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.

Lukies (pt. III)

 

    The next morning, Gregory sat up in bed promptly at seven o’clock. He walked slowly down the hallway lined with decommissioned radio equipment, taking care not to disturb the twinkling colloids which hung in the atmosphere, and attended to the maintenance of his body in the kitchen. Here, he brushed his teeth in the empty metal basin on the left side of the sink, spitting out foaming urchins of coagulated lukie that were tinged a vague pink from the blood of his gums.

     Outside his back door, he heard a stirring on the wooden porch. Switching off the dim bronze light above the stove so as to obscure his silhouette, Gregory approached the quadrilateral windows embedded in the door and watched through the diaphanous curtain which hung there.

     It was his neighbor, who had moved in across the hall not two months before: a sporty woman in her twenties with blanched skin and oddly thin, yet flaxen hair, pulled tightly flush to her skull and terminating in the back with a bulbous circular bun; this was all too evocative of the round valve handle of a bulkhead door on a mid-twentieth-century battleship – just a few affirmative twists to the left, and the panel of bone enclosing her cerebellum would swing wide open on its hinges 

     She was loaded down with three cotton bags, pregnant with soiled laundry: as she stumbled toward the precipice of the stairs, the rough-spun cotton chafed and reddened her otherwise pale thighs, just below the denim cuffs of a pair of, frankly, obscenely revealing shorts.

     As she took her first descending step, a swarm of agitated lukies came whipping around the stained brick cornice of the building, revolved a few times about one of the stairway’s support beams, and then launched themselves directly into the woman’s face.

     She immediately paused, one foot already stabilized on a lower step, and began a tirade of furious spitting. All the while, the wind was insinuating itself under the strands of her hair that had not quite fallen under the guillotine crunch of the elastic band which held her bun tightly pinioned. These hairs stood on their haunches in mystical obeisance, wavering in a half-sentient salaam, and then joined in with the ongoing harassment of their owner’s chapped lips.

     At this point, one of the swollen laundry bags slid from her shoulder and bouldered down to the landing below, where it crushed the already mutilated remnants of a basil plant into its own desiccated soil.

     Gregory’s neighbor straightened out her spine and anchored herself to the raw wooden handrail with her now freed left arm. A posture of resolution if ever I’d seen one. With the back of her other hand, she cleared her lips of the lukie scrim and took a further moment to pluck each offending hair from her scalp, whereupon she released the traitors to ascend on the rising breeze and depart from her.

     As she neared the runaway bag on the landing, a pair of words pulsed from out of her larynx, bounded over the bollards of her teeth and the weathered barrier of her lips, and then floated up the stairs toward Gregory. As the words passed through the transparent glass, they were swaddled in a cloth of semi-muteness, which depleted them of their already paltry freight of human warmth before permitting them passage into Gregory’s ear canals:

     “Fucking things…”

     With this, the woman plodded farther down the stairs, encountering no further incident, and disappeared into the laundry room.

     Gregory backed away from the windowed aperture, yet held it in his gaze for a few solemn moments before departing from the kitchen.

     Once again in his bedroom, he stopped to retrieve a wadded pair of black jeans, which he had trounced underfoot on the previous day while doffing them. He pulled them back onto his legs, slipped his feet into a pair of colorless sneakers, and shrugged on a green fine-woven aviator’s jacket, which had been hanging on the back of a grey metal folding chair. Then he left his apartment, pulling a plume of slightly ossified lukies behind him in the vacuum action of his closing door.

     Outside, the temperature had dropped roughly ten degrees and the sky had adopted a bruised marble pallor. Here in the street, the lukies adhered strictly to the ground, crackling with a static charge. On his way back toward the EL station at the bottom of his street, Gregory passed one of the trees which had emptied the contents of its pods into the world of his immediate neighborhood (a shaded oasis of red- and yellow-brick tenements, interspersed with eccentric houses designed in a late-nineteenth-century Chicago version of the Art Nouveau style, to say nothing of the odd crenelated castle).

