Travel Greetings (part 1)
You have to let other people be right. It consoles them for not being anything else
- Andre Gide
I am convinced there are events that occur only because we fear them. If they were not summoned by our fear, you see, they would remain forever latent. Surely it is our imagining them that activates the atoms of probability and it awakens them, as it were from a dream. The dream of our absolute indifference
- Carlos Fuentes
Prelude (Grotesquerie o’clock)
There is no sicker critter on this planet or any other than the human imagination. If the interior of our minds were visible to each other, we would all be mass murderers before we were old enough to eat hard candy. As it is, our minds and our mouths have learned to play Good Cop/Bad Cop with the wily expertise of a couple of Dickrock County deputies. Here lying before you, dredged from the benthic murk of a fully grown human mind, rendered in text, and quivering in its own filth, is one such imagination.
VJH
Washington, DC
TRAVEL GREETINGS:
(Hallucinatory Romps & Jet Set Waywardacana)
Skyfell
(accounts of Jason Skyfell, as written by Jason Skyfell)
Tokyo, Shibuya-ku. October 6th – notes on DC (rendered aerially to counter the gravity of The Event)
I only ever cleaned my apartment when the nookiebots came over. I’d start in the bathroom, always the worst off, and then I’d move on to the living room and then the bedroom and then finally the kitchen. I didn’t so much clean my apartment as I did neatify it, or give it the illusion of cleanliness. Some people believe cleaning to be therapeutic and I’m not one of them. The act of cleaning strafes my psyche with a host of new neuroses. I make up new curse words when I clean, unconditionally. Stubby syllables squeezed through closed teeth. Beginner Cantonese, it sounds like, or the language of Dachau and Old Sparky. It was the kind of frayed garble of sincere electrocution. . . Alas, I would persist. I squelched my ire with Erik Satie. I pulled muscles I had long forgotten about. It’s tough stuff, this cleaning business. My efforts were haphazard and the results were shaky. Mainly because I had no proper cleaning items. All I had to work with was a washcloth, some “all purpose” cleaner that sure as hell smelled like it worked, and a little broom about as big as a paper airplane. The cost of a single nookiebot could buy me enough cleaning supplies to last three hundred years, but you could stick a Ruger in my face and I still wouldn’t be able to come up with anything more uninteresting than spending money on cleaning supplies. If I had any goal in life, it was to abstain from all things domestic. And if I skipped out on this, it’d just make me another fraud, all dorsal fin and no bite. Consequently all of my money went to booze and junk food and artificial sex and used books and endearingly trashy music.
Jason Skyfell: diligent bohemian, noble degenerate, accidental murderer.
(Yeah, more on that in a minute. . .)
Here we are a hairbrush through the twenty-first century and this tiny corner of the galaxy is already infested with nookiebots. (The geeks really revved it up, man, and I salute their ambition.)
Nookiebots are basically androids that look and act like real women—real women who give you whatever kind of nookie you want in exchange for, yeah, money. Of course they have aspirations of their own. They are never just nookiebots. They’re bloggers, photographers, writers, models, actors, and artists. And yet, they are not really any of these things. Not if you give them the Sartre treatment and define them by their actions.
They were young and incomplete (and sometimes old and incomplete), with jejune aspirations to be something more but unable to harness the focus or discipline to do anything about it.
They were waitresses and baristas and retail clerks.
They were in-between jobs or on hiatus from school.
They were artificial women who took money for sexual favors.
They were nookiebots.
The nookiebot, usually draped in a cascade of accessories, would eventually show up, we’d do our thing, then she’d split and I’d spend the rest of the night sitting on my bed smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and listening to music that made me nostalgic for girls of yesteryear whom I had never really cared about. This was a weekly routine and some weeks a daily routine.
This was more or less how the last two years of my life in DC went down. I mean, there were the jobs: contract roofing, doing bullshit in hotels and restaurants, scooping elephant poo at the zoo, but mostly it was just low-grade decadence, clinical and heartless, but largely free of consequence or any other words that featured more than four letters. I have few good memories from this period that don’t involve unfamiliar flesh.
Now I’m in Tokyo. On the lam, as they say. Neon bewilderment, this place, endowed with the wriggling verticality of my fictional futures. At long last, a familiar future!
