Lukies (pt. VI)

      A paté of clouds spread thickly across the afternoon sky. Gregory was now several blocks farther south on Milwaukee Avenue, approaching the zone of River North and emerging into the Chicago ‘Loop’.

      In the very navel of the city, with its disintegrating brick and ramparts of littered chain-link fencing (eaten alive by squamous zygotes of pouting burgundy rust), Gregory’s face was a sight to behold. Say you were striding down the sidewalk in a direction opposite to his, on the way to the barber shop or the EL; or say you were heading home from your evolved urban career – and you were to come across him, locking eyes for just a moment. In that fleeting span of time, you might scan his visage in much the same way that a post-human superpower scans, via satellite, the visage of a rogue hermit kingdom. And then you would pass by him, forgetting him the moment he exited your field of view.

      But the image of Gregory Deinde would remain before your eyes in some capacity throughout the day. In the tense, glimmering surface of your broccoli-cheddar soup, you would discern the rheumy, weeping orb of his blinded eye; as you later twisted the battered bronze knob of your apartment door, you would hesitate at an unexpected and minor commotion taking place beneath the pads of your fingers – could it be that sniffling goiter of a nose at which you had been staring, with its blued girth bathing in the chilled October air?; upon opening the freezer to retrieve some sodden box of meatless patties, the fluorescent lighting overhead would shatter against the miniscule facets of thorny ice coating that compartment’s walls; and soon, you would find yourself in silent awe at short bristles of hair, seemingly encased in conic coffins of milky glass, irregularly carpeting a bare, eggish pate. 

     But Gregory encountered no animate pedestrian as he crossed a corroded bridge spanning the Chicago River. He found himself at the heavily paved intersection of Clark and Wacker. Here, long strands of crystalized lukies were carried aloft on brisk currents of air issuing between the skyscrapers which flanked the street. Occasionally, those winking filaments would hang around the corner of a parapet or the jutting edge of a canvas portico and billow out like a dragnet.

      Straining with his final eye, pulsing the muscles of his iris to compensate for his lack of depth perception, Gregory surveyed the depths of Clark Avenue. The pale yellow scolopendra of the elevated rails came into high resolution about a hundred feet away. As he scrutinized the fine textures and reliefs of the infrastructural growth, it expanded, colonizing his screen of perception. Its riveted girders were planes of pitted paint; the rounded heads of each fastening were veritable cupolas coated in car exhaust, seen both horizontally from the vantage point of the sidewalk and vertically from the height of a weather balloon. Lukies affixed themselves to the steel, conforming to streaks of moist oxidization: as Gregory drew nearer, he could see that their emergent forms prospered outwardly, accumulating into transparent venus eyetraps, whose clarity might have been the eternal swill of an optician, drunken in soul and incandescent in spirit. 

      Something shifted down amidst the cables of Gregory’s spinal cord, causing his torso to twist in a propellent jerk. He sailed a short distance into the rumbling storefront window of a prepaid cell phone shop. While propping himself up against glass now fogged with his breath, he chanced to look inside. Behind the counter was a caramel-colored man (indio or Indian, little distinction could be gleaned) who sluggishly stroked the screen of a tablet. The dim clerk moved like a sloth, apparently struggling to raise his arm or turn his neck. Gregory allowed his gaze to persist. Is it any surprise that the fellow was utterly saturated, within and without, by a glacial mass of lukies? The man was so arrested, limb and digit, that the tip of the finger which he employed as a stylus for the tablet screen had fused to the device by way of a semi-liquid tether of… lukies.

      Gregory’s eyes rolled in his head, the lame blind one flashing with bored inertia. His left eye could not stay trained on any single object for more than a few seconds; eventually, it darted back out into the street. His jaw and neck followed in the direction of the eye, after which the hands of Gregory Deinde detached with a brittle rasp from the lukie-lacquered glass. 

      And an auspicious moment it was, for no sooner had Gregory turned around than a sudden interloper plowed into him from the side. Gregory collapsed onto the slick concrete and received a concussive blow to the head. The immediate result of this collision was the formation of a barely perceptible hairline fracture, which bolted from the knobbed base of his threadbare skull to a smooth place just above the shelf of his right eyebrow.

      At that moment, I got an exhilarating whiff of the outside atmosphere, and mobilized every effort of will in order to stay my many shoots and appendages from gaining a wider purchase in the new opening. But what I might have done for the magnanimous gift of a porthole supplied by a trepanning saw.

      It occurred that Gregory’s sacker was in fact no stranger. The man stooped over with his hands on his knees and a sharp smile bowing over his pocked chin. 

      “Greg, babe! Little run-in, huh? Good to see you, fella. I hope that fall didn’t throw you into a seething homicidal rage, heh heh.”

      After ejaculating these sentences, he remained in his hunched pose, making no movement to help Gregory to his feet. Instead, he shuffled slightly forward, towering over the latter’s traumatized body as far as his center of gravity would allow.

      Gregory propped himself up on his elbows, eyes agog as he took pains to recognize the hovering face. 

      “…James?” 

      “You got it, baby! Assuming I didn’t get out of bed this morning wearing someone else’s skin.”

      “Oh… I… Wasn’t expecting to see you downtown like this…”

      At Gregory’s stunned incredulity, James made an expansive gesture of swatting at the air. He turned his back momentarily, raised his shoulders, and shook his head, bemused, at a non-existent third party as if to say, ‘Do you believe this guy?’ He then returned to his previous attitude, facing Gregory.

