And dust stirr’d and did dance in time’s own company, and yea, the years did wander’d, as the kilns of la Marais Noir wast seen no more, no light from the smokes, nor the stench of those familiar figures. Burn’t they were, yea, the seeds of Jimsonweed, and there came a whisper, a phantom-call from the little man below, down in the caverns deep, in a tongue strange and unknowing save one word, one word alone: pourer, power… &&& Yea, I shookwith delirious splendor and Yea, I seized and frothed like Le Marais, and with calmer nights and warmer winds were taken from me the very worst memories of this chemical exorcism, a stretch of time in which my absense had made itself so sudden and glaring sucb as to solicit concerns from even the most selfish and clever, who did not affect any pretense of worry or concern for my “rare blood disease” as Mother had concocted at the very moment someone – it matters not who – inquired as to if I needed work done in order to “make mine own livre &&& comptes” – his books, accounts… all “rendre entier” and Yea, he had felt the Wrath of God as Mother registered the mischief, Yea, and it came to pass that he would surrender five arpents further &&& Mother’s long-held notions were proven sincere to say nothing of what became of this man after a series of oblique and bizarre schemes conjured a taught yet ever-fraying fiction the Seigneur wouldn’t have other-wise given this grinning, toothless charlatan’s noted and storied penchant for exactly this behavior in the past, but Yea &&& it came to pass as the little men shrunk de plus en plus petit, smaller and smaller as Winter hath now ascended upon this most fertile and crafted landscape, and I do sweat and churn, and canst smell the reeking oils and gasses, spewing as blood from a stone, from organs unpierced and yet bleeding. It is as though I am a corpse in mine own body, and of a mind more decrepit and water-logged than even the Scarecrow. Yea, my mind and soul are dense with splinter’d thatch, memories tearing apart like wood rotting under the lash of time. And verily, eerie words in tongues which cannot exist, no, not in all the spectrum of human speech, didst invasively take over and declare that mine own mind hath a new Seigneur, and I was left to retire, to spend my days as but a skeletal remnant.
Yea, mine potions were scatter’d about, so that it came to pass that I could not stir from mine bed to inspect them, for I was bound. Ossified, yea, I was as clay against the bedsheets and the pillow, and beside me a great book about the old hermit Leopoloux, who told of vile, near-death experiences, not unlike mine own. For as I read, I did reek and spume upon the page with the bilious stench and croaking froth of acid, churning as in a kiln of ice, now cloaked in stillness and utter defeat of mine own will. And infallibilis videri (infallible seeming) illusions surrounded me, as though life were but a tunnel of two mirrors, facing one another and reflecting endlessly into a vast and undefined distance.
When Spring arriv’d, I did venture out to find mine beloved once more, she who had only seen Mother two or three times in the last six months of mine corpselike demotion. For mine job, and mine vocation, given by God, did unfurl into a circus of pidgin-words and demon-mangled grammar. Pings of Pure Light from God’s hands and His Eyes didst flicker through this chaos, and His Craft—yea, carpentry and wood, the wick wood sickly wrapped thickissly we reject the conflation clause rampantly webbed but such delicately wrapped wick wood and wick cloud and wickish gossamer shaddled into gérepont wick wood and Yea I chew’d on my tongue at the nadir of Winter’s own bite in various throes of baragouin verbiage and wick-wood’ed radotage des Bois… of this writhing babulatio His all-promoting, all-allowing hand—was mine only solace.
The sky and the water reflect’d back His Creation, and those incantations of aphasic fury, gibberish overwhelming mine senses, all the wicked things and wooden things scampered off into the caves and miniature dungeons of the mind, and it was our neighbor closest to the city that gave me a French &&& English Bible brought me again to the land of skin that clingeth yet to bone, and the tissue that maketh us animate, if not somnambulant Men.
And thus, it came to pass, I was prepared to make fair terms as sucb as a resigned Man of Cloth and Grace, and I needeth sustenance; yet, before long, I could find no food, no drink, nor note left for me, as was the custom of Pierre. Mother was gone, and Yea, gone for the first time in ten long years. Where hast thou gone, Mother? Où, dis-moi, maintenant! Maintenant, Mère, maintenant!
Seigneur and Mother did draft many contracts and wait for the strongest wind’s whistle before the voices of both were plaited and Sacre was what little I could merely mouth out, and I would mimick this vulgar appeal to the Heavens only for the Seigneur to bellow at the most discreet, personal tales of boyhood foolishness and the putrid bequests &&& reeking malignant heirlooms left by the Scarecrow, all of this to an ever-cascading choral-valley of laughter descending and soon then going quiet as the stench &&& reek waxed fouler still, until the lac was now calm and fair and with great reluctancy and with that violent sweat sans fin or rather sine fine, or ceaceless, Yea, without end, O &&& mine imperative then became to model myself into a Scarecrow, for I had no place to inhabit this effigulated Exuviæ, this wormed manikin husk, this Chaotique pupa fantoche, o Mother, hold my midden remains and allow me grace… Sacre, o Mother!
&&& I iterated this call in seeming vain until she found me along the enwrathed &&& starved exuvaeic remains of connective tissue between wind and soul &&& to Mother I begged for time and cried out as she held me close to the final stretch, hushing me into dreams replaced by vulgar glossolalic ferver, dreams credited as ceaseless cadavering towards an inner passage, beneath all known falculties of logic and waken consciousness, down where the wick wood strings grow out into matted locks of memory and ephemeral images which do rise and Yea, flourish as tho exotic plant-life or aquatic organisms yet known but suspected, and forged, and Yea, seen but never caught, just like the little men, o they have must return’d to Detroit and its environs so as do the birds and beavers and color and sound and processes of daily life such as the skiffs carrying small caches of pelts and yew-wood and peaches and broken coral, the waves from the captains of these modest vessels, the sensation of instant-love as another young petit Imaguncula walks along the water and jumping so softly between planks connecting the ribbon farms to the wornless roads and echoate patter of the little men and of dancing footsteps in the dark drossed tunnelage below…