     The tree in question was only a block south of where Gregory lived. Its domed root system was visible to the average passerby from several feet away: these were not the distinct tubular roots which grope for a more horizontal purchase of the soil and to which most are accustomed, but rather a coagulated umbrella of tortured bark, frozen in its own special sort of defecatory agony, lacking a definition of parts. In the canopy above, the once green footlong pods, hanging among a gallery of spiny, serrated leaves, had shriveled and curled back upon themselves, revealing at their inner apex, where the pod walls met the junction of the stem, an incandescent jewel of sap. Despite the overcast skies, the inner light of these jewels dazzled Gregory’s retina, causing his grey irises to collapse into pinpoints. He averted his gaze from the arboreal pageant and proceeded farther down the sidewalk.

     Once he had gained the mouth of the street, he turned toward a titanic concrete overpass that stood nearby and walked into its black underbelly. This structure doubled as the local EL platform and the Interstate 90 traffic bridge. Overhead were corroded steel girders upon which, at any given moment, anywhere from thirty to seventy pigeons would usually be roosting. But today, there were only a few, perched in odd, isolated positions and regarding Gregory as he passed below them with an affect either of brilliant, intellectual hatred or merely the dumb liquidity of pigeon eyes.

     In even, diagonal lines corresponding to the placement of the girders, Gregory’s path was striped with pigeon shit, layered upon the concrete in various thicknesses and states of yellowed encrustation. He navigated these bands of cloacal filth with the smart bipedal kinetics of a hurdle jumper until he arrived at a musty stairwell leading up to the back entrance of the platform.

     At the foot of these stairs, he came across what appeared to be a sleeping pigeon bearing a rare lactic down. Its breast extruded before it, provided a pillow upon which it lay its dormant head. But as Gregory knelt down to it, a new array of details resolved themselves to his now dilated pupils: the bird was not sleeping, but was quite dead. Its beak had been separated from the rest of its skull by a swollen tumor of lukies that must have accumulated during its flights through Gregory’s neighborhood before dramatically expanding. Moreover, what had initially seemed a sheening coat of porcelain feathers revealed itself to be a further colonization of lukies upon the creature’s corpse. Its naked white skin was slightly visible under the hoary accretion which had overtaken it – indeed, it was utterly featherless.

     Having looked his fill, Gregory stood erect and, tilting his head upward for several seconds, stared wildly into the empty box of sky enclosed in a rectangle of shuddering, slimed cement just above the stairwell.

     Then, for reasons which I am positive I shall never have the privilege of conveying to you, Gregory returned his eyes to the site of the overridden pigeon and, sweeping his leg back to its anatomical limit, gave the corpse a brutal kick into the street. An immediate car, streaking past the elephantine struts of the underpass colonnade, drilled the pitiful object with its front and back tires, whereupon the erstwhile animal exploded into a shimmering dust cloud and oozed up and away through the narrow gap between the interstate and the train platform, no doubt drawn there by the tornadic pull of torrential traffic, tearing both toward and away from the Chicago ‘Loop.’

     Gregory then bounded up the tainted, yellow steps. At their summit, he entered the automated turnstile, ratcheting through its mechanism – the iron maiden of the urban peon. Just as he crossed the borderline at which the platform opened out onto a view of the moaning interstate, the structure beneath his feet began to quake. The distant shriek of pulverized rails trebled in volume. Just a few seconds more and a blur of raw, riveted aluminum and stolid polycarbonate windows whisked past Gregory’s face. The train came to a hoarse stop.

     Amid the degraded gonging of the handicap-accessible intercom, the doors of the nearest train cabin rolled apart. Gregory ducked inside and wedged his body down in one of the few available solo seats, which was bolted to the floor at one end of the car. Immediately adjacent to this seat was a scabrous emergency door, plated in the same beaten aluminum as the exterior of the train and plastered with visually intuitive warnings and hieroglyphic escalation plans for what a passenger should do in the inevitable event that his life should come under threat.