      “You have no idea, do you?”

      “No, I… must admit that I am missing something,” said Gregory, his feeble eyes swimming about, scanning the doorways of nearby buildings, lest they should open to disclose a hideous conspiracy.

      “I’ve been looking for you, Greg. Surely you found my letter yesterday?”

      “I did. I read it.”

      “…And?”

      “And, well, I hate to disappoint, but…”

     “But you’re done with HAM. I’m aware. Listen, I’ve got some things to tell you, and a thing or two to show you. How about we walk and talk? Go ahead and pick yourself up.”

     With some difficulty, Gregory twisted himself into a crouching stance, his head prostrated before James. As he rose, he stumbled aslant into the street, loping forward and nearly diving headlong into the lukie-shrouded asphalt. James finally interceded, catching his shoulder and standing him up.

      “Get a grip, you clumsy son of a bitch. Come on, let’s go.”

      The pair walked down Clark and then turned in an easterly direction onto Lake Street. As they moved beneath the elevated tracks, they were met with luminous stalagmites of accreted lukies, each of which entombed a vague, dark cataract of hominid proportions. They skirted these impediments, taking little interest in them.

      After passing three more blocks, James spoke up again.

    “You weren’t the only one who received a communication from them – the lukies.”

      Gregory stopped in James’s lee, while the latter was carried on the inertia of his steps. Finally, James also stopped and turned around. His face bore a tight-buckled grin.

      “You know… their name…” said Gregory.

     “Yes. Believe me, it’s no secret to those of us still vertical. It was us operators who got the first call. When I left that letter for you, it was in the hopes that you’d be joining us at the Hi-Fi shop. We had a large aerial set up and were camping out there. I started taking shifts with the other guys, scrubbing through frequencies…”

      Here, James paused while an unidentifiable expression, corresponding to no emotion ever known to homo sapiens, replaced his rigid grin. He fished a knotted ball of clattering metal and vulcanized rubber from his coat pocket and began to pull it apart.

      “Ice cleats. Here, take a pair,” he said, handing over two drooping tongues, hollowed in the middle and shot through with sharpened molars of bluish steel. “You’ll need them in a moment.”

      Having strapped on the devices, the two men resumed their slow promenade toward the lake. James continued to talk while Gregory listened, his head lolling down onto his chest occasionally.

      “We eventually hit on a signal pattern which produced for us that hallowed Name. Our awareness of ‘lukies’ as an integral presence, all around us in the air, began to produce certain behavioral effects in the group. I began to covet writing paraphernalia. There was little quality paper in the shop, but then I remembered the stationery place that was catty-corner to us at the end of the block. I started making lone trips out there, taking care to hide the sheafs of vellum under my shirt when I returned. But no one really cared or noticed me.

      “After a few days of making those trips, the lukies began falling to the ground and clinging to things. We lost the signal when that happened, but then something changed for all of us. Each person began to isolate. Speaking for myself, it wasn’t like I’d forgotten the others. I was just full of apathy for their lives. Blaze had his own little internal drama going. He started smashing all the HAM equipment and roaring at the top of his lungs. We just let him go full swing. Some of the other guys went catatonic and swaddled themselves in their sleeping bags. I procured and carefully maintained a fountain pen, imported from Japan, that was coated in a coveted ‘urushi’ lacquer. A sweet little vermillion torpedo which few afficionados can claim to own – I’d swiped it from a jade box sitting on the derelict store owner’s desk.

      “Naturally my compulsion to write with it was extreme. I must have filled over three hundred pages in the course of twenty-four hours. I couldn’t tell you exactly what I wrote. I was hardly aware of myself at the time. But eventually, I returned to my senses and, with just a remnant of ink left in the pen, I decided to write to you. And I did so. But once I had finished and had raised my eyes to survey the shop, by then bathed in a stone-age gloom and left unrecognizable after repetitive tirades of destruction, it suddenly occurred to me that something final had taken place in near proximity to me that had escaped my notice.

      “Initially, I just figured the guys had all left and abandoned me to my autistic inscriptions. The interior of the place was still. But then I looked over at a pile of pummeled aluminum chassis which had been shoved into a corner of the main showroom and engulfed in hillocks of powdered glass from the shattered front window. And just at the fringe of that dormant mound, I saw an unfamiliar thing whose attributes could only be approximated in my disjointed imagination. It was something like one of those industrially-raised meat chickens who have been bred to grow so quickly that their feathers can’t keep up with the expansion of their puckered, scabbed flesh; whose sole reason for existing is to end up in a fast-food sandwich, garlanded with oozing coils of hot honey. But when I came closer, I could see that this thing was, in fact, a human hand covered in lukies. And underneath that, it was coated in brown blood.”

      James paused in his monologue while he and Gregory navigated through a narrow triangular corridor of iron stanchions, the floor of which sloped up from the dead end of Lake Street and onto the circular driveway of a hotel tower. Their cleats bit into a pearlescent slab of lukies which, this far east, had completely swallowed the ground beneath them. On the far side of the hotel’s enclosed courtyard, they wound their way through a mezzanine of glass pyramids, suspended in toadstool fashion on cylindrical stalks of varying height. Eventually, they came out to the precipice of a vast declining sheet of lukies, which only leveled out into a plane again eighty feet down.

