Diegeses Read online

  The lights flickered, sparks flew from bamboo filaments as they penetrated the troposphere and fell into a steady flowfugue. Beaulac sat hunched over with his mouth half open and his eyes half closed. She sat a few seats behind him, waiting for him to make a crass remark.

  “What’s your name?” he remarked crassly.

  She chewed the makeup from her underlip.

  Beaulac didn’t repeat himself.

  She told him her name.

  “That’s not a name. That’s a mytzlplk.” He looked over his shoulder and eyeballed her.

  And they drifted towards one another as if underwater, or outer space, gravity a distant memory, an earthbound disease for which they had discovered a terminal serum. Beaulac’s fingers plunged into her hair and gripped the back of her neck, squeezing the hard, warm cords.

  They rolled across the compartment. Frenetic, impassioned. Limbs locked and unlocked, flesh against flesh, and fingertips strummed hungry orifices, and sanctimonious acoustics poured out of the walls with greater and greater concentration, getting stronger, angrier.

  It was too dramatic. Even Beaulac recognized and acknowledged the Excess, and he was the star of the show. And yet the Excess continued to inflate, the drama to unfold.

  A View from the Blindside

  Long ago, Boise spread across the expanse of the state with bubonic angst, infecting the land, ruining its flora and fauna, and the city’s grave architectures flattened the painted mountains. The city died. Only the jagged husk remained, a benign growth decaying on the scales of the earth. Overhead the immolated sky moved and undulated like a great tapestry of fireflies jockeying for position.

  Idaho once had a reputation for spuds, dust, proles, and spontaneous evaporation. Props á la Steinbeck. And Oz before the tornado. But it was much more than that. It wasn’t that at all.

  [Description of the topography of Idaho from the sky. Segue to the man who conquered Idaho with nothing but a Fujikawan pickaxe and an absolute, if unfathomable, will to power. Invoke Nietzsche. Invoke Nietzsche in every sentence, somehow. Descended from the Balthazar dynasty, the conqueror of Idaho, who came to be known by the catchphrase “Must Obliterate All Dirned Buttes” (pronounced “Muad’Dib” in shortened, quasiacronymic form) possesses certain distinguishing features. These features also belong to the star of the soap opera based on Muad’Dib’s deeds. The rub: they belonged to him long before he auditioned for the role. Like Jack Torrance, he has always been the moonraker.]

  Hence the palimpsest of The Idaho Reality, an extrapolated adaptation of the long-defunct Ryan’s Hope, the “organic” syndication of which had been anachronistically retrofitted and dubbed according to contemporary vogue and desire. The setting of the original image-text had been New York City. As a first order of business, writers superimposed NYC with the entirety of post-Boise, Idaho, before post-Boise actually existed. At this point, the “mise-en-scène” was sheer science fiction, and there were few indications that the science fictionalization of reality (i.e., the realization of outréality) would occur. But one can’t jumpstart an electrochemical cell without an etc., etc., etc.

  Screen upon screen upon screen.

  Socius upon diegesis upon fuckscene.

  Veracity upon the Blue Loch.

  Beneath the cold, clear waters, miles deep, fathoms down, a sleeper awaits the Awakening. Consciousness will produce the Fully Developed Soldier of the Mundane, the Tedious, the Exotically Ordinary and Formulaic. The stuff of history. The stuff that has appeared in limitless tomes of kingly representation.

  Memory of the Shed

  A large, dark shed along the desolate tract. Mnemonic thunder. The radium dial paintings . . .

  On stage, an old glamrocker—tight black tapered jeans, gutflab, blousy black shirt unbuttoned to the unshorn navel, deep orange tan, sagging neckskin, bleached jaws, matted curly hair like a dead hedgeplant—leaped out from behind a banister, hit a high note (tenore contraltino, the highest possible male register), and took refuge behind the banister again, denying his one-man audience too long of a glimpse. Woofers thumped. Piezoelectric guitars blasted from loudspeakers.

  Moravagine.

  A discoball spat diluted squares of light onto the corroded hardwood floor.

