. There are no saviors. No spirit will fly from the sky, sword in hand, wielding the fire of God. All you have is yourselves, and the divine light within, that little spark that keeps alight in your darkest hours, those minutes in between sleep, half-awake, when the only thing you have, the only truth of which you can be absolutely certain, is the truth of life itself.

Choose your archon. This is all according to the game.

“Comply!”

Of course, the names and faces, being replaceable, mean nothing. They will change, they will come and go, and nothing will get better, so long as the systems of power and control themselves stay the same. It’s all in the game.

You, your children, their children, their friends, animals, plants, all life walking the surface of the earth are fair game for these demonic shit heels, if, God forbid, you fail to show them and their systems their proper respect, to kiss the ring wrapped around their sweaty, red, pulsating, vermilion fingers, swollen the color of the worm, wet with their nervous emissions, the demonic ooze from which they derive their powers of avoiding justice and prosecution (for now).

Of course, when the stakes are as such, there is no quit. You do not have the option of giving up, of quitting and submitting, as if this was all but written in the stars. Why should you? How could you?

The price of compliance is no less than everything you have ever loved or held dear. Otherwise, you will die for Israel and the Epstein Admin, one way or the other.

The average person is a good person. And too many good people are suffering and dying for absolutely no reason. Families are being torn apart and traumatized. Parents and their children, like Jawad, the 18-month-old Palestinian toddler who was tortured by Israelis in front of his father.

Or Oudone Lothirath, who, after moving here 45 years ago from Vietnam, fleeing a conflict for which our government was responsible (many such cases), missed vital chemo sessions under ICE custody and is now on his deathbed.

I have seen too much death and suffering to look the other way and say nothing. We cannot let the losers win. Fuck them, and, more importantly, fuck their shitty little game, the nefarious scheme from which they have benefited, thanks to our suffering. Their game is called capitalism, and it will leave use with nothing but each other, and when that day comes, we can but hope for the best from ourselves.

I have nothing but my Word, but in the beginning, there was nothing otherwise. Nevermind the silence. Kill it. When you scream at the gods and hear nothing, you have no choice but to continue making noise, bleeding yourself of the righteous melody, a song of persistence. A song of liberation, sung on behalf of the one thing that can never truly lose: the human soul, the very light of which there is no name but “God.”

“Hail to the hour when oppression shall be gone…”

“Caution, Sir? I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice!

“If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments-I submit; so let it be done.”

— John Brown, abolitionist.

It’s still the same old story,

a fight for love and glory,

a case of do or die…

The Red Crystal Watcher

Strapped inside the ship’s cockpit, a jasper red crystal womb glowing across the sky of some alien watcher, Bianca Potentia shuffled through various states of agitated unrest, having long ago grown weary of the stated purpose of her mission: to record and interpret the signs and symbols, the biological semiotics, of this absolutely confounding planet.

For the longest time, Bianca could make no real sense of the things she had observed, the patterns of movement, of destruction and regeneration, undulating waves of creation and dissolution, reaching no satisfying thesis regarding their habits of life, a consequence, she had decided, of long stretches spent drifting in puzzled orbit, taking notes, making audio recordings, committing to memory their languages, stories, the names of every obscure body of land and water, every word of the riddle, typing up her conjectures, speculative lines of thought that ultimately led nowhere, hypotheses fracturing in a thousand directions with the sticky splitting sound of cracking glass.

[REC.]…rituals of necrophonesis, compulsive transfers of death, transmutations of precious life into uncanny legions of the un-dead, walking and breathing order, unprecedented shapes of hostility rendered self-devouring, a linear despotism unmatched in its all-encompassing techniques of assimilation…

…the only ideas that seem to take hold are the truly insane. Their insatiable need to destroy what they create chief among them. Locked inside of systems they themselves created, every idea thereafter becomes a madman banging his head against the walls of a prison cell, like fallen leaves cracking wild against pavement. Tlitl tlitl.

Poetry, once the highest achievement of the planet’s most evolved species, their sole cosmic triumph, is but another of their dead things.

What else had she seen?

Wandering tempests, divine forms of salt and wind carried forth in spiral tyranny, a rhythmic planing of the jagged continental surfaces, bitter mineral faces of calico tan desert grayed over by habitual abuse, dull viridian and lemon yellow sanctuaries harboring life in all its self-defeating improbability. Bianca saw a mind, a self-reflecting and self-referencing organism capable of both self-discovery and self-destruction, of evolving within the boundaries of the very life which it both sustained, and, most frequently of all, with which it raged eternal warfare, wailing beneath cavalries of ghostmen on horseback like smoke above blackwater, constant de-differentiation, necessary death and obligatory rebirth, each cycle resulting in a diminished variant of the previous geo-intellect, a self-correcting ego mechanism that Bianca knew, at least this time, would reach its state of absolute un-resurrection prematurely, long before its star reached its own melansis, a scorched condition of purified ash.

Most improbable of all, Potentia watched the hopeful and desperate grasping, generation after generation, by a select few, toward some better, more hospitable, life-affirming take on reality, a repeated unearthing and rediscovering of the lost methods for optimistic forecasting. Potentia bore witness to these reflexive twitches skyward, past the distortion of their city’s light, not at her but past her, at the infinite void of possibility, and thought better of recording their prayers.

But did any of it matter? One could argue that nothing mattered more, because, in the end//beginning, when there were no more curious souls down there watching, it would be up to Bianca Potentia to rebuild that world from what she’d learned. Without them.

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In the Valley of Salted Bones

Strikes the never-ending hour:

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On a desert stretch of interstate, Zissi drove her favorite car she would ever drive, a 1967 Plymouth Barracuda, a hardbody repainted in Olympic blue, the color of Zeus’s heaven, pushing its Slant-6, the famous Leaning Tower of Power, displacing at 225-cubic inches, approaching 100/mph, brakes pressing back with around 2,000 PSI, sweeping a waltz zigzag along an incline set steep into deep violet Eastern sky of twilight.

The steady dance, one two three. Too much, and Zissi would burn out and end up on the side of the road, possibly somewhere even worse, but not enough, and, well, where’s the pursuit in that? Jagged down black asphalt, dashes of uniform hyper yellow to her left, a straight line of bones demarcating the way to tomorrow. Though she would never admit it to anyone, in the moments that Zissi came closest to death, God spoke to her.

She hugged the inner-edges of a rightward curve downward, gaining some distance between Quadriga, the name she’d given the Barracuda, and the pair of officers in pursuit. For miles, neither had made a mistake, keeping an automaton-like fixed pace, not too close nor too much slack, tractor beam-assholes who would’ve loved nothing more than to have found a loud and fiery ending out there on the silent earth. Professionals, men without eyes or mouths. One two.

It wasn’t necessarily that she liked to drive fast, although speed was an element of the art form that the young woman quite enjoyed, but it was the exercise in control that enlivened in Zissi the godlike rush, the gas-burning interplay of tension between increase and decrease, fuel and brake, up and down, forward and back, gravity and flight, the idiot dance of premium octane.

Sirens harassed in a whiny simulacra of the damned wailing of hell, an aural-tyrannical sonic dilating of orders that would only awaken the wolves, spectrum red and Antwerp blue reflecting off of the “lucky charm” hanging from Zissi’s rear-view mirror, a holographic St. Christopher’s holy card reworked in the likeness of Bugs Bunny holding a carrot in lieu of staff. One red two blue three white. The white light of death herself.

Just past Zissi’s window, visions flashed in the hints of waning and artificial light blending like dyed streams flooding riverbanks and bleeding into impressionistic landscapes, apocalyptic images of a world cleansed in a caustic bath of merciful renewal, a chemical planing of the rougher surfaces of her external reality, vague hints of possible armageddon transmitted from the depths of some outer-space just beyond the limits of our very own.

But the rhythm one two three was one two three exploded in a one two chaos Zissi couldn’t be sure of what it was but on instinct she swerved hard left. Quadriga sailed belly-up, exposing her under-body to watchful heaven, a mechanical act of submission to the greater deities.

And from the material darkness, speaking from around the curving shadow of close-by death, Zissi heard the Word:

“…and the child spoke: ‘I am the Logos.’” — Valentinus, 100-160 A.D.

