She always comes at seven, orders chai,
And chats with him in hisses and in clicks,
A ratchet laugh and engine-cooling ticks.
The regulars all smile when she comes by,
Her skin dark bronze, her pockets full of tools.
He pours a steaming cup of tiny jewels.

* A joke about the long-vanished San Diego coffeehouse Java, whose menu offered a “Bohemian Breakfast” of black coffee and two unfiltered cigarettes.

(Writing exercise January 24, 2012: something with a mechanical bird in it, in honor of Shweta Narayan.)

All this was sealed to the outside world. No living things had ever been allowed to enter that no dust could work harm on tiny gears or gum the oil that kept them turning. The fingers that held those tiny hammers, that cut metal with files as thin as hair were themselves metal.

The glade was unknown to those who had walked the street above, but one branch of the tree bore scratches where a metal foot had clasped. On the inside of the room the door had been framed with gold leaf, lapis lazuli and faceted rubies. The ornaments seemed to grow out of the door the way plants reclaim a burned ruin.

The hallway that lead to the door felt too close, a drunken guest leaning in with one eye lidded. Overhead pipes dripped down long trails of calcium buildup, spattering against dull black spots on the iron-grated floor. You couldn’t walk there without catching on some piece of corrosion. The outside door was plain wood. One plank replaced with scrap on which clung pale blue paint, the rest cracked, dry, unfinished. The lock appeared ordinary, but there is no key which could open it. Or at least, there is none anymore.

The hallway attaches to the subbasement of a warehouse, the warehouse sits near the back of an abandoned factory, the factory stands sentinel on a river, the river runs long to the ocean. The river has not carried cargo for as long as anyone can remember. But who here still remembers anything?

All the people have fled and it is my doing. Armies will raze these buildings, crush the concrete and stone. They will uproot every made thing until there is no metal left.

And there will be more armies after that. My children’s children.

But they won’t recognize my glade as their own, and I will have long since abandoned my perch on that tree.

Lara was already up. Normally Jorge was up first, in the dank hour before dawn, to make coffee. But Lara set a large mug in front of him, brimming with deep brown liquid, and he closed his eyes and breathed in the burnt caramel aroma.

He felt her hand on his, and opened his eyes to see her, sitting next to him. He reached up and brushed a lock of black hair from out of her eyes, and she smiled. For a moment they just sat there, and he knew she was thinking the same thing he was thinking: maybe we could spend the whole day not talking. Just be together.

But then, inevitably, the Watch on his wrist buzzed, like a pompous, angry beetle.

Lara squeezed his hand tight. He could hear the dull buzz of her Watch too. They looked at each other, not at their Watches, both wanting a few more precious seconds of bliss.

It didn’t last long. It couldn’t, and they knew it. The buzzing of Jorge’s Watch, and Lara’s, grew more insistent. Painful. Jorge gritted his teeth. Lara gasped and jerked her hand away.

At the same time, they both looked at their Watches.

CRITICIZE, read Jorge’s Watch.

He sighed. Why couldn’t it have read “COMPLEMENT”? Or “MAKE SMALL TALK”? Or even “KISS”?

“Well,” he began, then stopped.

A small electric shock ran from his Watch and into his arm. He cried out, and Lara started to reach to him. But then she looked again at her Watch, and, slowly, sadly, withdrew her hand.

Jorge raised the coffee to his lips. He took a sip. It was thick, almost syrupy, but without grounds, the way he liked it. Lara had added just a bit of sugar, to take the edge off the bitterness. As soon as it hit his tongue the caffeine jolted his nerves, made the gears of his brain whir.

They whirred with resentment.

He grunted. “I…I’ve had better.”

Lara raised her head. Jorge tried to turn his head to the side, the slightest of shakes, to indicate he didn’t mean what he said. But the Watch caught the movement–it always did–and zapped Jorge again, causing him to spill some of the coffee.

He rubbed his arm and shoulder. He’d heard tales of people who had died, refusing the orders of their Watches. It had to have been a painful death and required the utmost determination. He wished he was that brave. He wished he loved Lara enough to resist that much. But, he supposed, that very point was the issue the Watch wished to prove to him: how very frail and fallible Jorge, and Jorge’s love for Lara, was.