      “Take a seat, Greg. It’s easier to slide down. Any attempt to descend this thing on your feet would result in an instant neck-snap.”

      Gregory obeyed, easing himself into a sitting position. James sat down beside him and extended his legs. The two of them then leaned forward and barreled down the slope. All the while, the granulated surface of lukies bit into the seats of their pants, sparing very little fabric and, where possible, sampling their tender haunches. Having arrived at the bottom, they found themselves dwarfed beneath a gaping roof of concrete, supported on elephantine pylons. They had come to rest below the now dormant thoroughfare of Lake Shore Drive, hemmed in on all sides by boulders of lukies which had formed cocoons around an endless fleet of parked and abandoned cars.

      James climbed to his feet, leaning on a nearby pylon for support, and emitted a fake groan.

      “Alllright. Looks like we’re almost there. Get your ass up, Greg.”

      Gregory stood. The sudden rush of blood to his head caused his brain to pulsate and, ever so slightly, to swell. The expansion of his brain led, in turn, to a widening of the fissure that had recently opened in his skull. I could feel a part of myself fully exposed now to the biting air of the lakefront. Yet I luxuriated in a lascivious self-constraint and remained, as before, a highly compressed spring.

      James guided Gregory through the labyrinth of interred cars and resumed his narrative, his words telescoping, sucking them deeper into that arctic grotto.

      “So, anyway. I cleared away the scrap and detritus and, sure enough, I found Blaze lying crushed at the bottom. There was a Glock pistol imprinted into his sternum from the weight of radio trash that had just been bearing down on his frame. The firearm had clearly just been used on him, because much of his mouth and a large piece of his forehead was missing in a gunshot kind of way. But, from the remainder of his face, it was plain to see that he had died in a state of orgasmic enthusiasm. For a while, I was simply entranced by the whorls of lukies that had petrified into an exoskeletal crust over every facet of him. But then I heard something move behind me.

      “It was the rest of our HAM crew. They had emerged from their catatonia and were looking at me with such expressions… the mildest you’ve ever seen. One of them – Peter: I don’t think you knew him that well – came up to me and stared down at Blaze’s body. Then he beheld me, and in a sweet, most pacific tone of voice, with a lisp that you might almost describe as ‘cutsie,’ said:

      ‘The lukies have made their will known. They brought us here not only to listen, but to hear; not only to look, but to see. Now we are the ones with eyes to see and ears to hear.’

      “And I required no further explanation from him. You see, a communication is very much like a transaction – an exchange of value, of energy. And language contains aspects both visual and aural. When something is spoken, the sound of it travels on a certain wavelength, and then it is received by a taut drum, from whence it percolates down the cochlear abyme. Sometimes that transmitted signal is, in turn, encoded – a compound procedure which requires both an act of transcription and one of translation. I understood that I had been made a scribe, and that all of the radios in the world had become an unnecessary encumbrance. I then knew that you, too, had become aware of the lukies…”

      As James unburdened himself of his meandering words, Gregory stirred, raising his head and directing his good eye at his guide. The two grey figures emerged from beneath the overpass of Lake Shore Drive and came to a halt at the edge of what had once been an expansive marina. The waters of Lake Michigan slept unseen below an opaque stratum of lukies several feet thick. Sailboats and yachts sat firmly moored in their new medium. The freshly arrived pair were now standing on a large sandstone compass set into the fossilized cement of the urban shoreline.

      “We all have a role to fulfill,” said James. “We have all sunken down into the eye of a maelstrom so mute and minute that no one, save the most devout, will even notice it.”

      James straightened out his spine and set his left foot out before him, placing it on display. He wore a shoe on that foot unlike his other one. It was a leather shoe of heterogeneous tones, bound with thick black stitches and infernally crowned with a puckish sole (this latter component extended so far beyond the boundaries of the shoe wall that it stretched the ice cleat, there affixed, to its uttermost limit of elasticity).

      “Do you see, Gregory? Do you see the winged Níkē of Samothrace with her linseed-polished lips encircling my ankle, her esophagus swallowing, sarcophagously, the delicate meat of my foot? She is mine, and upon me. She is now of me, and I of her. And we are: WING-TIPPED… But as things presently stand, she is but one. She is a wretch when not the constituent of a pair. But now…”

      Here, James raised his arm toward where Gregory stood, on the farthest eastern extremity of the sandstone compass. Behind him, piercing through a narrow rent in the dismal marble firmament above the lake, a ray of purest light streaked down and painted the apex of his bald pate with its brilliance. And then…

      Then I was freed. I climbed out of Gregory, coyly peering up the coast at the gallery of desert skyscrapers standing aslant in the faded blue depths of the Chicago ‘Loop.’ Here I was…

      Here I am! Do you see? Have you the eyes to file through the manila gills of my wavering extrusions? Are you the technician of sight for whom I have so long waited, who can survey my topologies? My geometries? Can you stand, steady-legged, at the crumbling edge of the escarpment of me, and see that my mirror-image is WING-TIPPED?

      Here I stand, over-against you: I am lukies, and WING-TIPPED. I am WING-TIPPED, and lukies. So mote it be.