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“Tyranny is seldom (in the long run) imposed on people from without, it is a projection of their own pusillanimity.” — Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry

Yesterday, Renee Nicole Good was shot at point blank range, in broad daylight, by a masked ICE agent. The extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a human being, was caught on video, from multiple angles. Some eight hours later, over ten thousand Minnesotans showed up to a vigil in Renee’s memory.

As of writing, it has been but some twenty-four hours since Renee was murdered. Seeing as how the propagandists and the charlatans, the mouthpieces of fascism and their lapdogs, were already out defending ICE within hours of the shooting, lying, twisting the truth, constructing a narrative that goes against what you can see for yourself, with your own eyes, it is more important, and urgent, than ever to speak out in the name of truth and basic human decency.

Years of witnessing atrocities play out in real time should not desensitize us to the vile, shocking, and unprecedented nature of these atrocities. The genocide in Gaza, which Israel continues to perpetrate to this very moment, was, is, a precursor to the violence that now haunts our cities, obscured in mask and shadow (though they are seemingly accountable to no one), lawless and out for blood, with the full backing of a corrupt state. Trained for forty-seven days, the President’s favorite number, then given a license to kill. It’s no surprise one witness to yesterday’s tragedy described the ICE agents as children.

As many have pointed out, the militarized violence that we as a nation have manufactured and exported for decades has found its way back home, repelled by the limits of a frontier that, wherever it settled its borders, could not settle for long.

The boomerang has returned as a toxic dust cloud, a phantasmagorical vapor, white as death, drifting down every street, around every corner, making its way to the doorsteps of the innocent, those guilty of living not in the darkness of fear but in the light of basic human decency, making their way the best they can, committing their effort and will not toward spreading violence, hatred, and misery, but doing the best they can out of a shared hope for a better future, for a better present, out of dignity, out of respect, out of a dream of prosperity not for the few but for the many. For the right to wake up and live not in terror, but in love, in love for the gift of life itself, a gift which, on Wednesday morning, was taken from Renee Good.

Make no mistake, the vast majority of people are absolutely disgusted and horrified by what happened yesterday. And people are scared. Even those defending the actions of the ICE agent who shot Renee Good speak from a place of fear. But those whose aim it is to control traffic in fear, because fear paralyzes. The road to a better world, however, is a movement, taken one step at a time. It is a departure from the inertia of a broken world, from broken promises, broken patterns, the sharp fragments of incomplete architecture, ruins in the shape of misery and death.

Mere hours after Renee’s murder, armed Border Patrol agents showed up to Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis and physically harassed students, forcing the district to shut down classes for the rest of the week. This morning, in Sacramento, ICE/DHS agents were caught of film defacing a memorial for Renee. When confronted by a protester for this disgusting show of pettiness, a trio of DHS/ICE thugs attempt to intimidate the man, who replies with, “Behind that badge, you’re a coward. Renee Good is a mother that [was] standing up for our rights and was murdered.” The agents retreat inside.

It is not enough that they are allowed to kill, kidnap, and wreak absolute havoc with fatal abandon. Even power does not satiate their desire. The total dominance those in power seek is but a prelude to their true ambition: universal annihilation, pure death, a razing of all human endeavour, a return to zero that ends in the blink of an eye.

But if the old proverb is right, and the Devil’s first attribute is cowardice, then it should come as no surprise that these men wield fear like the walking stick of a dying king, a blunt ashplant used by a sick man to bludgeon all those who stand in his way. wild eyes and feeble mind be damned.

If we are ever to divert from our current path of misery and all-out destruction, to escape this track of bare bones, laid out by ghosts and nailed to the earth with bits of old chain, then we alone must shift the momentum. A world unamenable to the basic truths of justice and human dignity is one hostile to all life, including your own.

As I write, "ICE/CBP agents [are] beating and abducting peaceful protestors" at a detention center in Minnesota.

If we ever wake up to find ourselves in a better world, it will be because we made good on a debt we owe to Renee, to her memory, one to never forget her life and what happened on January 7th, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It will be because we honored the memories of every family ripped apart, imprisoned, exiled, and killed under racist pretenses. It will be because we honored the memories of the victims of the genocide in Gaza. It will be because we honored the memories of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Sandra Bland, Heather Heyer, and the countless other victims of senseless, institutionalized violence, casualties of an insatiable death-machine, one fueled by the snuffed-out joy of others, fossilized and harvested from belowground.

But we the living continue to walk the surface, and for the sake of those unable, even in the face of unprecedented horror, must never turn away from our commitment to joy, to life, to the day when that toxic fog dissipates by the inescapable heat of the sun, in the light of tomorrow, not the darkness of yesterday.

R.I.P. Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother of three.

The drive home

took us past the ruins,

moon-rock gray and scorched brick,

broken shapes littered

in the overgrowth.

What do you think they’ll do with it all? I asked.

The ruins silhouetted

deep violet overcast,

cruel reminders

calling for an end,

or to an end,

concrete echoes of a past

with which no one dare reckon.

Nothing.

So long as that’s what makes them money.

Her husband slouched in the passenger seat, half asleep.

She thought about her father,

who worked in those ruins

back when they were still a factory.

That night,

they parked on the lip of a ridge

overlooking the llano,

ornamental purgatory,

horizon glowing blue-silver,

lighting the nightly rituals

of life

hidden in otherwise total darkness.

Life-giving mementos float across deep indigo night, watched by ash gray and blank faces of a living moon, rising a crowd of privileged decadents, dancing strangers who gather beneath the permanent twilight. They hear a name, wailed in shrieking tones at all hours of night and day. It is not one they recognize, much less one they know as their own. But it yanks them by the spine of the soul, by that bundle of nerves gathering behind the mind’s eye, a name written not in letters but in pictures and whispers, in the language of nightmares, in clouds of ash, radioactive bits of rock and carrion from halfway across the world, a tropospheric spiral of remains gathering in hushed tones, a wretched billowing of dust, the caput mortuum of that insatiable death machine, madder brown coughing from engines combustible by misery. What songs do the victims sing? In spectrum red and lemon yellow harmonies their voices bleed a chorus of resurrection, on dull viridian papyrus a whispering of remembrance in haunting echoes against knife-sharp rock, bleached cave walls like teeth-white coral beneath melodies dancing a dance of regeneration, masterworks of holy defiance written in swirling pools of blood, warm violet flowing in grayscaled earth.

Pearl gray in dull violet, a full moon watched her oracle’s final vision:

Deep within the temple walls, she fell across the altar; windswept realities constricted in diminishing spaces, rooms painted deep slate and purple drab, images in ruin, fractured pictograms within which all realities bled into the holy and forgiving unicity of mortal life.

And what did she see?…

…the priest-king’s sceptre, contorted ash wood, beat a steady metronome in increments along post-industrial badlands, a tired thump in powdered ruins scattered teeth-white over beaten earth. He carried a message from his timid deity, his Paloma, his beloved. In all directions, neutral gray blanketed empty structure divested of any and all function, all meaning, all signs of life, abandoned before a rising tide of hostile probability.

Spinel red fog hid sulfur yellow stars brilliant in undulating madness, a punctured glow brilliant across all sight-lines, a living, breathing thing they called “the pale burnt light.” How long had things been that way? Just the two of them, the fallen goddess, and the lowly mortal, a pretend demigod betrayed by his flesh and bone, with little to show but domain over a razed forest, silent but for the sound of very small bones being picked by jackals, bleak hounds with blue eyes who paraded around in the memories of their victims.

And he, a messenger-king, a delivery boy carrying an envelope, inside of which, written on a scrap of paper (stamped with the goddess’ seal, a sprig of holly), these three words: “feed the dead.”

Where were his people? He’d failed them. As far as he knew, they were all gone, waiting now on the other side, coupled with their righteous grievances, alienated in that hidden world of the ill-fated, poor souls, lackluster phantoms whose destinies had been theoretically determined without their knowledge, decided upon behind sheets of black math, written down and kept in books by sickly elders, “their betters,” grandfathers play-acting as humble warlocks, thin-lipped and covered in sores, blistered old fools who lived every day of their lives, tens of thousands of days, every single one of them, in absolute fear.

He knew he should be looking for them, but where? And what about the letter? Betray his beloved? Or betray his people? Either way, there’d no doubt be hell to pay.

“‘Hell to pay?’ Uh-oh, sounds like you’ve really stepped in it!”

The voice came from a decapitated head upon a wooden spike.