The Event (or why I am on the lam):
Books can kill you. I don’t mean in a roundabout Mein Kampf sort of way, but rather the book itself, the physical thing, if husky enough and used with proper force, can take your life. It’s true and I have proof. The nookiebot I bludgeoned was barely nineteen (allegedly). My weapon of choice was, aptly enough, the collected works of Dashiell Hammett. I’m assuming everyone—the cops, my neighbors, the victim’s friends and family, my friends and family—by now know it was me who killed her. My apartment building was populated and often astir with movement, even in the dregs of a weekday night. I had three options: I could just leave the nookiebot in my bed and flee; I could take the nookiebot downstairs and throw her in the alley at the high risk of being spotted by a tenant or passerby, or I could drop the nookiebot down the garbage chute, which was located only about eight feet from my door. I chose that last option. (What would you do?)
The languor would begin where the nookiebot ended—literally within seconds of her exit I would collapse on my futon and sprawl out beneath a miasma of cigarette smoke and residual Lysol. I would then lay there, robed, basking in benign guilt, for hours, getting up only to piss or get another beer. Eventually I would write the gal’s name down along with a convoy of adjectives that would allegedly spur my memory if need be on one of two lists: Nookiebots I had slept with, and nookiebots I had not slept with, but with whom I had done other things.
(Other things: Blow jobs, hand jobs, boob jobs, leg jobs, and foot jobs)
Both lists were decidedly Fordham Road, with the same manic multiculturalism of that polychromatic Bronx thoroughfare. There was a black nookiebot named China, a Chinese nookiebot named Kenya; a lone Salvadoran named Midori (who wore a green dress over green leggings, inadvertently coming off as some sort of equatorial Peter Pan). There were a number of places (Eden, Syria, Miami), plenty of rogue consonants (Marikah, Jamillah), names that had been nibbled on (Mita, Tesh), adjectives (Sunny, Jazzy). I figure about a quarter of the names were really real.
The nookiebot I killed was named Juni Juli (proud of her birth name, she produced an ID when I showed skepticism). Juni Juli Korba—JJK, I called her, or Double-J K. Like all nookiebots, she was modeled after an actual girl—an actual dead girl (SkrumpTech, the company primarily responsible for the worldwide epidemic of nookiebots, handed out big bucks to model their products after actual humans, both visually and behaviorally, but a countrywide antiquated blue law prohibited nookiebots to resemble living humans so SkrumpTech had to wait until they were dead and go from there). The real JJK had a Greek father and a Uyghur mother: an unlikely mingling of genes that produced, in simplicity, a psychotic that looked Persian. The four times I met up with the JJK nookiebot, three times she intentionally burned me with cigarettes. And she was the queen of unwarranted missiles: beer bottles, coffee mugs (filled not with coffee, but white wine), ashtrays, pillows, books, CDs, taquitos—it was all armament as far as she was concerned. My lack of action usually prompted it. She would start up with her fierce, outré rhetoric about Eritreans, mild salsa, the Cold War, minor league baseball, Fellini’s ‘80s films, carpet, pigeons—and I would not engage her. This would incite her. I would withdraw further. She would begin her Blitzkrieg, grimacing through her fusillade of estrogen punches.
(It really was that bad)
The night I did decide to engage her I had drank about a third of a very large bottle of Beefeater. I was not a gin drinker and had only purchased the bottle due to a suspicious discount. The idea was that the bottle would last a year and just be “good to have around”, when in fact it probably wouldn’t have made it through the evening had I not brained Juni Juli. The genesis of the argument had been The Thin Man—the book, not the movie. Juni Juli was “positive” that it had been written by, stunningly, Rex Stout (why not Chandler?). She would not take my Hammett book as proof of her defeat, so I gave it to her—with both hands, a la Albert Pujols (slugger). I sat there for a while smoking Parliaments and sipping my Beefeater, her lying next to me, preposterously motionless, her postmodern pallor impossibly aglow, before I did anything about it at all. I briefly acquired some self-respect when I acknowledged my calm and resolve. I contemplated walking her down to the alley a la Weekend at Bernie’s before realizing that I was too drunk to walk that far, much less in tandem with a dead girl. The stuff of nightmares, squeezing her into that chute. A corpse’s final revenge: its profound uncooperativeness.
I haven’t seen much of Tokyo. I stay in most of the day, dipping in and out of consciousness, staring out the window, or skimming over the Washington Post online. At long last I’m reading Don Quixote—a novel, the novel, as they say, that was, in fact, never intended to be a novel because novels did not yet exist.