Lukies (pt. V)

  Having trekked several blocks southward on Milwaukee Avenue, Gregory now approached the border grounds between Bucktown and Wicker Park. Here, every few feet along the sidewalk, he passed either a bodega, or an open-air bar devoid of patrons, or a defunct film developer whose sidewalk display swarmed with yellowing family portraits from decades before, or a Thai nail parlor reeking of lacquer and acrid soap. In between these oily establishments, there often appeared the entrance to a vacant building, whose doors were shuttered with iron grates, blistered black with sun-baked paint. In these rhomboidal alcoves, often tiled in a forgotten mosaic of beehives, acacia saplings, portmanteaux of sun and moon, 13-stepped ladders, and other angular implements, the doors were buried under sloping bank of lukies.

    Gregory was approaching the place which, for the past several weeks, had become his daily post and station of labor: the Turkish Baths, which stood just south-east of the verdigris spire of the flatiron tower, planted at the six corners of Damen, North, and Milwaukee. The baths were housed in a deep, old building faced with porcelain bricks. The grout in between these bricks swarmed with a fulgurant black mold, which bit also into the beaten gothic embellishments surrounding its front portal.

    Entering the vestibule, Gregory passed through the twilit lobby. Only a single bulb shone out from a cylindrical socket that had been installed in the ceiling. Two cyclopean pillars of raw pink marble, shot through with goldenrod yellow veins stood as sentinels before a set of moist oak doors. Beyond these doors, a rare and muffled activity could be heard: trickling waters, effervescent evaporations.

    As Gregory took steps toward the ornate reception desk, carved from an oak identical to that of the doors and stained a purple-brown hue which appeared never to have fully dried, he was compelled to extend his arms into space for balance. The octagonal tiles which furnished the lobby floor were frosted over with translucent patches of melded lukie. Accumulating on these treacherous areas was a shimmering, nacreous sweat which, just the day before, had caused Gregory to take a fall and almost puncture the frontal plate of his skull on a sharp protrusion – an ornately carved cornice – at the foot of the desk. Just before the capital penetration was able to proceed, Gregory had managed to brace his arms against the swollen wood. The violence of this sudden suspension had caused a microns-thin mask of knitted lukies to dislodge from the contours of his face and to shatter against the baroque carving before him.

    The carving was a mere six inches from his eyes, basking in the pulsating inertia of the moment: an artichoke enclosed the crowned and pregnant bulge of a pomegranate, from the pinnacle of which projected a miniscule pyramid with a capstone of unadulterated crystal; just above the pointed extremity of the pyramid’s capstone, there hovered a single lukie, its filaments illuminated by some internal, inscrutable source.

    Now, with a mettle much tested – with astute circumspection and adroit circumambulation – Gregory navigated his emaciated limbs and corporeal trunk toward a stool behind this desk, whose padded stop was upholstered in tufted carmine leather.

    He took a seat.

  Before him, built into the underside of the desk’s counter, was an array of open compartments, stuffed unremittingly with envelopes in discrete states of decay. Gregory engaged himself for several minutes with drawing these envelopes out of their holes, one at a time, and holding them just a few inches from his face. Each bore one word only, inked onto the degraded vellum in a tangential, hyper stylized script, the individual letters of which expanded past the space that it was their lot to occupy: here was a morass of vegetal draftsmanship, overshadowing the word as such in a hostile arabesque of detrimental lines.

    It was usually not his practice to open these envelopes; they had sat waiting in this lobby for several decades at least – some for a considerably longer time. The glue which held them closed had only just begun to petrify, cracking at every expansion and contraction of the cotton fibers to which it was bound, as it was menaced by parades of vapors, drifting from the baths. But whenever Gregory happened upon an envelope whose glue-petrifaction had fully developed, and had just about opened itself, he was obligated by his… recent employers… to carry out an immaculate routine.

    First, he was to set the envelope squarely before him on the dark wood of the reception desk. The sides of the envelope must be perfectly parallel with the desktop.

     Then, he was to press down on a round wooden protrusion on the corner of the desk which was carved into the simultaneous image of a human eye and an acorn. This, in fact, was a cylindrical spring-loaded drawer. Housed in its verdant velvet chamber was a magnifying loop – such as those used by jewelers and other grave professionals with a need to look at and see the surfaces of life on a most minute scale.

    Screwing the loop into the sunken depths of his eye, Gregory was then made to study the particular word which had been inked upon that particular envelope. At a glance, even the most ancient specimens were legible. The words were usually even quite banal, in themselves provoking little reflection on the part of the viewer, whoever he should be. But under the loop’s distended lens, the letters would become cultures in a petri dish, branching off into wandering tributaries of desiccated ink with all of the agency of a slime mold. Here were knots of strength and deep intelligence; zones of repulsion and attraction; an eros of sublime and sterile syntax.

    After analyzing the given word’s effusive growth, Gregory was then to open the flap of the envelope with the sharpened spade that was his thumbnail. Whenever he did this, the contents therein would be exposed to the saturated atmosphere of the baths, whereupon they immediately swelled from humidity. What were these contents? Were they the average contents of an envelope?... At the very least, they were… things. Things at first solid, but then volatilized in the wet air. Things sublimated into snaking coils of buoyant gas which loitered against the ceiling for a time upon release, gathering by the vestibule door. It was here that this… thing… no longer isolated and quantifiable, but conglomerated and undeniable, was forced to wait until the outside was made available to it.

