A puddle of daylight condensed on the countertop. The wind outside shrieked, its angry force unabated lo these many months. A dozen rats sat sleeping, triangular heads nestled in woodchips and sawdust, locked inside a dozen white boxes with wire mesh windows. The mesh doors were clamped shut by prongs emanating from silver boxes on which small red lights flashed.
The scientists had not entered this room now for many days.
Under the counter was a thirteenth box, and in it the thirteenth rat. This rat was sleeping as well, but not peaceably; its head quivered, its eyesockets loosened and tightened, and its claws jerked in spasms, clutching or pushing or clawing at dream monsters. It lay shivering on the cold iron floor of its cage. Woodchips lay around the cage and piled around its inside edges, thrashed out during night after night of the rat’s drug-induced convulsion. Without opening its eyes, the rat awoke and vocalized a sound curiously like a human sob.
A gray plastic tag clattered softly over the window of the cage. It read, in red permanent marker: "Dr. Garth, futant project, file 1903, Property LLSL," and this was augmented with a sticker on which was scrawled in pencil: "adverse reaction v. neothujone; placed on deathwatch, 2101-10-01; replacement prepped, file 1724; dosage decreased to 1mg/8 hour."
The sob did not go unheard. On the north wall, a pair of rat cages sat apart. A strip of masking tape on the counter in front of their doors marked them as the responsibility of a Dr. Tom. One cage was marked M, and the other F. The rat in the M cage was awake now. He lifted his head up and looked down at the sick rat under the counter.
There was a whispered sound, a word: "tangerine." The rat in the F cage jolted awake and turned towards her neighbor and hissed. And then again, the word: "tangerine, tangerine." The sick rat under the counter jumped, head swiveling up, looking for a scientist or janitor, but there was none. His eyes fixed unsteadily on Dr. Tom’s two cages. M looked back down at him, nodded, and opened its mouth, moved its tongue, and once more spoke in English. "Tangerine."
"Tangerine," echoed F, moving forward towards the door so the sick rat could see them both looking down sympathetically. The sick rat opened its mouth and gasped, again sounding almost human. M heard the gasp and knew it was not the sound of a dumb animal; there was emotion in it, animal emotion, but encoded with the very same tones that humans used in their most basic pre-verbal language. Humans, even speaking their more complex and precise language, the one they called English, spoke this emotional language at the same time, encoding their feelings in the crannies and timber of their voices; sometimes doubling and reinforcing, or sometimes belying, undercutting the meaning of the English words. The sick rat’s gasp was astonished, pleased, but came out of racking despair.
"Tangerine," said M yet again, and the underlying tones said: have courage, we want to help you.
"Can he speak?" whispered F, pressing her face against the side mesh between the M and F cages.
"No," said M, "I think still not yet."
"He’s the closest I’ve heard, though," said F, "besides ourselves."
The sick rat stood up, trembling all the time, and began shuffling around, clumsy, circling the inside of his cage. On the third circuit he glanced up shyly at Dr. Tom’s rats, but continued circling. He stopped once, then twice, leaning against the cage walls for a moment to catch his breath. And then he cut short his circling and walked to the mesh window, putting his nose against the electronic silver latch box. His nose danced, and his whiskers curved in such a way that Dr. Tom’s rats could see he was concentrating on something.
"The cage door?" whispered M, trying to determine by studying the sick rat’s body cues exactly what it was doing.
The female rat shook her triangular head back and forth. "The lock box," she said.
They looked at the silver box at the edge of the sick rat’s box. A circle of red lights were flashing a pattern; there was a regularity and complexity to the flashing patterns on the silver boxes on the cages, such that Dr. Tom’s rats had, on a previous night spent whispering deadly quiet to each other through the windows of their adjacent cages, decided that the red light pattern was a language in its own right, though they had not yet learned the key to decoding it.
But perhaps the sick rat was their superior in that arena, because all at once the lights on his cage went dark, and there was a loud clack as the pins retracted into the box. The sick rat dropped flat to the ground and his gaze shot up to the ceiling. A loud bloop, the containment alarm, screamed, piercing even the shrieking of the wind outside, but only for a split second; under the sick rat’s gaze it cut out and went silent.