He put down the coffee.

“I guess I don’t feel like coffee,” he said softly. His Watch blinked at him: CRITICIZE.  He sighed and said, loudly, “The coffee doesn’t taste good, okay?”

Lara cleared her throat. He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t want to see the tears forming in the corners of her eyes. He just hung his head down. It had looked like a beautiful day, and now he felt like shit.

“Ooh, so the coffee isn’t good enough for you, is it?” said Lara. Her voice was very quiet at first, but then, after a little Watch-induced yelp, she spoke louder. “Or perhaps you would have preferred to have been served in bed? Your majesty?”

Now Jorge raised his head. He didn’t bother trying to read Lara’s Watch–you never could quite make out someone else’s directions–but he could guess this one. MOCK, or perhaps BE SARCASTIC. The left edge of his mouth curled up in a bit of a smile. Well, she certainly had hit that one on the nose.

And he caught her smiling back at him.

His Watch buzzed. Jorge looked at it. GET ANGRY, it said.

“So!” he suddenly shouted. “Are you mocking me? Or being sarcastic at me?” He shouted so loud that Lara shrank back in her chair. Fucking Watch, Jorge thought, and said aloud, “I’m very angry! Very angry indeed!” He paused, thoughts coursing around and around his caffeine-greased nerves, then said, “And to prove it, I’m–”

And with the tip of his forefinger, he pushed over the coffee cup, spilling it on the table.

Lara leapt up, stared at the brown liquid soaking into the tablecloth. Then she turned to Jorge, who crossed his arms, and muttered, “Yes, very angry, very angry indeed.”

And she burst out laughing.

Some sinister cabal invented the story of a Hollywood studio making Capricorn One in order to hide the truth, that Damnation Alley was the real film about a hoaxed Mars flight.  Yet today, there are any number of people who believe they have seen the movie, who have fully convincing memories of the movie, who genuinely believe a movie with the name Capricorn One was released in 1977, about a faked flight to Mars, and that Damnation Alley was a film set on a postapocalyptic Earth.  Imagine the shock and horror with which they will greet the news that both of these movies were hoaxes, imagine how confidence in our public institutions will collapse, the monetary system will collapse as people stop accepting paper money, riots will break out in all major cities in the country.  Imagine, then, the relief with which people will greet the news that it was actually this book which was the hoax, that Capricorn One and Damnation Alley were about a faked Mars mission and a postapocalyptic Earth respectively, and not the other way round.

Robert nodded, but he couldn’t shake off a lurking feeling that there was something he’d forgotten to do, something important.  This is how begins the haunting story of Robert Pritchard, a man rendered amnesiac by an infestation of rare microworms that burrow in the brain.  In the tradition of Beckett, Joyce, and Tristan Shandy, comes the harrowing tale of someone so forgetful that he forgot to write his own autobiographical novel.  Thus you, the reader, will find 300 blank pages following that previously quoted opening sentence, which actually wasn’t even written by the author but was copied out of another book by the writer of this dust jacket blurb.  Beautifully written, achingly evocative, this harrowing exploration of amnesia explores, in exquisite blank pages both marmoreal and lapidary, the nature of the self, of consciousness and memory, in what the New York Times called, “the tour de force of the decade!”

.

