Читать книгу An Army of Lovers - David Buuck - Страница 5

the san francisco bay area can boast of having both many great poets and many mediocre poets. Among the mediocre were two poets better known as Demented Panda and Koki. These two poets thought of themselves as living life in pursuit of both the intellectual and the social pleasures of poetry. In this they were like most people who considered themselves poets.

It is important to realize that in the time of Demented Panda and Koki poetry was an art form that had lost most, if not all, of its reasons for being. It was no longer considered, because of its ties to song, the superior way for a culture to remember something about itself. And at the same time, it was also no longer considered the superior way for a nation to inspire patriotism and proclaim, with elaborate rhyme and rhythm, that its values were great and universal values. This was especially true in the nation that claimed Demented Panda and Koki among its citizens. This nation had long ago realized that the best way to inspire patriotism and convince other nations that its values were great and universal was to offer a series of tax breaks and incentives that encouraged the international distribution of colorful moving pictures and songs that celebrated soldiers, government agents, and upwardly mobile consumers as heroes.

It was in part precisely because poetry had lost its patriotic importance that Demented Panda and Koki were so devoted to it. But as poetry had lost its patriotic importance, it had also lost much, if not all, of its potential to be a meaningful part of any sort of resistance movement. It was not as if they had totally given up. They knew that poetry still had a role in various anti-colonial movements in cultures other than theirs. But they found it impossible to imagine any equivalent role in their own culture today. Despite this lack of faith in their ability to be meaningful poets, they remained devoted to poetry, full of hope about its possibilities, no matter how limited these seemed to be. As they remained devoted to poetry, they met frequently to take long walks together, and on these walks they talked about poetry and its particular lostness.

When they walked, they took up a lot of room on the sidewalk. Demented Panda usually brought his two dogs, who tended to yip and yap at other dogs and at skateboarders, and Koki frequently pushed her baby in a stroller. Demented Panda and Koki thus walked down the street with three other sentient beings in tow, sometimes talking loudly like the baby, laughing and enjoying the sun, which was often accompanied by a cool breeze, and sometimes, like the dogs, getting in each other’s way and then being annoyed and snippy with each other or with the world at large.

During these walks, what they would talk about could probably be best described as gossip, although it was also about poems and poetry. They didn’t gossip about poets or poetry they didn’t like. So they didn’t talk much about poetry that tends to portray, in a quiet and overly serious tone, with a studied and crafted attention to line breaks for emphasis and a moving epiphany or denouement at the end, the deep thoughts held by individuals in a consumerist society. Instead, they talked about poetry that they liked, the sort that stretches language to reveal its potential for ambiguity, fragmentation, and self-assertion within chaos, the sort that uses open forms and cross-cultural content, the sort that appropriates images from popular culture and the media and refashions them, even if they often also talked about their frustrations with and the limitations of these kinds of poetries that they nonetheless liked.

During their walks they often played a sort of game where one of them would say something negative about some poem and then the other would say something positive and then one of them would say something negative and this would go on and on for some time. They were fairly ecumenical in their approach. They talked in negatives and positives about their own work and each other’s work and the work of others. It was a sort of erotics to them, this moving of their brains between saying something negative and then something positive. It was like a game of one-upmanship that they played with each other and with the poems themselves. Some days Demented Panda was more negative and Koki more positive. But other days Koki was more negative and Demented Panda more positive. But when it came down to it, at the end of the flipping back and forth, the poems always won, and if they made a list of work that they liked, their lists would probably be remarkably similar and it would be that work that they talked about together, no matter how much they complained about the poems or gossiped about the poets while walking on any given afternoon.

One summer day, a particularly nice and mostly sunny day of 69 degrees, while on one of their many walks, Demented Panda and Koki decided to collaborate. They would, they said to themselves, write something that they would come to call A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities. Demented Panda and Koki lived only 1.4 miles from one another but they lived in different cities. They said to themselves that in A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities they would write something about what it meant to be poets in this time, this time of wars and economic inequality and environmental collapse, and in this particular urban space, a place that put up signs claiming to be a “Nuclear Free Zone” despite being the place that was largely responsible for the development of the nuclear bomb, a place that was now defined by the development of a technology industry that distributed colorful moving pictures and songs and social media through flatscreens of various sizes. They hoped that if they thought hard enough, they might be able to figure out some possible new configurations for political art and action. They wanted to think about the connections among place and time and writing as more than just an artistic problem, and also about how a site can be a complex cipher of the unstable relationships that define the present crises and their living within them.

