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.
