( part 8 )
Copyright (c) 1996 Cognitec/3rd Force
30-ONE
1
By accident, one day, I dialed the wrong number and got my therapist, Dr. Our, who immediately placed me in rehab, I forget for what.
"A wrong number is like a slip of the tongue or a joke," he said. "It's really just a thinly veiled cry for help, coming from the innermost reaches of the human heart -- where cries and jokes and mistakes all originate."
2
When I got out, he was there to congratulate me on my speedy recovery and guarantee me that it would never happen again, and that, from now on, all life would lay open to me -- like a nymphomaniac.
"You've just had to learn the hard way," he said, "That alternative dimensions will just simply never be there for you when you need them -- if ever."
Cher showed up briefly at the post-release party and said approximately the same thing.
3
I was given an IBM&T 4-door Sedan-LX to use in my work. It came equipped with driver's side pop-up suicide caplets, so if I were ever taken alive and tortured, it would be entirely my own fault.
Though I was doing mostly cleanup, at the time, in mostly small bars, after usually 2AM, all up and down the coast, I still frequently got called on to intercede in situations where vicious military struggles had somehow gotten out of hand.
Because I had been the proud recipient of the World Sainthood Award for 5 consecutive years and had been extensively trained in utter neutrality (without walls), I could usually waltz, unannounced, into almost any conflict situation, no matter how intense and, with just a quick sidelong glance, immediately psych all the hopped up combatants into slowly, quietly, grudgingly, disengaging, one by one, as I walked slowly, silently, lamely across the center of the (bloody) battlefield, between them.
Then I could just sit there on the sidelines, on a rock or stump, picking my fingernails or staring blankly off into space. And they'd all just have to sit there too, with all their pent up rage -- vibed to the spot by the sheer power of the presence of my pure, off-the-wall righteousness.
Eventually, this inhibition would get so burned-into them, I could get up and leave and be replaced by almost anyone just sitting there -- doing nothing or reading a book.
Even if my replacement had no trace of world sainthood and no training in the neutral arts, the conflict would still not resume as long as he sat there, glancing up maybe only once or twice a month.
4
One day, my supervisor, Mr. Our, asked me to transport some American refugees back to their camp at Alamogordo.
I was chosen because I'd always answered, "I don't give a flaming, flying fuck about anything!" to every question on every questionnaire I'd ever filled out, since day one of either me or the world -- whichever came first.
And, of course, that was just the attitude needed to drive the Dream Blood Expressway -- the jerky road from here to Alamogordo, where hundreds of abandoned nations and peoples had come to settle down in their designated historic homelands, along its divider strip.
And where, if you weren't cold-blooded, most of your driving time was spent in a stop-and-go 2-mph crawl around the bodies and possessions of various squatter factions who, over the years, had gradually spread into first the breakdown lanes, then lanes 1 and 4, and now into all but a few feet of lanes 2 and 3.
Only 1 offramp out of every 15 was not a dead end, but none of them indicated which, in advance -- so being fucked up here was of utter necessity, and not just a fashion statement.
5
When I picked up the refugees in front of their one-and-a-halfway house, they turned out not to be Americans at all, but, rather, Franco-Amerasians masquerading as Americans in order to receive the benefits of World Refugee Relief.
They were also members of the Progress and Freedom Through Slave Labor Party and, as soon as they piled into the back of the IBM&T, began trying to convince me to give up all my jobs and identities and join their cause. They had brochures.
"We believe that if people were honest, they would just either fuck or kill each other, one by one, and as a result, once this was all done, the world would be a much happier place," one of them said.
6
I was seriously thinking about joining up when a call came through on the carphone from my Cross-Therapist.
"Hello, this is a pre-recorded message from Dr. Our, your cross-therapist," it began. "I'm sorry I can't be here in person to break this news to you, but I'm sure you can appreciate the heavy time constraints placed on members of my profession."
The doctor's message went on to say that I was so fucked-up, even 24 hour-a-day therapy, 7 days a week couldn't help me, but he was still game to try -- and the first $500-hour would be at half price -- because I was such a good sport about hopelessness.
7
"You're not in too big a rush, are you?" I asked the pseudo-refugees, who seemed pretty engrossed in singing some bitter song about the people who'd raped and pillaged and made them flee their pseudo-homelands.
"I just need to stop off at my University for a minute," I said. And they didn't seem to care.