But mainly they tended to say to themselves what they did not want to do. They did not want to write something that did what they already tended to do, something that was all clever about capitalism or all pious with long lists of endangered plants and animals and statistics that made you feel sad or all celebratory of poets and friendship or all self-lacerating or self-flagellating or self-cancelling or all about their edgy sexuality or all deep and serious with dramatic line breaks and well-crafted prosody or all jokey and deliberately bad and all about the genre or all full of found language edited to be either serious or funny. They did not, in other words, leave themselves a lot of possible things to do. As a result, their collaboration was more about what they did not want to do than what they wanted to do, even as their hope was that through the collaboration they might figure out what it meant to be a poet in a time and a culture where poetry had lost most if not all of its reasons for being, might by telling their picturesque story about a border between two cities find a new elsewhere, whether in poetry or as poets.

To begin this project, Demented Panda and Koki did not choose an obvious part of the border between the two cities, such as the intersection where people had once marched against the Vietnam war from Koki’s city to Demented Panda’s city and at the border had met the police and a motorcycle gang from Demented Panda’s city and a brawl had ensued, even though this brawl more or less summed up the mythic histories that their two cities told about themselves, one claiming to be lefty and the other claiming to be bad-ass. Instead, after much wrangling and many misfires they decided to locate their picturesque story on a plot of land that was more or less equidistant from each of their houses and that included the border between their two cities. It was hard to say what exactly the plot of land was. It was small, about .27 miles around its perimeter. They could tell from looking at it that it was flat, somewhat rectangular in shape, with the distended sides of the rectangle going north-south. But the plot was not really a rectangle in any meaningful way as it had a hump on the northeast side and came to a point on the southernmost tip. A heavy-rail public rapid transit system emerged from an underground tunnel in the middle of the plot and traversed the north-south axis of the rectangle on an elevated platform. When the trains headed through Koki’s city they travelled beneath it, entering and exiting through the plot of land at the border between their cities. When the trains travelled through Demented Panda’s city they travelled above it on raised rails and towering concrete hubs. On the southwestern corner of the plot, three streets and ten lanes of traffic met, regulated by three stoplights and numerous security cameras. A sidewalk was available for pedestrian access and there were benches every so often along the sidewalk. The rotting wood of the benches had been recently painted by children and featured self-improvement slogans such as “drink 8 glasses of water a day.” There were also two metal sculptures facing each other across the border between the two cities that spelled out the words “HERE” and “THERE.” “HERE” was north of “THERE” and read north to east, while “THERE” read south to east. The sculpture was a kind of joke for those who knew about poetry or who knew about the Bay Area, but it was not much of a joke and certainly didn’t make the plot of land any more poetic to the two mediocre Bay Area poets.

In order to collaborate on the writing of A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities, Demented Panda and Koki met several times a week that summer on the small plot of land. There they sat and talked in the partly cloudy 78 degrees or in the sunny 77 degrees or in the sunny 76 degrees, the dogs panting at their feet, the baby cooing with pleasure at each passing truck. Those passing by might have mistaken them for sunbathers or picnickers enjoying a summer’s respite from the hard labor of toiling in the intellectual mines of the academy, but Demented Panda and Koki had only one thing on their mind and it was the small plot of land. It is true that their conversations frequently turned to urban theory, site-specific performance, environmental art, and debates concerning gentrification and public space, but at the same time, they tried to focus all such wide-ranging conversations, with their detours into gossip and doubt, back onto the small plot of land, the plot for their picturesque story about the border between two cities. And as they did this, they talked frequently and repeatedly about how despite the amount of research they had done they were increasingly not that interested in the small plot of land. And then they would talk about how it made them feel uncomfortable to be there on the small plot of land attempting to write about it when they were not interested in it and how also they had no clear right to write about it because of who they were, although they always left who they were unspecified. And they talked about how they did not want to present the small plot of land as uninhabited because they imagined that certain people lived and slept on the small plot of land. They talked a lot about how they didn’t want to bother these people but they didn’t want to ignore them either and about the ethical issues around this sort of neighbor-love and its representation in poetry. But as they spent more time on the small plot of land they began to realize that very few bothered to live or sleep on the small plot of land. The small plot of land was probably both too isolated and too exposed. Plus, beginning early each morning, it was regularly blasted with the vibrations and clamor of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system trains thrusting into or out of the ground as they moved people to and from either city. The people that they imagined lived and slept on the small plot of land and that they talked about not wanting to bother mostly only passed by the small plot of land, despite its many park benches, on their way to slightly more accommodating plots of land, like the street corner where Koki lived, which had hedges for privacy, or the abandoned lot with the burned-down house on the street where Demented Panda lived.