    The thing had a great thirst for disambiguation. The thing longed to shed its alien bark and to spray out into that begrimed arroyo of glass, brick, and steel which constituted the breadth of Milwaukee Avenue. The thing would be funneled down this artery by winds blasting off the barren plane of Lake Michigan, whose guiding hand would plunge it toward far-flung neighborhoods to the west; to sub-urban townships; and to the psychologically dismantling zone of concrete which erected a funereal infrastructure of hotels, pulverized train stations, and corporate towers sheathed in polarized glass, all of which connected the territory of Schaumberg to the Chicago O’Hare airport. And where the thing landed, it would imbed itself, establishing a relationship to denatured nature, and would reach a critical mass. The thing would burn its way through the skin of everyday life in previously unforeseen ways and would become more than merely ‘a thing’. And the world that had existed before the thing’s entrance into it would be duplicated. And those whose new world had been utterly conditioned in every aspect by the thing which had announced its own awesome arrival would become strangers to the world which had previously been…

    Today, Gregory had removed precisely such an envelope from its crowded slot. Its flap had all but fully disengaged itself from the hardened orange glue, which crumbled and sifted onto the desktop the moment Gregory lifted it to his eyes. The word written on the envelope was a composite one:

“Wing-Tipped.”

  Swiping the detritus of powdered glue from the desktop with the sleeve of his aviator’s jacket, Gregory placed the dog-eared rectangle at the precise angle demanded by his employers. Holding his breath, he bent over to retrieve the loop in the manner I have just described. This he pressed firmly into the swarthy lids of his right eye, after which he pored over the envelope.

    As the light from the sole bulb in the lobby decanted itself over the steam-warped paper and ricocheted into the oceanic hemisphere of the magnifying lens, I extended myself from the bed of Gregory’s retina to wash myself in the frigid, luminous beams. I came to see: and see I did.

    On the surface below me, each letter radiated an anemonic fan of the blackest pigmented ink. In places, the autonomous growth seemed inorganic in outline. This was not scattershot scribbling, merely. It was a cogent language of ratios, patterns of derangement (like the wanderings of rivers over the terrestrial crust of millennia). I looked at this, and I saw it. But soon I became dissatisfied with the powers of the loop’s lens and, desperate to find at a greater resolution that which I had been brought into this world to seek, I ballooned by being forward, pressing against Gregory’s cornea, surging with hemorrhoidal might. As an immediate result, the vessels in the eye swelled with a redoubled flux of oxygenated blood; the shape of that organ was elongated so that it mushroomed past the aperture at the rear concavity of the loop and into the device itself.

    The eye had paid no insignificant toll for such extravagance: the caruncle which, hitherto, had served as the hinge of Gregory’s inner conjunctiva, had now snapped in a manner befitting a cheap tapioca bead filled with colored saccharine juice. No doubt, I had delivered that psychic portal to a permanent state of trauma from which it would never recover and, in so doing, had rendered my Gregory half-blind. But, in paying such a needful price with the riches of another, I had attained my fondest wish and broken through the barrier of apparent surface. I now beheld the agents of the black ink’s tumorous growth.

    They were humanoid, but impossible to construe as people. People are always torn in twain, always caught up on the spinning axle of a personal schizophrenia, the contents of which are the inner and outer worlds, held eternally apart by a gap of total incommunicability. But these bipedal laborers were unsullied by such angst, evincing no distinction between body and soul. Their heads were jetty walnuts bereft of sensory organs. Yet the convolutions of this supreme appendage bore all the intimations of a perfectly inductive receiver. At once, this ‘head’ was an omniscient antenna – the sculpted, gnurled gem of a universal ear. Farther down their bodies, I saw a pair of arms and legs equally as black as the head, which were employed in the sole act of manipulating the ink, of which they were undoubtedly a part. In aggregate, the beings locomoted much like an assembly of ants, rippling to and fro from the deposits of black ink forming the body of ‘Wing-Tipped’ to the webbed periphery of the envelope, where they unloaded flakes of pigment in a procedural sort of footbridge. The ink was their path, and they followed the traces of their incessant circuit with the dignity of Most Worshipful Masters.

   As my excitement mounted, I began to puncture Gregory’s cornea and extrude into the balmy lobby air (which had been trapped inside the loop itself). But, having yet to fully mature, I paid my dues to the angel of prudence and reseated myself ‘behind the looking glass’ of Gregory’s biological lens, now capsized in its own aqueous humour.

   The blood vessels in Gregory’s eye had not yet burst, but soon would. I consequently took advantage of the few moments left to me to make some final observations regarding the happy commune spread out below:

    They were without number. But whenever I was able to leverage my focus for long enough, I managed to follow the travels and travails of a single corpuscule among them. It had just bent over and uprooted a wafer of ink from somewhere in the neighborhood of the hyphen. It held the debris out before itself: an anthracite offerty plate. As it progressed past its toiling coevals, they removed the minutest of chips from the deposits of ink that had accumulated on each of their torsos; it was these tokens of communion that they gave up to the plate-bearer, who slowly proceeded to the outermost edge of the envelope. Once the lone creature had come to that absolute boundary, it dropped the mound of particulate ink at its feet, whereupon the being collapsed into itself and disappeared from my sight in a cascade of light so perfect – so unctuously pure – that I joined Gregory in his blindness over the span of several minutes.