“The name’s Merl! Merl N. Monroe! Ahahaha! Look at you! Frightened? Don’t be. Life’s not so bad out here. Not for you, anyway, your majesty. I’d bow, but, well—ahahaha! I am, as you can see, not much but spiked noodle. In this life, anyway. In my old one, I was a seer. The royal seer, indebted to the gods for the gift of sight and ever-loyal to my master. Ungrateful at times, perhaps, but that’s another matter. In fact, I’m still prone to the occasional vision. Sure am! As a matter of fact, even as I speak, one begins to form, emerges from the far shores of the back of my mind. Would you like to know what I see?…”

In the distance, he sees it: the crystalized remains of a 100-foot were-jaguar, “Dionysus,” a translucent skeleton glittering diamond hues, spectrum red and sea green points exiting the refractive index, scattered majesty in perpetual brilliant display, a stone age titan in repose upon a bed of glass straw, a physical nightmare in hulking form; in its paws, it grips a pair of lighting bolts that end in the heads of serpents, lilac and madder brown, with scales of gold and tongues of bronze; sharpened spears of silver for fangs, Dionysus’s mouth yawns wide open a black threshold, the gates from beyond which the priest-king could feel heavy breaths approaching.

 From the darkness, one by one, their eyes lit up ash white and scarlet…

...and what did she see? Everywhere: the pale burnt light.

My brother never came home from the war. I can see him now, still out there somewhere, slipped under jungle air, sticky as the rubber trees, limping from one life into the next…

…jasper red faces of memory floated in deep indigo violet, their industrial night, faces like masks, faces of the three-headed hound—surveillance, management, control—eyesight, space, liberty, hieroglyphic subheadings demarcating the order of necropolitical desire, an agenda of wolves, authored by their fathers and amended by invisible hands. They carried out their orders with glee. And so did I.

“Raze life!” they shouted. For the dream city was empty, a row of ghost towers built brick-by-brick by the delicate hands of the men made of the bones carried in the feathered serpent’s talons, like the blue-capped traveler of many worlds, a grain of sand his pittance for the dead, one bit at a time, dripping in his blood; reconstructed, I step forth by the light of the shaman’s fire, a guilty foot soldier.

Mom cried for him every day until she died, and then I cried for her. He cried for the both of us. At night, I could hear all of us wailing away into nothing, silently…

…into theater, lights up: a backdrop of pale king’s blue, warblers strung along diagonal in angles of pretended reality, above marshland wet and heavy with refinery egg-scent. Before a wall of Cyprus and Spanish moss buzzing cicadas, the tall cordgrass in which I plot…

…eyes watch my every move, jaundiced sclera like the grackle’s eyes, fool’s gold scales of the Midgard Serpent smelted a lemon yellow moat, sour apricot in which every vision circles a drain of infinite density.

And I drowned. At least, they saw me drown, watched as I slipped through deep slate singularity, disassembled as I was torn beyond all logic, before being reassembled as an awareness in the topological space. I became the threshold itself, the archway upon which death was spilled in tribute to gods who hid in privileged silence, in fear, in quiescent reign; now I lie, waiting, breathing, watching the sacralization by blood, knowing the secret shapes and melodies that will one day unlock color and song again; until then, drift in neutral gray tomorrows and windswept walls of childhood homes, run your fingers along the names chiseled in the memorials, remember their faces, and dream.

Their cities are now the hunting grounds of the jackals and were-jaguars. Hungry, they stalk the sidewalks both day and night. They feed on the young, but are cared for by the old, taken into their homes, given shelter by a fire that burns but does not consume, waiting until the earth is pregnant and time comes to feed again.

...and I miss my sister. I miss my sister, and I’m never going home.

[In honor of the 50th anniversary of Nashville]

HOLLYWOOD
“What we show in The Player is a very, very soft indictment of Hollywood, an unrealistic look at that arena. It’s really more of a farce, because although we did lift up a few rocks, Hollywood is much crueler and uglier and more calculating than you see on film. It’s all about greed, really, the biggest malady of our civilization, and it was Hollywood as a metaphor for society…the truth is much, much worse…”
—Robert Altman

MOROTAI
During World War II, filmmaker Robert Altman, stationed in what is now Indonesia, flew over forty bombing missions on a B-24. While overseas, Bob wrote to Myron Selznick, brother of David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind, whose secretary was a second cousin to Bob’s father. Altman took her response, that the letter was funny, and that Bob should be a writer, to heart. And so, he started writing.

THE SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS
“The original book [M*A*S*H* by Ring Lardner] was terrible, racist, and filled with jokes for the sake of jokes...He said I’d destroyed his script and that I’d double-crossed him, and he was very upset about it. But when he won the Academy Award, he didn’t say anything about me.”
—Robert Altman

NASHVILLE
Shot in the summer of ’74. Nashville isn’t a film about family, or found-family, so much as forced-family: musicians, bookers, politicians, the power-hungry and image-obsessed of the city, all coming together in shared pursuit of American fame, fractured subjectivities beholden to the symbolic order of hillbilly heartache, booze, and songs of domestic ambivalence, a story of yet another subculture monetized and eaten alive—hollowed-out signifiers of increasing kitsch-factor, from the rhinestone jacket to the American flag. In the end (spoilers), Barbara Jean, played by Ronnee Blakley, is carted off stage, wounded of a gunshot, only for a new Barbara Jean to emerge from the wings.

MONACO
In the late 1970s, after the successes of both M*A*S*H* and Nashville, Altman pursed more experimental (i.e., not as commercial) fare, like the hypnotizing 3 Women, the criminally underrated A Wedding, and the far-out Quintet, starring Paul Newman.

Luckily, Altman had a powerful ally, and fan, over at 20th Century Fox: Alan Ladd Jr., “Laddie” to Bob. Ladd Jr., whose father, Alan Ladd, the noted actor who portrayed the titular role in Shane, loved Bob’s work. Whatever the project, be it a political satire about a health and wellness convention (but also the 1956 presidential campaign between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, the latter for whom Bob helped campaign) (Health, 1980), or a dystopian sci-fi about a card game, starring Paul Newman (Quintet), Bob knew he could get the green-light over at Fox. “Laddie liked me and stuck his neck out for me, and even lost his job because of me,” according to Bob. In his own words:

“Just after Quintet, there was a stockholders’ meeting in Monaco. Princess Grace [the former Grace Kelly] was on the board of directors, and she said to him, ‘How could you let Altman make that awful, awful film with my friend Paul Newman?’ And Laddie got up and said, ‘Oh, fuck you,’ and he quit. Maybe he knew he was going to lose his job anyway, but that’s the story.”

MALTA
For Popeye, an elaborate set of the town of Sweethaven was built on the island nation of Malta. Bob was well-known (and well-liked) for his post-wrap (and pre-wrap, and post-shoot day, and post-weekday) parties, all crew and cast welcome; Malta was a whole other world. Tales from the set include copious amounts of drug use, a makeshift recording studio fashioned out of a Quonset hut for the film’s composer Harry Nillson, and a visit from Colonel Gaddafi, accompanied by a fleet of “thousands of ships,” according to Bob.

It was also, like all of Altman’s work, a family affair. Although the studio wanted SNL star Gilda Radner in the role of Olive Oyl, Bob fought hard for his old collaborator Shelley Duvall, who, in his words, “was Olive Oyl.” According to Robert Reed Altman, the cast and crew would hold weekly talent shows, and Duvall even took it upon herself to print up a very, very local newspaper, detailing the various on-set gossip. One of Bob’s grandsons, who played the part of Swee’pea, even learned to walk during the six-month shoot.

TEXAS
1982’s Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, shot in a Manhattan studio in seventeen days, concerns the reunion of a James Dean fan club in the fictional town of McCarthy, Texas. The found-family, once full hope, dreams, and visions of a better future, reunite changed, fractured, different. Using simple techniques, like Mylar mirrors to affect a shift in time periods, Altman captures the metamorphoses that are not only as part of the human experience as anything else, but may very well define it.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
In 1988, Bob ran a fake presidential candidate, Jack Tanner, played by Michael Murphy, for an HBO series. In Tanner ’88, as well as the follow-up, 2004’s Tanner on Tanner, Robert Altman blended fiction and reality, make-believe characters “living” alongside the news, a quasi-historical record on video, scripted, improvised, real performances of fake people, in search of deeper truths in, of all places, the nation’s capital. Murphy and Cynthia Nixon, who played his daughter, Alex Tanner, were so convincing that, while walking the floor of the Democratic National Convention, they were treated just like any other political family.