8
My university, Most Fucked-Up Person Alive Institute of Technology (MIT), which had been built and endowed and staffed by me (using some of the prize money from my (many) World Sainthood Awards), had programs for advanced degrees in 3 different academic disciplines: Giving the Finger; Giving the Finger as a Second Language; Language Itself as a Second Language; and Math.
MIT had been set up specifically as a counterbalance to all those schools that serviced students from wealthy, aristocratic families, and so it was filled with only students possessing the most complex of family backgrounds. In order just to apply, you had to be able to prove that, at the very least, your sister was one of your mothers, and your mother was really your grandmother.
However, if your father was really your grandmother's second husband, and your husband was really your brother, then it really didn't matter what your SATs were -- you were guaranteed a slot in the freshman class.
9
The Chancellor of MIT, Chancellor Our, did naked speaking engagements and naked luncheons all over the world.
When we arrived on campus, the refugees waited in the car while I ran in and berated him for not maintaining the proper balance between sociopaths and psychopaths in the student body.
And, because we were on the upper floor of a tall building, I took the liberty of flinging a few large desk chairs out the window, as I spoke, to emphasize my point. Then I stormed off in a huff.
10
We got back on the road and eventually the squatter territories ended, but the road failed to widen beyond a single lane for both directions -- so opposite or passing cars still had to gently ease around each other, paying special care not to lock door handles or snap off external mirrors.
Technically, we were now on the Misplaced Persons' Expressway -- also called "Route 66 of the World," because you could drive the full circumference of the planet without ever leaving it.
Though no one lived along this stretch of the road, and there were often no other cars for miles, we'd still sometimes pass small groups of refugees on foot, headed slowly back towards their camps in the hills, while others occasionally ran by them in the opposite direction, still trying to escape.
A mood passed. It wasn't an 8.0 earthquake or greater, so why worry? I flipped on the radio.
The only station in the world was Socialist Presbyterian Radio and the only things they played were hidden-microphone recordings of lifelong hermits, talking to themselves.
This was the only popular form of entertainment left, because, by now, everybody was so fucking sick of listening to the kinds of things people said when they talked to each other or to an audience.
11
It was about 2AM when we finally arrived at the American refugee camp whose name I can no longer remember, but one day, I'm sure, a cyclone or typhoon will bring it all back to me.
I stayed on there for a few more days, trying to interview some Americans for a book or movie or tee-shirt or greeting card I was writing, but they just got impatient with my questions and kept trying to turn the discussion away from real issues to just a lot of random idle talking and opinions about community and love and responsibility and relationships.
Of course, everyone knew this was just their quaint way of trying to hide the fact that, in the face of no longer having a homeland, they clung even harder to the essence and the prime source of the power of their culture: unquenchable, ineffable material desire.
12
When I was finally kicked out of the camps for not even being a refugee, I went and settled down in an adjacent bean field, just to stay nearby.
I lived in a room there, designed to also be used as a lunar landing module (if the situation so warranted) by simply adding just a few inexpensive, plug-and-play upgrade modules.
The room came unfurnished, except for a small nightstand which contained a pack of Motorola Lites, a bottle of Motorola Vodka, and a Motorola sawed-off shotgun.
All 3 could only be used here, in the room, and only by the legal occupant, and only in the prescribed manner, which was:
1) Sitting on the edge of the bed, smoke a few Motorola Lites and ponder what a fucking pile of shit it all is. Then,
2) get so genuinely bummed out that you down the whole bottle of Motorola Vodka -- straight -- till you eventually
3) reach for the Motorola sawed-off shotgun....
THIRTY-2
1
Things got so bad, I was almost ready to believe my doctor. She'd told me I was suffering from narrative deficiency bulimia and filled out a voucher so I could get some free Narrative Inject.
The voucher was redeemable at any of the illegal, government-run, narrative supply stores that lined Highway 11 in the Disputed Zone, but when I got there, the storefronts had no street numbers or names on the outside -- only messages rolling across LCD strips in subtle gibberish metaphors, hinting at whole new stories beyond emotion, and at whole new ideas, beyond cognition.
2
I chose a door at random, opened it, walked in, tried to look around, tried to focus on object-1, but before I could, was blasted off to a bold new world where somebody's fucking somebody else's ex-wife.
The ex-wife's kid walks in and sees it and gets so pissed, he goes out and smashes a stolen car into a crowd of people, killing 7, injuring 11.
The brother of one of the people killed goes crazy with revenge and tracks the kid down and drives-by his house, and fires repeatedly into the window.
