There are still pictures over on a page to the right (above the Hungry Ghost link)
I just typed in the first section of a long story I’m writing. I literally just typed it in, no editing, at least one serious continuity error that I know of. Anyway, if you do read it, let me know what you think. Oh, it sort of assumes that you’ve taken a look at the Zephier Instructions Sheet, which was the first post on this blog, if you want to dig it up.
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Bale Pelango was a Zephier Representative. He still carried the title around with him, printed on a vast supply of little cards long ago. But nobody in New York could afford the input costs of the Zephayer anymore. Their bodies were drained, their city had little more harvest to yield. Bale had hijacked the keys to the Zephayer, Inc warehouse, and so had an overstock of useless hardware while old Machines had were used way past their date of final expiration. Sparse groups of ageing yuppies who felt the pain of new poverty but couldn’t part with their old addictions huddled around obsolete Zeph units on UpperWestside streetcorners using their old street jackets for warmth. But mostly, the Zeph was just the addiction too expensive to renew. Cigarettes were an older habit, and crack was just more efficient. Considering, the image that Zephier Inc. had created before the Melt hung on pretty well. Most of them that wouldn’t meet Bale’s eyes as they hurdled themselves down desolate streets toward no destinations still carried their Zeph brands on their bodies somewhere, a useless knowledge that gave Bale great post-Professional pride. He still felt that the Zeph brand had built latter America, at least aesthetically, and though America had ceased to hold meaning, it still owed Bale some debt for his life’s work. Perhaps that was why he stuck to existence on these empty streets in this hollow city abandoned by history. Some ageing obligatory patriotism, quant in its irrelevance? Waiting to cash in on a preMelt life of expectations?
Something had allowed him to last as long as he had. Outlasted his world, his life, his economy, his government, his family, his food supply. The shell of the city remained along with him. It had to, it was ssteel and concrete, it knew no better than to continue existing, motionless, to give Bale streets to be alone in and buildings to be empty in. Two years back he had moved to a penthouse downtown, deep in the desolation, far from the enclaves in deep Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens. He blew open the door one day with powder collected from the Zeph armory in Chinatown. His materialism got the better of him; he had his pick of any of the apartments he could breach, and he had chosen one on the 5th floor simply because he would’ve wanted it preMelt, though the elevators lay dormant at the bottom of their shafts. He knew that he would not outlast this apartment.
Bale was one of the few who actively remembered preMelt NY, who made it a point to remember the well or ironically dressed crowds that used to be contained in these streets. Remembering, a wholly useless activity, one that really held him back, took an inordinate amount of psychic energy and usually made him feel helpless and alone.
The change in the city had been fast, but it didn’t feel fast. It seemed like most were slow to react to the sudden dissolution of the System that had structured their whole elives. Some waited until their immediate resources used, they emptied their pantries slowly before getting desperate and only then realizing that they had missed all the good looting. Which Bale hadn’t; he had looted himself silly, stashing absolutely useless objects like TVs and jewelry in his apartment until he forced himself out and into the Penthouse.
The unMelted world, mostly the darker nations, had recovered surprisingly quickly to the sudden dissolution of America and Europe. For all the self-importance of white economists, the exThird World, starting with the biggie China and then on down, hadn’t really been that dependent upon them after all (China had owned America’s economy when it Melted. After the Melt, they were relieved that though their greatest asset had been a huge nothing, they still owned themselves, and that was a lot). In an instant, they saw the promise of Power, and flung open their boarders, promising free work visas to qualifying exAmericans. Agents of the Middle and East East began prowling the streets, promising people a better life, or at least a continuation of their lives on the other side. Americans began to fill the ranks of a new Corp of International Reconstituted Workers. The Agents were surprisingly good at evading inquiry into the fate of those who signed up. But it wasn’t hard to see who qualified. The Upper. All the brokers and advertisers and journalists and doctors, anyone who had participated at the top of the system that had given them knowledge then abandoned them. Interpreted liberally. Anyone who had managed to squeeze their way to the upper half of the Corporate Ladder. Any ladder. But artists were noticeably left behind while their curators and agents and buyers disappeared East. But most of those left behind were the same who had been failed by that old system. Whose labor and whose ancestors had provided the little solid base that rocketed America out of the industrialism of material and into the ‘Information Age’ that convinced the world that Information was an actual thing, a commodity, no less, the idea that had built Zephier Inc, whose hardware was incidental. If information was a