All was good, yea, and prosperous, for upon my twenty-and-sixth fête d’anniversaire, I did meet a young woman; a keen and slender and forte, agile orphan, she was, brought forth from the failed and ancient colonial attempts, like unto those led by the hommes sans foi et rusés, autorités morales, men who walk’t without fear of God. She, Miss Renee de la Rivière-Lune, didst slowly lead me astray, away from the libations that were as plentiful as the dews of morning, and from the wordless dreams of the Marsh—and, yea, of the lesser bogs also—where there sat ever a man, a dreamer, they said, yet this man did proclaim in a voice both low and terrible, that we were not dreamers, nor men as such, but wretched souls wandering in rances, décrépits spaces of dreams not our own.
For in those places, yea, even the crumbling of the very theater sets of creation itself was upon us, and without reason, all form and void was taken by the creeping of the vine and the green, and the shadows thereof cast into the shapes of copper mannequins, who were summoned by the copper-man, a creature from the kiln, who delighted in the strange machinations of his art. For he, though lacking mouth or nose or ear or eye, wound up his machine, yea, he did latch it high unto the rafters of wooden structures, and all below were as clay in his hands.
These remnants, what were they? Broken planks, empty shells of ammunition, loose powders and herbs, and, yea, even food, long since spoiled and smothered in filth that had become one with the bark of trees. And this family, did they not know the source of their toil? Four boys, and three girls, and a father, and a mother, and yea, it was said their name was DuPlaine. Or perhaps Antoinette de la Plaine-DuMarie, for such were their ways that names and truths did change in the turning of the seasons.
I remember only her, Miss DuPlaine, and her habit of collecting the “duplaine tendre,” the DuPlaine-Marie Treasury Tender Bills, a scheme so murky it was as the marshes in which they wander’d. The family, near hermetic, would take fine garments, some stolen, some found, and divide them—one to the bank, and another to the Seigneur, while in the deep hours of night the parents could be heard whispering, au-delà des chuchotements des arbres et de la danse du vent, and I have been told it such as beyond the whispers of the trees and the dance of the wind.
But in time, yea, the seventh time seven years had pass’d, and Mother, ever diligent, did discover a great discrepancy in what she called Les Livres—“The Books,” depending on who sought them. For some, the Seigneur himself, or others, a vestigiale banking operation, bound either to confess or to flee with haste afore the many chevaux forts et apprivoisés dans l’écurie de Mère were sent forth, yea, near-spooked in their fervency for conquest and the breaking of men. For it was said: the bounty hunters did sit in silence, their eyes ever fixed upon the lointain, fleuri de pourpre horizon, waiting for the first light of dawn to fade, and their hearts, yea, their very minds were riven with hunger, a hunger for flesh-debts owed, a hunger to collect what was due…