ST. PAUL, MN
Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion, represents a bold step in a new direction from a filmmaker, in his 70’s and on his second heart, still exploring new places in novel ways, unafraid to dig into the nuance of unfamiliar worlds; unfortunately, it was to be his last. “The death of an old man is not a tragedy,” says one character in the film. I disagree.

“The only ending I know for sure is death…There are ambivalent endings, but to me it’s just a stopping place, not a real ending. People’s lives go on. If wedding bells are ringing, and they run down the aisle and they’re happy, well, four weeks later they find out they’re sexually incompatible or they have a terrible fight or they’re divorced or she murders him. To me, it’s just a stop on the curve. The river keeps going.”
—Robert Altman

Let us wander into a deep melody of night—summer, one-hundred years ago:

A young woman, smartly dressed, in her wool coat and cloche hat, ornamental buckle of delicately wrought silver, stood at a bus stop, nervously tapping her low-heeled strap-ups against gravel. Not another soul in sight.

It was an empty block of downtown. Skyward, foreign constellations peopled some strange new heavens, intruders in repose, archetypes of unknown origin depicting scenes of sacrifice and war, life and rebirth. She watched new shapes and symbols dance along the firmament, right up there above her, pole stars skipping out-of-time through a crime scene: a crashed chariot harboring a pair of frightened hounds. There was no moon up in there in that sky—instead, many fictions.

Then, she heard a whisper:

“…”

…but couldn’t quite make out the words. She turned her head and found exactly what she expected—nothing.

“Okay,” the young woman said. “But this is the right stop?”

Across the way, streetlights flickered in affirmation. She relaxed, at ease knowing that, at the very least, wherever this place was, however she got here, wherever she was before, she was right where she needed to be.

Down the street—a bus. Chrome impressions flashing across aerodynamic curvature, motion sweeping her way, a mechanized weight she could feel, deep in her blood. What a thrill. The young woman took one last look at that unknown sky, looming like the heavy body of someone else’s deity tattooed in divine pictograms.

The bus pulled up. The faceless driver, her chariot man, opened the door: that’s when she knew. This was her ride to those gray fields of dimensionless time, out to those pastures of final harvest, razed for good—and the young woman smiled into a deep melody of night.

The one-eyed brute, the absolute zero, slouches his 15-foot frame across a stone run of white rock, as he’s wandered all these years, alone, navigating beneath a permanent twilight of red-black expanse, his unreal sky. The End came swiftly. Brief, definite, unlike it was described in any text, it took everyone—except, for whatever reason, the cyclops, wayward beast, one eye in the middle of his forehead just like the Devil, left to roam chthonic geography, night and day and then back into night, until one became the other, until one place became all places.

Things weren’t always as such. Once upon a time, in a past life, he’d worked as a blacksmith, honest work operating the bellows of eternity, raising the fire that powers all. That was until the men he worked for, on behalf of the Star King, tossed him into his own furnace, melting him down to a formless nothing. After that, he was reborn as a giant, a seafarer who swam the old salt of deep ocean, a reconstructed being, stitched together in rebirth, older than the rock formations themselves. Down there, he would float thoughtless, watching the luminescent bodies of comb jelly and vampire squid, the suckerfish feeding from his skin, a sensation of life. It was not to last.

With the age of mankind came the age of cataloguing, of categorizing, of naming and of putting into boxes. It wasn’t long until they pinned him to the earth and marked his body with tattooed lines, a grid from which they, the faithless generation, could only derive laws of no meaning or real value, merely diagrams of his anatomy, maps in obscure symbology, sketches of musculature from which they drew blueprints, engineered machines of cold extraction, a satus of misinformation, all the while mistaking the representation for the thing itself. In fact, once, he briefly reincarnated as one of the machines themselves, in a future life that, thankfully, was never to be.

So now, like an ant crawling over mountains, a being without end, tethered cosmically to endless rebirth, edges obscured, no one to pity him—although, honestly, he’d find that the biggest offense of them all—he presses into tomorrow, mounting a slow, steady charge against, he was sure, the wicked demiurge who’d singled him out, submerged him for stretches at a time, eons, long enough to weaken him, but not enough to kill. Maybe that was the point? Even then, so be it, his persistence would be a living monument in defiance of the asymmetry of justice. Or maybe it was all an illusion, a series of hallways ever-darkening with corners that sharpened their edges, twisted like the volvulus that spun his insides.

And yet—despite all this time and distance, he can still see her face, clear as the waters they swam, Galatea, his mocking beloved who, even now, laughed at him through the depths, across worlds, obscured but still—there. Often, though, she appeared as the mother of Cerberus, the beauty of her face matched only by the magnificence of her serpent’s tail, coiled through the heavens, spiraling into the distance.

Syren Satus

Gelid ichor,
void of desire,
now-bloodless gods

in a death-mask
of waiting.

Syren satus,
call of harvest
in stonework chalk

they carve
in naming.

1918—

Domingo knew the language well. Still, there were times like these, when he couldn’t, for the life of him, get his point across, couldn’t find the right words, couldn’t express himself, no matter how hard he tried, without devolving into some frustrated, adolescent state, a helpless, undignified silence that pressed up against the very limits of language itself.

What Domingo knew was that, for almost a week, he’d not heard from his son Umberto. Calls and visits to the sheriff’s department, local emergency rooms, even the district attorney’s office (and home) turned up nothing more than silence, a sinister absence that said something the old man couldn’t quite decipher. What was there to do anyway? What could he, a migrant worker and Mexican national living in Texas, really expect to get out of them? “The Good Ole Boys,” as he’d heard them referred to, always with a wink. He knew what that meant.

Within hours, Domingo called family, gathered neighbors, and commenced a search of the surrounding area.

Across the llano, dry air carries the laughs of the wicked…

———

[This is where I’ll die?], he thought. [Like this? A prisoner? And for what? My father warned, begged, plead, did everything short of—]

———

…but the earth proves it won’t hide their secrets for long.

An old man walking his dog. At the foot of a grove of honey mesquite, a tuft of hair clings to bleached bone like a black wave from white seas.

———

By her husband’s gravestone, Isla comforts her father-in-law, Domingo. They are all her son Galeno has left. Their lives were never going to be easy; it will be an altogether different thing from now on, supporting little Galito while carrying the burden of injustice.

Stories like hers were all too common, and yet, all too commonly untold, left to the empty spaces of history, faded instances unearthed as disparate coordinates, points of data, bits and pieces here and there. A birth certificate, a death certificate, any trace of being.

Lynching of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans by assorted vigilantes, militias, and law enforcement agencies were common in the tapestry of life as long as Isleta had been alive (note: “…between 1848 and 1928 in Texas alone, 232 ethnic Mexicans were lynched by violent groups of three or more people.” Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 2018). “Juan Crow” they called it. Always cute with language, especially when discussing their specialty—death. Kicking the bucket, buying the farm, hearing the fat lady sing, anything to get in one last laugh.

The year prior, Umberto participated in the Bath Riots, joining other residents of their sleepy border town in justified fury. Mexicans were driven to action by outrage over forced de-lousing, kerosene baths forced upon them at the Mexico-Texas crossing. Stripped naked, men and women, children and the elderly, were subjected to chemical spray by authorities, dull men with ugly laughs, on the order of the U.S. Public Health Services.

Despite mass protests, the baths would continue for another 40 years, incorporating, over the years, additional chemicals such as D.D.T., a pesticide and carcinogen.

Isla would only have to wait another 30 years to see Zyklon B, the chemical used in the “gas chambers,” as the facilities in El Paso were described, be used in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps. The war would be won by the same men who dowsed her and her people’s belongings in insecticide.

No matter. For Isleta, that war, the one that had traveled across the Atlantic and taken so many lives, the one that would persist well beyond 1945, in dark corners of well-known places, had already taken her husband, Umberto.

———

[This is where I’ll die], he thought.

———

“In Mesoamerica, there is commonly a mixture of fear and derision toward the gods of death. Although widely thought to be ruthless and cunning, they are frequently outwitted and defeated in mythological accounts.” - Miller & Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya

———

It starts on the way home—night, along well-trod sidewalk, little boxes like movie frames going underfoot, gray and empty, the ones that play after the picture’s over. That’s it! That’s the show folks! You’ll love the next one, about a grieving young woman:

At first, I thought I was only seeing double; soon, it became apparent that my world had become another one entirely.