~The following message is a paid advertisement by Brentwood Skrump, founder and CEO of SkrumpTech, creator of the Tell Me Tina, the world’s first fully functional nookiebot~
“Are you tired of the #MeThree movement and its bland tantrums and stylized hysterics and manufactured strife and tireless crusade against your pecker? Vote NO!NO!NO! on Article 3186366310 and let’s preemptively strike down the proposition to ban our God fearin’ right to boink our nookiebots whenever we want and in whatever adventurous fashion we want!”
“Aye, Stevie Boy, I bet you three thousand clicks my Tell Me Tina can whip the snot outta your Artifox3000!” - overheard in Café Bukakke, a popular destination for DC politicos
“The District of Columbia and State of Maryland and Commonwealth of Virginia hereby agree that the offense of committing murder against synthetic lifeforms that resemble and behave like human beings will be punished with accordance to the laws of first-degree murder” - District Attorney Isadora Jackson
October 8th—
Last night might as well have been a dream. The memories of it are about as sturdy as its unconscious brethren. I went to a bar buried deep in Shibuya’s bouncy dimensions, and drank Asahi, maybe eight of them, and bought a gal named Bigbig Sunglashes a Patron margarita and when I got drunk enough we danced to Ziggy Stardust and made out and her breath I swear smelled just like pistachio mint and then a brawny Nigerian named Norris turned up and we all went to another joint with a patio and an ambitious sun disapproved of everything we did or didn’t do in its jealous glare…
…I woke up with my clothes on and the lights on, and with no evidence last night was real, save the wayward kanji sprawled across my forearm in purple ink…
“What’s this mean?” I asked the concierge this morning.
He took my arm in his hand and strained to read the manic writing. I didn’t know Kanji but I could tell this was like using ALL CAPS. He loosened his grip (stature of grip: severely academic, ladylike) and said, “It mean somet’ing bad.”
“Bad like bad bad or bad like bad to the bone?”
This confused the hell out of the guy so I went into the hotel’s café and asked the little girl behind the counter. I knew she had lived in the States and spoke English without the schooly rigor of her starched coworkers.
She read it aloud twice in Japanese, once quickly, once slowly, and said: “Who wrote this?”
“Some girl I was hanging out with last night,” I said. “Your buddy over there said it means something bad.”
The girl looked like a mannequin made out of soft rubber. She had bronze bangs that trickled down her forehead and amiable eyes that suggested a sober intelligence. She was the kind of gal you marry, not fuck.
“No, it doesn’t mean anything bad. It’s just kind of strange. It says—” (she said it again in Japanese) “—which means be careful what you breathe life into.”
“Ain’t exactly Confucius caliber,” I said, flippantly.
“Maybe it means you shouldn’t have children.”
“Fine by me. No itty bitties on the agenda.”
A customer came in so duty dictated that the girl abandon me. I went upstairs and took a thirty-minute shower for all the wrong reasons and fell asleep to Japanese MTV.
October 9th—
In order to thwart atrophy I have decided to invent imaginary pursuers, two of them. One is tangible, loosely possible: a bounty hunter I will call Mixon Clawwell. The other is more nebulous, its methods more oblique and needling as to inflate my paranoia. I can only describe it as Sentient Spam. For convenience, and with a nod at the prickly connotations of its acronym, I will refer to it as SS. These are essential inventions, as I am uncertain if I am being pursued—an uncertainty that could lead to laxity and thus apprehension.
SS (observations of, in second person)
Your name is Jason Skyfell. You are in a hotel in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. Your room is on the eighth floor. The overhead light is turned off and your room is as dark as the Shibuya skyline’s chronic flicker allows it to be. Your room is tiny and its dimmed austerity is smeared with patches of sourced lighting: pink and green and yellow. You are sitting at your desk looking out the window, which is to your left. You watch Shibuya’s illusory chaos bubble beneath you. The sink is full of bottles of Asahi and melting ice; a muted Japanese variety show persists on the television.
You open up your laptop and check your email.
Inbox (1)
ChoosyBlips1970 to me:
こんにちは JS
You who you believe me which am continued to are able to trust me whether you are complied with that which is following you;;;; ありがとう
“Choosy”
There is an attachment. You open it.
