Adrift in the Noösphere (9 page)

“Clare,” he cried, alive on Venus, “Clare, we made it!”

Luminous Fish

(written with Paul Di Filippo)

From: The Beadle Monger

To: Local Secundus

Subject: Brane Breakthrough

Let's get this effort on the road. The team has been futzing about far too long. The Faith Gambit pissed itself up against a wall for 3000 local years, and the Science Trope has just about done for them far more quickly. I need a Brane Breakthrough, and I want it now. I suggest you take a closer look at candidate Jeremiah (“Jay”) Cornelius, Registered Earth Sentient 2744692043.

From: Local Secundus

To: Lord Beadle Monger

Subject: Brane Breakthrough

Your Eminence, the department has developed a plan for your consideration. Please see Attachment 5338.

From: The Beadle Monger

To: Local Secundus

Subject: Cornelius Brain

Very droll. A pun in their native language, quant suff! Proceed at pace. I want to see a working Messiah before the Galactic Ginnungagap Event closes the Brane Potential Portal.

§

Jay made a beast of himself during dinner. Nobody there except Tim had the faintest interest in the tedious horrors of toiling in the bowels of Henry McKinley's disgusting empire. Least interested of all: long-suffering wife Jessie.

If you don't like working there, man, get another job, she thought but did not say. God knows, she was complicit. They needed the money, and it wasn't going to come from her PhD scholarship. Jessie gazed remotely at her plate, moving a fragment of gristle about the rim. After a time she began to polish her serrated steak knife with a paper napkin. A sort of rough dandruff floated from the napkin to the tablecloth. Annie's glance snared her drifting, absent soul. With a start, Jessie put the knife aside, pushed back her chair, took herself away to the bathroom for a quarter of an hour. Jay, more than half-drunk on Chardonnay, babbled about masturbation magazines and their destruction by free pr0n on the internet.

On the Metra home (at least he hadn't attempted to drive, although he was too mean to call a cab, justifying it by a monologue of dubious ecological reasoning), Jessie bleakly examined the ears of the brown, nodding Eastern European man across from her, next to the door between cars. At the first shrieking corner the door ratcheted, groaned, abruptly found within itself some magical lubricant and sped like a calving one-dimensional iceberg to crash back into its slot. The abrupt jolt was more psychic than physical; it bruised her. She looked at Jay, who was staring in befuddled pleasure at the smeared streetlights, their virtual reality. He failed her gaze. She stood up, pulled angrily at the door. It rolled slightly out of its slot, stuck. On the next curve it crashed fully closed. If the man with the ears had extended his foot into the doorway, Jessie thought, his bones would have been broken by the impact.

They were nothing like a beast's ears. No beast she knew of. The man's head was bald and smooth, regular as some Eastern church's dome. Mosque. At his fringes, the last of his hair was as crimped and curly as, presumably, the hair at his groin. Shit no. On his arms, then. His back. She didn't like him. His feet stuck out into the space where other people might wish to walk, could trip, tumble painfully as the tram turned a corner, might at the very least be obliged to step awkwardly. His ears were very human ears. The ears heard nothing at the moment, of course, because the man was asleep. Was that possible? Asleep on the tram. On the Metra. You can go anywhere within reason. He could easily miss his stop.

“She's certainly a very interesting woman,” Jay said.

“How would you know?”

“Know what, precisely?”

Oh, Jessie saw in his mind, you're in one of your moods, are you? One of your incomprehensible, incalculable, unplumbable, fathomless, mysterious, womanly moods. Nothing is as it seems, nothing conveys its own transparent truth.

You prick, she thought.

If the Metra went away all the smeared reds and greens and mercury vapor shapes might be stars floating at the edge of a surging swell, salt at the back of her tongue, endless flowing steppes of grass dark and mysterious and shadowed with beasts with ears like hairy Euclidean theorems, lolling tongues, no doubt, and flowing manes, Christ; and its discontents, its woes, its nasty little mean-spirited toads.

She takes the steak knife from her bag. It has been cleaned to a certain brilliance. The door crashes open again. Jessie imagines taking a single step across the aisle. Jay is watching the night. The cry would be in no language she has ever heard. Hot and wet. Rubbery. It would come free in her hand. The man's eyes open now, staring at her, shifting his feet back under his seat. The train accelerates around a curve and back again. The door crashes and crashes.