Dr. Tom’s rats looked on, astonished. The sick rat nosed the door of his cage and it creaked gently open. He slid slowly out, still twitching and trembling, and then let his head hang limp from his shoulders. His ears bobbled back and forth, and M, staring, realized that whenever the sick rat’s ears twitched, a light went on or off on the lock boxes of the cages.
There were twelve clacking sounds, and the front panels of all twelve of the lock boxes went dark.
The ground shook. A glass jar fell into the sink and shattered, and for a moment the sunlight went out. When it came back, it was pale, whitish. The rats stayed frozen, pressed to the ground. M watched his door float open. The light coming through the window slowly deepened back to yellow, and the inhabitants of M and F cages slithered out.
M leaned over the counter, running his forepaws down the vertical surface, and jumped to the floor. Out of his cage, it was impossible not to see that he was gigantic, at least a foot long. F walked cautiously to the edge of their counter, jumped to the next, and whispered to the inhabitants of other cages, enjoining them to experience freedom. She was gigantic too, but she was thick rather than long.
M put a forepaw on the shoulder of the sick rat and felt the trembling. "Shh," he said. "Tangerine, tangerine." Living reflection of a dream. The sick rat showed no reaction. M sniffed, and his brow furrowed.
"There are two of you," he said. The sick rat looked up at him, eyes unreadable through the pain.
"You have a mate?" said M, trying to clarify, but then realized that wasn’t it. "Not a mate," he said, "but something." He reared up on his back legs and rotated, sniffing the air. There was a new smell in the air, something made by machines, but the smell of the rats was stronger. The one he was looking for was sitting in the door of her cage, head out, body in; F had not been able to get her to come all the way out. The tag on the cage read: 1724.
The steady shriek of the wind outside suddenly rose and rose until the noise felt like it might rattle M’s skull apart. His paws shot reflexively up to his head to clamp his ears tight shut; it happened so suddenly and subconsciously that he toppled forward and his chin struck the ground before he had a chance to think. The noise continued for many minutes. At first, M didn’t notice the strange sensation at his tail, but it slid slowly up to his hindquarters, and through the infinite pounding wind shriek, he could feel something subtle: an inwarad pressure on his hindquarters, a feeling that his body was pressing out of itself. His hairs were standing straight out, and there was a feeling of cold. The region of wrong pressure slid over his paws and then over his tightly clamped knot of forepaws, ears, and face, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe; it was like being underwater, except perhaps the opposite, because when you’re underwater you can’t breathe and it’s hard to move, but his body felt light and flexible. No air. No air at all, a roving pocket of no air. He dropped his paws from his ears, and it was compeletely silent. He pushed against the floor, scrabbling backwards, and when his head came out of the pocket of no air the screaming came back, but quieter than it had been.
M shivered for a moment, feeling like the sick rat, and thus reminded, walked back over a few paces to see how the sick rat was doing. It was convulsing, and there was an odor of ozone. M lifted a paw to reach out, then, frightened by the violence of the convulsions, began against his will to back away.
The sick rat began to scream, jaw whipping in semicircles. F dropped off a counter and came beside M, pressing her shoulder hard against his.
The volume of the wind dropped off, but the sick rat’s scream made up for it. But then that stopped too, and a dullness entered his eyes. The convulsions stopped; the sick rat slowly stood up on its back legs, nostril twitching languidly, eyes unfocused, hunted around in the air for a moment, and then froze in place. His eyes were closed, his face gone calm. There was a popping sound as he exploded, face and guts blowing out -- exploding, but not out onto the floor of the lab. The gore was just gone.
A hollow rat statue now stood on the floor of the laboratory.
A keening rose from the rats on the counters. The keening stopped after a brief time; they were always kept in individual cages, and knew each other only as fellow sufferers.
F stood on her back legs, and stomped. "Rat 1903," she said, "died this afternoon of our slavemasters’ poison." M bowed his head. The rats on the counters sat silent; whether they could understood no one could guess. F stomped again and stalked away to sit in a corner and brood.
Hours later, the sun set, or was blocked out. There was was really no way to tell. Four of the other rats were down on the floor now, but cage 1724 still contained its rat. Her counterpart’s corpse stood where it had stopped, upright, tail arching to the ground, making it look like a tripod against which a bloody, stinky hollowed-out potato skin leaned.
M and F lay on either side of the hollow rat. M could not stop glancing up at cage 1724 and its occupant.
F turned her head towards M, her nose stopping close to the hollow rat’s tail. "Jack?" she said.