  Whenever the client’s glass went dry, a stickthin waiter stepped out of a shadow and refilled it with the finest pinot noir in the shed. The client gave him a dirty look every time, then tested and studied the legs of the wine for at least half a minute, rocking the bulb of the glass in his palm. He always spit out the first sip, on the floor, the table sometimes, and bellowed in disgust. Then he drank half the glass and nursed the rest.

  The client drank until he got drunk. And he drank more, and more, scenes from monochromatic action blockbusters running across the mindscreen at increased speeds as he struggled to abort dreams of profound heartache juxtaposed with undue expressions of affection.

  The Idaho Reality

  The main character of the soap opera wore the same outfit in every episode: flipflops, corduroy slackpants, roomy longsleeved wheatgrown white shirt. This was not an acceptable ensemble, and it certainly wasn’t the ensemble itemized in his contract. In the early days of the role, he conceded to the terms of the contract, at least in the case of bodygear and its vicissitudes. Somewhere between the fiftieth and sixtieth episode, however, he grew weary of costume changes, and he came to the listless conclusion that he would wear what he wanted, something comfortable, something airy and formlessly fitted, and everybody else—the director, the grips, the naysayers in between—would let him do what he wanted, since he was the star of the show and ratings would suffer beyond repair even in the days or weeks it would take to replace him with another, equally (in)capable actor, who would require the audience to suspend their disbelief, as a new, different actor would suddenly be in the position of the old, obstinate actor, who might actually find that life wasn’t so bad, sipping lizardgreen margaritas on the lush peak of a fell overlooking a cool blue tarn in his Own Private Idaho.

  Incidentally, on the issue of suspension of disbelief, the audience had already been required to do so vis-à-vis the protagonist’s attire. In fact, at the beginning of every show, and whenever a costume change was supposed to occur, subtitles warned viewers to pretend that he wore this or that garment, despite what he actually wore, as this or that garment reflected the psychological economy of his character, whereas the flipflops, the slackpants, etc. merely reflected the actor’s authentic desire, or lack thereof. In addition to the subtitles, the actor, for the sake of human idiocy, as a kind of insignia of that idiocy, agreed to wear a sign on his chest that reified the subtitles, e.g., at the beginning of episode ninety-six, he pranced on-scene wearing flipflops, slackpants, etc. and a sign that read

  ADDIDAS SNEAKERS

  ACIDWASHED JEANS

  ETC.

  and in the third act of episode three thousand and one a sign that read

  GLINTING CORDOVAN PENNYLOAFERS

  CUFFLESS PINSTRIPE NAVYBLUE SLACKS

  ETC.

  and once he wore a sign that read

  CECI N’EST PAS UNE PIPE

  only instead of accompanying the image of a pipe, the text hung beneath a photograph of an inconspicuous bald man with pinprick eyes and poorly applied pince-nez. A joke on his part. But such monkeybusiness was rare, and generally the actor and protagonist and star (viz., Curd) bore the signs in good humor, ensuring that the audience was not bamboozled to the point of no return. Hence a fertile mediation between reality and fantasy, according to some critics. Others elected to turn a blind eye on the foremost specter of The Idaho Reality.

  Curd’s penchant for assholery of this nature underwent a slow cultivation. On and off the set. Moneymen, authoritarians, colleagues and underlings loved him and hated him. Fans generally loved him, unless they met him in person, in which case they came to despise him like unleashed, unwanted kernels of repression, wishing they could bury the kernels again, until they returned à l'écran
to The Idaho Reality, and their obsession with the cult of celebrity dissolved the Odium. Curd had a way of wiping mnemonic slates clean. Something in the prowess, the dynamism of his performances, which, objectively conceived, were quite poor, almost silly, unintentionally, as if he had no acting experience or training whatsoever, and if he did, as if he aspired to subvert that experience and training at every turn, remorseful, sometimes appalled, that he had ever acquired it.

  And yet.

  In virtually every shot, Curd interacted against the Vile Canvas. Silent movies summoned from covert projectors and pixels threatened to overthrow the prevailing diegesis. Marginalized lifescapes didn’t stand a chance.