    When my sight returned to me and the trawling black forms came again into view, I saw that the once animate individual I had previously watched over was transformed: in its place stood a crude monument of fused carbon slag, its branching tendrils of obsidian glass piercing the cotton fibers of the paper while its highest point rose into a sharpened tip so acute that it waxed into a realm whose invisibility I knew must be absolute, no matter how greatly one might endeavor to magnify the optical field. Nevertheless, it was precisely at this impossible apex that I began to sense the presence of a faint glow. A light not of sight, but of mind. I had seen. The homunculus was trued. God had made himself known.

    How I longed to bear eternal witness to such a spectacle, such a throng; to use Gregory’s body as armature, armchair, and observatory for all time to come. But my trusted chrysalis of meat had his own needs and urgencies. Finally, the vessel walls in the white of his eye exploded under the pressure of my sustained gaze. The quarry of contrasts below was bombarded with planetoid globes of blood. Fearing a hemorrhage even greater than this, I withdrew into the retina, slipping my silvery legs in between bundles of optical nerve fibers and flattening my head into a dense plug.

    Having definitively lost sight in his right eye, Gregory removed the loop from it, fished a dark felt cloth from a pocket deep inside the breast of his jacket, and began to wick the sanguine syrup from the inner lens. The envelope had been peppered by the bloody rain, which was already being incorporated into the migrating rhizome of the ink. Once Gregory and serviced the loop and restored it to its previously pristine state, he returned it to the drawer of secret velvet and loaded this latter back into the recesses of the desk.

   Now there remained the final task of unsealing the envelope and releasing its contents. Gregory saw this through with measured dexterity: first, he finessed his bladed thumbnail under the flap, then he slit it open in both directions. What remained of the time-hardened glue came trickling out on the desk in a rocky orange powder. The flap, unmoored, rose upon the tension of its own warped pulp to reveal that which lay within.

    It was a letter – what else? But this letter was much less volatile than usual, for the first time affording Gregory the opportunity of removing the folded paper from its corrupted sheath and exposing its written contents to view. The text read thusly:

    “I might have remained always alone, save for they – save for the fact that they are WING-TIPPED. They are my bipartite trophy, my mirrored brides, and WING-TIPPED. Upon asphalt, upon grass, or in foul water dipped, are they WING-TIPPED. They stun with their glamour and shimmering leather and weather the whimpering storm, being WING-TIPPED. My heart skips a beat when I walk down the street, and whom should I meet but a dame most discrete, who then proffers her meat (I’ve sucked lemons as sweet) with its hot ruddy heat; what should render complete this liase but a cleat smartly kicking her neat pearly teeth: to repeat, I’ve indulged in this treat for the simple conceit that they, and no others, are WING-TIPPED. When my mother was buried, I stood upon that mound of heaped soil with tears blurring my vision. It was a snapping cold October morn, but my mourning was stifled by they, which are WING-TIPPED. At a time in my life, I floated anchorless and without ballast; the memory of a betrayal which savaged my innocence and capacity for unalloyed love was my nightly aperitif before vainly attempting slumber. Anxious for any pretense to leave home, I gathered what little remained of my recent inheritance and moseyed down to the local cobbler’s shop. There, the proprietor greeted me with his fat, liver-tinged lips, moist from licking. He showed me a gallery chock full of them, gleaming behind beveled panes of glass and glaring with a cyclops eye of sheeny sheen a show light suspended above. But nothing could get me fervid – nothing could coax the mealy bankroll from my silken breast pocket, save for they that stood before me WING-TIPPED. A few months anon, an acquaintance of mine called upon me in the way of an invitation: would I join him at his estate to celebrate the grand opening of his apiary? Being that I harbored a mild fear of those galling airborne demons, whose existence constitutes an apiary’s entire raison d'être, I hesitated momently to accept. But then I glanced at the nook of polished wood by the jamb of my front door. Placed on a low marble pedestal beneath a lacquered coat rack and beside a lead urn, there placed for the disposal of freshly wetted umbrellas, they called to me, reminded me that it was time to brandish them before the public eye, so that all might regard them and notice with appreciation that they were WING-TIPPED. Having resolved to satisfy my acquaintance’s request, I directed my valet to ready my coach, for to-day we should tread upon honeyed grounds, the grasses of which would soon be anointed by the dual imprint of those which are WING-TIPPED. No more than a few hours later, we arrived to the sylvan environs of our host’s chateau; he came out to greet us as the coach clambered up the gravel drive, letting out a great leathern creak as it rocked upon its suspension. The young lord smiled a brilliant white smile and flourished the gilt tails of his frock coat as he ushered us through the echoing surfaces of a grand corridor, paneled in ringing mother-of-pearl, and into the back courtyard. We stopped for a moment in a shaded grotto to take tea, and in reposing thusly, I saw to it that my acquaintance and my man both marveled at they which depended from my stockinged feet. I took pains to drape first my left leg over my right knee, and then my right over my left, all so that equal coverage would be duly granted to the WING-TIPPED. After thé, our gracious guide led us out into the open air of the grounds. Here the grass crunched underfoot as verdant shards of stained cathedral glass. Round about stood large, layered cubes: citadels full of buzzing. Then the infernal ones came out to play. They rushed by us in confused swarms, but I saw them minutely. I watched the slow lapse of those vulgar appendages, transparently veined, which allow their kind to take flight. My face was hotly offended. How ever could such vermin deign to behave, to put on airs, as though WING-TIPPED? My acquaintance began to monologue on the minutiae of breeding and keeping them, but I halted his diatribe with a burning stare. And I lifted my legs, one after the other. And I crushed, and I stomped, my exalted accessories carrying me high above the earth, magnificently magnified, and they drew me aloft, oh so WING-TIPPED. When I returned to ground, all was a tamped tangle of carnage. Human and yellow-striped hellion lay equally flattened, flightless in body and soul; I trod upon the pavement of them for quite an hour, enjoying the percussion of my soles upon that queer macadam. Like a goat on a drawbridge, I tapped with my hooves. I sifted their ruins, their pestled effluvium, paced in a circle and deepened the grooves of my tracks in that which had become little more than common waste. A more delicate liqueur of circumstances may never be sipped; and lo, they in which I stride are now, and into perpetuity, WING-TIPPED.”