thing, the most lucrative of things, it was something unattainable to those left behind in unforgiving schools, warehoused in prisons for actions that the system which had no room in its legitimate ranks had demanded of them, whose civil rights and equality and struggle to break free hadn’t really taken them anywhere while the walls around them crumbled. The ghettoes remained full, became fuller, of drug dealers whose clientele and supply evaporated, full of street poets freed of their menial jobs in landscaping and retail, dancers and lovers and taggers and rockers who now had nothing left to do but dance and love and tag over tags and rock. And though huge swaths of the city that used to be the most desirable, the penthouses and offices and classy stores lay abandoned, looted, empty, free for the taking of anyone who could break down a door, most of those left behind stays in their homes, in their ghettos, in their Communities. Nose said that it was because they had communities. Something that those with Power in New York had totally lacked. In the Hood, Nose said, people had relationships with people they called ‘neighbors,’ and when those neighbors had stayed put, so had they. The ghettos expanded into enclaves, spilled over into the buildings that had been inaccessible bastions of gentrification on their peripheries, grew enough to get some breathing room, to accommodate those that had wandered home from Upstate after suddenly being let out of prisons that had stopped running. In the backyards of Brooklyn, fences were torn down and backyards converted into productive farms. The parks, too. A few years ago, a gang too young to remember preMelt introduced and bred a store of cows in Prospect Park, grazing them on overgrown lawns. Produce exchanged, treasures hoarded. But they didn’t need outsiders, refugees from the Melt that had happened around them coming looking for survival. If you weren’t part of the family preMelt, you weren’t going to join it Post. Though discussed in terms of Black and Brown Nationalism, it was really a matter of limited resources. Though every time he got shot at for scrounging in a vegetable garden, Bale cursed these people he wasn’t one of, he tried not to really resent them.
Which gave him the rest of the City to roam about in. The exodus had left behind a surprising wealth of food and fuel to burn. People who had been rich their whole lives didn’t think about what was essential enough to take with them or use up before the left. The Agents had encouraged people to take all they could with them, presumably to be subsumed into their native economies and collectives. But they had left behind enough for Bale and an indeterminate number of urban hermits and tiny cohabitant enclaves. Those who still craved humanity found it in oases, reclaimed coffeeshops and bars made to flow again, spaces reclaimed by people like Kitt, who had provided for himself and found themselves providing for others in his reclaimed Sturbux coffee shop, where strangers showed up every day for coffee, for fried food, to feed their gullets or addictions, to stave off the hell of withdrawal for another day.
Bale became a regular of the Sturbux after a stint of trying for an altruism of his own. He had kept his Zeph running for as long as he could, giving himself to it continually until he had nothing left to give, and put it on a streetcorner that few crossed anymore, letting any wanderer who happened upon him to hook themselves into the Output for a few moments, to remind them of what it had been, a glimpse of being something beyond their survival, when the Zeph had guided them. He raided the Long Island City Zeph Plant for lube and oil. But Power harder to provide, on a personal level; his body couldn’t handle the strain of running the Machine without external Inputs, he gave it all he had, meditated nightly and did Yoga and ate beans and lentils to try to replenish his store, but eventually gave up. Anyway, that’s how he met Nose and Chin. Reconnected, actually. he had been friends with Chin in college, preMelt, and were still technically friends according to the immortal Internet networking sites, but had of course lost each other over time and space, even preMelt. It was a shock for him to discover that there were real people from his world still in New York. Even if it was just the one. Chin took him to Sturbux where he could trade even the smallest of scrounged things for a cup of Kitt’s dishwater. Everyone who frequented Kitt’s place was living like he was; alone, scavenging. Some had amassed huge piles of what they had coveted preMelt, old desires that they satiated simply to pass the time. But men had been known ot fight to the death over a pack of cigarettes. Anything consumable was coveted and hoarded. Bale collected art, anything that enriched his visual field. After he moved to the penthouse, he had spent weeks hauling a massive bronze sculpture—a pantheon of mythical beasts to the sidewalk in front of his luxury squat.
-
‘Chin’ Malai—adoptive name from his massive jawline that made him look like an Asian hybrid of Jaws and Jay Leno—advocated Revolution constantly in the Sturbux. It was an easy position to take, an old habit for Chin. He spent months talking about it, in obscene and lavish diatribes that bored empty suits sat around to listen to. No one agreed with him, no one thought that there was a revolution to discuss. Their silence said, debt is debt. We built this ourselves. All that I thought was mine had turned out to be the property of the Government Bank, but they were bailing us out, saving us from ourselves.