The open air before me was now the corridor of a many-folded house. The street lamps burning a cool, sick blue, the white efflorescence tracing red townhouse brick, the distant skyglow rising neon piss-green—all doubled, quadrupled, grew exponentially before collapsing back down to four, two, then back up to four, eight, sixteen, etc. I swam an ocean of disjointed patterns, overlapping fractals mid-zoom, frenzied asymmetry in desperate need of mandalic completeness.

The rationalized space of the city had been un-rationalized.

I looked down to get a look at my own broken form, un-made, fractured into a dozen pieces, rearranged and held together, just barely, by some precarious sense of “self,“ or “a self,” a continuity now threatened.

I made my way, step-by-step, down the ever-shifting labyrinthine path, taken by the phantasmagoria, in search of the Minotaur. The sidewalk below now played an actual movie, reel pulled at the pace of my stride, a lost silent film, a slapstick comedy starring a buffoonish ham hock and his comedy partner, a chain-smoking infant, as masochistic bullfighters who save an orphanage from fascist gauchos.

As I turned a corner, the scenery shifted—not in space but time. Beneath, a dirt path; above, the warm, electric light of a bishop’s crook, iron spirals casting a wicked hypnosis. Buildings stood piled one on top of the other, towers in terracotta armor, twelve ribs of marble apiece, etched with the faces of twenty-two archetypes, known to have lived and died at least twice, topped with iron cupolas tipped like the jaunty caps of boxcar tramps.

Above a church (every building here was a church), crouched atop a sign that read: dolus, smiled a witch with kind eyes. She whispered, “welcome to a thousand ways.” Beneath a stone archway swung an oak door, creaking next to a black void of a half-parabola, halted at the apex.

Skyward, a behemoth deity occupies every inch of the heavens, massive even at a distance, this distance, all the way at the very edge of space. The big gal even winked at me. Swear!

I entered the church, encouraged by a pat on the back by the friendly crone. Inside, a fairly normal mass took place, congregation mid-ritual, beads in hand, drab as Pilgrims, in mourning, oh, for no reason in particular, really, hungover, led in the Agnus Dei by a twelve-foot rat.

Yes, I see it: a neon light pointed down and to the left, blue and green, tilted at a 45° degree angle. Down, left, down, left, down…

And so on and so forth, down a blank spiral, air gelid and painful, colder the further I went, until I made it here, to you, deep inside the light-less heart of it all, bare bones stripped of all they're worth by the torturers and their dogs, can’t even see my own damn hand in front of me. I suppose it’s just as well, familiar enough, it’ll do for now. What else is a girl to do? I have accepted the fact that I will never see home again. The question is: will you?

…awakening on two feet, in a daze, torched beneath a white sun, dragging my feet across alien sands, rattled, dizzy, but I can walk forward—and begin the process of going back.

I have my arms and legs, thin beneath my black suit, chalked-white from chthonic terraforming, powdered in the byproduct of unholy chemical reaction, the sum of all human endeavor—absolute death, summoning a lunar underworld right here on earth.

I wander the man-made desolation, newly formed, a wasteland fit for our shadow world, caught beneath the thumb of the Archon, that dark master of this reality, petty tyrant, a slovenly oligarch who hides in the dark, gripping, wet with desperation, slug-like, salted, the leash of his pig-boy son—meanwhile his daughters, fun house-mirror reflections of the Furies, misshapen forgeries, judge hourly in a chorus of wicked laughter.

Step by step I penetrate the walls of an invisible labyrinth, hands dry and cracked, by instinct always turning left, far from the comforting shade of the red-cedars and live oaks, the weeping willows and crooked black locust trees, twilight where the jimsonweed grows, a bit of the devil’s trumpet sprinkled into the reefer, for good measure and a bad time, a little bitches brew for what’s-his-name and Lady Macbeth, ain’t I a you-know-what, rolling up in a field with cousins and old friends, preparing for the rites of a new cycle, smearing the sacred vessels and utensils with blood of the poor fawn, although soon to be made whole in death—

I see no other person, no animal, not a living thing, not a single, solitary soul, merely the dust of ravaging un-miracles, deployed remotely, by cowards, radiating particles of Erebus, personification of darkness itself, head singing I am strange, I am stronger than hate, reminding me of times I bowed at footstools—all around, a gray cloud, choking life it does not contain itself, particles of dust, skin, bone, the flesh itself, once men, women, children—now, dust.

It slowly returns. Nearby, an outcropping of brick, slanted and jagged but formed along a straight line, mounded in talus at the foot of some abandoned construction, little fallen brick men, a sturdy cavalry befallen by forces of deconstruction, ended violently, serving valiantly but falling nonetheless, like the men of Wecta, Witta, Wihtgils. Beyond the smoke, red clumps peek through gray like a cobwebbed chokecherry bush, and I know this will be the first thing that I will remember, when recollecting in the future. This is a point in a line that extends three-way, possibly four, up to eleven but never past twelve—pictura, les yeux de l’âme, drowned in a cloud of flesh. rock, asbestos, dehydrating and tightening the skin bone-dry, like that of the Anglo in the Nefud, blue-eyed Aurens, or blue-eyed Peter, a reality of images—better yet, a hyperreality of projections, spun through light like a speed freak, left airless, suffocating, a haze of many things distorting any line of sight between me and another living thing.

Speaking of—carrion, immediately buried in the subtext, forgotten now for later, identity better left a mystery, filed away in the Unconscious, left of body but right of brain, master betrayed by his lesser half, that rational tyrant, gathering with others of its ilk in order to impose systems, grids, points—all unnatural, thanks to the heathens, the Founders, that gentry of man-made aristocrats, whitewashed by the Spectacle.

Machines fly overhead, Valkyries in carbon fiber, no life of their own, only capable of taking life, precious life—as if I could say the word enough to undo the destruction in whose wake I drift. Everything in the sky is now a fiction. Helpless and yet not hopeless, for whatever reason, insanity? I stay tethered to this world of, well, you know, by, of all things, yes, life, and it all runs on love, endless, boundless, eternally renewable, the reverse-gravity of floating mid-heaven, catching yourself at the apex, the point at which you’d normally begin your descent, the ritual of the long come-down, except this time, somehow, someway, you find yourself continuing to levitate, losing yourself in someone else’s thoughts—I am no stranger.

But I can hear nothing. I’m struggling at the bottom of an ocean, summoning every step against gravity, forward, pinned to the bottom of this world, a prisoner serving time in the dominion of Niörǒr, praying for salvation or deliverance, lost in the white beard of Kronos, a dust cloud, a simulacra Saturni, orbiting an endless cycle of violence, not wet but dry as a brick of clay, unadorned by desert lilies or yucca, but plenty of “ghosts in the graveyard” so to speak, not to mention elsewhere, yes, floating, passing through three-dimensional space, a mere shadow…

I stop walking.The dust settles. In the distance, silhouetted like a rain cloud, by our blood-orange star (there is no god of light in this country)— the outline of a megalithic structure, an outcropping of black stone, sharp edges like the scales of the feathered Serpent, breaking the surface if only to remind of some ancient truth, Dis Manibus, only the body dies in death, not the good souls of our buried dead, faces shifting underfoot, shaping the earth itself, receded back into the Field. But a death nonetheless.

It’s the jagged monolith, far away, having settled its place in the horizon eons ago, that reminds me of exactly where I am—this rubble, barren, desolate, death-gray and obsolete, stamped out, this desert for machines, this wasteland, this hell was just my home.

Every Friday night, hopeful, in a dark corner of her room, Ilda leaned forward and watched, transfixed by her host for the evening, a 700-year old librarian broadcasting from somewhere deep underground. The imagined past, as we all remember it, as it never existed, is where Ilda sat, hopeful, in a dark corner, watching.

Tonight’s program:

———

THE ANIMUR
s02e07

In orbit, floating above an alternate version of our own world, the famous, period-themed space station-resort, home to the loneliest souls in the galaxy: The Animur Hotel & Casino.

Tonight’s guest sits in a booth, tucked away in a dark corner of the Twiggy Lounge, looking hundreds of miles below at the badlands, gray, blue, spinning—SLOAN UNDSET, human, so far as he could tell.