But, instead of the kid, the ex-wife is hit and in critical condition and has to be rocketed immediately to the only planet in the galaxy where the gravity and atmosphere allow the very delicate operation she needs to survive.
But there's only one pod available for the trip, and that one hasn't been inspected for years, and the only person who knows how to launch it properly is a drunken loser, sleeping in the gutter, high on DMT and in danger of dying at any random moment from choking to death on her own vomit.
3
The next day, I borrowed an old Bustamente 10-cylinder and drove out to Heisenberg International Airport (where they're never quite sure when your flight's arriving, XOR where it's landing).
I carried an Anais Nin .357 "Enforcer" with me, just in case.
Thanks to my training, I was well-equipped to hang out in semi-abandoned airports like this, anywhere in the world, awaiting almost anything, up to and including absolutely nothing, for any length of time, up to and including forever.
4
When I first got there, it was one of those nights.
Everyone in the place was all fucked-up. They knew there was only one desire, and that, once it was fulfilled and found wanting, civilization would begin.
Until then, all stories were about scoring the only commodity that satisfied this desire, though it was never explicitly named in the text and all the characters had to act like it wasn't the only thing.
But no one was fooled.
5
The restaurant at Heisenberg International opened only every few days and only for a few minutes (no one was ever quite sure (either where or) when), and all it served was Dex-a-dream.
This aggressive stimulant put you to sleep first, so you could express your drug-induced hyper-activity in the dream state, and not hurt anyone.
Then, when you woke up from it, the only side effect was that you just couldn't stop yourself from inventing whole new genres and whole new traditions of intra-national and interpersonal strife.
6
By accident, I fell asleep without drugs, one night, and, as a result, had the following standard airplane dream.
In it, I'd designed a simple, untraceable, home-brew airliner bomb, that virtually anybody could build and deploy.
It was a plexi-glass unit with a huge colony of starving ants in one hermetically-sealed half, and a mass of compressed, pureed banana in the other.
When the plane reached 20,000 feet, an altitude-sensitive mercury switch in the unit would trip, removing the barrier between the two compartments and allowing the ants to rush in and gorge themselves on the bananas.
Then, as they all puked to death in unison, enough heat and energy would be released at the same moment to ignite the nearby fuel tanks and blow up the plane.
7
A woman seated on the floor, leaning against a vodka machine, had been watching me sketch out my design on a napkin while I slept, and came over and woke me. She introduced herself as an agent of Fuck the World Airlines and offered me a job on the spot.
"You'll love working for FWA," she said. "Top management likes to walk around bragging about all the fatally defective parts we use in our planes and about how massively strung out all our pilots and maintenance crews are."
I was offered the kind of job where you get paid huge amounts, at first, but afterwards, you are totally discredited and nobody wants to know you.
8
I started right away, but was soon fired because whenever I got really pissed off, I showed it by slamming down all the buttons on my personal thermonuclear universal remote control panel, at once -- with generally unpredictable and universally unpopular results.
9
As I was cleaning out my desk, my supervisor came over and tried to be nice to me for a moment.
"Today," he said, "All lies are based on the truth that, one day, long ago, lies didn't need to exist. But now that they do exist, they rule the world by first winning over just the dumbest people and then simply letting them go out and peer pressure everybody else into submission -- even the smartest people.
"And that is both the proof and the source of the old philosophical dictum that 'Humanity precedes Intelligence.'"
"Or that 'Memorabilia Precedes Essence.'" I gently corrected."
Meanwhile, as we spoke, someone next door had started a wash, then blown away her entire family and herself before the first rinse cycle.
30-THREE
1
I had come to Professor Our's lab to scout human psychological experiments that might quickly be turned into amusement-grade, theme-park attractions or TV shows.
Because he'd been made chief of research only by virtue of some egregious administrative error, Professor Our showed his gratitude by making "accident" the only methodological principle he embraced.
As a result, no parameter anywhere was excluded from the scope of study. The EEG of the floor, for example, was providing incredible data -- with implications no one even dared think about.
Hundreds of thousands of ultra-low-speed osterizers had been set up to keep different mixes of neurotransmitter- and-brain-cell soup slowly churning in warm sunlight, in hopes of generating whole new classes of consciousness, and maybe, among them, just one that could replace the no-longer-relevant, narrative kind.