In setting their proposed picturesque story on the small plot of land, Demented Panda and Koki were somewhat right that nothing much dramatic had happened there. Even the story of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system that passed through it, a story that in the city of Demented Panda was accompanied by the razing of vibrant, multiethnic working-class communities, had not been that dramatically controversial as it had merely replaced an already existing railroad line that had been in place since the turn of the century.

Yet looked at another way, the plot of land had all the histories of the surrounding areas, some of them sad, some of them triumphant. It had for many, many years been populated by various humans and animals, such as rabbits and other small rodents, large deer, elk, and antelope, and various birds, some migratory and some not. The humans hunted these animals and they burned the grasslands regularly and they harvested roots and tubers that they planted. They call themselves various names and spoke various languages. This history Demented Panda and Koki did not know all that well and was only vaguely told in their time. But the history that came after they knew fairly well. In the quick telling of this history, despite the humans who had for three thousand years been hunting the animals and burning the grasslands and planting and harvesting the roots and tubers, the land had been considered unclaimed and unpopulated by an expedition of people sent by that other nation far away who then claimed it for another nation and then a representative of that nation gave the land that included the small plot of land to a member of one such expedition. From then on, different nations and many different people claimed the land. There were many lawsuits. A couple of armed skirmishes. And various deals were made and continued to be made. The land was now claimed by an entirely different nation from the one that sent the expedition and was owned by many different people, as long as they defined ownership in the same way the nation who now occupied the land did.

As they began their collaboration, they talked about the fickle nature of observation, about how they would walk to the small plot of land not really noticing anything but then once they got there they would perk up and begin to put on their “picturesque story” mindset and then look around for things to write about. They wondered if they should go through life using the “picturesque story” mindset all the time or if they should refuse the “picturesque story” mindset when they were at the small plot of land or if it was okay to use it some of the time and not other times. They did not even know what to call the small plot of land that they had settled on for their picturesque story. They agreed that it was not a park, despite the presence of park benches and trees and grass. It was certainly never used as a park because it was surrounded by large amounts of traffic and every few minutes the heavy-rail public rapid transit trains careened through. But they were also hesitant to call it a median strip because it was a bit wider than most median strips and had the kind of public art one wouldn’t see on a median strip. And so they kept on referring to it as the small plot of land.

When it came to the writing of poetry, Demented Panda and Koki were badly matched. Their mismatchedness could be seen in the accoutrements that they used in their writing lives. Demented Panda always carried a notebook, but a notebook that might be called the littlest of notebooks. He kept this notebook in the front pocket of whatever jacket he was wearing on any given afternoon and it was so small that there was never an unsightly bulge. He carried a notebook at all times because he was a poet but he carried a littlest notebook because he didn’t want to have to commit to writing anything really and the littleness of the notebook made it difficult to really write anything even if he had wanted to. Koki, on the other hand, carried with her at all times a backpack. In this backpack, she kept no fewer than five identical pens lined up for easy access in the pen holder section. And in the backpack itself she always kept at least one large and thick notebook and a book for reading in case she was stuck for some reason somewhere for a long period of time with nothing much to do, along with the usual detritus of modern female life, like lip balms and tampons and small tins of painkillers.

As they talked about the small plot of land they also, of course, talked about themselves. They talked about how their writing might sometimes do a kind of political work but still leave them dissatisfied. And they talked about their own tendency to write things so as to show themselves and others that they had the right attitudes about various things. They talked about failure and shame and about maybe making failure and shame the work, how maybe this talking of theirs was a kind of doing even if it was mostly doing nothing and, like poetry, seemed to make nothing happen. They talked about collaborating and how the personal and the political and bodies and sex and work and wanting and writing and writhing can get all fucked up, can get in the way, even if they could not exactly say what it was in the way of. They talked a lot about their bodies, their bodily aches and pains, their signs of infection, their nipple discharge and breast swelling, their bizarre behavior, agitations, hallucinations, and depersonalizations, their severe dizziness and drowsiness and confusion, how all these might be part of their collaboration as well, part of the picturesque story they might tell about living as a poet today, a story about that complex cipher of unstable relationships that define life under capitalism.