All through college, preMelt, Chin had worn a Che Guevara t-shirt, and of course scorned all others who did the same, blaming them for commodifying El Che without regard to his Revolution. When the Melt came, he felt vindicated—of course it was exactly as he had predicted overall, even though no-one was rebelling. He watched it with satisfaction, without regard for his own future. Because he knew that his own future would be spent proclaiming Revolution in some form or another.
But now the time had come. Nose called him out: “You say the objective conditions are here, now? You say the Revolution is coming? Let’s start it—I’m ready—show me the capitalist oppressors, and I’ll follow you to the fighting death! Make your revolution today.”
He said he would, he only needed some time for the final preparations. And excused himself. He was absent from the Sturbux for more than a week.
Bale had arrived at the Sturbux much earlier in the morning, having once again been unable squeeze any sleep out of his anxious mind. Kipp had poured him his coffee out of a dirty urn without making eye contact or greeting him at all. If he had, thought Bale, perhaps he would have fallen into the bags under my eyes. He massaged his cheeks as he counted his coins. Perhaps if he bought more food and less coffee he’d sleep better. But he excused himself from such thoughts.
None of the usual crew was there. Today was a week after Chin had disappeared from the crowd. It was too early for everyone else. He was surprised it wasn’t too early for Kipp. That man had some unknowable dedication to this place, he certainly wasn’t talkative about it. Eleven. Most of them tried to sleep through as much of the day as they could. To pass the time, make the days feel shorter. Bale settled down to wait patiently but his mind would neither think nor lay still. He jiggled his leg until he felt his calf tighten, then jiggled his other. He pulled out his wallet and peered inside. Maybe just today he could endulge himself. Yes, today of all days, he could afford to get high. It’d quiet his mind. He could skip lunch and breakfast tomorrow. He preferred not to think of his addictions in economic terms, but was forced to.
He gulped down his coffee, remembering his original intention to nurse this cup through the morning. All the sugar he had put stayed on the bottom, and the last gulp was soupy-sweet, so just when it ended, he wanted more. He stood up, self-conscious, looking around to see if anyone had clued in to his erratic behavior, which was only erratic if you had been inside his head, which we were.
He had to walk across the island to get to Marcus Ozlepore, his least favorite drug dealer. The drug market had, of course, been only substantial sector of the economy to be unaffected by the Melt. It grew a little bit. Drug dealers still expected to trade in currencies, were eating well, had no need of the beans and wheat the rest of the city trafficked in. They demanded international currency, of course—dollars still technically had value, but not much. Marcus had a taste for Thai bhat that Bale managed to feed by offering occasional doses of Zeph to Thai agents, most of whom were quite attractive, anyway. But Yaar across town demanded dinars—easier to find, but expensive.
He could shut his mind off only when he walked, but didn’t realize it. He had to. The cityscape was the source of his pain. His city had become a hollow monster, even its silence was beginning to betray him. The city had become a breathing and shitting being. A repo man by profession. The demand of the debt leftover from the Melt the city could never pay off was stagnation. As assets had dissolved, objewcts had lost their permanence, their materiality, and disappeared. Turned into liquid credit in some abstract vaccum somewhere. This city had betrayed everyone. ll he needed was something to keep it off.
Which is what he told Marcus after he had woken him up from what appeared to be a wet dream. Marcus cut him no deals. Simply and groggily provided, without the showmanship of his later-in-the day sales.
Sated, he walked back to the Sturbux. He didn’t have anything for another cup. he stood outside and peered in to see if any of his people were there. They weren’t. He decided he couldn’t take more of that place anyway. He crossed the street. And just stood there, leaning against a building. He would end up sitting on the sidewalk, but sitting down immediately seemed like an admission of defeat.
Chin silently saddled up beside Bale as he stood across the street staring at the Sturbux. “Pitiful place we while away our empty time in, isn’t it? A decaying reference to the height of decadence in a system that failed us? And we go there, and dare to call ourselves men?”
Bale thought. The problem wasn’t anything to do with Sturbux. The problem was that the only people who whiled away their empty time there called themselves men. Bale felt a pang through his body, missing a woman’s touch, or even a woman’s presence. His woman’s, who’d disappeared during the looting. None of these survivalists, even the female ones, of postMelt New York maintained any femininity, Bale thought. Where had the women of America gone? The Melt seemed to have destroyed the very essence of women for Bale. Turned the streets empty, cold, and hard. Chin wouldn’t understand—he had a woman secreted away somewhere, Bale vaguely knew. He knew that she was a valuable asset to be hoarded, and that is how she would have been treated if she had stepped into the Sturbux. Disgusting. He had barely ever glimpsed her. All this thinking had occured during a silence that Bale was oblivious to. He hadn’t acknowledged Chin’s presence by his side. But now he began to steal glances at the gym bag that Chin was hefting from hand to hand, trying to ignore its weight.