010010110100101010010110100101101001011010010110100101101001011010010110100101101101101101101101001011010010110100101101101101101101001011001010110100101101001011010010110100101101101101101010010110_J_10100100100100100100100100101101001011010010110011010011010010110100101100110100101101001011010010110011010010110110110110110000001011011010110000010110001011000101100010110001011010010110100101101101001010_J_10101001010101011010010101010010010110100101100010110001011010010110100101100010110001010110110110100101101101101000100101101101000010110010101011010101001010010110100101100111010010110100101101001011001110100101100010110010010110100101100100101101001011001001011000101000_K_1010110101011010010110100100010101010101000101010101101001100110011010100101101001011010001010101010
You reply:
Me to ChoosyBlips1970:
Dear C, who are you and what do you want? - J
The reply comes with suspicious speed.
ChoosyBlips1970 to me:
こんにちは JS
I am “Choosy” I am one of these good and I am your friend that which is trusting;;; It is here that I am that which is protecting;; ありがとう
“Choosy”
Inbox (1)
Another message, from a different sender:
BR1956 to me:
lets chat JS
spandexperience.com register log in and meet me in chat asap
Brian
You go to Spandexperience.com. It’s some sort of softcore porn site for spandex fetishists. A cursory trek through its tour page contains slim gals, mostly ambiguous Eastern Europeans, sheathed in glistening outfits.
You register and log in and go to the chat room.
[areaboy] 12:04 am: Brian?
[br56] 12:04 am: I’m here, dude
[areaboy] 12:05 am: What’s this all about?
[br56] 12:05 am: Listen, dude. I made this room so we can chat in private, but it’s looking for us right now so we have to be quick.
[areaboy] 12:06 am: What’s looking for us?
[br56] 12:06 am: There’s a thing that knows about you and what you did. It’s watching you, dude. It’s electric and it’s in all the cameras and it squirms around the internet looking for you. I’m pretty sure it knows where you are.
[areaboy] 12:07 am: What kind of thing is it? What does it want?
[br56] 12:07 am: Quick history, dude. Here’s what I know. The New Poles designed it. You know about the New Poles?
[areaboy] 12:08 am: No, nothing. Tell me.
[br56] 12:08 am: The New Poles are like cyber-terrorists. They’re based in DC—in Ivy City, this narrow triangle of brick and concrete out in northeast part of the city. There aren’t many New Poles. Hundred, tops. Most of them were carpenters before they came over. The old Poles have been absorbed by the city. They’re now busboys and concierges and lifeguards and doormen. They’re Americans now. They’re only Poles during the World Cup. The New Poles are different, though. No loopholes for the New Poles. They went underground and now they get paid to fuck up air traffic control and turn red lights into green lights. Their insignia is a little coat hanger and nobody knows why. Weird bunch, dude. Somebody gave them a lot of money to construct this thing and sick it on you.
[areaboy] 12:10 am: Who paid them? And where are you now?
[br56] 12:10 am: On a train. Got the Olympics on my left and the Cascades on my right. Going north, dude. Vancouver. I don’t know who paid these guys. You got rich enemies or powerful enemies or both. Gotta go. Time’s up. Be careful, dude.
[br56 has left the room] 12:11 am
[areaboy has left the room] 12:18 am
[SiP has entered the room] 12:22 am
[SiP has left the room] 6:22 am
Mixon Clawwell
Look at this makeshift congregation in Dulles airport. All women, 100%. Maybe thirty of them. There’s an air of celebration about them. The balloons and streamers are implied. There’s a chronic cascade of hooting, clipped questions, rowdy exclamations, fusillades of alto laughter; all of it atop a purr of awed contention…
It’s Mixon in the middle of them, cloaked in Saharan Banana Republic, sharp, symmetrical, with a GQ on his knee. Mixon looked good, and all this attention amplified his good looks. He was an ideal fifty years old: Six feet tall with an implied couple of inches stacked on top and he had the sturdy build of a baseball player or state trooper. His hair was the color of cement and just about as pliable, and his jaw line suggested liters of testosterone and was covered with journalist scruff. His big brown eyes and slightly puggish nose endowed him with a comicality that teamed up with his other features to equip him with a naturally strong charm. His personality, however, was 100% garbage, but he was aware of this so his communications were frugal, if not reliant on whatever company he was in. Altogether, he had the ingredients for a fine bounty hunter, a fine celebrity bounty hunter, whatever with this weirdo world we live in…
“Where you off to, Mr. Clawwell?”