  . . . and Curd crashed The Red Sky at Night Show. He had not been slated as a guest, but he showed up anyway, knocking out the keynote celebrity in his dressing room with a Tiffany lamp. He sashayed onto the set to a tuneful (but suddenly mystified) gust of brass, doing a semi-coordinated jig, and then he groaned into the corner of a long leather chair, legs splayed, wearing a tumble-dried leisure suit from which he removed and shotgunned a tall silver Asahi. He belched. He crushed the empty can and kicked a cup of coffee off of the table in front of him. Ready for anything, the host, Conrad Oakperson, deflected the intrusion with indisputable normalcy and a handful of out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouthisms. They talked, exchanging compliments and willful diatribes. Things went well. Curd assured Oakperson that The Idaho Reality was a “great place to work,” a “real fulfilling experience,” run by folks who were at “the top of their game.” Then, unexpectedly, he got mad. Nothing in particular set him off. He and Oakperson were exploring the issue of anti-aging skin creams. And Curd said, “Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true. Well. F@#$. I don’t know. Really I don’t. But the problem with everybody is they’re a bunch of f@#$heads. I mean, %@$&^#*$*&$#($%!!! Everybody wants to be me. And I want to be everybody else. F@#$ everybody. And f@#$ me.” The imprint from the verbal suckerpunch seemed to linger on Oakperson’s smooth bronze cheek. Curd was drunk, per usual, but on wine, not scotch or vodka, so it could have been much worse, and he didn’t get in a fight with anybody in the audience or even backstage after the show, barring a short scrap with the keynote celebrity, who had returned to consciousness and ambushed him, but another Tiffany lamp put an end to further aggression. And later that night, after he had gotten in a fight with a call girl and trashed a hotel room, he told the cops that a wild armadillo had finagled its way through an open window (on Floor 36) and tore everything to shit. “The animal was the culprit,” he assured a de facto newscrew. He lingered on a busy streetcorner in a bright white bathrobe. “That broad and me, we could only do our best to evade the beast and try to kill it,” he informed a cluster of pulsing microphones behind which flashbulbs exploded like supernovas. “We used the furniture. Chairs. Ottomans. Stuff like that. Who doesn’t want to kill an intruder? I even dislodged a mirror from the bathroom and smashed it on the f@#$er, but it was too quick, or too strong. It was an armadillo. Do you know how mean armadillos are? They’re mean.”

  Days passed and everything was recorded, replayed, fetishized. Forgotten.

  “It’s not easy playing the same character over and over again. Ask anybody.” Curd looked around the studio. Set against a row of clumsy partitions, the gaunt faces shattered the rules of banal magnetism. Curd dryheaved and said, “It’s not about stamina. Leave that to the s&%!eaters. I’m talking about soul murder. I’m a victim. Hack me open and you’ll see nothing but stardust, hear nothing but a dry whistle. The character becomes more real than the real you. And the real you is a fiction. A multiple fiction. An infinite fiction. I’m not complaining. I’m only saying f@#$ everybody. And f@#$ me. I just want to be left alone.”

  Feelings of inadequacy. The body as prosthesis. Consciousness as epiphenomenon.

  In spite of certain misanthropy, however, Curd flew into a rage whenever he went unnoticed in public for more than a reasonable duration, accusing guilty parties of ignoring him simply to prove a point. “If we’re forced to live among one another,” he rationalized, “we might at least exercise the bareknuckled social niceties.”

  A Snarl of Wind

  accompanies a tracking shot from Coeur D’Alene . . . . . . to Montpelier. The theme song ends abruptly, with a choking of aerophones.

  The Good Director

  He—and it is always-already a he, phallic insecurities necessitating cosmic elements of control—tells the actors when scenes will be shot in slow motion. Despite the gravest talent, nobody can act truly natural with the knowledge of being unnaturally inscribed onto “celluloid.” Following a brief period of compensatory overconfidence during which the actors move their arms and lips with increased animation, they proceed to exhibit vague traces of inhuman minutia, attempting to act normal, to negotiate the fabric of realtime, but of course this fabric—the knowledge of its illusory form re the ensuing Screen—discombobulates them, as they know, mindfully, in those esoteric moments, that they are being subject to slowtime, if only by the camera, while “existing,” so to speak, as both actors and people, in realtime. The good director plants this seed. Then he shoots the scene in realtime and unleashes it on the world, au naturel, like a dragoon of sledgehammers hurled at the cheapseats with wild precision.