"Who?" said M.
"I thought," said F, "that we should give ourselves names."
"I can be Jack. There are more of us than there are smells," he commented to F.
"I don’t... smells?" she said.
"Smell," he said, with an imperative tone. "I smell... five rats. You, me, and four more."
"But," started F, and then she sniffed the air too. "You’re right. Those two smell the same."
"Yeah," said M, who now thought of himself as Jack. "There are two of that one, two of that one, three of that one, two of that one, and of course," he said, indicating now the female rat in cage 1724, "only one of her now. We come in kinds."
"What does that mean," said F, "kinds? Maybe some rats just smell the same."
"Maybe," said Jack. They were quiet for a long moment, Jack’s nostrils twitching all the time. "No, no. I was in the... other... rat room once." F’s eyes squinched. "You know the one I mean?"
She shook her head.
Jack shivered. "It was down the hall," he said, "a long way down. I hope I never have to go there again."
"But there were more of us there?" she said. "Let’s go and let them out."
Jack’s shoulder muscles clench and his head rotated, tense, pulling away. "They weren’t..." he said, "like us. They were so small, and their eyes were dead, you couldn’t look into them. It was appalling to look into their eyes. And there were a thousand of them in just a few cages. They were crawling over each other, eating their dead...."
"This is our dead," said F of the hollow rat. "We can’t eat him. We should do something, put him somewhere to go back to elements."
Jack continued, irrelevantly: "those little rats, they smelled almost as different from you as you smell from the doctors and scientists. And all these kinds," his nose bopped to indicate rats, "each kind is that different from the other kinds."
"They made kinds of us," he said. "This one," and he gestured with his nose towards the statue, "and that one," and he gestured to the rat huddled in the back of cage 1724, "are of the same kind. I don’t think I would be talking crazy if I suggested that you and I were of the same kind."
F bobbled, nose twitching. "Yes," she said. "The scents are less than the individuals. There are perhaps only four. And, of course, that one other scent."
The corpse of the hollow rat 1903 stood balanced, macabre. There was a faint scent of despoilation coming from it.
TBC
Willy slept badly, and that not for long. Damn it! Fucking idiocy. There was a rancid flavor on the roof of his mouth; his tongue probed it. The back of his head ached, where the skull joins the spine, and oil stood out on his face.
In the dark, dirty figures rustled. The body odors had never stopped revolting him. Especially from the women; women were supposed to be clean, to smell like flowers and the superego. It was cold. He curled head toward knees, arms clutched tight against his chest.
Whores.
It was freezing cold. There was a dull ache in his ear. His penis was smaller than it had been, and his testicles felt more tight. Smaller than it ever had been. Why would it shrink? He imagined his spermatazoa swimming in his testicles. They were the real kings here. They grew me only as a vehicle to send them out, reifying new variations. We exist only to spread our genetic material. Catapults for sperm. And mine have abandoned all hope.
He shivered. His ears ached. Filthy, filthy, cold and filthy.
These were end times. But there were women aboard this boat. Stay alive, sperm, he thought, I’ll find a way to use you, I swear. Two beautiful women. Beautiful but filthy. Three technically, three women, but one was old. So two women, but three men. Four men, technically, but one was old. I’m the third man. We can’t all form the fucking pair bonds, and I’m the one left over. I’ve always been the one left over, the one who got the leftovers, left over leftovers left over.
There were crocodiles in the water outside, and apes stalked in the forest.
You get what you think you deserve, Willy thought. You get what you go out and get. So on top of all that shit, I don’t believe in myself, either. I’m my own fault.
It’s so cold.
Nevermore, never be. He wondered if the rancid taste in his mouth were figurative somehow, psychosomatic, if it was just another symbol of his self-hatred. He swallowed and felt his throat constrict, itchy like shag carpet. No, that’s real. That’s raw bile left from throwing up over the ledge today...
today when the sun went out.
He pulled the sheet tight around him. Mr. Cody had a reformer for a wife. Why was he thinking of that now? Shiny finger.
I walked across gray pavement and bricks to an island between two driveways, and they were there. A huge tree rose from the center of the island. I stepped to the side and saw that there were more trees behind it, a procession of evenly spaced, perfectly centered evergreens, and between them stood women. A car approached down the hill and turned away toward town and their eyes glinted, two by two by two until the headlights were as gone as the car.