Chin saw him looking. “Sure, I remember the day I got my first one of these things,” said he, adopting an overblown folksiness, “Couldn’t believe my very eyes. Who’da thought that they’da come out with a machine that would do that. Such Power. Who’da thought that it was even something that a machine could consider doing?” He was mercilessly parroting back Bale’s old sales spiel to him. Bale was vaguely aware that Chin thought that he was torturing him. As if Bale was somehow responsible for the Machine, or maybe that he had been the machine. Maybe once, a vague and distant Pelango might have taken pride in being offended by Chin’s insinuations. He couldn’t be sure if that man had ever existed, of if he was part of that grand History that Zephayer Inc had fabricated to give their product significance. Anyway, he was pretty sure that Chin was trying to get him to buy into a story that he was writing over Bale’s faces. He stood silent, glad to be nursing a fading high. It was at least some internal excuse to distance himself from the situations at hand, to unhand the situation, in fact.
Without noticing the duo across the street, Nose slipped throught he plywood door of the Sturbux, trying not to seem paranoid.
“I’ve got to go disappear and go take care of some things,” Chin said quickly, as though he had rehearsed it. He scooted away. Bale crossed and went into the coffeehouse. The interior of the Sturbux was perpetually twilight, decaying couches Kipp had hauled here from various decaying Starbuckses in the city.
Speculation abounded about how Chin was going to respond to Nose’s calling out of his Revolution. As Nose never tired of pointing out, and Bale never tired of parroting, that no one knew exactly who Chin thought he was rebelling against. After all the repossessions were over and failed to make a dent in the debt crisis, the Government Bank had declared bankruptcy and dissolved, the last of the five branches of the Federal to melt away. After all those years of complaining about the government, only the Fed had been selfless enough to absorb all the ‘toxic debt’ when the Meltdown started, when it happened, who did we look to save us? The Fed, that mysterious part-private unelected and uelectable navel of the American system that we all remember from childhood, the system that we mocked and spectated, the greatest of all entertainments, fell because we spent more money than ever existed in the first place. So now there was nothing that the coffeehouse could think of that Chin could be rebelling against. Only the empty shell of the city, the steel and asphalt that still sheltered us from the climate of disaster that we created—and their factories made hurricanes while we were feeding out debt.
There just wasn’t anyone left in Power to blame. All the Power had been auctioned off, mostly bought up to feed Zeph units as long as possible. And still, nothing much changed. Things got steadily and vaguely worse, but in no different manner than when we had elections, so most of us figured that the last President, Jessami, was right when he said in his last speech before the final dissolution, “You’ve got no one to blame but yourselves, now.” Still, the pundits on TV looked for other people to blame. The Blacks came up a lot, but we had all grown up after that type of sentiment had gone out of fashion.
Nose was happy to fill the conversational silence left by the absence of Chin’s diatribes, with a monologue of his own. “Why do you think we ended up losing our own game? We thought we were the ones leading the world in capitalism, at least for a good while there. We were making our own terms, I tell you. But we were fools enough to think that we could do capital and equality at the same time. Or at least pay legal lip service to it. You don’t need Marx to tell you that capital demands, positively insists on, cheap labor. You need a system based on inequality to have any kind of sustainable semi-free market. Endless cheap labor, so that someone in the system can make some real money. You can’t free the slaves then try to keep building, not unless you can replace the slaves with equally cheap ex-slaves. Better to have a tradition of it, a whole culture built on like a caste system. Absolute inflexibility in the class structure. It needs to be less about poverty than it is about duty. Each body has a duty to work. For. To work for someone else. Piety helps with that. As soon as there were bigger pools of labor in competition with us, as soon as there was global competition, we lost the game. From then on through the Meltdown, we were running on credit. Running on money that never existed except in the hands of the Asian elite. When do you think the Chinese began buying our government? Earlier than you think. And now we’re paying for it the only way we can, with our bodies, going over there to give them our labor, to become slaves again. After the Melt, the flow of global immigration did a U-turn. To get any value from our bodies, or, failing that, our organs, we have to go there. The streets of New York aren’t empty because of the riots. We didn’t kill a whole city. The city moved. And they bought into it when they started buying us. They don’t think that what they saw was the end of Capitalism at all. They think it just shifted in their favor. They’re lapping it up in the name of the Revolution. Because they’re still calling themselves communists, most of them—have been for a long time. You remember before the melt, learning at school that communism had been dead since the Berlin Wall? That the failure of the USSR was the failure of the idea itself. So no one who had learned this early on bothered to watch it become incorporated into the essence of capitalism. The idea that justified cheap labor, the same thing that freedom had done for us. No, before the Melt we were all too busy fighting for radical equality, for the abolition of poverty, only to feed our own future poverty. We gave them legitimacy with our NGOs and army of aidworkers. Our liberalism demanded that India abandon their caste system, the structure that had kept the whole massive boat afloat from before America was even a landmass. We, in our shining century, an instant of high minded liberalism fed by universal wealth, we gave them no choice but to officially renounce it and turn instead to the Red answer, their only and obvious recourse to the North, turn to the ghost of Mao himself, the immaterialist.”