In sloppy-labelled jars of growth media stacked on the floor, DNA from many random species were coaxed into trying new, once-in-a-cosmos, re-combinations which, if at all successful, would promptly be moved, to grow unimpeded, in hospitably filthy crevices between old refrigerators and old roach-infested walls.
2
Sensing my lack of enthusiasm for his work, the Professor took me to a quiet corner of the lab to try to re-sell me on his bullshit.
"I am just this close to getting at the fundamental nub of cognition," he said, holding his thumb and forefinger less than a millimeter apart.
"Or the fundamental nub of cosmic being," he added, almost as an afterthought. "Whichever."
I looked over at a nearby booth where the subject of a currently malfunctioning experiment sat with an IV bottle dripping a gray/red viscosity down a long tube into his arm, labelled in a language I couldn't read or even recognize.
"Don't you think you ought to get him out of there," I said to the Doctor. The booth was clearly starting to agitate.
The Doctor grabbed his head in frustration. "This is too much responsibility!" he exclaimed. "Too many things at once!"
He did a bottle of quaaludes and a bottle of aspirin to calm himself down.
"All our experiments are designed to include the destruction of our old, outmoded lab equipment," he said. "And, in the absence of any genuine positive results, this allows us to at least show some net gain."
"Who is funding this incredibly stupid work?" I asked.
But instead of answering, he looked down sadly and asked me to talk him out of committing suicide that very minute.
"Sorry" I said, "But I've got a plane to catch and if I miss it and then hear it exploded in mid-air without me, I'd really be pissed."
But he wouldn't take NO! for an answer. "C'mon," he said. "Lighten up. Tell me the one about how it's just a passing mood. Or about the sun and the moon. Or about all those less fortunate than me."
3
I thought it would be the best therapy for him if we went to a Happy Hour somewhere and just started being the biggest assholes we could, and he got the shit beaten out of him or arrested and thrown in jail or maybe killed a cop and stole a car and lead a high speed chase across 20 states into other countries and genres, maybe ending up in a helicopter crash or a cocaine bust of para-military prostitute-kickboxers on an island where men are hunted for their brainstems.
4
As we walked down the street, looking for the kind of bar where all this could start, the Professor tried to panhandle spare change from the homeless people who sat propped against the mosques and shops.
But they were all "too busy" or had just heard the doorbell or phone ring and hadda run, or something was boiling over on the stove or they'd just washed their hair or a dog had just died and they hadda go make the funeral arrangements immediately. Sorry.
5
In the end, we decided to go to the bar where all the ruined former Surface-Fab employees had come to wait for their disability checks.
These workers had been hired, years ago, to grow custom skin cancers for use in high-powered micro-processors of the future. Suddenly, one day, years later, they were all found to have a (formerly) rare disease whose only symptom was the severe disruption of satellite communications wherever they went.
Of course, that was more than enough to get them removed from society and warehoused in towns like this one -- where satellite transmissions already sucked.
And, apparently, no one had even told them that their excessively high pay in the early years was simply World Workman's Compensation, in advance.
6
The bar was decorated in Pseudo-dilapidata: a simulation of rot and wear and decay based on slick new plastics that were dirt- and germ-resistant and soft and smooth -- even when they mimicked broken glass shards or the twisted steel edges of an auto wreck.
The walls were covered with candid photos of mutilated celebrities -- caught in the delicate balance between how important they were and how important it was to make an example of them when they got out of line.
A dynamic, cartoon-character, semantic-network display of powerflow in the room played out in off-life-quality graphics on the screen labelled MON-2, set into the ceiling.
We sat down at the bar, and I stared at the fake scratches and nicks and spills and strange tiny outgrowths that made up its surface, and tried to think some thought about them -- but failed.
The custodial crew had turned on all the vacuum cleaners to try to create atmosphere. And the chefs had all joined in by turning on all the meat grinders and coffee grinders, and the bartenders turned on all the martini machines. And all the TV sets and radios and speakerphones were turned on loud, as well.
But nothing changed.
7
Hired actors, pretending to be people, were strategically placed at the bar and at a few tables, muttering things to themselves, in between drinks, about "taking control of their lives." Then suddenly staring down at their hands and being shocked to notice they didn't match.
Other actors sat around, rambling off famous passages from famous plays, or famous quotes from famous, mass-murdering women, or famous prayers from famous religions -- all soft enough so there was only a slight din from the sum of them, and the important information was contained more in their violent lip movements than in the actual words they spoke, which could not, of course, be understood.