     The hulk of the train shivered and dinned, reengaging with the electrified third rail and overcoming its inertia. Then it set off down the tracks.

Lukies (pt. II)

 

     Dusk found Gregory sitting still in his office, whose door was but two steps from the kitchen. A slatted, burnished light filtered onto his desk through the closed blinds of two flanking windows. The room was all but empty, though it had recently housed an installation of modules and components, all of which had been integrated to facilitate the functions of a powerful HAM radio. 

     A few weeks earlier, during the first break in the concluding summer’s oppressive heat, Gregory had been on-air, cruising frequencies in search of a worthy interlocuter. The pods on the trees outside had only just erupted, and the lukies, ferried around on the livid backs of the Chicago gales, had been sucked high into the atmosphere. They had acted as a sort of diffractory chaff, disturbing the natural, all-pervading flow of the city’s electromagnetic fields. As an immediate consequence, Gregory Deinde (or W4TKI, as he was known in the HAM world) failed to discern even the faintest intimation of human speech in his headphones. 

     But, then again, he had heard something. This was not the static hiss of dead air, but rather a high-pitched whine, machinic and nearly musical. Gregory had sat there, hunched over his console for some several hours as he dialed through the frequency spectrum. 

     Each wavelength possessed its own peculiar timbre: toward the bottom end, the noise was blunt and guttural; further up the dial, a jubilant note bassed with the reverberations of a million-man barbershop choir; somewhere in the middle frequencies, Gregory encountered a sudden and violent glottal snapping, followed by a couple hundred hertz filled with absolute silence; in the buttery mid-high zone, the hydraulic whine was at its shrillest, at certain sweet spots producing the deft simulacrum of a pig’s squeal at the moment when it feels the cold steel bore of the butcher’s pop-gun leave an impression in its ruddy skin, just above the frontal skull plate; and at the highest extremities, the drone tapered down into a pastoral buzzing: an aural realm of infinite flies – ZZ-ZZ-ZZ. 

     As the hours passed, Gregory had begun to describe the quality of these evolving tones in his radio operator’s diary. By late that evening, he had filled nearly fifty pages in his dense, minute script. While economy of space precludes me from sharing the entire contents of his observations (and though it greatly pains me to exclude them, for they were piercing revelations which may never see the light of day), I reproduce below for the reader a selection of salient excerpts: 

     “(01:27:35) – I’ve been listening to this signal for a small age. Initially, it was raucous and seemed to be damaging my hearing, but now it sounds almost harmonious. I am currently stopped around 330 MHz, where the tone appears to have taken on a sinusoid dullness. After having listened to this for twenty minutes, I feel that it is goading me. I feel utterly unbeholden, now, to the regulations of that great, yet irrelevant giant of conventional human communications – the FCC. That may just be the result of this total radio isolation. But every aspect of these new, insulated signals, which I presume to be the product of electromagnetic radiation rebounding off of the flurrying fuzz outside and back onto my antenna, alludes to something more than a mere disturbance pattern […].” 

     “(2:25:33) – I went ahead and fired up my old oscilloscope, thinking I might be able to glean a definite visual pattern. There was a pattern there, indeed – but unlike anything I ever expected to see printed in green light across my humble grid. Some sort of sine wave motion is definitely involved, but the wave is oscillating at so rapid a frequency that it is phasing across the screen in a wide, solid band, through which only the most occasional darkness seems to appear. I am almost seeing shapes in this image. Things seemingly impossible, even for the most contrived arrangement of modulations, set into motion at the hands of a hermetic hobbyist. No, this is something like a hologram. A bas-relief chiseled into the side of some gigantic megalith. Just now, I am looking at what could be an extremely weathered hand, pointing at something, or signaling some definite direction […].” 