Jessie imagines herself holding out the moist ear, a gift really. Jay would watch the man bleeding into his cupped, clawing hand.

“Well, I thought she was interesting,” he'd tell her, oblivious.

§

Luminous fish with rubbery lips hung from the heavens, a school of grinning, finny clown-specters. The leader squeaked like a vinyl dog toy, and said, “Jay Cornelius! I will pheromone no Eve girl!”

A dark bird of omen, sharply winged like a stealth killer drone, swooped through the dimming sky and began to gobble the squealing panicky fish with a capacious maw. Without conscious summoning of associations, Jay Cornelius knew this raptor to be an emissary of that beneficent personage known as “the Beadle Monger.” Despite its predatory actions, the bird must therefore be doing good.

“I love you,” cried Jay Cornelius, laughing joyously. He flung up the heavy Rasta locks from his velvet shoulders. “You are the wind beneath my wigs!”

“You fool.” Stately, anfractuous Jimmy Brunner scowled. He descended a sigma sequence, a Planck egg in one hand, his swollen member in the other. “You don't even know what anfractuous means. Think, man.”

Slightly embarrassed, Cornelius temporized. “You're right, but let us consider the roots. ‘An-' suggests negation. ‘Fract-' might be a break, a cleft, a cleavage, a...well, a fracture. So you can't be smashed?”

Now, shielded from any surveillance from the sky, the two men clung together under the bridge, smooching wetly, clasping each the other's gigantic, equine, throbbing manhood. The satisfaction of a climax seemed imminent—

“What the hell?” groaned Jay, waking. A gay Harlequin paperback dream? With babbling fish? And someone absurdly named “the Beadle Monger?” His subconscious was generally as disciplined as a Marine drill sergeant. Why this weird outburst, and why now? And who the fuck was Jimmy Brunner? Nobody he knew, had ever heard of, let alone—

His tongue and the roof of his palate were bone dry: he'd been sleeping with his damn mouth open again. These filthy allergies. His nostrils and eyes were swollen all but shut. The sensation of bristled lips pressing against his still rankled. “Oh my god. That's not me.”

Half-dark still, early morning. Turning his head to find Jessie snoring faintly. Continuing to mumble his apologetic credo. “I mean, I swear to god I'm no gay basher, but for fuck's sake—” Under the sheets, he was unequivocally—albeit unequinely— erect. He nudged his wife. She replied in her sleep, “Humph?” and rolled his way. He pushed up her nightie.

“Open to me, my sister, for my need is sore great.”

She woke and punched him. “I ain't nobody's sister, jerk, least of all yours. What time is it?”

“Come on, my darling, let me at you. You would not wish to connive in the sin of Onan, I trust?”

“Five minutes only,” she said, and gave him a smelly
après le sommeil
kiss.

“Ninety seconds,” he promised, “as usual on these occasions,” and spat on his fingers. He returned her kiss and caressed her, lathering, heaved up beneath the autumnal covers, entered, plunged, made good his promise, fell back. “Ah my dearest girl. Later for you, I swear. No good deed shall go un....”

“Punished?” But she was falling into sleep again, her own dreams, no doubt, just as full of twisty turns and windings.

“...rewarded,” said Jay Cornelius. In a minute he'd get up and check his email and google
anfractuous
. Where does this stuff come from? he asked himself and, remembering then some small part of the vanishing dream, groaned. Jiminy Bullard, was it? Where the hell does it come from? Jessie's damned incessant gender research, maybe.

§

Laughing quietly, Jessie scans into a Word doc a passage from Edmund White's
The Beautiful Room Is Empty
.

I had to put on a leather harness, stick a swan feather up my john's ass, and call him “Pretty Peacock” as he strutted proudly about, cocking his head from side to side like a bird while wanking off in an all too human way. Fifty bucks for me and seventy for Lou who, after all, had organized the party.

She is up to her elbows in unlikely gender research material. These guys do seem to confuse their bodily secretions. On the morning after a rowdy party in the largely gay high rise apartment building where he was living, one New York writer reveals, the elevator floor was awash in urine.