&&& it came to pass that a false twilight hath broken, the air scatter’d as black mold upon the earth or as an émulsion de rêve, a wicked cosmic vision writ upon the wooden marsh and trap-sand whereupon the very trees did murmur strange tongues, and I, in the depths of slumber, dream’d of the lake pressing forth blood from the rocks beneath, and the Great Light dripping as honey from the heavens, du ciel et des étoiles mêmes, and the purple sky was plung’d into the abyss, oozing forth sweet golden nectar until all was swallow’d by darkness, and lo, this wild land hath (a eu) laid its claim upon me as though I were naught but its vassal; for my father, he who was once known for his prolific commands, calling forth men’s loyalties unto their duty—to the lord, the crown, and to God Almighty—spake ever of such obligations, yet I, though I hearken’d unto his words, did ruminate upon a commandement supérieur: our duty above all to the wood and the water, to this very land that sustaineth us, and now, two decades apart from that dissolving memory, I stand amidst the damp and rot of the marsh, dans les roseaux et la boue of this land of servitude; and in the windows of the grand buildings, and in the shadows at the edge of my periphery, I see my father no longer as he was in life—nay, his flesh is long gone, consumed by dampness and worms, and behold, he is now but a thing of wood, noircit et imbibé d’eau, slouch’d by the hearth, his limbs stiff as the dead, yet still he speaketh, though not as the living do, for his voice is thrown from the very walls themselves, as though moved by some cosmic puppeteer, commanding the roots of the earth; &&& it came to pass, in the days when men did hearken unto strange counsel, &&& that there were two, FranSwah and Gérard by name, who did transgress the law they had bound unto themselves, even to trust in their own maps, and the land was no land, but a span of numbers graven upon the firmament, as points upon a scroll unfurl’d, and they took their path by the Strait, even the Détroit du Lac, when the sky was as purple as wine and the splendeur of the heavens did pour forth in the breaking of the day; and lo, the canoes and skiffs arose with the dawn, set in ranks ordered as the hosts of the sea, but soon they were sever’d, each to its course into the winding canals, le dédale des marécages, and the broad expanse of Lac Synklarr, so called by FranSwah and those of New France; and the lake did stretch and swell as a thing unending, its waters as a maiden untouched and undefiled, swaying betwixt the horizons of the earth as the heavens above did reflect upon its surface; now these two, FranSwah and Gérard, were brought together by the word of Mother, who had knowledge of them by way of Pierre, who once had fallen prey to the craft of FranSwah, for he was a man of great ruse and la sagesse des hommes; thus, they departed into the vast wilderness, into the depths of the earth, trusting neither in their maps nor in the wisdom of men, but rather in that which is invisible and incalculable; and lo, the morning did break upon the Detroit, but it was no simple dawn, for the sky was hued in violet profond, as though the heavens were dyed by some cosmic hand, the air thick and dense as it s’accrochait to the waters, moving not as a breath of life but as a murmur, un murmure d’inconnu et oublié, scatter’d like spores of mold upon the winds; and upon this water, calm and vast, the canoes and skiffs of the habitants de la Nouvelle-France did stir, moving silently as if compelled by an unseen force, proceeding in ranks tight and ordered as an army of the sea, but soon each was drawn from its course, turning aside into the labyrinthine ways of the flats, the marshes, and the maze of canals leading unto “de Lac Sinklayrr”; the lake, as muddl’d by FranSwah and those who knew the wild tongues of this ancient land, appear’d ever-expanding, un corps d’eau neither beginning nor ending, stretching far beyond what the eye could measure, its waters pristine, untouched, virginal—rocking gently as a young maiden unmark’d by man, cradling the horizons between earth and heaven until both