Dust Jacket: History’s Most Seminal Dust Jacket Blurbs is “a triumph!” says Dust Jacket Quarterly: the Magazine of Dust Jackets.  Compiled and edited by the famous blurbist Dr. Robert Pritchard, this book collects such jewels as dust jacket blurbs to the Code of Hammurabi, the Symposium of Plato, the Summa Theologiae, and, most importantly, Gossip Girl 3: All I Want is Everything by Cecily von Ziegesar, in which Serena simultaneously dates superstar Flow and vegan Aaron, while Blair learns her mother is pregnant and must make a life-altering decision about Nate.  Among the fascinating essays are a dissection of quid pro quo blurbing between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, an analysis of glucose metabolism in the amygdalae and hypothalamus when patients at Dr. Pritchard’s laboratory in Tashkent were exposed to blurbs from I am Number Four (including a statement from Skadden, Arps LLP explaining why he cannot be held legally responsible for their deaths), and a history of blurb compilation books featuring the origins of the blurb compilation book in ancient Mesopotamia, its long dormancy in the Middle Ages when the dust jacket blurb was kept on life support in the form of Post-It Notes stuck to the covers of illuminated manuscripts by the Venerable Bede, its revival in the Renaissance when scholars, with the examples of the great blurbs of classical Greco-Roman antiquity before them, created such masterpieces as blurbs to the sonnets of Petrarch (“Boffo!”) and Dante’s Divine Comedy (“I couldn’t put it down!  Or pick it up, since it’s so heavy!”), and the current post-war Golden Age of Blurbs, when the blurb as its own literary form truly came into its own.  No longer must blurbists cringe when novelists and poets tout their wares, because the blurbist is their equal and more.  Written entirely in the form of an epic dust jacket blurb, this book forms its own incredibly long blurb, a masterful synthesis of form and content that will render this book-blurb an essential component in any subsequent compilation of history’s most seminal dust jacket blurbs.

A: Don’t you realize, Margo, that this sarcophagus is the very one stolen
from the British Museum on the same night that the dastardly master
criminal Rene Dastard escaped from Reading Gaol?

B: But Lamont, surely you don’t suspect…

A: But I do, Margo.  If the riddle of the Brass Head has led us here,
that means…

B: Lamont, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.

A: I should have known all along.  The motto in the Tristero’s sacred
seal is an anagram.  If you re-arrange the letters, you get “Margo is
evil”!

B: Don’t act so surprised, Lamont.

A: A gun!  So you betrayed me.  You’ve been working with Dastard this
whole time.

B: Call it what you like.  Yes, I used you to find the sarcophagus.  I
needed you to find the Wallenstein Codex among all the scrolls in the
Vatican Library of Pornography.  And the codex led us here.  Sorry to
disappoint you, old chap.

A: And the love-making?  Was that a lie as well?

B: Oh, Lamont, don’t be so self-righteous.

A: What are you going to do with me now?

B: That depends on how reasonable you’re willing to be.

A: No, you can’t expect…

B: That’s right.  Into the sarcophagus, pretty boy.  Dastard needs a
body to smuggle the diamonds into France.

A: Diamonds?  I thought he was looking for the sacred Aztec Amulet.

B: That too.  All in good time, my friend.

A: All right, Margo.  You win.  Will you at least make sure Snowy
finds a good home?

B: No promises.

#

The Scene: A chateau outside Paris, France

B: Where’s that crowbar?  Okay, now I’ll just pry off the
anthropomorphic lid of this sarcophagus and…

A: Expecting someone else?

B: Lamont!  You’re alive!

A: Fortunately I left a few PowerBars and a bottle of Gatorade  in the sarcophagus
beforehand.  I knew I would be making the trip across the Channel in
it, you see.

B: But that means… you must be Rene Dastard!

A: In the flesh.  Which means I manipulated you into shipping this
sarcophagus out of England under a rare antiquities license so customs
wouldn’t inspect it.  It was the only way I could get across the
border.

B: But Lamont, I mean Rene, surely you don’t think that what I said
reflected the way I truly felt about you?  Why, I was playing along!
I always knew you and Dastard were the same person.

A: Nice try, darling, but the jig is up.

B: Oh, Lamont, please don’t shoot me.  We could run away together,
just the two of us, forget about the amulet and maybe open a small car
rental agency in Las Vegas.

A: No dice, sugar.  But let’s get down to brass tacks.  I’m not going to shoot you.  Yes, I see you
understand me.  Now get into the sarcophagus.

B: But if I get in there, perhaps when I come out, I’ll be Rene
Dastard, and you’ll be Margo.

A: I don’t think so, babe.  Your sequined dress would clash with my
body glitter.