When they talked, Demented Panda usually said things in the negative and Koki usually took notes. After all this talking, Koki would then make the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. And when Koki made the face Demented Panda usually made a joke or he would propose that the way beyond their impasses and their symptoms and side effects would be to create a giant mess. Demented Panda liked to talk about what he called the dialectics of mess, how he would hold his messes back or would hold his messes in his back where they could make pain instead of progress. He would talk about the messes he was maybe going to make, or talk about the messes he had already made but weren’t quite done somehow, or about how his back hurt from holding all his messiness there, or about his never-finished messertation, which he thought maybe was no longer a good or a relevant mess, or about his messuscripts that he also thought were no longer good or relevant messes. And then when he would get frustrated or bored with the mess coming out of his mouth, Demented Panda would turn and talk to his dogs in a voice that mocked itself in direct proportion to its seeming earnestness, as if the dogs could only understand philosophical questions or aesthetic questions or political questions if rendered in a cartoon voice.

In moments like these, Koki would again make the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. She would stop taking notes, put down her pen, and tell Demented Panda to stop with the jokes. She would say that it was making her insane, not the jokes but the not finishing A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities, and if he wasn’t going to do something productive for the collaboration with his small notebooks, then at least he could let her get some work done. And then it again would be Demented Panda’s turn to make the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. And then one or both of them would call to the baby or the dogs, in a chirpy bird-brained voice or a dopey cartoon bear voice or maybe make faces at the baby or rub the dogs behind the ears and the baby would perk up and giggle and the dogs would turn and push their hind-flanks into the poets, while sniffing at the small plot of land, and then Demented Panda and Koki would get back to their talking and their note-taking and their exasperations and their frustrations and the hard work of unproductive labor.

So this is how they spent their summer, talking about themselves as they talked about the small plot of land, and the more they talked about the small plot of land and themselves at the same time the more they began to consider this talking their art practice, an art practice of meeting and, while there, doing some talking instead of doing some doing.

The days wore on. It was a sunny 78 degrees one day and then a partly cloudy 77 degrees the next and then a more sunny 79 degrees the day after that and then a slightly sunny 76 degrees followed by a mostly sunny 75 degrees. Then suddenly the summer was over. And they realized they both had worked all summer on A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cites and they had both written the same amount, which was more or less nothing. It is true that by the end of the summer Demented Panda had some notes in his notebook that he kept promising to type up and send to Koki along with some audio recordings he had made while walking around the small plot of land at night, but he never did. And it is true that Koki had written pages and pages, and then rewritten those pages and pages night after night, but her pages were so wandering and incomprehensible that they were the same as nothing.

Nonetheless, Demented Panda and Koki agreed to meet one last time on the small plot of land and talk one more time about A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities. Demented Panda decided for this last meeting that he wanted to make a right proper big final mess. He decided he was going to cast a spell and then he mumbled something about how the first poems were probably spells. Koki then mumbled to herself that of course Demented Panda would choose a spell because spells are short and fit without effort into small notebooks and do nothing but nonetheless she eagerly agreed to be a witness to it. So this time Koki left the baby with its father and Demented Panda left the dogs in his house with a couple of rawhide bones to keep them occupied and, in the mostly sunny 76 degrees, they walked one more time to the small plot of land and there met for what they hoped would be one last time, one last mess.

Demented Panda’s spell was a simple one, aimed at gathering energy from the plot of land and its environs and from such energies shaping their picturesque story into poetry. And Demented Panda thought to himself that because the place didn’t have much energy, as it just had a lot of commuters traveling by car or rail around and through and beneath it, when the spell did not work, it would of course make perfect sense. He could then add it to his list of unfinished messes and write about that in the littlest notebook that he kept in the front pocket of his jacket.