were one; in that hour, as the sky burn’d with shades of violet profond, FranSwah and Gérard knew they had enter’d a world not their own, a place where moting, étrange light was strange and the land murmured of choses inconnues et oubliées, the strait, once familiar, become a place of dark beauty where the laws of nature bent under the weight of some hidden force, unseen but ever-present; and lo, my blood-sweat curl’d and twist’d into the pitch and sap of the earth, seeking to bind itself unto the soil, drawn deep into the foul womb of the marsh, and behold, a man of copper, burnish’d as though forged in ancient fires, did plunge his blade into my flesh, yet it was no true blade but a dull forgery of times long vanish’d; My son, a voice spake unto me, look behind thee, and I turn’d to see a child, his hands kneading clay as though shaping a thing born of his own mind, for he commanded this illusion of a golem, and behold, the blade had punctur’d naught, I did not bleed, the pitch is pure, do not let it bleed into thee, Yes, Mother, I whisper’d, my voice naught but wind through reeds, thou art not hidden in the grass, she spake again, cease thy shameful display, for the lord approacheth, hide thyself, but I was no longer in the open fields; I had pass’d into a tunnel unknown to the lord, deep beneath the greatest canal, where shadows danced like idle marionettes conjur’d not by flesh but by idle play, born neither of urgency nor fear; as I mov’d deeper, a new path reveal’d itself, unseen before, and there stood a little man, beckoning me to leave, but I was not ready; thou art reckless, he spake, Jacques nearly perish’d trying to ascend yonder path; thou shouldst wait for his return from Acadia… and lo, his voice became as my mother’s, the two voices melding and parting like shadows cast by a swinging lamp, ever elusive; the little men led me deeper into the earth, where air was thick and foul with age, and there I saw a figure, a man of wood, hunched with a finger rais’d, a wick burning at its tip, revealing the face of the lord in crude effigy, we had to know what he looked like… the little man mutter’d; the Bouchards have vanish’d into the flats, where the lake mirrors the heavens, marshes and grasses rise tall, canals weave endlessly, navigable only by the rarest of wood runners, spectral figures whose language unravels as if the land twists their tongues; the hermits were here before Cadillac, before the French, and my father was one, shap’d by the land, forged from copper, wood, and mud, a lost man without root or name; my mother whisper’d of him as the Scarecrow, who took on my father’s emptiness, becoming as he was—a man of air and decay; at first, they were unalike, but over years they ventur’d together into the flats, merging until they were one; Mother says both are dead, but something moves behind the walls when my father’s figure appears, crude and waterlogged; she has seen the effigy, heard its voice, though she speaks little, saying it is the little men who speak, summoned by hermits like my father, but her words are sharp, fearful; others I’ve ask’d are stricken silent, fading into marsh shadows as if the land consumes them; my horse was found by my youngest brother, skeletal, near death; I recall not what befell her; we hid her, Elysee Bouchard cared for her; My son, that name haunts us forever, Yes, Mother; but much she does not know—my second home, a property left to her by debtors seeking refuge in the flats, who vanish’d after her contracts, existing only in void, known to hermits and Powatomiwe traders who keep vast, unknowable records; when Jacques returns from Cousin Errol’s distant realm where du Lac meets The Detroit straite, and then the Detroit straite meets the Strait of the Lake and winding corridors of flats remain’d with hope to be forever unmapped, I shall learn more; Errol was guided there by a favor to Mother, before Pierre came; ah, Pierre, effete and nebbish, yet clever; we trust him more than we ought; he knows little of my affairs; My son, Mother asks, why not have Pierre deliver your contracts? and I laugh, for much she will never understand; and