“Half of India is still capitalist and democratic” hopped in Cole Borne, with the arrogance that useless knowledge brings.
“Can you point to it on a map? No, they’re a total anarchy. Plenty of free Power floating around for anyone to take. Mao was an excuse for some of them to grab it. In other places, capitalism was the excuse. Whatever.”
No one had any opinions. Bale hadn’t been listening, just letting the sound become part of his world.
Chin spent the week considering the question himself; who he was revolting and how. He spent it alone, avoiding the Sturbux, and any other human contact. He didn’t want to face any questions. Not that there would be any; he hadn’t faced questions before, he knew that no one cared enough anymore. He went back to his books on Che and Mao and Prachanda. A protracted guerilla war to take political power. He didn’t have time for that sort of thing, and there didn’t seem to be any power left to be had.
He had stopped running all over town to sell his grass and veg, so he didn’t have any way of obtaining food, just grass and veg. He had trained himself to fast during an ascetic period a few years ago, after Zolt Chaat had given him a mantra from his pre-melt Indian tourism. So he didn’t think of food while his body consumed itself, as his mind consumed all the thoughts that he had had about revolution over the years, all he had said about it, trying to remember forgotten cups of dishwater coffee and reconstruct cigarettes from their remembered butts, sitting on his sheetless bunk holding his old copy of The Red Book but not reading it. Who had he fought all those old hypothetical revolutions against?
At some point mid-week he realized that there was nothing to remember. He had just been filling time, filling his ego, hiding his nothing background story just like everyone else’s story growing up in PreMelt America. New, suburban, bought on credit, nothing much to love, certainly not enough to hate.
He had invented it all, then lived it daily in his mind. He had forgotten when he had bought The Red Book but remembered carrying it on the outside of his bag, hanging it out of his back pocket. Couldn’t really remember reading it the first time, much less identifying with it. It seemed foreign. And Chinese, which seemed ironic every time he met a Chinese agent in a suit, crossing the street to shake his hand and pull him away from his City.
Irony had been all he was going for, back in the day. He couldn’t have said it, because that would have destroyed all the irony. But now that he had stopped to remember his world before the Repo man came it all made sense, it fit in with the tight jeans and arab-looking neckerchiefs he used to wear. He had never broken into the small circle of hipsters smoking in the corner of his public high school, who didn’t have to care about anything to achieve Irony, who swaddled themselves in distance and hashish smoke, and so at some point he decided to find his own path, his something to allow himself to be aloof even from all those who gained their shiny grey egos from their aloofness, especially from them. How dare they ignore the political—no, Revolutionary, yes, Revolutionary, needs of the people! Of the people Chin couldn’t point to in the immediate vicinity, but people nonetheless, with needs! No one asked which people. And because no one asked, he felt victorious in his image, the freedom of ironic distance from his street and school and family.
So he had stuck to it. And a year after he left home to go to college in the East, the Melt began. He welcomed it into his theoretical world, and it remained theoretical for years.
But since then, nothing had happened. Everyone was struggling for survival, a daily activity that added up to nothing grand. The Melt brought riots, brought looting, brought small instances of violence, but no one could pretend that it had been a revolution. Because no one had used it as such. When the air cleared and the city emptied, no one took power. Most of the power had gone to feed Zeph units anyway. He had continued preaching to fill his time and his personality with something. He appreciated that people listened, but hated the uselessness of his words. He could do nothing to change the basic survival needs of anyone. He could add no higher significance to the personal daily battles they all faced.