This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and they’re attacking us because we’re free and prosperous, that is just not true.

This whole idea that we have to be in 130 countries and 900 bases . . . is an old-fashioned idea.

I think this whole idea of media deciding electability is really silly.

This whole idea, that’s the reason the cost is so high.  The cost is so high because they dump it on the government.

But this whole idea of talking about endless wars and endless foreign aid, it seems like nobody cares about the budget.

“This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody —”

This whole idea that we lack compassion because we want the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people – this is where prosperity comes from: our Constitution and liberty.

This whole idea that any bureaucracy, that any agency can write all these regulations and they’re the law of the land.

This whole idea that we have absolute control over people in the Palestine and the Gaza and the West Bank, I don’t think that’s right.

So this whole idea is that there is something wrong with people who don’t lavish out free stuff from the federal government, somehow aren’t compassionate enough.

This whole idea that the most important thing between two candidates right now is the definition of cult, trying to make it sound negative for one person to get the edge over the other — and they are encouraged by others to keep this thing going.

I mean that’s what people need to stand up to this whole idea that you just go along with this to prove how strong you are.

I mean, this whole idea of sanctions, all these pretend free traders, they’re the ones who put on these trade sanctions.

This whole idea that now we can be assassinated by somebody that we don’t even like to run our medical care, and giving this power to the president to be the prosecutor, the executor, the judge and the jury.

This whole idea that government creates jobs is a fallacy.  Only business people create real jobs.

But this whole idea that if we don’t do anything and we continue to spend and you have a collapse of the dollar, you’re going to have this, and that’s the whole reason why we don’t want them to follow these policies.

This whole idea that the only thing democrats have done wrong is giving into Republican­s cannot be anything short of naive and pure partisanship.

But this whole idea of another country getting a bomb, we should put it in proper context.

Therefore, this whole idea of liberty comes in different packages, but I say it’s only one – it applies to our foreign policy, it applies to your personal liberties and your religious values, your right to homeschool and all these things, and also an economic liberty.

I mean, this whole idea that the federal government can deal with weather and anything in the world, just got to throw a government there — FEMA’s broke.

This whole idea of “paying for” new programs is a political euphemism that suggests that raising taxes is just as good as cutting spending since neither one increases the national debt.

The confirmation of this whole idea of why they [terrorists] come here came from none other than Paul Wolfowitz.

This whole idea, we’re going through the same argument, the light at the end of the tunnel.  We did this in the ‘60s when I was in the service. And we finally left Vietnam, tragically.

I think this whole idea of an “opt out” date is just great.

This whole idea of either having to subsidize something or prohibit something shows a shallowness that I think we ought to challenge.

This whole idea that the world will not provide for people if you don’t depend on government — freedom provides more prosperity and better health care than all the socialism and welfarism in the world.

This whole idea that these lawsuits that claim that the Constitution and the founders said they were anti-religious, that we couldn’t express ourselves?

I mean, I would like to see more challenges on this whole idea that I’ve thrown out there, which is, does the PATRIOT Act really repeal the Fourth Amendment, are these things important?

This whole idea that we can ‘re-capitalize’ markets by merely turning on the printing presses and increasing credit is a total fallacy.

But I — I just — I just think that this — this whole idea that the government has to take care of everybody doesn’t — doesn’t really work.

This whole idea that a people can turn over to a secret banking system the control of money where politicians can spend endlessly and then deliver the bills to a secret bank that creates money out of thin air and then circulates it, it’s absolutely absurd.

It was starting to snow, or as he would say, “Atakupikiat,” which meant a light snowfall that sometimes looks like dandruff if it lands on your hair.  The Malamute at his side barked as if to say, “Though I am only a dog, still I would love to be granted autonomous, self-governing status within the Canadian federation.”

“You and me both,” the Icicle murmured.   “You and me both.”  He stroked his canine sidekick’s thick fur and felt a deep bond with nature which all native peoples share.  Then he took a bite of whale blubber.

Then the Icicle’s spirit guide appeared, who was the majestic Emperor Penguin.  “I will help you, but only on one condition.”