One of them was Astrid.
"Erdogan," she said, "can we talk to you?"
No, I thought. "No," I said, and started running away towards my car on the side of the hill. I could hear them running after me. A belly-high hedge stood between me and the car, and I barreled over it, trying to jump and roll. I landed on the flat, square top and felt it ripping through my shirt, and then my head went over and my feet rotated all the way around and I landed on my back. My head fell back against the hard stalks. I gasped and scrambled forward. I saw mocassins approaching from my right and someone rising up out of them. I looked up and it was a black-haired woman with something on her face. Behind her, I saw a gap in the hedge and wished I’d noticed it before hurting myself.
I staggered towards the car, a woman now on either side of me, and when I reached it someone hit me from behind, bent me over the trunk, and held my head down. In the back window I could see dim reflections of half a dozen dark-haired women, faces grim.
"Please?" said Astrid from behind me.
"O... K," I said, choking.
Practice what you preach, my son. Even if you’re not writing for the story, you’re still writing. Put it here. You’re an intuitive writer, you have trouble sticking to a structure. Let it wonder. Let this be the experiment grounds.
I’m very tired. There was a brunette girl at Mogan’s that I found attractive. She looked like she was looking at me without being obvious. At first I thought she was being too affectionate with the guy sitting next to her to be available, until I decided he was likely to be gay, which was later confirmed by somebody asking him how his Red State parents had taken the news. But then I noticed she had a ring on her finger. What does it all mean? Why does it look like nothing will ever get any better, although all the signs seem to be pointing towards hope? It’s just like the deceptively Blue exit polls.
Murgatroyd.
I never want to go into anything in enough detail. This is the question -- why am I still a virgin? I’m more socially adept than many of my friends, but I guess I want something different -- that is, I have self-respect. Or that’s how I describe it to myself. Oh, there’s a rat’s nest in here. Heh heh. Rat’s nest. Sluts and princesses; it’s not virgins and whores for me, it’s will they lose interest that I’m sexually inexperienced, on the one hand, or why should I have to put up with this irrational controlling histrionic selfish bullshit on the other.
It’s a big fucking question, the why am I still a virgin question, and it has a million easy answers.
Because you’re asexual.
Because you’re gay.
Because you don’t reeeeeally want to right now.
I mean, you’re not though. Asexual, except in a temporary sense, or gay.
Virginity is a silly thing to focus on. Follow your bliss, man. Even if it doesn’t involve, you know, physical bliss.
Because you’re a perfectionist.
Because you can’t relax.
Because you never learned how.
Because you won’t settle like so many of your stupid blind friends did. Although there’s other ways you would settle, you slut. Imaginary slut. Slut in your own mind.
Because of refusal to commit to a relationship that according to your own reckoning is doomed to end badly; that is, because you have heard, learned, or decided that one must go through many breakups before you are experienced enough to trust a relationship, you are unwilling to take the first step.
Come on, punky monkey. I bet the garbagehole becomes the most interesting and unpublishable part of this file. We’re looking at another five hour night, man oh man. I’m paying off the top and the bottom with this writing in the morning plan.
OK, so about the story. All the physical description is: colors, cold, squatting, loud unpleasant noises. Also, I find that when I try to actually follow the thread of logic in a scene, the kind of A to B to C path that makes it clear what’s actually going on, I get supremely bored. I don’t want, it seems, to tell a story, I want a bunch of weird inexplicable magical creation. And then I spend time hating on ... and her literal-mindedness, but it’s not fair, I don’t listen to all of what she’s saying anyway, and what I listen to I listen to because I agree that the story’s too unnecessarily unapproachable. And I agree with the dictum that you need to tell real, human stories. Maybe I’m afraid to do that. I do know when I sit down and try to do it my mind goes totally blank and I start free associating, and it comes out colors and screaming and temperatures and squatting and tooth-clenching. Are there other ways to describe things? Like, say, bulbous noses, hair like a Christmas wreath, bony smiles? Duck, goose, why am I thinking of the goose in Sherlock Holmes -- ah, yes, because there was a Carbuncle hidden inside it, and David Foster Wallace uses carbuncular for the bulbous red noses of drunks and probably people with colds.
Another thing is I feel like the Folk-centric stories in the North Place need to have a better thought out idea of what the Folk are like. The terrible moment of awareness dawning, speech that reflects that background, with no allusions to concepts or objects a lab rat wouldn’t know about. And that’s a lot of things, lab rats can’t have seen much.