    No sooner had Gregory’s remaining eye scanned the final line of text than the brittle sheets of paper vanished into shimmering rivulets of gas and poured upward through his fingers onto the ceiling. At first, the vapors chased each other around the halo of the lightbulb, directly above where Gregory sat. Then, first gradually, and afterward rapidly, the convolutions of bent reality resulting from refracted light could be seen creeping toward the doors to the entrance; here, the gasses awaited a ceremonious release.

   Gregory sat erect upon his stool and watched after this phenomenon for several moments, quietly shivering and rubbing dried remnants of blood from the corner of his lame eye. It was not until a sudden clattering rang out from the opposite end of the lobby hall that he changed his posture. The source of the noise had been the double doors leading into the baths proper. Something was rattling the brazen railing of the doors’ pneumatic handles. The occupants were due to emerge.

    Immediately, Gregory sprang to his feet and pressed his fists tightly to his thighs, digging the angular corner of his sharpened thumbnail into the outer seam of the right leg of his jeans.

    The oak doors glided open synchronically. Behind them stood a wall of total blackness from which pearlescent flues of thick steam tumbled, obscuring the glinting tiles of the lobby floor. A few minutes passed at this promontory of expectation. And then… what should emerge?

    There was a soft shuffling, an icy crumbling and quaking. A hominid being, ghostly in its pallor, came out under the sole lightbulb in the ceiling. It was nearly a man, but clearly lacking organs, muscles, and the mechanical motivation of moving parts. Instead, its limbs were propelled by a mute crystallization of lukies, of which it was entirely composed.

    Gregory remained standing, a rigid column at attention before his employer. The striated cords and sinews in his neck rippled and stood out in high relief: these were tension cables stabilizing the bridge between the spit of his ovoid head and the slumped, ambiguous punctuation mark of his torso.

    We communed between the roseate columns of that stately hall. The sequence of events that had begun with the arrival of the lukies and ended at this point in space and time had reached maturity. The transaction was complete.

Lukies (pt. IV)

     For some time, Gregory surveyed the train car. His teeth were slightly bared, while his upper lip rose in a fettered curl beneath the goiterous bulb of his nose. Perhaps this rebus of facial affect was a simple reflection of the train’s poisonous atmosphere. Or maybe it had resulted from the mechanical pathology of petrifaction caused by the lukies, whose own public transit system Gregory’s gaunt body had become.

     Foregoing the arrogance of fiction, I must abstain from any decision in the matter.

     Besides our host, there were few other commuters aboard. About half the car’s length away, sitting on the other side of the brutalized plexiglass barriers which hemmed in the sliding doors, was a black vagrant, splayed out with his legs obstructing the aisle. Neither quite sleeping, nor entirely alert, he dug his mossy chin into his clavicles and constantly muttered something from out of the swollen protuberances crowding out the lower half of his face. 

     On the far side of the train car sat a pair of plump women in their early twenties, both garbed in ensembles of ratty black clothing, swarming with pills of lint, bacilli of cat hair, and the occasional lukie. Their voices were rhythmic and shrill, beating and reverberating through the car’s cavity toward where Gregory sat and causing his eyelids to spasm open and shut.

     Finally, across the aisle from the conversing pair, only slightly visible to Gregory now through four graffiti-etched panes of smoke damaged plexiglass, there appeared to be an individual sitting perfectly still. He possessed a perfectly ellipsoid head of jaundiced complexion and exuded the general impression of… perfection.

     As the train bored ahead into the pitch night of a tunnel, the quality of light inside the cabin was immediately altered: a bath of photonic urine shrouded the riders.

     They passed through the tunnel for roughly two minutes before halting again at the Belmont platform. Given the time of day, the expanse of brushed concrete quadrants which lay beyond the gonging train doors was all but deserted. Only one newcomer found his way aboard: a nearly spherical day-laborer wrapped in layers of paint-becrusted denim. The squat man was indeterminately Hispanic.

     Seeing that the legs of the hypnagogic vagrant barred his way toward Gregory’s end of the car as a maintenance barrier might (¡Attención! ¡Cuidado! ¡Piso mojado!), he walked in the opposite direction. Initially, he set about surveying the row of seats just ahead of the stock-still personage of mustardic hue. But then, something caused his homely eyes to widen. He lurched backward into the two women, who immediately ceased their chatter and pressed themselves into the window niche, creating an air gap between the inner woman’s sweat-glazed shoulder and the man’s – we shall call him Ernesto – soiled back.

     “Excuse me?!” one of the women shrieked.