“What condition, oh spirit guide?”

“You must always solve crimes in the old Inuit fashion.”

“I will obey, oh spirit guide.”  Then the Icicle speared his spirit guide with his trusty harpoon Innuvalieut, apologized for killing him, skinned and dressed him, salted the meat, and used every part of the animal.

Together the Icicle and his dog set off in a kayak which was endowed with shamanistic powers that enabled it to fly, but only as long as he remained righteous and didn’t partake of the white man’s central heating or Doritos.

Reaching the dragon-headed longship moored in the East River, the Icicle saw that the Viking, wearing a pointed helmet with huge horns and a bear-fur ruff, was holding hostage Yupipiat, a young reporter for the Daily Walrus.

“I think it’s time we pushed you out on an ice floe,” the Icicle said, throwing an icicle that the Viking deflected with his battle-axe.  Then the Viking began shooting arrows at the Icicle with his bow, causing the Icicle to duck behind a snow bank and say to his dog, “Y’know, I’m just not sure how many masterminds can be defeated solely through the use of icicles.”

Most of the time we’re rounding up stray animals, dogs and cats wandering over sidewalks that look like Appalachian hillbilly teeth. But we answer all sorts of complaints, barking dogs and spraying cats and sabotage-intent badgers. We do a whole line in missing animals. That’s the worse. Every one hates the missing animal beat.  People crying their eyes out and hoping to get back Fido when you know he’s likely a red splot on a freeway somewhere. Dealing with that day in and day out breaks your heart. I’d rather shot up my grandmother with rabies and watch her foam at the mouth as she dies than be on the missing animal beat. But then, my grandmother used to hit me with a coat hanger so maybe that’s not a good example.

But I’d got in bad with the boss, and I was stuck with missing animals. My fault for sleeping with his wife, and then complaining to him she was no good in bed.

My latest case, however, the animal in question wasn’t missing. No, I could see it right there, in front of me, in its cage. Dead.

“I swear he was healthy,” the owner said, her eyes red from crying. She was a dame, the kind of dame who’d make an archbishop kick in a stained-glass window just to get away. But I didn’t hold that against her. Someone had loved her once. The best candidate was the now-deceased chincilla, especially since chincillas are notoriously loyal, and have equally notorious bad eyesight.

“These things happen, ma’am,” I said.

She grabbed the front of my shirt. “I’d just taken Chuckie to the vet last week. He was perfectly healthy.”

“Chincillas die, ma’am,” I told her as I tried to pry her fingers from my shirt. “Every day. So do dogs, cats, mice, horses, pigs, people, bluewhales, slime molds, redwoods…”

“But I saw these men lurking around the house. They looked very suspicious. I tried calling the police, the real police, you know…”

I sighed. “Yes, I know. Real police, not animal control.”

“…but a patrolman came by and said there was nothing to it. Then this morning…” She emitted a little sob, almost like a burp as if she had been drinking sob soda. “Chuckie was gone.” She wiped at her eyes. “I tried calling the police, the real police, but they put me on to you.”

“As I said ma’am…”

“Please, couldn’t you at least inspect the crime scene?”

I winced. Next thing you know, she’d want me to put yellow tape around the cage.

But as I lifted little Chuckie Chincilla’s body and ran my fingers through his luxirous hair, thinking what a nice sweater it would make, I discovered something.

A fresh injection mark. Hardly noticeable, unless you have the eyes of a hawk, or a brother who’s a heroin junkie.

#

I didn’t say anything to the owner, but talked her into letting me take little Chuckie away to our unit’s vet.

“You’re right,” Doc Yippitango said, stripping the latex gloves from his hands. “I almost missed it in the blood work, but there’s the signature of an extremely subtle and rare toxin, which according to Wikipedia is used almost exclusively by a secretive and murderous religious cult.”

“Which one is that, doc?” I asked, but he didn’t have time to answer, because he was busy rubbing at a mysterious injection mark on the back of his neck, and then falling down dead.

I asked my boss if I should call for an ambulance, but after checking the doc’s pulse, he shook his head. “He’s dead. And the bastard also slept with my wife. I really hate you guys.”