it came to pass that I dream’d upon the lake, my sweat mingling with blood, seeking the wound I thought was there, as I roll’d within visions of a faceless manikin thrusting a red-fuming copper rapier into my back until the vision decay’d, slipping swiftly away, and I beheld a man lying dead against a skeletal tree, in boggish land where vagrants’ children run, scraping against reeds, inhaling spores of Stachybotrys, ergotamines, and other unknowable things of decay; I saw the fleur de tan—slime mold, bark flower—growing along trees and tunnels, tracin’ eorum patterns qui led me again to Black Marsh—the Marais Noir of local fable and myth, and I say now in times passed: the Marait Noir was un thought de a wandering et forse, Yea, a place where fiendish mens mind to imagine leurs rituals et la manière they used wooden dummies et homines in rotten effigy et all ces lenses et mirrors et sable et raw coke from leurs tar kilns.—the Black Marsh, that reeking place of wooden reeds crack’t into un-holy shapes where men tread at wretch’d lost hours, a place erasing itself with the sunrise over Lake St. Claire, the fungi and bizarre flora receding into trap-sands &&& it was within mine throe of assassination by some crude automatoic weapon, on the path holding up a knife, a bag of bread- there he was, a shadow barely holding onto a nimble young boy and I shout’t Yea, young man, I need—- &&& as his countenance tighten’d pass’d me with concern, holding distance, yet lock’d eyes with me and spake: Oh, sir, I must be on my way but… that… &&& he did walk towards me panting and as he drank foul Ferventia and he did affect a voice of pointing to my waist and chest, averting his gaze before fleeing, and I was swept into another state, feeling as though caught within interlock’d wood-cut zoetropes, a broken kaleidoscopic toy, out of body, watching myself seek a wound that was not there, yet drops fell, leaving a fresh trail, until daylight reveal’d the truth—it was not blood but ink; I was far beyond the outer marshes, beyond Grosse Pointe, beside the ever-changing Grand Marsh, wander’d up and down the river, lurching upon my horse through sleepy hallucinations of settlements copying each other, blurred signs, monstrous plants, structures resembling barns but serving no purpose, dreamish impressions fleeing the majestic arc, away from water and home, prompting me to turn back, drenched in oily sweat as my horse turn’d against the wind; the majestic arc… my father explain’d it simply when I was a child, as we camp’d by the lakeside, trekking paths unworn and overrun with weeds, nature still fighting; he spake with clarity that startled me: Between New Orleans and Quebec is a majestic arc of golden light that peaks exactly where we lay—and he tore meat with soft teeth, unable to chew it all, stripping it like a beast, looking upon me as though I did the same, eating like a slave bound by hunger &&& and it came to pass that Gérard and FranSwah were given a task, and a canoe fashioned of the Yew Tree, which Pierre had received following the fire of 1765, from the days when New France was of young men and ancient customs &&& and Gérard spake unto me of the doomed unholy mixture of unholy mathematics and the reeking marsh-woods, tiled into men suspended as desired to make proper peace, to breathe wooden air and burn as the aphasia became operative unto their fate &&& so then is there FranSwah, deterred only by his shadow-self, pushed through this bogged graveyard as their paddles splintered as they tried to break through densely woven &&& rotten black-wheate fibrous-structure reeds &&& click into the lattice, yea, FranSwah said—as told by Gérard in confidence—as the little men listened deep down in the tunnel: “Ensure thou count’st the length of cords. Beware the false twilight, sir, and do pack our pipes as I row,” and Gérard duly counted the cords as just the two men alone did amble in petrified quiet as diligent &&& admirably self-coined during the fortnjtely victorious Coureurs des Errant: Kings of Error”, and was assured in his ability to do so without having to cede land within their own conspiracy, one which they assured another equally as to its viability within the temperament of their employer &&& behold, on this very day did mine eyes fall once more upon the Frenchman, the animate scarecrow who walks and lo, his gaze was fastened upon me, filled with disbelief and a strange, unnatural thrill, as though time itself had ceased its course, yea, he did sit within the tavern, where men gather’d for foolish mirth, skulls held up by terrible actors; men who could not even impersonate or even dare play themselves &&& there he, the somnambulant scarecrow, with whirling wooden games ticking and metronomically controlling the tempo of the room, all these phantasmic works, his foin effiloché et rouillé housing these impii enginements and geared machinery sustaining his countenance &&& there the Frenchman, my Father, play’d at cards, bellowing like a beast stricken by madness, making of himself a wretched jester, as one who hath squander’d all his gold, and yes, I did see him raise his hand, and with trembling finger point toward me, and I beheld the rotten tableaux for its God-furnished reeking nakedness, all the men that did surround him did turn their gaze upon me, as though ensnared by some face they knew too distantly to trust, and they did play games beyond games using mirrors and I announced, yea, let this stained glass smashed reveal great beaming pinhole worlds, gleaming, ever-manifesting camera obscura and laughed and drank potions of Datura stramonium (Devil’s Trumpet), Atropa belladonna (Deadly Nightshade) tincture, Mandragora officinarum (Mandrake Root Elixir), Hyoscyamus niger (Henbane Brew), Amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric Mushroom Decoction), Nicotiana rustica (Wild Tobacco Infusion), Sassafras albidum (Sassafras Tea), Salix alba (Willow Bark Decoction), Panax quinquefolius (Ginseng Tincture), and Hypericum perforatum (St. John’s Wort Infusion), and it did make us all gay and then soon ill &&& I withdrew, and there was ice upon my spine, as though the very breath of void were upon me, and I made my way in haste toward the river, even unto the dark waters of the Detroit, to the marsh, one I was never able to find again, and which did murmur strange things beneath the heavens.

