The film ran far longer than you were anticipating. And to add insult to injury, you were left standing in the soiled concrete grotto of a subterranean train platform for an additional half-hour, watching the emboldened mice scavenge for sustenance amidst rubber-insulated cables, shattered gravel, and begrimed rails. It was already nearly one in the morning by the time you were taking your seat on the train. Just a few stops later, you stepped out onto another platform, this one raised high above the street and closed in on both sides by an interstate; even at that hour, cars passed incessantly, the rubber of their tires raising up an evil sigh. You limped down the long, austerely lit catwalk to a turnstile, which led in turn to a stairwell that would take you down to street level. At the foot of the stairs, you balled your fists into your jacket pockets and set off under the stanchions and girders supporting the interstate bridge; overhead, recently installed nets were hung with the fragmented bodies of pigeons that had thrashed themselves to death in a panic of entrapment. Banks of feathers mounted the low brick wall nearby and littered the concrete embankment behind it, occasionally opening up to reveal further avian corpses. Some of these unfortunates lay in two or three pieces, their matted rib-cages cooling and hardening in the mild autumn air; others were more elaborately deconstructed, having been sampled by local rats.
Just as you were coming out of the overpass, you looked down at a relatively unscathed carcass. For a moment, you simply mistook it for a live pigeon, nuzzling itself next to the bolted base of a bus sign. But closer inspection revealed that it was quite extinguished. What's more, its head had been rammed down into its plumed trunk by a cheap plastic dictaphone. Thinking little of any possible contaminations that might befall you, you immediately squatted down and removed it from its expired receptacle. Wiping the brackish fluidic crust off of its speaker, you pressed the play button. As you walked northbound up a residential street, with harsh LED streetlamps casting daggers of shadow through the lower boughs of decaying trees, a steady, affectless voice droned and buzzed into the gloom, barely audible beneath the turbulent wind and vehicle traffic of the EL platform you had just left.
"I have this idea of conducting an egregious invasion of someone's privacy... by surreptitiously recording his most innate moments of... candid admission... This tape will mark the beginning of my sidewalk sessions... To return to the idea of generating a negative being... the anti-matter of human experience... the connective tissue that spans from one person's day to another person's day... [car horn]... alone cannot be deciphered or interpreted... yet, later, through conversations that can only come after the fact, an intentional movement of forces outside of human agency reveals itself... So what could this be? What could this entity be, I'm thinking... Something dreadful is happening. If enough people with the right eye and the same disposition were to get together and recount the events of the same day, they might discover that something awful has happened. It took all of them getting together in a room to find it out. I wanted to talk about... and his short story collection... Uh... a monument... he goes into an... ah... a litany of different names for this monument.. and, at every point, it seems as though he has exhausted the names... and then he leaps from his own perspective to the perspectives of concerned mothers. And then, suddenly, entirely new fields of concern become apparent... And that could be the most important aspect of generating a negative agency. 'Agency' is probably the word. I suppose the other dimension of this problem... is how this can tie into the Iptar worldview. I guess an obvious person or being... to revisit... that's probably what I'm getting at here... would be something that is the negative image of human agency - everything that isn't the result of what we all consciously desire and try to bring about, that does not exist but nonetheless has its own desires and intentions. So... essentially, the Beast of Conglomerate Surface is formulated in an ambling way. It is all surfaces, but only for the moment. So, as many moments as there are... in a human life,... but it takes a certain kind of hyperawareness of surfaces in general, of texture, of objective presence to even perceive the Beast of Conglomerate Surface. It requires a paranoid disposition, to repeat myself..."
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