     “(05:03:31) – Just a moment ago, I looked up from the stack on my desk to rest my eyes, and I looked out the window. I couldn’t see the usual street with its line of parked cars and its walls of brick. It was like opening the door to a room where a fatal pillow fight has just ended. Just like the blinding green strip of light on my oscilloscope, my window was a rectangle of off-white, with only the occasional aperture opening in the blustering blankness to afford me a glimpse of something: the corroded metal hood of a streetlamp? One of those ceramic dowels around which powerlines are spooled? I couldn’t say for sure, and my words would be doubtful even if I could. Because, in this new context of the visible, the street furniture has been assigned a new identity and purpose. It’s all a part of a deliberate communication. I see that now […].” 

     “(06:23:32) – All plausible deniability has evaporated. They’re not just some excrescence of nature. They have a name. I discovered this by scrubbing quickly through the dial. Each notable alteration of sound that comes with the various frequency ranges is clearly delineated from the others. At the right speed, I began to hear a voice, almost human yet profoundly not, stringing together the following phonemes: L – U – K – I – E – S. This is what they are, what they are called: Lukies […].” 

     “(10:01:10) – And just like that, the lukies have fallen out of the sky. Now they are bunched up in the wheel wells of cars, nesting in the upper crooks of trees where the limbs diverge from the trunk. They are whipping around in dumb vortices after the sucking acceleration of a passing car. And, needless to say, the signal is gone. Now the chatter of the world has returned. The first person I heard on the radio was going on in a drawling Esperanto. I could not tolerate it for long. I felt compelled to switch off the power strip under my desk. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve had my fill of HAM. Perhaps this is W4TKI’s final sign-off […].” 

     And, indeed, Gregory had had his fill. So oppressed was his gorge with this now superfluous burthen of human interaction that, even after having sat for over ten hours to probe the aural tissue of the lukies’ communiqué, he labored yet three more hours in stripping his office bare of the radio and its attendant paraphernalia. He had hefted these clattering aluminum modules into the hallway by his front door, dropping them carelessly into partially collapsed cardboard boxes, which quickly flared up with a patina of mold and liquid rot, due to the irreducible humidity issuing from the doorway of the bathroom nearby. 

     The bathroom was the one area in his apartment which Gregory had perpetually avoided since that day. he had taken to urinating in the kitchen sink. Defecation had become a much more delicate consideration. Eventually, he settled into a regime of controlled dehydration, drinking just enough water to eject his post-peristaltic waste, while ensuring that the fecal excrescence would emerge each time in a rigid, compact oblong. These latter he deposited into the remaining surplus of cardboard boxes that had colonized his apartment. A given box, designated for this purpose, would be positioned in a crumb-strewn corner of his kitchen under the breakfast table until Gregory had filled it to the brim. 

     The aridity of the decomposing feces, I imagine, was meant to counteract its inevitable stench. 

     Meanwhile, the bathroom had changed both in form and function as the lukies filtered in from the street. Given their singular moisture-wicking properties, they gravitated to this epicenter of apartmental humidity, crowding around the faucets of the sink and bathtub, coagulating into permanent fiberglass plugs over the respective drains. The toilet lid had mechanically risen to a vertical position as a quivering tower of lukies accumulated and crystalized; the toilet tank had developed a lacework of hairline fractures, from which miniscule ridges of oozing, transparent teeth had begun to protrude. 

     Perhaps counter-intuitively, this growing accretion around the various water sources in the bathroom only seemed to draw more moisture into the air. It was as though the lukies acted as a sort of nebulizer for water molecules, projecting them up into the heights of the small room, where they condensed into cloudy strata and began to billow out into the hallway. 

