Excerpt Forty-Two:
The Stockholm Munchaus
Bear in mind both Atoll and Kirk could be stuck here in Sybil’s antechamber of paracollective quasi-imagination for the rest of their prolonged perceptional experiences…
K. had set out differing scenarios, all reverberating potential, to Kirk and Atoll individually and to Atoll & Kirk in tandem, that put them, if not entirely back on course, at least on course to get back on course.
Atoll had been made aware of a secret venue; the coordinates fed to him via extended-metaphor-matrices, he wended and wound his way towards the place with intense sub-detection; to potential salvation from expected damnation, in a circuitous, indefinable wormroute of increasingly frustrated anticipation. He needed Kirk for anything off the mission menu, but perhaps K. could offer him something a la carte. He walked past the derelict nightclubs of yesteryawn, feeling like he had escaped at least that one rut; a rut on a route to nowhere but rut canyon.
Down a backstreet, behind a side-street and negotiating several labyrinthine alleyways, Atoll passed a hooded street gang. Unruly and disciplined, masked security guards. And a huddle of Ninja assassins off the clock. They all waved him quietly through with directional body lingo. He reached a moonlit, cobbled square, edged by shadowy nondescript facades on three sides, but on the fourth, a diner, organically proud, lit up from inside; a heavy iron door, open just enough of a jar, beamed out a ray of invitational old-school neon.
The name of the diner, ‘The Stockholm Munchaus’, was set in stone above the first level of two, and illuminated subtly by an ill-matching light source that was ingeniously designed to instil ominous feelings, for atmosphere or amusement or whateverelse. Atoll’s mind presented itself a pang which escalated into a perplexing panoply of pangs that pranced and pinged around seeking attention. A dissonant/resonant, climbing/dipping stutter-wave quantervating with Atticus just for a singularly odd moment. Atoll had no idea what this meant. It was like Atticus’s ghost had peppered him with shot in a drive-by… In breatholding secrecy and feeling nerve-jangled about mission deviation, albeit committed in a spirit of desperation, he entered the diner.
He crossed a line drawn on the welcome mat. His stomach churned as it received messages as though it had just entered the belly of the beast. Atoll’s creeping senses fought to adjust to the situation.
When…
In a booth at the end of the long narrow room, that took the appearance of the interior of a giant hollowed-out pine tree lying on the ground, his eye caught recognition and wouldn’t let it go. The fellow, in the booth at the end, head down, radiating poor disguise, unable to contain his shakily true identity was Kirk. Atoll had to deal with internal conflict and resolve it before reaching the obviously, now, treacherous Kirk James… What the fuck was he doing here? Atoll curtailed his Kirkward trajectory, turned, sat on a stool at the pine wood bar and clicked his fingers. He didn’t know why or what for he clicked his fingers but the action seemed to activate the juke box that was by the entrance door that was now bolted shut. It could have been coincidence, but the record dropped and a stylus swung over.
Only soundlessness was forthcoming…
Atoll was dreading, with worn flashback, in Ultra High Reality Replay (UHRR) accompaniment, another long session of pretending to listen to silent music, marinated au gratin, in galling pretentiousness.
Atoll did not want the piercing crown of silence to prevail.
‘I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me,’ he sang suddenly; tunefulish in part… too late to retune.
’She showed me her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood,’ Kirk added, in a voice previously only exercised in an ice cold shower.
Embarrassed echoes scuttled about before scurrying out, allowing silence back in for another slug at the title. Maybe they were codeword lyrics, unconsciously trying to sync Atoll and Kirk, to bypass the treachery that formed a dissonance between them, so dissonant the very pine turned a queazy hue.
But now they were here, and their ultimate sin, as far as mission imperatives went, sat terribly, awkwardly, you could see its private parts. But they shared blame in equal measure. They forgave each other because it pumped up a dose of self-forgiveness dolloped with chunks of reinstated teamwork. Mutuality assured reconstruction waxed…
Luckily time heals all wounds and perceptually all they needed to do was communicate with K. to get a few hours within the few seconds happening in the outside of the diner timeframe. They’d come to this power soon; this great power, cancelled out only by K.’s policy of favour-debt; to be paid with interest, and not necessarily knowingly.
That was what they were here for, in Pineland, to collude with K. K. was working for them and what they stood for; those credentials were solid. But K. was also working for everyone and anyone with the technological resources to send him an email and make a request.
Una must never know they visited the Munchaus; she’d have questions they’d be unable to avoid revealing the answers, and suggesting further pertinent questions, to. Una had a power that they instinctively reacted to with resistance… unknowingly.
There were monitor screens around the diner and they blinked into action. A news report updating us on the Una-Sybil Axis of Evil (U-SAE). Propaganda no doubt, yet no less instructional. One needs information to go on, regardless of its veracity. Maybe the screen in Kirk’s vision had slightly varying amendments from the screen in Atoll’s vision, it is impossible to say for sure.
K. addressed Atoll through the screen…positioning him…framing him, and Atoll voiced his alignment out loud… While at the same time he could hear what Kirk was voicing at his screen: Kirk’s long sealed mind letting go, bursting forth. It could have been worse, they could have continued singing.
And for the first time they both put out the knowledge that they both had a vital vested interest in themselves, as a force, as a mission core, that was imperative over all others. Kirk had an obsessional need to nurture all systems available to preserve Dave’s wellbeing…and in or out of turn Atoll maintained a high-level of unconsciously repressed desire, akin to a furnace exploding, to make sure Atticus remained healthy and breathing and out of danger.
There was a coming together, cementing, fermenting; keep calm and heave ho!
Relaxing into the pine… chins wagged loose…
No barkeep or beverages, yet toasts mimed in an increasingly inebriated reenactment of fictional and actual sessions remembered. That night the Munchaus saw many tears of relief; Kirk and Atoll were on the same dog-eared page, doodled with equations, workings out and annotated solutions. And pages turned like waves rolling on to the shore.
K. promised them he would keep their quantum roots safe. They both got a hit of reassurance from this despite having no cognisance of what quantum roots were. The main drive, as they saw it, was for both them to dis-recognise they were lost and to create a para-familiarity for them to function in.
The screens had a good night message for both drunken sailors and time-gentlemen-please repeated until a small white dot was all that was left; the revellers filed out one by one equalling two, feeling like five; ignoring neighbourly signs, spilling into the atmospherically perfect night air that allowed heavily disguised reality to creep back in.
They couldn’t retrace their steps…they found alternate ways back, all of them leading to the library; constructed by now with an ornate, baroque facade; peopled with gargoyles who would judge unwary onlookers.
And posters adorning the notice boards, around the frontice-entry, that supplied civic informational frameworks, requested their attendance at an interview which Una had planned as an interrogation.
Una had changed…
K. had changed her.
What would free will have to say?
…Swap her back…
…or ride around on the bucking bicycle of square-wheeled propaganda…