Since it was Happy Hour, the Judeo-Buddhist Trash-the-World boys had just come up from the beach, mad as shit. They sat together at a table, talking loud and obnoxious about tragedies of the body and popular autisms of the heart.
Everything they said was somehow a prescription for a new world order, on one level or another, and their unique blend of neuroses, psychoses, sociopathies, and general personality disorders guaranteed that, if nothing else, they'd at least be kamikaze-ready from Day One.
8
All surfaces in the bar employed an ultra-sound-based technology which suffused wood and plastic and made any spilled liquid or mush disappear on contact.
People enjoyed the casual atmosphere this created, because it set them free to sit around all night throwing drinks at each other or spitting at or bleeding on or puking all over each other and themselves and discharging whatever fluids from whatever orifice, real or imagined -- without anyone caring.
There was never any mess to clean up, and in fact, the regular patrons of the place much preferred violent, body-fluid fights to the more standard entertainment of singers and comedians, or to even an old-fashioned barroom brawl.
And their favorite song was the delicate hiss emitted at a characteristic frequency when flying goo hit protected surfaces and disappeared.
9
Exit out of the bar was specifically designed to be as demeaning as possible, so you wouldn't be leaving there again anytime soon.
THIRTY-4
1
Then I did every drug and took every rehab. I could recover from anything in less time than it took to bounce a digitally compressed lifeform off Pluto or Uranus.
First I'd get really fucked-up on some drug. Then, after a while, I'd get all pious and sentimental and repentant and wind up in some rehab.
Then -- Bang! -- It was gone.
And onto a new drug.
Then rehab that one in a flash.
Then get a new one and rehab that and get another, rehab that, and so on.
Still, I knew this was my last chance, coming up.
Coming up.
Coming up.Right here.Right here.Whoops.....2
Meanwhile, the calls kept coming. You know, the ones where somebody on the other end is all screaming and pissed and saying things like "Well where the fuck is it, asshole?"
And all I can do is say arrogantly, indignantly, "Where's What, shitbrain!" and try to write down their angry response, but they're talking too fast.
Then they start making threats about what'll happen if there aren't results. How they hired me over 2 years ago, paid up-front, were given glowing promises -- and haven't heard a word or seen a pixel or a bit from me, since.
Of course, at that point, I'm forced to remind them why they hired me in the first place.
"Look asshole," I usually say, "You came to me because you needed something well beyond hope and possibility. Something well beyond normalcy and beyond even Nature himself. And you came to me because you knew I was the only one in town who could fucking give it to you. So just keep that in mind and back the fuck off! These things take time, ya know."
3
But everyone wasn't always reasonable about it.
Like this guy who grabbed me on the street one day and said he'd hired me a year ago to see that shipments of some critical goods flowed smoothly into our ports and warehouses and cargo bays and holding tanks.
"Right, right," I said, "I remember that one now. Yeah, don't worry -- I'm workin' on it."
But, instead of smiling and telling me to keep up the good work, he got really pissed.
"Working on it?!" he screamed, incredulous, "Working on it?! It's too fucking late to be getting around to working on it! Billions of people have already died. Hundreds of billions more have been severely damaged for life. Children, women, infants, -- they've all been wiped out or devastated because of your laziness and irresponsibility...."
I was genuinely touched, but what could I do?
"Hey, sorry about that," I said, trying to console him as best I could, "But, you know how these things are. I got my own shit too, you know. I got my psychoses to think about, and my drug stuff, and my head stuff, and my body stuff and my batting average to think about. And I don't see any of your fucking people trying to help me!
4
But he just didn't get it. Did he? And I was arrested for crimes against so-called humanity, and my "Get-Out-Of-The-World-Free" Card was revoked.
That meant I had to go, immediately, to some far off refugee camp and spend possibly the rest of my days there, idly waiting for the liberation of some unknown country or planet or, in my case, state of mind.
5
I was sent to the famous camp that was just one big trapezoidal astrodome, made out of hundreds of torn open UPS trucks, rapidly welded together. It housed members of almost every refugee group from the whole history of human displacement, and there was hardly an ancestral enemy not represented here at the tip of at least somebody's stiletto or magnum.
When I arrived, they were all busy bitching about control of the TV that filled the back wall of the complex.
The guy sitting next to me on the floor kept looking anxiously at his watch as the argument raged.
"'The Cold Consolidation Hour' is on soon," he whined, certain he was gonna miss it now. "You know, they take some massive knowledge base and compress it down into one dense little nub," and he squeezed his fist closed, tight as possible, to demonstrate.