To begin his spell, Demented Panda sat down and crossed his legs and then adjusted his stomach over his lap and then reached down and pulled his ballsack forward so he could really clear his mind and become one with himself. After he cleared his mind, he cleared his mind again. He felt that he really needed a clear mind to make the spell work, or as he figured it, not work. Then he held out two of his arms or legs and made his paws into fists. He then felt some sort of energy, perhaps the energy of the entire universe as the spell’s instructions had promised, enter his recessive paw and flow up from his ballsack and through his body and into his projective paw. He let the energy build up in his projective paw until he felt he had an immense amount of it. Then he flung his paws to the right, opened his projective paw and, while doing this, he envisioned the energies flying outward. He then recited a quick chant, one that went “give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you,” a chant that was something Nim Chimpsky, the famous chimp who had been taught sign language by his human caretakers, had liked to sign when he was hungry for an orange. Demented Panda had decided to use the mumbling signs of Nim Chimpsky as a chant because they were slightly absurd and slightly meaningless, and reeked a little of dubious science, all of which seemed the perfect combination for his goal of performance art, the kind of performance art that someone like Demented Panda might turn to so as to express the complete collapse and failure of a project, not so much as a last resort but as the right proper culmination of the lostness of a summer and the lostness of poetry and the lostness of being a mediocre Bay Area poet.

Despite Demented Panda’s skepticism and his desire for picturesque performance art, the spell worked, in a certain sense of the word, and though what happened next began rather mundanely, it can best be described not with poetry but by resorting to the language Tommy Lee used in his description of the party that Pamela Anderson threw for his thirty-third birthday, along with various first-person accounts of the Woodstock concert of 1999, and Livy’s description of the Bacchanalia in his History of Rome. What happened next began with shit. Raw sewage began pouring out of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system tunnel and collecting in a series of small pools or lakes on the small plot of land. At first, Demented Panda and Koki just sat there as if slightly stoned from the shock of the spell working and watched the pool of sewage seeping up and out of the small plot of land. The flood of sewage grew to be fifty feet long and perhaps a foot deep and soon it flowed over the laps of Demented Panda and Koki and into the intersection, where cars continued driving through it.

The smell of the raw sewage seemed to only intensify Demented Panda’s spell-casting, mess-making desires, so he got up from his seated position and stood in the middle of the small plot of land whirring his arms over his head as if signaling to an invisible fleet of helicopters that it was time to land, and as a result of this whirring, two rows of flames appeared, stretching out for hundreds of feet in front of him and then, just as suddenly, young girls in sheer flowing gowns and bare feet appeared all around him and sang “give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you” over and over as they unrolled a red carpet between the lines of fire. Clowns and acrobats materialized, filling the air with confetti. A giant on stilts dressed as the devil walked through the tangle of girls, parting them like a sea. There was a Ferris wheel, roller coasters, contortionists in boxes, caged lions, and bubble machines. Impertinent beings in white face and breasty girls in top hats then began to practice debaucheries of every kind, as each found at hand the form of consumption to which he or she was disposed by the passion predominant in his or her nature, such as the pushing out of butts from the wearing of high heels or the accenting of the genitalia with tight pants or the excessive ornamentation and exaggeration of secondary sexual characteristics or the promiscuous intercourse of eating high levels of refined sugar, white flour, trans fat, polyunsaturated fats, and salt, or the burning of excessive amounts of fossil fuels by endlessly idling buses and trucks. Koki looked around and she noticed diamond-covered push-up bras, pubic areas vajazzled with Swarovski crystal ornaments instead of hair, skyscraper heels covered with pavé-style tiny twinkling crystals, and diamond-encrusted dog tags. Demented Panda looked around and he noticed stands filled with hawkers of food, such as Dove Bars, Frozen Lemonades, Iced Mochas, Orange Mango Drinks, Sprites, Pepsis, Cokes, Nachos, Tenders and Poppers, Jelly Buns, Fat-Free Soft Serve Ice Creams, Gourmet Butter Salt Potatoes, Caramel Apples, Jelly Bellys, Doughnuts, and Arepas. Enormous mounted speakers amplified angry and ecstatic guitar solos, trap drums playing taps, and brass trumpets playing reveille. Musicians kept appearing and joining in, some blowing their horns from great distances, others using joysticks or satellite communication systems to control their computers and samplers and sound processors and circuit-bent video game consoles. DJs spun and scratched the dented hubcaps of half-exploded armed personnel carriers, the hillbilly armor attached to sprawling networks of scrapped wiring and repurposed military hardware, improvised exclamatory devices screeching into the general din and frenzy.