The artificial smoke—a nice touch, he’d not seen much better in his travels—traced the outlines of the music…

———

…an alien melody lamented in a familiar tongue, annotated, 3/4 time, a waltz? in three-dimensional space, light cobalt, that apocalyptic shade of violet, like plucked crocus. Her favorite.

What the hell’s in this thing? Already refilled, and I’d hardly noticed it was empty. They refill from the inside. I’ve never figured out how, but I’ve never had a reason to learn, and I’ve been far too busy to be curious.

I can see the exact spot, all the way down there, where it happened. It’s like nothing because, really, that’s what it is. Like a rough patch on the skin. But I can still see it. Refilled again, from the inside. It’s one too many.

Later, gathering my thoughts in the Kissinger Suite, on the king-sized bed that’s mine for the night. I don’t even have a view. I keep the light at a low ambience, enough to get around. Tinted, cobalt. Saffron.

The Ophyte wants to meet in an hour, but I’m still thinking about the smear, that scar, down on the gray land. I knew it was the last time I’d ever see her. We had no choice but to fight, after they returned—the ones who fled, when it all turned to shit, after they learned the hard way. Things happen when you get too far from the home planet. They figured they’d come back to nothing, so sure we’d tear each other apart. We could barely walk. But we worked together.

All their failure, their misery, their death—they brought it all back home, so sure they’d find a wasteland. Instead, they found us. And we weren’t going to let things go back to the way they used to be. To hell with it all, they said. Wiped off the earth. Smeared. Everything, so far as the eye could see, engulfed in the cobalt light of the blooming crocus. Some of us survived.

———

They met in a Parisian cafe, circa 1890. La Remise, down in the Early Modern section, faux-Colonial Era architecture and a view of Earth, through space-proof glass, tens of thousands of feet in the distance.

The Ophyte spoke: “The transfer has been made to your account. Maybe you know this, maybe not, but the information you’ve provided will be extremely helpful.”

Sloan picked up his glass, an imitation of a Bordeaux, newly refilled. “I have enough to retire now.” He stressed his brow, feigning confusion, but Sloan knew the path that lay ahead.

“If that’s what you wish.”

Nearby, a crowd of guests emptied out of an arcade, a covered walkway dripping with flows of simulated rain. Sloan finished his drink, then watched, with the Ophyte, as the glass began to fill again.

———

It was all set up just like real life. The faux-leather sectional and matching sofa sitting atop a synthetic fabric rug, its dizzying pattern zigzagging in pastel, resembled in its arrangement a version of a space that every person knows well. The cardboard wall segments, the computer-generated artwork framed in plastic, the fake Boston ferns hanging slack like the necks of drunkards, every object set a stage on the permanent act of an elusive Act I, the start of a forbidden performance never to lift its curtain. Every department store had one, but the one located in a dark corner of the second floor of Nyquenas Mall, in Olwyn’s opinion, was especially uncanny.

On a day like this, when the mall was empty, it was her favorite place to sit and waste away, tossing precious moments of youth to drown in a river of silent turmoil, knowing absolutely nothing about the world or—especially—her place in it, lying on the couch like in some abandoned living room on some dying planet, orbiting a dying star, lost in the cartography of her inner-geography, on a Tuesday afternoon.

That day, Olwyn wandered over to Nyquenas Mall, per usual, for no reason in particular, first to smoke one of the long cigarettes she’d swiped from her mother’s purse, in the shadow of The Anonymity, a misshapen statue of some lumpen humanoid with bad posture. The security guard, Carlos, would leave her unbothered so long as she performed her juvenile delinquency discreetly. Puffing away out of sight from the respectable shopping public, Olwyn found herself unable to lose herself truly as she loved to usually do, bothered by that ever-present sense of dread that had attached itself to her and everyone she knew, infecting, she felt especially, her network of private hostilities.

Lately, she couldn’t seem to get ahold of any of her loved ones. Family and friends made themselves sparse, burrowing like ghost crabs, hidden from the light of day. It was nice, at first, getting a break from some of them, not least of all her parents, whom she loved but secretly suspected of praying to themselves when they prayed to God.

Times like these, Olwyn could truly feel as if she was on that dying planet, circling that dying star, abandoned as punishment for some unspecified trespass. Except this time, the young woman took a look around and—she actually was on that dying planet, circling that dying star.

The ceiling vanished, revealing an unsolar sky, a daunting infinity, pierced vaguely by ever-distancing stars who looked down on our world in pity. Olwyn’s heart stopped—was it even there anymore? She expected death, prepared for a violent retreat into oblivion, her body succumbing to the total lack of atmosphere. And yet—she stood, alive, allowed to exist on the second floor of Nyquenas Mall, suddenly displaced beneath alien sky, re-staged as a phantasmagoria lightyears from the known world.

Things shifted. The furniture now appeared snatched from another era: gilt-wood settees, French two-seaters, an iron tête-à-tête with sharp stubble. The decorative wall art was replaced by floating cartouches etched with obscure details of some lost history, pictograms with meanings rendered urgent by their indecipherable nature.

Olwyn watched glowing purple finches fly alongside comb jelly and vampire squid, flashing rainbow-silver with light from chandeliers that levitated like spheres of illuminated pollen. It was a vivid scene, haunting, alive, like nothing she’d ever seen or experienced, the closest she could remember to feeling like she was both living and dying. Olwyn had not the faintest clue how or why she’d ended up here, but she never wanted to leave.

Right on cue, as the sound of baroque strings swelled in the distance, the mannequins commenced a dance number, wearing décolleté ball gowns, long-line bodices and tight-corseted waistlines containing graceful automatons, heads framed by sapphire diadems, bodies animated in order to act out the art of some wicked archon with a well-developed sense of aesthetics. Olwyn, the only human being as far as she could see, got a closer look weaving in and out of choreography while an alien symphony sang from a choir of phonographs. She almost lost herself completely. That’s when she looked up—and there she was.

Blanketing the heavens, the hyper-massive face of a goddess floated upside down, serene, her body that of a serpent coiled far out into meta-galactic space, ending in the fiery tip of some faraway star.

Instantly, Olwyn recognized the being: Echidne, mother of the Gorgons, among others, prismatic viper’s torso emanating the color spectrum ad infinitum, looking down on the young woman with the eyes of Olwyn’s mother. The comforting stillness of her familiar brow, arched slightly in her patented expression of reserved worry, in the form of an awesome, inhuman colossus.

Every fear, hope, dream, memory, every slight shift in Olwyn’s personal cosmology, recorded by her consciously or otherwise, over time, every passing moment of happiness, fragmented, flashed like slivers of filmstrip, and she could do nothing but stand completely still.

“I…I—”
“You don’t have to speak.”
“But I want to say something.”

She did? But what, exactly? Olwyn surprised even herself. She knew she had to speak up, desperately, to that matriarchal titan, up there crying tears of pink light. However much she tried, though, Olwyn simply could not find the words. Instead, she merely held her breath and disappeared.

——

The stony horror of judgement, secured in a handbag gifted to him by Hesperides. He dare not look into her face, not even her dead face, lest he make rubble of himself as well. But he could imagine.

Contorted, lovely, a landscape of stone runs in miniature, the head of an unearthly beauty, from another world but sent to ours in order to remind us of some vital fear, lost but deep-seated in an even more important truth. He loved her in a way he couldn’t really explain. Even her name enchanted, more so in death, he felt, as it uncurled and reached out like one of her head-serpents, pointing right at him. “Medousa.”

How could she not be beautiful? Damn the rumors. Slander, jealousy. At least she got old Polydectes good, one last vic for the old gal on her way out, en route, according to her cosmic origin and the terrifying power she wielded, to lie in rest, requiescat in pace, at the foot of Athena. His name, surely, would live on as legend, but the man himself would go to the grave regretting that he carried out what he’d been tasked to do: destroy the poor gal.

But Perseus would remember her as a beauty, not quite immortal, misunderstood, as the white horse upon which he flew, like the White Cross itself, momento mori, the Reaper. And dumb Polydectes, cemented like the lump he was, a nameless monument, a place for common birds to leave speckled shits, shadowing juvenile delinquents near the markets of Old Nyquenas.