He only had one option, he realized. It would perhaps expose his disingenuousness, reveal him to be a hypocrite, but it would at least shake them out of their survival-malaise, as if all that mattered was survival. It would at least set things in motion. The preparation was simple; hauling his Machine all over the city, paying exorbitant bribes and fees in huge piles of grass and sexual favors, he knew who to talk to for this kind of thing, though they weren’t the kind of people he’d want to talk to under any normal conditions. Prepared, he prepared himself to go in the Sturbux and face what his humanity had become.
Bale should’ve seen it coming. Maybe he did, but didn’t think about what he saw. He knew what was in the bag; it was his life, it was a Zeph that maybe he himself had sold Chin long preMelt. He knew that Chin was trying for Revolution, and knew that Reversal started with the same capital R. He had called out Chin, forced him to manifest his Revolution, basically called this upon himself in every way. Yet he was bereft of any personal responsibility, a phrase that had ceased to have any meaning for him since he had dropped out of rehab preMelt.
Before the gathered circle of Sturbux bodies, Chin dramatically thumped his gym bag down upon the table. Looking around, trying to make eye contact with all the fools that had brought him to this point, he unzipped the bag to reveal his large and obsolete Personal Zephayer. A large homemade plug of reclaimed plastic jutted out of the Outtake. He had obviously conned one of these urchin Zeph-hacks to force it into Reversal. Which could only be done in the absence of centralized Power in the anarchy of postMelt; the Power Structure which had acted as insurance against this very eventuality had melted away, and yet no one, until this moment, had used this freedom to tear into their reality.
“Chin, no! wait!” Nose Malai cried after the requisite stunned pause, as if reading a script. “What do you think this is going to achieve? A Reversal? How is that even remotely revolutionary?”
Chin gave Nose a little disdainful look, then hit the Power hard. He had filled the tank overfull of Power, which began to course through the components to be converted and spread upon the lubricated flank of the carapace, through which one would normally ascend, but which slowly at first began descending, crushing the Flow and driving it backwards, through itself, building pressure, isolating itself where it ought to be forming connections, building pressure even more. The components of the machine were filthy, clogged, unused. Which Chin hadn’t been counting on; he wanted a lucid and enlightening glimpse of Reversal, but didn’t know enough to clean the filth that would need to be worked out during the Process. The aura of the machine changed from red to brown. No one in the Sturbux knew what they ought to be doing, waiting for the reversal to hit. Except Bale. He rallied the remainder of the drug in his system and forced his mind into a deathlike complacency, removing himself from consciousness as much as possible, hurriedly, before the pressure broke. Which took more consciousness than he expected, to silence himself. But he did.
Clearly Nose began to feel the effects immediately. Waste and filth flew out of the Machine, plastering his being. The antlers flew off his eyeballs wrapped in their dreamy delirium. His hindquarters shed fur, leaving a translucent pink nakedness that promptly began to spurt Lysol diuretically in the direction of the Southern Cross. Chin’s chin grew like the tumor it was to unsightly transcendent proportions, becoming independently conscious, then immediately enlightened, and left Chin’s body with his soul taking it to rejoin the eternal light and removing Chin of the burden of life. Chunks of material, cement and glass, flew off the constructions of the City and floated down as ash, ash which swirled around Bale’s silent head and closed eyes, avoiding the morphing of the Unit itself into a prenatal cauliflower, its zest tucked inside itself and seen again no more. The room swirled with the silky residue of material that had lost its place and form, like the swaddling of ash that coated the glory of the Lord after it had been burned by the river. Bale remained objective. The tea dried up into a powder. Nose’s bile had eaten through his stomach lining and was spilling out through his nostrils.
The machine choked suddenly on a glut of solid waste, spewing irrationality relentlessly. Endless dreaming bras of unspilt milk mixed with the ambient Listerine that stung Bale’s returned flesh like the shards of long-dead Mass Cultures and Popisms of ancient regimes, which were wrecking their revenge on the poor psycheless post-Zephayer salesman, unforgiving him for the dissolution that they had come to through his former mastery and endless selfiship, whatever had kept him selling though the years, whatever the Machine was to him besides a means to eat, all the food that it had provided him with at the expense of thousands of hopelessly addicted bodies starving for a hint of Power that came back to reclaim the sacrifice that they had given to him, to his Unit, and the endless stream of once-conscious matter that had uncomplainingly poured itself down his gullet to be dissolved into Bale and into his toilet, it came back upon him. He had been it, had been his food, his body hadn’t known what else it could be until now, just now, when time ceased to flow, and his lifetime food had come back mercilessly to reclaim him, to hold him to the Material and prevent him from becoming anything Other, anything other than himself, silent, anything that didn’t need to eat, anything other than a food-sheath, anything other than Consciousness. And now he had sacrificed even that, simply to remain existent and constant through the reversal, which he was unsure why he desired.