Why is Tai so cuuute? She’s not though. I thought you agreed not to do that any more. Do what? The -- hey, down cat -- thing where you evaluate a woman using the same blistering scrutiny computer programs get, you know, where you come from. But people will make fun of me. Just people like .... Well, yeah, that’s a point. They’re never perfect, you’re supposed to fill that gap. That’s called romantic.
Now there are claws in my shoulder and a purring head butting at my face. I have to dodge the nose or he’ll lick me. Aw, pressing the ears up against my lips. I wish I could derive some more complete pleasure here -- I guess that’s what human relationships are for. Sex has a climax, and intellectual relationships actually evolve. Good cat, though, you’re doing the best you can without actually trying to improve your own behavior or anything.
I turn sullen and slow-witted when I realize I’m interested in a girl. I often seem to notice this when I’m around my friends. I wonder if they’re a barrier, if I’m too worried what they think to think on my own. So what should I do? Clean up my room real nice then go out to bars alone and chat with any girls that meet my eyes? It’s not like there’s a big girl vending machine. And then in the extremely unlikely event that I bring one home, the cat will get in the way....
Howl, the beloved fantods, ho ho. There is a certain kind of free and easy writing style at which I feel I’ve become very adept, one in which I feel freedom to mess with the meter and twist up the words. It’s derived out of gale, out of the sense that I’m sitting there regaling an appreciative audience with whatever entertaining stories I happen to be able to think up right there, right that second, in front of them.
Heh heh. The following exchange occured on gale: someone pointed out that Barbara Bush (daughter of the demon president, not his mother) was wearing a strangely fancy dress in a picture from what I assume was Bush’s I will conquer the world with my new popular mandate speech. I said "hey, honey," as if hitting on her. I was sent a private message by ..., who implied that to him she looked like a high priced $500/hour whore, forced to take time off to appear with her father. I said I’d pay for an hour, and he said he would too -- he’d sell his car and do her nine times.
I thought that was funny.
And also the kind of thing that I shouldn’t think is funny, denigrating to women, blah blah.
So here’s my new idea: my story hasn’t found it’s proper length and consistency because of certain leaps I make. So what I should do is go through my story bible, find character traits, backstory, attitudes, etc. that I want to show, and think of scenes to put them in. Whooooo. So obvious. So not the way I was operating, as I asphixiated, metaphorically, and clawed, pop-eyed, at a brick wall of sullen desperation.
My guilt burns in me so fucking hard. Every time I saw this screen today I quailed. I have had thoughts, certainly, and here they are: Erdogan is, like, oh this is so fucking horrible, anyway is like me a virgin, virgin virgin virgin, and like me it’s because of his own behavior. Behavior. Choices that he no longer has any control over. In any case, it has reached the point where, for Erdogan, it’s analogous to an oppressed populace overthrowing a government that doesn’t address its needs; his id needs sex and more and his executive has been denying it that, so there is an internal rebellion underway, the rational increasingly sliding off or becoming impotent as the id follows its own needs. Lucy will talk to Erdogan and tell him what is happening, and that it’s happened to her so many times she has a bank of two or three personalities left over from previous internal revolts.
Heh heh. Dale just came it to try to commiserate with me about how he didn’t want to spend $2.50 for a song he’s been wanting for ever because it’s too much money, absolutely speaking, for one song. I started talking about the fallacy of the concept of value, how if it benefits you it’s worth more than the cost you pay for it, that’s the point of monetary exchanges: that both sides benefit afterwards, the seller by getting more money than the object was worth to them personally, and the buyer by getting more personal value than the amount of money they gave up. And that the benefit in the long run probably far outweighs the temporary dent in the income stream. He said: I’m not going to talk to you about things like this from now on. Because I have a much bigger income stream and so don’t really understand. And that’s certainly true, I have a blase attitude because I can afford to, and that means literally.
I fall strongly on the side of hedonism being valued above prudency.
Come hound, come imp, come wolf, come rat.
Yoz boz. Woaaaaaaaaaaaah. Ha ha. Ha ha. What’s that thing they say in that Perfect Circle song, the thing I kept listening to over and over after I ... ... that one time. ... fucking deserved it.
I’m more than just a little bit curious how you plan to go about making your amends.