Their own dwelling, hers and Jay's, is on the nose as well, though for less lubricious reasons. After only a week or so of fruitless emails and phone calls (“Okay, lady, she'll be right, see y' soon, sweetheart, oh sorry, look, we'll try for the next clear day, eh?”) her builder Robert O'Kelly Branagan, Esq and his jobbie or rather sub contractor, a handsome hunk of bronzed expertise with a powered hydraulic nailing device, named Kyle if such a thing is credible, had appeared at the tolerable hour of 10 a.m. and tore into the roof's shoulder blades with such venom that soon the whole horrid thing lay in splinters in the concrete far below, where she stood at some risk snapping away with her nifty Nikon (as if for a forthcoming article, perhaps in the Tribune lifestyle supplement, on remodeling your inner city Chicago
pied-à-terre
), and a drafty smelly hole was revealed or created through which she cavorted bearing bulging plastic bags, happily quite light, of high thermal capacity mineral wool batts that she helped strew among the rafters, coughing and near to puking owing to quantities of dead birds, molted feathers, old dispersed nests, grime, Neanderthal men's bones and the like. Meanwhile young Kyle was nipping and tucking, sawing and hydraulicking, not a handtool in sight. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, she thought, and laughed quietly to herself.

§

The meeting that morning with Henry McKinley went poorly for Jay. Miserably, in fact. An agonizing death would be a blessing by comparison. He caught himself. Such a sentiment, he suspected, could be regarded as counterindicative of job satisfaction.

Henry McKinley ruled over the Groper Media empire like Genghis Khan over trampled Eurasia, although with less gentility. The comparison was particularly apt, given Henry's full-blooded Asian heritage—Uighur, to be specific. Adopted and rechristened at a young age by Western parents from the ruins of Urumqi after the Han Chinese had leveled the rebellious city, Henry had grown to nominal adulthood pampered and puffed-up. His native lateral intelligence allowed him to find the easiest path to any selfish goal, and to avoid hard work or any peaks of morality. He had been perfectly fitted to become a magnate in the new style. Today, Groper Media ran a passel of salacious or sensationalistic sites, such as Cunning Runts, Root and Tell, Fork Estate, and Mindlezz Pleazurez. The ad revenue from the gossipy, tawdry, eye-candy-filled venues had bought Henry a yacht (the
Canoodle Canoe
), a beautiful brownstone in Chicago's ritzy Lincoln Park district, a fleet of Lexuses (Lexi? wondered Jay, willy-nilly), and three mistresses, each of a different and complementary ethnicity.

Meanwhile the same enterprise had, over the last five years, provided Jay Cornelius, online editor and all-purpose whipping boy, with sixty-five thousand a year before taxes, a modest house undergoing renovations in Naperville, a monthly pass on the Metra, and all-but-dissertation wife Jessie. The continuance of these benefits relied, naturally, on pleasing Henry McKinley. Which today was just not happening.

Henry's fierce mustachios, cultivated precisely to engender racial memories of Mongol savagery, thus reducing subjects to a jelly-like state, quivered as he addressed Jay. “Have you gone fucking gay on me, Cornelius?”

The hyperbolic and clichéd accusation, merely one of Henry's standard taunts, resonated strangely with Jay today, after last night's disturbing dream. A premonition?

“What makes you say that? I thought the layout for the Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus spanking session was hot.”

“Hot? Yeah—if you were thirteen fucking years old! Who did the photoshopping on that anyhow? A blind monkey with simian AIDS and his head up his ass?”

From the back of the room, an intern named Huddleston timorously raised his hand. “Uh, that would be me, sir....”

“You're out of here. Go to HR and collect your check.”

“But, sir, I don't get paid....”

“Then just blow!”

After Huddleston slinked out, Henry turned back to Jay. The hapless editor could feel the eyes of everyone else in the room boring holes of pity, schadenfreude and terror-stoked disaffiliation into his living corpse.

“Cornelius, you're damned lucky not to be following Hudnut out that door.”

Am I? thought Jay.

“You know damn fucking well that the only reason anyone visits our sites is because we continually push the envelope of good taste and libel. If we run PG-thirteen pap like this, what will that do to our Google Analytics? True, I intend to run Groper into the ground. But not quite yet, and not with lame ass posts like this. Do you understand now what's expected of you?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Well, say it then! What's our fucking
cri de coeur
, man? Our goddamn pole star!”

Jay found the puerile words as unpalatable as fetid garbage, but was forced to utter them anyhow. “Tell it—tell it like it's jizz.”