———

Olwyn stood outside Nyquenas Mall, smoking beneath the shade of The Anonymity, avoiding eye contact with Carlos the security guard, adrift, per usual, on a Tuesday afternoon. That morning, she’d been unable to get ahold of any of her loved ones and was already forgetting why she even tried in the first place. She was happy to have those people in her life, even at a distance, so long as they orbited relatively close by, extending medusoid in all directions from the center of her being.

Things were never the same after her “journey.” She was grateful, whatever sent her over there, or brought over there to Olwyn, or had given her a peek, however brief, of something else, of something greater, of the world at which all perception merely hinted.

And so Olwyn wandered over to the showroom display, its furniture arranged to look like something out of real life, the waiting stage on that dying planet, orbiting that dying star, beneath the face of a serpent-goddess, a matriarchal leviathan, watching with her mother’s eyes the girl who cried the same tears of pink light, the young Medousa of Nyquenas.

On this day, exactly 114 years ago, former actor and 40th President of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, is born on the second floor of the Graham Building in Tampico, Illinois. February the 6th, one year later, on the other side of the world, in Munich, Germany, under the reign of Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria, Fritz and Fanny Braun give birth to their second daughter, Eva, a girl who, 33 years later, would go on to become the wife of Adolf Hitler.

Precisely 102 years later: February the 6th, 2014—Jay Leno hosts his final episode of The Tonight Show, with guests Billy Crystal and Garth Brooks. All these years later, and what have we learned? Evil abounds.

The state, still comprised of the same bad actors, wax figures who’ve aged out of being good-looking enough for real television. Nazis as far as the eyes can see. And Leno, the soft, corpulent chin, megalith of anti-comedy, floating above our cursed world in a psychic vision of wicked mocking, like a Burbank Zardoz, still haunting the screens of those weary souls sick enough to indulge in late night T.V., in the bloated and stiffened forms of the undead used cars salesmen who hawk legacy media and its cavalcade of “stars.” Colbert. Kimmel. And, of course, the one whom David Letterman once referred to as “that—what’s his name? Lonny Donnagan? What’s his name? Jimmy Fallon!” I like Seth Meyers, though. Always have.

Our timelines flood with uncanny video: slop generated by machines, a South African billionaire half-assing a Sieg Heil at a Presidential Inauguration, and, since it’s February, actors in unfortunate reunions for Super Bowl ads, clinging, like the rest of us, to the last tattered carrion of the monoculture, rummaging the caldera of a barren moon, sifting through the dirt of the past and finding that there is nothing. This world does not move forward. In fact, it doesn’t move at all—it tracks, pinpoints, maps paths through its fossilized self. We put our past on display, under hot lights, teeth clean, dead eyes reflecting, if we get up close, the same thing: you, but older than the last time you saw yourself.

Every day is a phantasmagoria. Dreamlike forms and structures trespass and overlap, brands meld together and form corporate portmanteaus, symbols of wicked deities whose most loyal followers gather near eternal stones, drinking wine and channeling a demiurge while they speak in tongues. From afar, we can hear the chanting, smell the flesh, feel the shifts in space, see the smoke of the fire by which they burn our futures to ash—and we are left powerless, distant.

As empire wanes, settling into a state of inertia, looted by delusional con-men and their army of 20-year-old grave robbers, it’s hard not to wonder—was this not the plan all along? Why else conjure these beings from deep within the shadows of our collective psyche, if not to unleash them upon this world, an inhuman techno-elite whose sole purpose is to operate the machinery? Meanwhile, New Money, awkward in its own flesh, dances for an army of sycophants, privates and sergeants hooting and hollering at the lewd clown-show, the prelude to a final act from which not even the mightiest of us may be able to un-fuck ourselves. F.U.B.A.R.: Fucked Up Beyond All Rebooting. Truly, as my people would say, a bummer.

And yet—not all is sorrow. It is February, after all, that time of year when an entire nation of cinephiles calls in sick to work, stricken dumb with an illness borne from the brave men and women of Hollywood congratulating themselves on another year of jobs well done: someone get my doc on a Zoom call, I think I'm dying of Oscar Fever.

Now, I know what you're asking yourselves. "The Super Bowl AND the Super Bowl of movies?! What movies?" Don't worry, you're not mistaken. This year's ceremony comes with a bit of a twist. In an Oscar first, no actual movies were nominated for any awards. Instead, a list of A.I.-generated films were put up in all categories, hallucinated cinema with titles like Emilia Pérez and Conclave. And how would the Oscar voters ever know? They're the last to actually watch any of the films—and, now exposed by this brilliant ruse, the voting body will promptly be replaced by a conference room full of T-Mobile Sidekicks, re-programmed to watch and rate HBO Max Originals on Letterboxd. Can you believe they've done 97 of these fucking things?

The ceremony itself will be hosted by none other than Conan O'Brien, the man who, if only briefly, vanquished America's false god of dumb guy jokes, Leno the Carpathian, to the nether-realm of 10:00 P.M. To show its gratitude, a weary nation offers what meager tokens of appreciation it can gather: the humble stage of the Dolby Theatre, bathed in scorching heat from lighting fixtures, making Wicked jokes in a Boston accent—but, we can all pray, hopefully not at the expense of Ben Affleck. Have we, as a nation, not suffered enough?

And it all goes back to when we started letting actors be President. Reagan, of course, but even further back than that—I mean, did anyone ever really buy Eisenhower's act? And Truman, like any good stage actor, performed a daily sleight-of-hand as, for eight years, he distracted an entire country from the fact that he was small enough to fit, comfortably, inside of a Cracker Jack box. (Did you know people used to eat that shit with milk? Truly a nation of sick-os). And, of course, the original, George Washington, who, while leading his men across the Delaware, read lines for an audition, a walk-on role in season 3 of Mad Men that, sadly, he would lose to noted character actor Christopher Stanley.

February the 6th. Unhappy Reagan Day to all who celebrate.

I.

In the attic of his empty house, somewhere among the exurban sprawl of Nyquenas, watched by the Tower, in the city that never ends but instead circles back in on itself, akin to the Serpent in the red-black twilight, all roads leading back home, Haynes listened. Who knew what, if anything, lay beyond the boundaries of the infinite metropolis, but this might be the closest he’d ever get to finding out. Faint signals shot their way through an in-between frequency, reassembling along an aging circuit board, the radio’s dial set just so—these were strange, distant waves from someone, somewhere else. He knew that, if he knew anything.

Every Friday night, five past the witching hour, his analog radio picked up pirate broadcasts of a little-known Golden Age radio show called Labyrinth Arcade. The surrealist-noir, hosted by a sultry, 300 year old DJ who called herself “La Commissure,” followed the exploits of Vick Seawell, a grieving wanderer in search of answers in the case of his missing wife, Helen, as he explores the infinite depths of a vast, underground mall, a bizarre setting outside of our own space and time, a maze of courtyards, walkways, stairwells, storefronts, plazas, balconies, backstages, theaters, and museum displays, each more uncanny than the last. Each episode, Seawell investigated inhuman architecture of extra-cosmic origin, lost among subterranean wonders like galleries of 600-foot statues commemorating both nameless gods and faceless men alike, forms hidden mostly in shadow, like the ancient beasts who floated in the endless waters of the black water aquarium.

Vick’s mission was to find answers regarding the disappearance of his wife, a task jeopardized by every minute he spent belowground, each moment presenting him with only more questions, weighing him further down the chthonic spiral, descending levels of increasing disquiet, looking around only to find himself at an even greater distance from his old world.

From the moment he stumbled upon the frequency, Haynes was captivated, brought to life, could feel his bioelectric currents move in sync with the waves being reconstructed inside of his little machine, translating across internal networks, joining thought and object in the unholy act of communication. Try as he might, though, any effort to find more information regarding either the show or the pirate broadcaster came up empty; playback of all attempted recordings amounted to nothing more than an incoherent melange of feedback and static. Haynes concluded that these were very specific broadcasts, directed at a very specific audience: himself.

In between airings, Haynes found himself frantically searching for similar transmissions, at all hours of day and night, dialing station to station, listening for errant signals, anything comparable—nothing. As far as he could tell, the show existed solely within the confines of these irregular waves, receivable only by this particular radio. In the meantime, he sat and listened to noise, to beeps and chirps that pulsed through his speaker, a miasma of signals that hung in the air like chemical smoke.