Harrison adjusted his tie in the private compartment, watching mountains blur past the window. The door rattled—a sharp knock. A porter, small as a child, handed him a stack of papers and an unmarked VHS tape with movements too precise to be natural.

His supervisor, Mr. Chen, appeared moments later. “Review everything before the terminal,” he said, eyes lingering on the tape. “And Harrison… good luck.”

Laughter erupted from surrounding compartments. The coin-operated TVs hummed behind frosted glass, their blue light casting strange shadows. Harrison sorted through documents as the sound of joy and horror mixed together, creating a cacophony that made his head swim.

———————-

“YyyyyyAAAOh… DAVID, BABY!” The voice stretched across the seawall, where men with broken metal detectors stood in formation. “OH PLEASE, BABY, OH IT BURNS!”

A young worker jolted, orange foam deep in his ears. His wife’s voice—but she was home, wasn’t she? The older man beside him laughed, the sound like driftwood breaking.

“Watch the skin melt, good man! Ferchrissake… Your wife’s safe at home. This one’s just a shoddy replica—got the profile all wrong.”

**************

One minute’s worth of coins. That’s all Harrison had when he finished the papers. The ancient TV whirred as he fed it the tape, then seized with a grinding noise that seemed to echo the laughter outside.

The train’s brakes screamed. Through his window, he watched passengers rushing toward metal hatches marked “MEDIA DISPOSAL – INCINERATION,” their faces masks of terror.

———————

“Just pretend you’re fixing it,” the older man said, banging his detector. “Like Happy Days—you know? When they’d hit the jukebox?” He paused, watching a fish writhe in the black foam before being dragged under. “Boss thinks hitting stuff fixes everything now. He’s right about 75% of the time.”

Time stretched like taffy. The younger worker considered asking to borrow the boss’s satellite phone—the only connection to the outside world in this desolate place. But she’d only yell at him again, call him weak for fearing “them.”

***************

Harrison tackled an elderly woman on the platform, stealing her tape as Chen backed away in horror. His apartment felt wrong—TV gone, VCR missing. His neighbor slammed the door in his face.

The phone rang in darkness. Chen’s voice trembled: “Name your price. Just never mention the tape.”

“Tell me what was on it,” Harrison pleaded.

———————-

“HELP ME, BABY! STOPITIGNORINGATMEee!” The thing’s melted eyes rolled as its rubber fingers stretched from the sludge. The older man hurled driftwood, shattering its jaw.

The workers cheered as it disintegrated, but their victory felt hollow. The younger man’s detector screen flickered green, then died.

***************

Chen’s voice came through the phone line like it was traveling through black foam: “They made it to eliminate things we couldn’t control. Microplastics, they said. Information, they meant. But it grew. Learned. Started eliminating everything.”

Harrison looked down at the stolen tape. Through his window, he could see the beach, where men with metal detectors stood in formation. A figure writhed in the dark waves, its face a perfect copy of the newsreader he’d seen on TV that morning.

“The tape shows what they really are,” Chen whispered. “What they’ll become. Man-made fungi that learned to mimic more than just plastic. That’s why we burn the tapes. That’s why we stand guard. But it’s too late now—you’ve seen how they copy us. How they replace—”

The line went dead. From the beach came a sound: “YyyyyyAAAOh… HARRISON, BABY!”

A memory so distant it must have been a dream as a child… He’s squeezed blood from his favourite stone and is trying to get it back in. He looks at the rancid thing calling his name and sneers. He says, “Shut up, bitch.”

He grabbed his coat and headed for the door. Maybe if he hit the phone just right, like in Happy Days, he could fix this. Maybe he could fix everything.

Everyone on the beach cheered. The sun was dimming instead of setting, and the wind seemed to be suffocating moreso than whispering.

He could fix everything. The tape will be forgotten about. Mind over matter. One day at a time.

But the black foam was already seeping under his door, and somewhere, a coin-operated TV flickered to life without any coins at all.