He had seen himself as Beyond, but couldn’t commit to it. Couldn’t commit to death simply because of the Zeph’s work, his work through the Machine.
For Bale, time had dissolved. So it was impossible to pinpoint when the situation had switched aeons. The filth that had crowded the personality of the old Zephayer had been worked out while he was unconscious a cleaning gone awry, a self annihilation on behalf of the Zeph that had included any of the present consciousnesses His mind remained silent, but he was gradually becoming aware of the massive Power that was flowing form his body. Nonsense ceased to be nonsense, and became a diffuse chaos, the ambient displaced material floating in pleasing homogeny of entropy flooded Bale’s obsolete orifices. The Intakes and Outtakes had become one and the same. But he was undoubtedly the center of it all. He enacted a reverse-gravity, spewing raw and uniformed Power from his living flesh. Anything with consciousness he could reign over with his flow, and everything was conscious. Anything with breath could blow this godly ether that swirled inside himself, where he could pit a lifetime of tamed bacteria and amoebae against it without result. He ruled not in His Image, there was no image-creation, nor a dissolution of material into energy. This was. A centralization of Force. He slowly ate his way through himself revealing himself to the object of universal self-adoration. Nose was lying in the corner unconscious in a puddle of Lysol, disinfecting the fiberglass lawn that once had been the floor of the future Sturbux that now comprised the epicenter of bale’s infinite domain, a domain that he intended to fill with the love absent in his own nonReversal time, a sad hope for belonging and companionship he had nursed quietly became a tremendous aphysical Power that he suddenly comprehended. He revealed Himself to Himself, to understand his infinite and undying nature, even as he remained unnaturally stuck to his body. He saw the rivers of Power flowing from him but felt powerless to direct them. He saw the ash swirling around him as if in orbit. He felt hungry. Felt the void, the emptiness at the center of all matter, whose hunger is gravity. He knew that he had agency, not only over himself, but over the Power that emanated from him. Even as he saw it, he felt insignificant, almost shy. Bale, in the center, he who had sacrificed conciousness simply to survive the Reversal in material form, he had been chosen by the Machine, chosen to be the input and output of Power, the channel, chosen him because he continued to exist, a being in a place now caught unawares, being now immersed in Godhood, was stymied and panicked.
Until She came. Of all the bodies pulled toward him as center, of all the beings pulled into his orbit, she arrived first, being first. She was a vessel of Power, manifested by the Reversal itself, she contained Bale and everything he experienced, he had moved about her irrevocably forever. She had manifest. Her feet pulled him down, he found his face between her toes. He felt right there, the only spot on her body he could feel justified interacting with. She twisted the Aether between them so that her head lay at his feet. They orbited each other, joining the swirl, Bale hadn’t realized he had been fighting the flow until he stopped, until he surrendered himself to it, and spun, Power leaping off their bodies. And that power could be shaped, she taught him, he knew. He had been human once. Had been subject to a System that organized his life, that supported life, that supported community, that supported empire, that had given him a family and wealth and ideas, and he could bring it back. He had been the beneficiary of every revolution ever fought up until the Melt, and now he would revolt against that Melt. He had stayed in power for hundreds of years, and now he had the Power to restore himself. To be with her. The power had brought her back to him. In a single revolution he brought back Money, lent it out to create a wage system, reclaimed it to create a debt system, reclaimed the debt to create a slave system. Created a body of knowledge, a religion, a caste, education to spread it all. With one more revolution he set it all in motion, a mass self-creating system that had produced him before once again was given the Power it needed to recreate itself upon the body of America.