Haynes gladly discarded the rest of his life, the series of nothing jobs, endless hobbies, dead-end romances he no longer had the heart to lie to himself about— all that remained after he lost what really mattered; the visages of his family, his dead, scattered incomplete like ripped sheets strewn across the face of a rock, somewhere deep in the far back of his memory. The radio, the signals, it all brought him back to that place of unreality, the borderlands of life, death, and the dreamworld, the place where maybe everything was imagination. This is the threshold.

II.

Labyrinth Arcade

Episode #513 [fragment]

[La Commissure]: ...Victor Seawell’s life changed the moment his wife vanished. A trail of clues she left behind started off a search for answers, one that led straight into the depths of an underground world of surreal wonders, one from which he may never escape, deep into the heart of...the Labyrinth Arcade.

[Cue SYNTH MUSIC]

Last week, on Labyrinth Arcade, our hero, Vick, and his companion, the enigmatic Operator, found themselves wandering the passageways of the Market of Evil Flowers, among a crowd of tired souls, searching for an elusive mystic known only as Block.

[Cue TRAFFIC, CROWD SOUNDS]

Vick: This place gives me the creeps. Those columns go up so damn high, I can’t even see where the hell they end. Barely enough light down here to see much of anything. Even the air sounds funny.

The Operator: I can’t believe you’re still not used to it.
V: And who are all these...people? I hate crowds.
O: All I know is that we’ve got to find Block, and this is where he likes to hang out.

Or hide out, I should say.
V: Is there something you’re not telling me?
O: You want my help or not?
V: No. I need any help I can get, you just happen to stick around. O:...
V: Hey, where’d you—

III.

Maybe this is it, Vick thought. Now I’m really alone, lost below-ground, abandoned and derelict, confined within dreamlike architecture designed by ambivalent deities of otherworldly origin, longing for a wife I secretly believed to be alive.

Vick, like anyone, could get lost in the alien majesty of it all, the markets, the passageways, the galleries of colossi, rows of statues with crystal faces that shifted expression. This one in particular, modeled loosely on a specific 19th century Parisian arcade, a corridor of arched marble columns, air reeking of mildew and sour orange, stained-glass walls commemorating pre-human scenes of grief and death, belonging to some cyclical epoch unbound by the sickness of linear time, felt particularly otherworldly.

He walked the exhibit, down a cobblestone pathway, its intricate tiling undoubtedly portraying some vital pictogram, a message for the future that no one here would ever read. Along drifted the weary souls whose eyes borrowed light from the same strange source that highlighted the features of the monuments. Vick knew better than to bother trying to make out their faces since he knew, down here, you couldn’t really see anyone, not in the usual way of seeing people. Here, strangers hung their heads at all times and spoke in voices he was only now starting to understand.

And yet, he knew they were real. Every single one of them, he knew, in the same way he knew anything about himself, represented a full life. The Operator was proof of that, the only consistent presence in Vick’s life since he’d shown up at the entrance to this otherworld. In that moment, he had only one thing to consider: the answers you seek, possibly even the very woman herself, are they down there? That’s what his wife Helen’s notebook alluded to, he believed. But those who crossed the threshold and braved the depths of this underground network, it was said, never returned.

Lost in the phantasmagoria, just enough light to see his next step, the outlines of the figures who floated past, he was reminded of a passage from Helen’s notebook. In it, his wife describes her fear of waking up in another person’s—or animal, object’s—body. As someone, or something, else. She theorized that the fear originated from her, as she put it, “equally irrational desire to dissolve into thin air, while retaining full consciousness.” It was a peculiar aching, one of seemingly many that she failed to mention to Vick. His wife seemed like an entirely different person inside the pages of that notebook. Vick needed to find her, now more than ever, and he knew, deep down, that she was still out there, somewhere. Down here.

II.

O: There you are—
V: [startled] Jeez! Don’t ever sneak up on me like that again.
O: Sorry. I thought you were following my lead.
V: I must’ve gotten lost in the crowd.
O: I ducked inside that vendor’s, an old friend...from another time. V: You get a lead on our guy?
O: Block? Block’s dead.

——

I.

After dozing off mid-episode, Haynes awoke in a frenzy with the distinct feeling of being chased. Maybe someone had snuck in through the attic window —nevermind, no time to question it; he dashed across the wooden beams, down the ladder, through his empty home, his static monument to a life of love lost, a place where he could hold, forever, onto all of the spaces and objects that triggered memories of happier times, before he’d been taken prisoner by phantom broadcasts and imaginary worlds. Was this it? Had he finally lost it? Liberated himself from all of time, the brutal tyranny of history itself?

He made it to the sidewalk, head forward, hurtling under a path of streetlights, still the feeling, still the presence. In the distance, the ever-watching Tower; in the foreground, a series of locked doors, hiding you and everyone you’ve ever known. Finally, some distance. Haynes turned to see—wait, Vick Seawell? Couldn’t be. Haynes barreled ahead, leaping across the sidewalk, gray boxes like squares of unexposed film. He hurried beneath shuttering lamplight, then checked again. That was Vick, alright.

Haynes ran faster, faster, until he could feel himself getting lighter, almost floating into the crimson highlights of the Nyquenas sky. He looked down and, sure enough, he actually was getting lighter; the little finger of his left hand had fallen off, lost somewhere along the pavement, human carrion stamped into concrete. His right hand was already all but gone. No matter. Lighter, faster. Then his arms, past his elbows, all the way up to his shoulders. Dust. No matter. Lighter, faster. Down. Both legs were in the breeze, scattered to the wind. Lighter, faster. No resistance. Then, no nose, no ears, no teeth, no face, no body, but still pressing forward, pure consciousness, pure of heart, floating into the stratosphere, taking in a bird’s-eye-view of Nyquenas, a network of lights, synthetic constellations, man-made symbols that called out—to the heavens— disease, sickness, a worsening, bad atmosphere, dissonant tones, aligned in shapes and patterns not found in nature.

He saw Vick huddling into a car driven by the Operator, on their way back to that underground maze of another world. And Nyquenas Tower, dead center, glass and steel, monument to a new modernity, an obscene gesture disguising antique construction, a tradition, a gaudy rebuttal to anyone who’s ever believed in the truth that answers lie in the future, not an imagined past, a monumental “fuck you” to the living and unborn. This is the grid we have spiked to the earth, inescapable except for Haynes, who disappeared into the skies above the labyrinth.

Tuesday, March 1st, 1692.

[John Hathorne]: Do you go through the trees or over them?

[Tituba]: We see nothing but are there presently.

Present day.

Haynes stood in the dirty white light of a business park, across the street from Nyquenas Tower, on break, rattling beneath silver-blue skyglow that faded into black like the foamy edge of receding surf. Everything was so large, so distant, so slow-moving as to appear frozen in time. And here he was, at the bottom of everything, collected with the other bits of something else, eroded fragments looking up from the bottom of an ocean.

That was the night he turned around to see the old man, tight-faced and caked in the white powder of drywall, grinning like a stiffened satyr, holding a fistful of crushed gravel. Haynes could feel the tapping at the small of his back, muted poking like the nose of an ass-sniffing mutt, followed by clicking sounds like falling ice. There is something in the air, he thought. You’d be stupid to say otherwise, even if you couldn’t name it, even if you couldn’t touch it, even if the only place you’d ever see it was in the subtle gestures of a stranger, it was something alright. It rendered you dumb and made its way along the stuff inside your bones. And this old man was part of all that.

“Problem, sir?” He wanted to be polite.

“No! Not at all!”

He looked down at the little rocks, accumulated at his heels as if they’d fallen from his asshole, alluvium of his inner-heaven.

“Not me! Swear!”

Haynes looked down his left, then his right, empty pavement on either side, absolute desolation, personless aside from him and smiling Coyote, the once-imprisoned trickster now liberated from his fold in time, here to taunt with a pantomime of high strangeness, embodiment of our uncanny reality. As if the world wasn’t scary enough, we now present to you: almost the world.

The young man turned back to night, the city, post-industrial undergrowth frozen in a half-remembered time he couldn’t be sure was of this earth’s chronology. Downtown, tangled and sticky with concrete spider-webbing, sick and permanent, sidewalks crowded with locals shuffling along while eyes hidden in the church cupolas watched all. And in the middle of everything, the Tower held a loaded round, aimed right at the Serpent, beyond vast distance and time, coiled around the source of everything, all matter, while Haynes stood there, rigid with fear and too solid to touch light. And the old man, throwing rocks and playing dumb.

He went back inside, never to see the old man again.