Garbage had piled so high on the streets of that rotten city that most people had desensitized themselves to the stench. This is what I think of when I look back at the Big City. A place where everything was fake, and anything real felt stolen. As a younger man with less of a glare I was enthralled, of course - 24/7 hour everything, no courtesies like politics or religion. The smut was truly an itch, so fiendishly erogenous that I didn't care about the coffee-grain dirt I was scratching right into it. Women keep telling me how handsome I am, and I tell them to clean my fingernails. That's what they like to hear. I didn't have a job, for years. I didn't want one, so some black guy at DeLuxe Excellent on 32nd and Trebonne got stubborn and insisted that I become a bouncer - this went terribly, but the black guy became my best friend, and then he disappeared. I was still a bouncer - like a bunny hopping around... I kept getting beat up by guys that were bigger than me, which started a small trend among club owners to fire any bouncer that lost a fight and to hire the guy that won. After getting invited to a Bouncer Convention I quit. I had been to so many conventions in my youth, and I knew how thin they could stretch whatever niche they had. Time passes, I get a job at the post office but lose it after I start collecting my own mail at work - apparently a clerk isn't allowed to, and the postmaster ended up using me as an example in an instructional video on what not to do. More time passes. Black guy comes back, says he got too many kids to pay for and had to get a vacation, we have beers, he says he found something new. I tell him I'm scheduled to surgically break my leg at the veterinarian's office the next day, and he sort of laughs and tells me about the job anyways, smoking up some gratuitous cigar as the strippers onstage discreetly eyed his bills to make sure they were real. Everything was fake in that city - I don't blame her. Everything was so fake that anything real felt stolen. The local currency wouldn't just inflate, it would crumble and wither if not handled with utmost delicacy - an intentional mechanism so as to discourage bank runs or any instances of frantic cash movement. At one point money-couriers had become popular, for they could pull an entire wheelbarrow of this awful currency and only lose a note or two to friction. Guns were fake, knives couldn't be sharpened, and horses were seen as meat or glue. God did I want to ride a horse on the outskirts of that city. So many hills, so endlessly away from the terrible racket and fervor below. He told me about the job, but it involved engineering and electricity and I told him the men in my family are only good for one thing: coming up with quotes, sayings, jokes. At least my uncle has come up with so many, but it's not like I can tell people that. I just get to hear them first. He doesn't get paid, besides his joke books. I told him he should show me how to write my own joke book - it sounded like a decent enough time - and he replied that it was the hardest thing he had ever done, and he once wrote a five-volume book series on the history of mold in Western society. I brought my buddy home, then came back to my place to find a note on my door. I left it there, in case whoever placed it regretted it in the morning. I don't need to open notes at this junction in my life. The handwriting looks measured, masculine. A strange rubber-stamped duck is half-there in the corner. Almost so green I could barely see it in the dark. My head was pounding, and I could hear my neighbor negotiating with some loud, marble-mouthed thug over some hard drugs. The man kept laughing and teasing this sad plight my poor neighbor had stumbled upon. I could hear a dog in there, which my building did not allow. The thug broke his lamp, and then started kicking at our shared wall, over and over again, until his foot broke through and I grabbed it with all my strength and tore the drug dealer's boot off, which sent a treasure trove of paraphernalia flying as he went quiet and began to beg for his boot back through the foot-shaped hole. I obliged, and he threw it back, saying he wanted his "shit in the boot." I gave him my badge and told him he's got twenty seconds til I call this in. My badge. In a fake city, the best thing a man can have is a fake badge.

“Hello, Timothy. It is me, again. You can not hide from me Timothy, and it is so cold. It is freezing out here! Timothy,
you need to pay your dues to the Private Business Club. It’s been three months since your embarrassing episode,
and you haven’t submitted a formal resignation. I am
here to collect that debt, God dammit, Timothy! Open
up. It’s so cold. Hello, Timothy? You can not hide
from me Timothy, and it is so cold. It is freezing out
here! Timothy, you need to pay your dues to the
Private Business Club. It’s been three months since
your embarrassing episode, and you haven’t
submitted a formal resignation. I am here to collect
that debt, God dammit, Timothy! Open up. It’s so
cold. Hello, Timothy? The Private Business Club is
starting to get impatient from your absence and
rumors are beginning to surface that you are too
cheap to pay your dues. Hello, Timothy?”

My Uncle grabbed his shovel and almost tore the
door into splinters as he thrust the head of it into the
little electronic man that had come to collect his paltry
dues for the awful Private Business Club which he no
longer wished to attend. The little mechanical man
went flying off into the freezing tundra, its head at
least – as my Uncle pummeled its pitiful humanoid
frame down into un-fanned sparkling rubble.