It was a big production, with a budget of $1,229,735,801,934.00. Camouflage-costumed figures rappelled from copters hovering above as others raised their arms to receive and pass along any number of bodies leaping and falling from above through pulsing strobe lights meant to induce sleep-deprivation, bewilderment, and increased motivations for compliance. The approximately 919,967 revelers lined up in a seemingly endless chorus line, arms linked or amputated stumps pressed up against one another, all singing in a half-whisper, “give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” The musicians made sounds like Dopplerized armored vehicles speeding by a riot at a heavy metal concert, with yelling and whistling and catcalls in what seemed like a hundred different languages, a riotous wash of voices shouting in the mosh pit, running, diving into the shit, with break-off factions scaling the twelve-foot-high, three-foot-thick reinforced concrete Bremer walls that surrounded the entrance to the heavy-rail public rapid transit system, posing for the closed-circuit security cameras busy scanning the theater of operations in order to document all that’s done in our name, before stage-diving into soft, greasy piles of Styrofoam nacho containers, paper hamburger wrappers, cardboard french fry boxes, and plastic beer cups.

All of this was surrounded by mobile production trucks and, in the shadows behind the mobile production trucks, empty buses parked in double rows stretching out for at least a quarter of a mile, and in the darkness behind the buses, oversize tractor-trailer trucks, the kind that transport forklifts and boilers and other heavy industrial equipment on superhighways at night. All of these vehicles had brought all the excesses to the small plot of land and had their air conditioners and refrigeration units running, so they gurgled as they idled, spewing fumes until soon the small plot of land was covered with a dense brownish-yellow hazy cloud filled with the oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbons.

Demented Panda and Koki wandered through the small plot of land. Except it was no longer only a small plot of land, but also an enormous food court. Except it wasn’t just a food court, but also an outdoor rehearsal space lent to artists by a small nonprofit arts organization. Except it wasn’t a rehearsal space, but a soundstage for gigantic live entertainments. Except it wasn’t a soundstage, but a fake Baghdadi neighborhood staged for counterinsurgency training exercises. Not a fake neighborhood but an intersection in the Financial District on the night of March 23, 2003. Not an intersection but an interrogation room. Not an interrogation room but a holding cell funded by the Department of Homeland Security for counterterrorist efforts, holding 2,438 protestors in a nearby warehouse rented for this very purpose. Not a warehouse-turned-holding cell but a warehouse-turned-club where the after-party takes place. Not an after-party but an academic conference on politics and aesthetics. Not a conference but a boardroom meeting on tax-deductible philanthropic donations to nonprofit arts organizations. Not a boardroom but a bunker, dug into the wet and muddy ground. Not a bunker but a book, each line redacted except for the numbers. Not a book but a bonfire made from its burning pages, with untold revelers dancing around it. Not a bonfire but a set of bright stage lights, illuminating the small plot of land so that the audience could better see the action. Except that there’s no audience, since all this was happening now and everyone was knee-deep in it, not just watching but as embedded participants. Even pointing and gaping was participation. Even taking cellphone photos for documentation was participation. Even standing perfectly still and doing nothing was participation.

But Demented Panda and Koki did not bother to stand perfectly still, did not limit themselves to cellphone photographs or taking notes for their collaborative poem. Instead they muddled their way through the lakes of raw sewage that were slowly filling with empty pizza boxes and crushed Sprite bottles, and were both thrilled and anxious, excited by the unleashed energy and skeptical of its implications, eager to join in because the scenes they watched were part of a larger story of their time, which in turn was a very minor episode in the history of debauchery and excess in civilization. And these excesses were not confined to one species of vice, for from this storehouse of villainy also proceeded punching, slapping, and kicking, jumping on naked feet, breaking of jaws and teeth, arranging bodies in various sexually explicit positions for photographing, forcing groups to masturbate while being videotaped, searching of anal and vaginal cavities, placing dog chains or straps around necks and having others pose as if taking them for a walk, dragging off screaming into dark, dank places, handcuffing wrists high up on the back, injecting various unknown drugs without consent, using dogs without muzzles to intimidate and frighten, allowing dogs to bite and severely injure, masking and then abducting on small privately owned jets, drawing of blood samples, plugging of ears, placing of rags over faces and pouring water over them, cutting away of clothes with knives and scissors, breaking of chemical lights and pouring of phosphoric liquid on bodies, threatening with cocked 9mm pistols, pouring of cold water over bodies, beating with broom handles and chairs, threatening with rape, sodomizing with chemical lights and broom sticks, threatening with guns and power drills, forcing into dark boxes for extended periods of time, slamming of heads against walls, slapping of faces and abdomens, and holding open of eyes while shining a torch into them. Meanwhile, the sounds of the churning roller coasters, the mobile production trucks and the gurgling of their refrigeration units, and the arena rock anthems all served to conceal the swiping of debit cards and tapping of personal identification numbers, the cash registers ca-chinging, the barking and the breaking, the whimpering, the crying, the screaming.

