Be seen and not heard, jellied caviar. You are only the meager bourgeois babbler-in-darkness and we shall not accommodate your folly. Butchered bathing beauties prance like winsome caterpillars upon your seeded airplane wings while morphine-sodden columnists compose scorching polemics against your use of portent. Fear as thick as eyelashes flutters down your precipices, rolling like shattered kneecaps into a gulch of remorse.
Yet seek you not the omnipotent omen; yet lead you only the life your ancestors begat you. Dry foreigners leap and tumble in your sockets; blaring poseurs cavort with courageous lipreaders on the broken horizon. No sentiment have I nor wings from which to plunder your steamless cays. I seek only the rubik— the mondrian mandala of snipped vessels.
In the distance looms neo-nazious labrador retrievers, racing the boots of spindly mongoloids. I sleep.

Midnight

I am awoken by a procession. Indeed! It is a grand parade led by a maggot chieftain arrayed in silken robes, a tiara crowning his balding pate. Frozen by awe I watch the legions pass under banners of gold and black: stumping walruses in braid and metal, partridge dancers spinning like centrifuges, scantily-clad rams closing and opening ranks, a phalanx of muskrats plinking on wheeled marimbas. On and on they swarm, captured slabs of buick pinioned and dragged like dead fish by armies of frogs in scarlet leotards. Faded medallions hung like three-color stars from the burly necks of vipers, gaboon vipers, pacing in supreme self-assurance amid the fracas. A vast icon of the Sacred Hemorrhaging Aorta of Jesus is held aloft by tear-stained gophers. I am struck dumb, eyes molecular now, fast and weak forces knotted in semi-circular rhythms among scented neurons. A dim blob floats lamprey-like in my consciousness. I succumb.

Three months later, in a greasy spoon west of Oregon

The plume in the waitress’s coffee urn flutters limply in the breeze; I await the shallow lizard. Drones elude me. Postmen loom in the distance tootling bass horns as I lift my embossed napkin, wearing away the rind of soot lining my teeth. A bone protrudes from the pink rabbit’s tongue displayed near the cash register and I am aware that not everything I see is sufficiently chromatic. Is it my imagination NO! IAMNOT
I am not I am not your footman! I am an English citizen! I am an Arabic denizen! I am poor, I am feeble, but I will not sign your autograph! The Shah of Iran! The great Lombardi! The Final Pill! I rest assured. Thank you.

“Welcome to the new world.”

Harlie muttered as he stepped down from the train, its cold steel side sweating in the gloom. Operators, in ubiquitous cubicles marked data on cards in magnetic ink and whole worlds of possibility were shut off; rendered inaccessible to curious eyes.

Harlie suffered the pains of a normal man. He wore his clothes poorly, and had too little hair grown too long. He dreaded hardship, though he’d never been truly badly off. He cherished a love for a woman who knew him only as a line debugger. He pictured her in poses he’d only ever see in magazines. Her name was Vanessa and she took diet pills.

Up, up above him, Harlie could not see the trembling fingers of steel that held the rust-stained canopy of glass that was the roof of the terminal stop. Artifactual evidence of the work of skilled hands tied into arthritic knots and dragged beneath the soil and ground beneath train wheels for two full generations before Harlie came here to limp uncaring across the glistening concrete echoed their derision. Or was that just some effect of the wind? Patients in the hospital had seemed similarly confused. Harlie suspected something much more sinister.

At home, Vanessa would be tidying, listening to the evening news, and wondering what to do with herself. She considered changing her job. She shouted obscenities at a still photo of Yasser Arafat and changed into loose jeans to watch Dynasty. She considered the face of her last lover and tried wishing he would call. Operators, in ubiquitous cubicles, marked data on cards in magnetic ink and

Harlie crossed from the track and entered a cab idling there.

The end.