If only we had enough budget in the department for a connection to the internet, I thought, and I might be able to solve this mystery.  Temporarily thwarted, I began to rifle through my desk, looking for appropriate paperwork form, when the phone rang.

“Consider this a warning, Mr. Jowseen,” said the gravely voice.

“It’s pronounced ‘Joe-sin,’” I said. “You know, there’s this guy over at the loading dock who pronounces it just like you.” I paused. “Is that you, Bob?”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“Hello?” I said. “Can you hear me? Are you going through a tunnel?”

“This is a landline, dipwad,” Bob said, now in his normal voice. “Listen, I’m supposed to warn you off.”

“What’s this about?”

“The end of the world,” Bob intoned. You know, I always thought he was a bit odd. “We are keepers of the secret knowledge, that there have always been thirty-six sacred chinchillas, whose presence prevents the Old Ones from remaking the world in their image. For thousands of years we have sought to destroy them and hasten the rebirth of a new world, but now, with Google and Facebook, we can track down owners of chincillas much more easily.”

“Thousands of years?” I said. “Aren’t chincillas from South America?”

“I’m talking about the rare Arabian chincilla, whose identity was hidden from the world for this very reason.”

“Huh,” I said. “And I suppose I’m just suppose to let you kill these innocent chincillas? What did they ever do to you?”

“My sister had a chincilla when I was a boy,” Bob said. “The little bastard bit me, on the thumb. I still have the scar. It itches when the weather changes.  The weather’s changing, Frank.”

“It’s pronounced ‘Mike’,” I said. “And I have an umbrella.”

“No umbrella can shield you from this storm. Once we kill the thirty-six sacred chincillas…”

I hung up.

And that’s how I ended up in this cave, far from civilization, stacked high with cages and chincilla chow. Someone has to keep the world safe. I guess it will be me.

“See what?”

“There was a man out there on the wing.  It was a furry ape-man.  He opened up the engine cowling.  I think he’s trying to sabotage the plane.”

“There’s no wing and no engine,” the stranger replied.  “We’re on a train, not an airplane.”

“Of course,” Mr. Bokchito said.  “I was only testing you.  What I really wanted to ask was, you want to kill your wife, right?  Well, I want to kill mine too.  She’s a dreadful harpy who torments me ceaselessly; also, I stand to inherit several million dollars if she dies.  But how to do it without being caught.  We need iron-clad alibis.  So what I propose is this: we swap murders.  Criss-cross.  You kill my wife and I’ll kill yours.  There’s nothing to link us to each other.  At the moment each of our wives dies, we will be miles away, in the company of many unimpeachable witnesses.  Do you not think it’s a most wonderful event that you and I, who can be of such use to each other, should be sitting here today?  It’s not chance that has us sitting next to each other, is it?  I think it’s fate.”

The stranger said, “Well, I’m not married.”

Mr. Bokchito didn’t miss a beat.  “Obviously not.  That was only another test.  Look out the window.  Does it not appear that we’re traveling in circles, yet the train isn’t turning?  Watch: there’s an automat, then a haberdashery, then a Pemex station, and then an Oxxo convenience store.  And then the cycle repeats itself.  Just those four things over and over again for hours: automat, haberdashery, Pemex, and Oxxo.  Plus, we’ve been traveling for six hours, and it’s only a 45 minute journey from my suburban station to my downtown office.  The conclusion is apparent: we’re trapped in some kind of closed space-time loop.”

“Of course we are,” the stranger said.  “Notice too that you and I are the only people aboard this train, which consists of an infinite number of carriages.”

“My God, you’re right,” said Mr. Bokchito.  “I’m going to go the end of the train to check.”

“No, wait,” the stranger interjected, but Mr. Bokchito was already through the doors at the end of the compartment, and, no matter how fast the stranger pursued him, he always remained two paces ahead, and obviously they were never able to get to the last car, as the train was infinitely long.  Eventually, Mr. Bokchito, exhausted from the trek, settled into a seat identical to one he’d left days ago, and the stranger sat down beside him.  Outside, a Pemex station passed by, then an Oxxo, both just a blur, first of green and white, then red and yellow.