At first, while all of this went on, Demented Panda and Koki joined in, running in circles and thrusting their hips forward and back, spinning their paws and claws around each other, thrusting their thumbs up and over their shoulders, making airborne chest-to-chest collisions while air-stroking their cocks, stopping now and then to pantomime a series of heretofore classified but since wikileaked enhanced interrogation techniques, contorting their mouths into idiotic grins. But eventually, after eating his fill of doughnuts and arepas, Demented Panda, bereft of reason and unable to enjoy the performance any longer, began to utter complaints, with frantic contortions of his body, mumbling over and over to himself that all he had wanted to do was write nothing about an unremarkable place, write a picturesque story of a post-pastoral plot of land. His frantic contortions now hovered somewhere between the panic-tremors of bodily shock and some kind of ecstatic postmodern dance.

Koki abruptly stopped and stood still and was silent for a long time, looking around and making the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. And then she looked down at her hands. Koki’s hands were normally fuzzy with down and sharp black talons, but one of them had now mutated into a pink and fleshy handgun, oozing and dripping amniotic fluid. Koki knew this dripping flesh handgun of hers well, for her hand oozed and dripped with amniotic fluid whenever for some absurd reason she thought she was not a part of what was going on around her. Koki thus suddenly knew her role and, in the habit of Bacchantes, with her hair disheveled, her claw now a flesh-gun dripping and oozing amniotic fluid, went to the mouth of the tunnel of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system and began shooting from her flesh-gun hand an inextinguishable flame composed of native sulphur and charcoal. As she did this Demented Panda followed along behind her plaintively asking her what she wanted and she looked at him for a moment and then shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious to anyone who had spent the summer visiting a small plot of land in an attempt to write A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities. I want to burn it down, Koki said. And Demented Panda found it hard to argue with that and so stood beside her, his fur matted and covered with shit, feverishly rubbing his face as if trying to wipe the idiotic grin off his face, his eyes alight with the simple anticipatory pleasure of throwing more wood onto the fire.

Everything burned. And when everything had burned and all that was left was smoldering ashes, the spell ended. The mobile production trucks, the buses, the oversize tractor-trailer trucks, the careening ambulances all vanished, the musicians, the breasty girls in top hats, the food hawkers, the clowns and acrobats all vanished, but the raw sewage remained. With nothing holding them together, Demented Panda and Koki sat there in the raw sewage. All that was left was the feeling of sitting in raw sewage and knowing lostness deep inside.

There is an analogy, although far from perfect, that may shed some light on what went on that day. Imagine Edible Fig. Edible Fig was first domesticated outside his native region in Mesopotamia in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is today Iraq, and then he travelled to what is now California beginning in 1769. It is not clear to Edible Fig, nor to anyone else, how Edible Fig spreads into preserves and wild areas, but he does, and then once there he grows quickly and spreads vegetatively by root sprouts, forming dense thickets that exclude most other plants. This story is not just the easy and obvious one of invasion from afar. There are other ways that this analogy works. Most figs are dependent on a species-specific agaonid wasp and Edible Fig is no exception. And so, one afternoon, Fertilized Female Wasp squeezed through the scale-covered ostiole in the end of the syconia of caprifigs of Edible Fig and laid one egg in each of the short-style female flowers that Edible Fig was growing. Eventually, still inside the syconium, Adult Male Wasp emerged and quickly cut into the flower containing Female Wasp Larvae and mated with her. Female Wasp then gnawed her way out of the syconium two or three weeks after this and then she searched for another, younger syconium and squeezed through that narrow opening to reach the flowers inside. This opening was so small that some of the pollen on the body surface of Female Wasp was scraped off as she passed through. There she inserted her ovipositor down the style tube to deposit her eggs, but the styles of Edible Fig were so long that Female Wasp could not easily deposit her eggs, so she had to insert her ovipositor down the style tube again and again and as she attempted this again and again she deposited pollen and fertilized the flowers vigorously even though she realized that she would never be able to leave the syconium.