"Then they explode it onto the air, in true-life animated video," and his hand suddenly sprang open wide, fingers maximally extended, to illustrate how the brain expanded this pure, compacted nub of information, once the video had delivered it.
"Bang," he said, "Just like that! In less than a minute, you've got everything you need. 'Cold Consolidation' they call it. 20,000 man-hours of information, compressed into one 50-second packet."
Then he closed his fist back down and slammed it hard as he could against a low table on the floor in front of us. A few people beside him jumped at the sound.
Others in the room nearby had overheard him, and translated what he said for others, who passed it on to others farther away, and soon, as more and more heard about it, a slow methodical beat started up, made from thousands of people banging on tables and stomping on the floor in unison, chanting "Cold Consolidation... Cold Consolidation...Cold Consolidation," each with her own national and regional accent, pronouncing the words phonetically.
6
The relentless pounding continued for many minutes until suddenly, without warning, a thin film panel over the TV slid back, and the screen blipped on.
A silent cheer welled up in everybody's throat, and the pounding stopped as they squinted and waited for their eyes to adjust.
7
At first, the monitor just ran "The History Of Color Bars And Test Patterns," and, soon, everybody was getting restless again. "Where's 'Cold Consolidation?'" somebody screamed.
"Hey, these test patterns suck," somebody else yelled out, in a Czechoslambodian dialect. The room buzzed as people tried to translate the utterance for each other. Then the slow, methodical pounding started up again, and I wondered what would happen if somebody ever got hungry.
"I want a story, man," a voice said softly, plaintively in American, the words threading their way through the angry beat till, again, the buzz of its many translations filled the room.
Then, gradually, one at a time, they quieted down on their own, and each head tilted up into a wistful, musing, meditative stare at a different speck of dust on the ceiling.
Each voice started talking to its owner, telling itself the story it wanted to hear. Or trying to hum the song that would play at the end of that story. Or trying to describe the clothes both sides would wear during the final scene.
Then, abruptly, the color bars disappeared and a soothing voice from the monitor said, in English, "We interrupt these test patterns to bring you a special message from Presidente Zero."
Old stories and songs stopped dead as each neck turned back towards the screen. Everybody had shut up, now, and gently waited.
8
A shot appeared on the monitor of a person trying to plant an egg in soil. It ran for about a minute before another voice broke in, this one speaking Esperanto with an English accent -- but so intense, so insistent, it didn't need translation.
The image faded out and a new one faded in: of a guy just sitting alone in a room in a plain wooden chair, staring down at the floor, obviously on drugs, talking softly into the air, to himself.
He was difficult to understand and there was almost no inflection in his voice. The refugees all strained to hear, while sloppy, uncertain translations were hurriedly whispered around.
"Welcome to 'The Elvis Presley And Jack Kerouac Show,'" the guy mumbled deadpan, towards his feet, but this time loud and clear enough for everybody to hear and understand.
"On tonight's show, our very special guest is Mr. Frank Snotra," he paused for a second, as if to let the applause pass, though there was nothing but dead silence in the background.
"And later on in the show, we'll have a visit from Mr. Marlo Brandon," again he paused, "And then ...."
And he mumbled some more names which couldn't be heard, but were still recognized by everyone watching, regardless of language.
"And of course," he continued, "Our studio band is The Jimmy Hendrix Near-Death Experience who'll be doing their smash hit 'The Pen Is Mightier Than the Pencil' for us a little later."
A soft buzz ran through the ranks of the refugees. They all knew this song because it was the theme music for the annual World Refugee Council Spectaculathon held at Cabo San Lucas.
9
An hour later, the host was still mumbling the names of all the world famous celebrities who'd be appearing on tonight's show, with longer and longer dead-air gaps between names, as he struggled to remember them.
The refugees started pounding on the floor again and throwing things. They wanted a story, and they wanted a story fast.
Suddenly the host looked up, for the first time, into the camera, and shifted his weight on the chair.
"This is a story about...," he began, as though he'd just read the audience across time and space.
All the ears in the place perked up, and heads that had turned away idly chatting, suddenly turned back to look at the screen.
"This is a story about two people," he said. "One wants to fuck the other, but the other wants to fuck somebody else. That somebody else wants to fuck somebody else. But all that somebody else wants is a blow job, not love. The end."
[ End: Part 8 ]