     After several weeks, Gregory had grown accustomed to the new variables of his home. Now he spent his idle moments in his vacant office – the driest room available to him. At the current moment, he sat erect before his battered desk of faux-oak, the veneer surface of which had begun to bow upward, separating from the grizzled particle board beneath. Even here, the occasional lukie hung suspended in the air, minutely revolving in the molasses glower of sundown.

     These last weak solar beams painted a tawny grid of parallel lines across Gregory’s face. Around his nostrils, two fanged coronas of pneumatized lukie sparkled and deliquesced.

Lukies (pt. I)

 

     The street was awash with lukies: plush little copulations of semitransparent cilia which had erupted from long, segmented pods attached to trees overhanging the sidewalks. “Lukies” was the name given them by Gregory Deinde, who presently dragged his shoes through entire drifts of them. His face took on the shapes and configurations of a novel mental difficulty, which it is to be doubted was ever experienced before. He had just disembarked from the train down the street and was plowing his way toward the ruddy brick carapace of his apartment building. The stifling breeze of that year’s penultimate dog-day slung its obese and drooping arm around his sweating neck.

     In two mere minutes, he was standing before the dingy, glass-encased vestibule, wrangling a ring of keys out of his jacket pocket. Just inside, tossed recklessly into a disintegrating cobweb, which had by now accumulated a veritable plumage of lukies, he espied an envelope bearing his name in large, hand-crafted letters. Shoving the key home into the bronze lock and leaning into the door with his shoulder, Gregory lolled into the dim enclosure and bent over to fetch the letter. He held it close to his face. From this distance, his eyes could resolve a finer print, jotted below his name:

 

“Somewhat urgent, but not extremely”

 

Gregory’s eyes jittered: from dyslexia? a kind of peripheral neuralgia? or due to a basic corporeal illiteracy? It’s not my place to conjecture. But then he stuffed the envelope into the breast pocket of his jacket and stomped up the stairs to the second floor, where he let himself into his apartment.

     Passing with hesitation through the hallway which met him on the other side of the door, stacked with mold-choked cardboard boxes and obsolete radio equipment, Gregory made his way to the kitchen. This culinary chamber was situated in the extreme eastern boundary of his oblong apartment. Once arrived, he approached the sink and filled a copper pot with water. This he set down over a trembling lotus of blue gas-fed flames and dropped in an egg to boil. Then he lowered himself into a nearby chair, his knobbed spine screeching against the cheap faux leather upholstery, and rested his elbows on the circular breakfast table.

     The envelope, which bore his name in the monumental font of a practiced and eccentric hand, once more hovered a span of inches from his face. He flipped it over and set about shredding its flap with his honed thumbnail; he had specially cultivated this utilitarian growth to serve as an all-purpose blade or spatula whenever the need arose. Inside of the envelope was a plain leaf of college-ruled notebook paper, folded into thirds.

     One result of its unfolding was the animated dispersal of a load of lukies. These were not the regal spheroid manes of milked fluff which were being hourly multiplied in the street below, but rather detached anemic sprays of three and four cilia apiece. They did not float down to the floor as gravity might have dictated, but cycled mutely through the air, carried on the invisible convection of the stove heat.

     Gregory spent a solid minute sputtering and motorboating his swollen lips in an ineffectual bid to rid his mouth of lukies; but the ones that had evaded the palisade of his dun teeth had already clung to the walls and roof of his mouth and had absorbed his saliva to the greatest extent conceivable, transforming the enzyme-infused liquid into an insuperable cement. After a further moment, Gregory’s eyes fell upon his spade of a thumbnail. He would need to carry out an aggressive intervention with this multifarious tool in order to alleviate his oral cavity of the invasive matter, but apparently decided to leave off with the business until he had tended to the contents of the letter.

     Drawing his eyes back onto the creased sheet before him, Gregory scanned, perhaps not fully comprehending, the following lines:

 

“Hey Greg,

     My power’s out and my phone’s cut off (ran out of minutes), so I’m left with good old pen & paper. Not that it bothers me to write this in longhand. I used to keep a diary, and the act of putting words on paper with ink was often more enjoyable than the very meaning the words were meant to convey. But this is all a bit of chatter and dross. Pardon the self-indulgence.