“The monorail seems to be increasing speed,” Mr. Bokchito said.  “Eventually it will attain infinite velocity.”

And, indeed, such seemed to be the case, because as they watched, the blur of automat, haberdashery, Pemex, and Oxxo, which for a while had been only streaks of incoherent color, now paradoxically slowed, so that at first the colors froze into a motionless multihued wall, and then, gradually, resolved into a tableau vivant of automat, haberdashery, Pemex, and Oxxo, all simultaneously occupying the same space outside their window, superimposed over each other with no loss of clarity.

The stranger turned away.  “I’d like a strawberry ice cream cone, please.”  The vendor scooped the ice cream and handed over the waffle cone, saying, “That will be 300 yen.”  The stranger paid and complacently licked the pink confection.  They were now traveling at such a speed that the strawberry ice cream reached a hypercritical state, its atoms compressed into superdense structures, so that a single ounce of the ice cream weighed first a pound, then two, then a metric ton, then an imperial ton, and so forth, increasing at an exponential rate.

Then the stranger turned to him and spoke, the timber of the words, burdened by the impossibly strong gravity, slowed and deepened to an almost subsonic bass during their passage through the degenerate matter making up the air and the interlocutor’s tympanic membrane and cochlea: “Would you pass that bottle of cherry quark-gluon plasma?  I want to put some on my ice cream.”

I know you won’t feel sorry for me. Stara Zagora is the most fabled city of the twenty-three real worldlines, and has sparkling echoes in nearly every of the one hundred and forty-four thousand shadow worlds. Perched on a marble hill overlooking a crystalline blue bay, the weather is near perfect year round. Even the rains, which come as three-hour bursts once a fortnight regular as clockwork, are as near to perfection in their refreshing nature. Because the city is famed for its artwork and its dazzling cuisine, the bulk of the admittedly steep taxes fund salons and galleries and movable food carts where you can watch a chef with a gold hat work miracles with eggs, truffles, anchovies, and an oiled pan. Chief among the edible delights of the city are its uncountable varieties of beer, as every corner, by decree, has its own brewery. The beers are probably not truly uncountable, the way the real numbers between zero and one are, but every mathematician who had attempted to count the beers never succeeded, because (a) they passed out, drunk, and (b) by the time they had gotten half way up the marble mount one or two or ten of the breweries at the base had closed and been reinstated with new owners and a new beer recipe. Beer is so plentiful that we flush our toilets with pilsner, brush our teeth with ale, wash our cars with stout.
And here is the irony, friend. I am part jellyfish, and as you may know, alcohol simply dissolves jellyfish. I am not sure how it happened. Geneticists tell me it ought to be impossible, a billion-to-one chance. My mother isn’t sure either, as she had been celebrating her graduation from the Ecole de Marmalade, and afterwards had gone down to the bay for a swim to wash away the beer-induced fuzziness. She must have met my father there, he taken by her beauty, and she thinks it must have been magical, making love beneath a full moon. But afterwards, and this is the only part she fully remembers, she tried to give him a kiss, and with a puff of her alcohol-infused breath he shivered and broke apart on the waves, leaving only a shimmering rainbow-colored slick in the moonlight.
Most people only dream of visiting Stara Zagora, and read cheap antinovels about the city. Some save for a decade to spend a crammed week here. But for me it is agony. Merchants laugh at me when I beg to buy a bottle of water. I huddle in my cramped, smelly rooms on holy days, when priests march up and down the slick steep marble streets flicking holy beer and blessed vodka on all passersby; and fully a third of all days are religious festivals, as Stara Zagora is a very devout city.
I cannot leave the city; my attempts to apply for a passport have been rebuffed, since as my father’s name and indeed species is unknown, my birth certificate is the shortest form possible.
My only hobby is reading graphic novels, of a time and place, while absurd and contradictory, sounds like heaven to me: set in a mythic land known as Usa, under a regime called Prohibition.