     Gregory, suddenly alerted to the growing upset, sat lower in his seat and watched. Ernesto paid no attención to the outrage he had caused. Instead, he grasped the chrome railing which crested the backs of the seats on either side of his pellicular frame, and pummeled the women farther into the niche, passing gas in the effort.

     “This is borderline rape, motherfucker!” said one of them.

     “¡Pero no! ¿Que es eso? ¡El hombre es Amarillo! ¡Ayuda me, Sagrado Corazon!”

    “This man is a psychopath! Get him off!” shouted the other one.

     The train increased its velocity as it streaked through the city’s lightless intestines. The violence of its speed caused the car in which Gregory sat to rock and vibrate. The perfect oval head on the other side of the cabin began mutely to oscillate. A sound of fracturing porcelain, only partially obscured by the deafening tumult of metallic friction, was the result.

     It was this sound which simultaneously arrested the women’s blood-thirsty protest and caused the murmuring bum to leap into the middle of the aisle, arms akimbo and buttocks exposed. A toothsome epoxy of diarrhoea-infused lukies held the cheeks firmly closed.

     “Y’all muhfuckas on some fuck shit!” he barked in a husky, beleaguered voice.

     Stillness reigned amongst the car’s inhabitants as the train coasted to a halt at the Logan Square platform. The final inertial pulse of the brakes elicited yet another guttural crackling, this time much heightened in volume. Two oblique lobes detached themselves from the top of that veiled, yet perfect head and slid off, one thudding against the textured rubber deck by the mottled suede of Ernesto’s work boots while the other fell into a cradle formed by the dormant commuter’s shoulder (Pythagorean in its angular precision) and the window niche on his side. Now the head had been shorn into the sublime apex of an obelisk.

     When the train car doors parted, a gust of air from the tunnels farther down the platform rushed into the stale compartment, riling an opaque plume of lukies from the fallen bowls of skull bone. At that moment, for all intents and purposes of the eye, that end of the cabin was erased from objective existence.

     Soon the doors resealed themselves and the train plunged once more into the mouth of the tunnel.

     From the agitated fray of the lukies, a jumble of flat voices reached Gregory and the homeless black.

     “It’s getting in me! It’s getting in me!”

     “¿¡Donde está la dignidad en la vida?!”

    “Jesus Christ, my –”

     “What is that? Who’s wet?! Who am I touching?!”

     “¡Una plaga de… Gringas, el peligro blanco!”

    “Get off, Paco!”

     “Yo soy solo un trabajador… quiero almuerzo… ay…”

     “Oh… oh-ohwww… Stings…”

     “… Yellow in white …”

     “O… Beber bebidas en Chihuahua…”

     “He’s… standing… Girl, I…”

     “O… Comer comidas en Oaxaca… lechuga y hongos… hamburguesa con cebollas… pero…”

    “Euhuhh… Euy… my puzzy’s hard…”

     “Pero…”

    “They’re… inside…”

     “Gheeh?... Gheeaugh?...”

     “Pero… un huevo desp… después…”

     “It sprout…

     “Un huevo… desecaaaado… desecaaaado… ay puto…”

    All the while as this chorus commenced, the black had been taking slow steps backward toward Gregory’s seat. The obscurantist cataract of lukies had already advanced and eaten half the seats in the train car. Now the vagrant was close to the emergency door, which communicated with the next car over. He turned around and wrenched the handle, crushing Gregory’s legs as the door swung open. 

     “Nigga, move yo shit!” said the homeless man, stomping the floor with a clay-sodden basketball sneaker.

     Gregory sank ever lower in the flyblown plastic of his seat, compressing his vertebrae and innards with such forceful urgency that the percussion of a membrane snapping inside of him was audible to all parties present. 

     This rapid Gregorian contraction provided the seething escapee with the requisite leeway, and he lunged out the door, slamming it closed behind him. But while that portal had remained open, it had created a vacuum in the cabin, drawing the lukies closer to Gregory and diluting them with unencumbered air. At the same time, the train burst out of the tunnel and climbed above the street on its elevated struttings. Sunlight flooded the windows and ignited the lukies, refracting through them with molten brilliance.

     Now the far end of the train car had reentered objective, visible experience, and the party who had suffered there was coming into view. Everyone – Ernesto and the two swollen boho-goths – was now cocooned in an even coating of hardened lukies. But they continued to move under this neodermis, which cracked and resolidified with each contortion. The commuting crustaceans raised their hands before their faces, muttering rhythmically. Ernesto lay in the aisle on his convex back, failing repeatedly in his efforts to sit up. His stubbed fingers kept burying themselves in the discarded skull leavings of the Perfect Yellow One.

     This latter had maintained his erect posture from before, though now the obelisk at his bodily peak seemed to emit a cold, rational light of its own.

     The train pulled up to the elevated California platform and opened its doors to the ripping winds outside. Gregory shot up to his feet with all the insistence of a pressurized metal slug in a butcher’s pop gun and shambled out onto the creaking wooden boards beyond the doorway. Not a second later, the train car sealed itself behind him and began to lurch forward. The wind dropped with a sudden swoon, so that now the world had become, in a sense, airless. As the train accelerated, a tracery of lukies unmoored itself from the aluminum carapace and hovered in place. Once the flashing, clattering worm of transit had fully departed, this inert, holographic ghost was all that remained.

     Gregory descended a rusted ziggurat of stairs into the street.