     I’m writing because I haven’t seen you lately at the hi-fi shop. Blaze even mentioned your absence toward the end of the last clinic. So we’re all wondering what’s become of you. No one has heard you on the usual bandwidth, either. We were hoping to have you come in and show us that modified encryption system you mentioned the last time you showed up.

     Anyway, you’re probably wondering how this letter found its way into your mail slot. None of us have ever come to visit your place, of course. But I got your address off of Charlie Reagent, the parts guy who runs that shop down on Lincoln. I figured he must have been mailing stuff to you in this interim of quietude (he sells better kit for cheaper, anyway, so good on you). Hope you don’t mind. Write back! You know where to leave the letter.

 

Over ‘n’ out,

D7KFY (Jameson)

 

     P.S. Apologies for the fuzz. There’s one of those pod trees right outside my parlor window and, over the past few weeks, it’s filled every cubic inch of air in my house with these whisps. Any minute now, I swear I'll see Donald Sutherland standing in my front yard, pointing and gawping at me."

 

    Having read this missive’s final line, Gregory folded the letter once more into thirds and restored it to the ragged envelope in which it had arrived.

     Just then, a globular missile of seething water leapt from the now boiling pot and landed on the crown of his head, searing not only his scalp (denuded as a result of male-pattern balding), but also very likely violating the seat of his highest chakra and momentarily destroying his chances of rejoining the pleroma of the Godhead, should his body happen to expire within the next five minutes. His shoulders gave a violent shudder as he clamped his knees to his chest. This sudden shift in Gregory’s gravitational center set his chair into a slow orbital spin. In all of this action, little to no sound was produced. Such was Gregory’s habit in his longsuffering. Silence is golden.

     But judging by the singularity of his facial topography, one could easily infer the words: “The Egg! Not My Head!”

     Truth to tell, Gregory’s phrenological profile was not entirely dissimilar from the contours of a healthy tan egg, plucked from the hay-strewn roost of a natural-raised heirloom hen, who is regarded by her human protectors, just about, as a member of the family.

     Naturally, in such a comparison, we make all necessary concessions for the presence on Gregory’s capital egg of a vestigial and piebald remainder of human hair.

     Yet, even taking this detail into account, as Gregory ladled the egg appointed as his lunch out of the tumbling, vaporous waters of the copper pot, the lukies latent in the atmosphere of the kitchen began to adhere to the smoking eggshell. Here, now, the resemblance was entire, such that, were Gregory to stand beside himself, comparing the two boiled eggs present in the room, he might just as well crack his own skull open on the cheap, savaged linoleum of the countertop and sprinkle salt upon the now exposed semi-liquid yolk inside.

     But Gregory, very much inside himself, cracked the initial egg instead. Standing over the trash can in the shadowed corner by a battered microwave and a pile of withered garlic cloves, he relieved the ovoid cargo of its fractured hull. It was this hull which, in the act of separation, came away with large chunks of white flesh and gummed membrane. This ejecta pattered onto a wreck of discarded cellophane which sat atop the mound of refuse within.

     By the time the egg was cleaned, it bore the countenance of an asteroid-ravaged moon, unveiling deposits of a pale yellow ore, already greying as it oxidized and gaped out from the soft, sweating crags; here was a supple Mount Olympus; and there, a shallow Sea of Tranquility.

     Gregory began to lift this quarry to his sparkling mouth when the lukies fell upon it.

     Once fastened and fully saturated, these tufts desiccated the egg’s surface and hardened into a brittle crust. Gregory turned the gnarled, ovoid sphere over in his hands a few times, inspecting the prohibitive new layer. Then he let it fall into the trash, where it crashed through to the bottom of the bag and lay stewing in a juicy abyss.