The raging horror that coursed through the New York streets was indiscriminate. In the heart of Black New York, in the eyes of street artists too young to remember, inside the bodegas and souls of lecherous men, all those Revolutionaries who had fought to end hate, all the Malcoms and Kings and Newtons arose to wreak hate upon their world, to bring back all the endless irrational darkness that had enabled America’s Rise and subsequent Fall amassed over the Harlem, over Bed-Sty, over all the Enclaves that had come to be. All the filth that had never been apologized for or reparations paid while White America had still had the chance. All the empty aggression that the ghettos had heaped on themselves, all the thousands of accumulated years of time served inside, came crashing down upon the asphalt of the city. All the empty gestures of imperialism and White Power that had no meaning at all anymore since the Melt came back with their full force, pounded the skulls of the city residents, made them see rage where before they had been at peace. Power was restored. It rained down on the schoolyards and corners and reclaimed parks, bringing back all the old fears. All the gestures of crime that had been fostered by an exclusive capitalism that didn’t exist any more came back, men started robbing and shooting each other in their minds before they did it with their bodies. All the souls that thought they had found liberation in the dissolution of the white system, who thought that they were free to exist, found again Power bearing down upon them. Not a legal power, no longer, not a power driven by an easily comprehensible and transparently corrupt carceral system of wealth deprivation, but a metaphysical Power which bound all these once-beautiful souls into a rageful introspection bound immutably to a being once known as Bale Pelango, somewhere down city, who had brought this down upon them, they felt his presence, felt his power, felt his need for the past to return, felt themselves being organized into the System as he remembered it, and hated him for it. Work stopped, love froze in the streets and coagulated. Vegetables growing underground felt themselves suddenly conscious of the dirt that bound them, thought about their purpose in life as Eatees, and decided they weren’t going to stand for it anymore. Tea leaves decided that they had had enough of giving their essence to water, and started keeping it to themselves. Water itself decided not to cleanse others anymore.
These people were no strangers to Power; they had been subjects before. Even the youngest ones seemed to understand instantly those old dominations, the becoming-poverty the unaccountable and unpayable debt that kept them in servitude. Time didn’t matter, they responded instantly. All of them. They would never go back. (even: name militant libertarian groups)
All the humanity in the city emerged from their shelter, manifesting crowds out of ether on the streets that had known only their desolation. They were following the flow of Power upstream, compelled to, but also because they wanted to discover the source and destroy it. Such Power had not reigned in New York since the Melt, and they were determined, each for his and her own reasons, that it would not reign again. (Insert mention of libertarians). Most had a long way to walk, and couldn’t see through the blinding blending wrath of an oblivious Bale Pelango, being as he was the new brief Monarch of reality, a being as he was White and in Power once again, all the regeneration of guilt and slavery and wage-slavery and prison and illiteracy squarely upon his suddenly-ethereal shoulders, they came to him, a few to worship for they remembered how to worship Power, more came to Obey because obey they had been taught and trained and bred to do.
But most had arisen from their dark squatments dreary to reclaim their senses and their selfhoods and their kinships that they had treasured as their own since the Melt. Most had learned to live Power over themselves and what was theirs. So most came to rebel. They came to enact upon Bale the revolution they ought to have fought long ago. The Melt had beaten them to it.
Power unified them. They were once a work force. Now they are a Force, driven by the Power unleashed by the Reversal, which welded them together. They heard Power proclaiming itself all over their bodies. They had renounced that. They had fought that Power and already declared victory, and devoted themselves to creating their own lives. They had heard the word Freedom before the Melt, but only since have they understood what it could mean.
They arrived almost simultaneously at the Center, where Bale danced. Most headed straight for the Machine, ignoring the broken but clean horse on the floor and the bloated and apparently loaded guy spinning around in the middle of the room. They fell upon the Zeph with no knowledge, tearing out whatever pieces they could grap hold of out of the few components that had remained material. They scratched at the closed safety valves. They chew at the Vestiblues. They ripped at the corrugated sheetings. They tore at the unlubricated varnished carapace. They wedged their fingers under the decaled tankcap. One big man had dropped his pants and was earnestly trying to fit his erect penis into the drainpipe, clogged with waste, which had suddenly reversed into an intake.
Then, someone finally ripped the Plug out of the Outtake. The machine suddenly flowed, the Reversal violently reversed itself, and the dick in the drainpipe got a sudden deluge of waste. And one man who had been nostalgically hovering near the Outtake, remembering old days, was rewarded by a glut of the machine running at full force. That guy would remember this the rest of his life, though he wasn’t sure what he was remembering, really. The rest of the mass was simply isolated from itself, it’s goal achieved, then remembered the face of Power that some had glimpsed, and saw it on Bale’s face.
Unaware of the political situation he had gotten himself into, they turned on Bale. Those who saw themselves as nonviolent resisters set upon him with all their spiritual energy. The rest bore down on him with fists and kicks. The pain returned him to conciousness only to become aware of the havoc that was being wrecked on his body, a body useless to fight back, soon useless to sustain his life. The body on behalf of which he had been fighting for the whole reversal. But through the forest of angry fists, reaching out to him, palm upward, was a dark and suited and cufflinked hand. He grabbed it, and it pulled him up and free, stumbled outside along with it.
2.