“Who you after this time, Mr. Clawwell?”
“What’d he do, Mr. Clawwell, kill someone?”
“Did he blow somethin’ up, Mr. Clawwell?”
“Is he a terrorist, Mr. Clawwell?”
The girls were a mixed-up bunch: husky Virginians that reeked of double-digit years of married life, cute and sleek fashionistas, contrived cerebral types with rent-caliber eyewear…They were all taking pictures of him with their cell phones.
“Is that a Banana, Mr. Clawwell?” asked one of the fashionistas, indicating his Banana Republic sport coat.
They waited…………..
“A banana?! No, lady, it’s a jacket.”
Nature of laughter: lubed, profuse, lenient.
“Mixon. Mixon….What a cool name!”
“No, it ain’t,” replied Mixon. “It’s a dolt’s name. Like Davan or Naylen. Worse, even.”
Mixon’s phone serenaded him with Le Marseillaise. A message waited: Shibuya-ku. JS is in room 802 of the Smileflower Hotel.
“Who’s texting you, Mr. Clawwell? Your wife or your girlfriend?”
“Neither. My agent. Says I oughta start charging ya’ll for every picture you take of me. Fifty bucks a pop. Of course I’ll give to charity, since I’m a saint and all.”
“You are a saint. A saint and an angel.”
“Yeah?” Mixon said. “Who ever heard of an angel using Air Nippon to scoot around?”
On the plane Mixon drank four little bottles of Cabernet and went to sleep. The other passengers were all doing Tai Chi or something like it when he woke up. The nap made his brain soggy and vulnerable and these wild, bizarro thoughts that didn’t have any business showing up at 35,000 ft. began to fester, so he consulted his GQ and tried to wring a little normalcy out of it; tried to brush up on his sanity. He always read GQ when he flew, mainly because he couldn’t imagine dying while reading GQ. When he exhausted his GQ, he pulled out his book on the Cold War. Black and white facts: good for preventing any rogue existentialist tingles from seeping into your noodle—Didn’t want those while you were way up in the air. And nobody got The Fear while reading about Truman. He got restless after eight pages, though, and closed the book. His bookmark was a ticket from three flights ago: that goddamned trip to Africa. Bad Africa: the part of Africa where they don’t play soccer in the soccer stadiums. Two weeks in an old city with a new name in a new country with an old name. And a new flag, patched up on an HP or a Dell. Primary colors, a palm tree, and a Kalashnikov. Everything mired in nostalgia for something that never was. And everything in cinders. The whole area exploded ten years ago. Unmitigated war, for the same dumb reasons. Mixon had roamed around like a specter beneath the city’s charcoal skyline, looking for his man. Everyone over thirty was all banged up. They limped, jostled with crude artificial limbs; coughed incessantly. That whole terrible continent can sink right into the ocean. Africa is not improving. Sure, it looks like it is—laptops, cell phones, moving walkways at the airport—but when you adopt the way of the West you adopt all of it, including all of its seven deadly sins and its archipelago of honorable mentions. Africa got his man before he did. Mixon did not like Africa for many reasons, but mainly because it kept him from collecting his $50,000 bounty.
And coming up shortly, the anti-Africa…
Japan: insane efficiency, failsafe safety, and every bit of it madly cleansed of yesterday. A satellite of humanity, le fin et le commencement du monde…
Mixon put on his headphones: Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love. He listened to Little Wing and watched the little plane on the screen on the back of the seat in front of him work its way south over the Arctic Ocean. Then the pixels wiggled like they shouldn’t. Something developed, deliquesced, developed again. The two passengers to his left were mired in sleep. He inched closer to the screen. Mixon knew that a decent percentage of the world’s paranoia was merited. Plenty of it had no basis, sure, but a good chunk of it did. Mixon was now 95% sure his employers were watching him from their triangular acre back in DC through the eyes of their Plan B or Plan C or whatever. He could almost hear their goofy tongue and their Schoenberg, see their constant eyes, juiced on new drugs, glazed and ambitious, pivoted there under the electric loom of their hectare spread of screens…
He gave a thumbs-up, as he does, and the pixels fell uniform with their peripheral brethren. He skipped tracks 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 and then reclined to the max and loosed a silent stinker.