  Yellow Mike

  . . . remembered summer camp. Like all the bourgeois subjects. Bugjuice in the cafeteria. Quiet wetdreams in the sleeping bag. Ghost stories around the firepit.

  It was at Camp Manitou-Lin. Northern Michigan. The smell of dank log cabins returned to Curd at least once a day, unsuspectingly, insidiously. He breathed in the content and struggled to process it.

  [THE LEGEND OF YELLOW MIKE (mnemonic remix). The creature/man is either a nascent sasquatch or a (d)evolved human. Distinguished by mustard yellow fur/hair. Lived in a city, somewhere in West Virginia, post-autogeddon, smokestacks set against the dead, bald mountains. He had been stabbed in the eye with a syringe. Long story. And the eye grew back with mystic, Gorgonic vehemence, capable of hypnotizing victims momentarily, just long enough for Yellow Mike to maul and on occasion disembowel them with freakish claws/fingernails. No motive other than assholery with a touch of bitterness apropos the proverbial traumatic kernel.]

  Curd’s thoughts turned to a crib. It might have been his, once. But he was older now.

  Mahogany bars. Skyblue sheets.

  Somebody was in there, folded into a corner, imploded, like a crushed oilcan.

  Somebody. Something.

  Fibrous, glistening wings folded around the core frame. And a design on the wings, a mirror image, green and sharp and magnetic. The arms were human, sinewy, wrapped around pointed knees. There was no face. Two red eyes loomed over a sad, sallow grin.

  Where did the baby go? Had there ever been a baby?

  Curd stood in the doorway and watched the creature breathe. Terror numbed the senses. He froze in these situations. It wasn’t like being behind the camera. Reality, consciously perceived and experienced or otherwise, was a different animal.

  A camp counselor approached the climax of an episode of Yellow Mike.

  Curd passed out, unable to process the horror from the standpoint of consciousness. Unconsciously, however, everything operated according to the “rules.” The dogs of clarity effervesced and sprinted across his field of vision. He knew what he was. He knew what the cosmos was. He knew he could kill Yellow Mike, but chose not to. He knew that futurity was contingent upon his desire, his will. The grasshopper’s long-legged song.

  Magnetic Attraction Enhancing Bodywash

  She spoke through an esophagul exodus of chili. “God just wasn’t ready to put me in my cage yet. (Swallow.) I was dead, more or less. Dead. (Swallow.) But they fixed me. I don’t know how they did it. I owe those men my life. (Swallow.) My life. I can’t wait to get into my cage but it’s not gonna happen because of this old spleen now. (Swallow.) I don’t like this fuckin’ chili. (Swallow.) Where’s the waiter? Waiter. Waiter.” A meek interlocutor sat across t
he table, nibbling French fries and agreeing with the woman who might have been her daughter, or her granddaughter, or possibly a sister. Difficult to say from this perspective.

  “There aren’t any waiters here.”

  She swallowed the last spoonful of chili and licked the rim of the cardboard bowl clean. “I’m only saying, is all. When I order something to eat I expect it to taste good. That didn’t taste good and somebody should do something about it. But I’m alive. Do you know what that means? It means . . .”

  As she continued, a grinning man with silver hair slipped in front of the table, coattails masking the women’s faces. “I am the Coda,” he intoned, and lifted his arm. He held a large green bottle. The label read:

  MAGNETIC ATTRACTION ENHANCING BODYWASH

  The bottle grew larger and larger, engulfing the scene, and the label began to glow. Then:

  Savannah and wind. And sky. Clouds moved across the rosewood vastness like the phantoms of slugs.

  And finally, gently, we return to The Idaho Reality.

  The Fall of Greased Lightning

  Seneca Beaulac raced down the street with a 600 lb. refrigerator full of sand strapped to his back. Seconds ago, he knocked out a stuntman (i.e., a stuntman playing a stuntman) who had been garishly stretching his legs and cracking his neck in preparation for the feat. But Beaulac was stubborn, driven. Likewise the actor beneath the Satin Sheets . . .