Excerpt 140:
The Doors of Perception
Harris, in a deeply malign, highly conspiratorial huff, continued round and round in an infinite∞eight configuration, figuratively speaking… He lowered his voice as he entered Jeff’s airspace, ‘Una made some recordings… I can let you have them if you help me get the others to coalesce.’
‘Coco…alesce?’
‘Yes.’
Harris was initiating multi-pronged attacks with forked teeth and clamping jaws. The people who he was working for wanted results and he’d been tasked with assembling a result directory with quasi-specific QASAI-ready annotation. The attendant pressure was infinite∞eighting him around the model race-car track like a whizzing-circuit event open-day.
To the rest of the survivors he shouted, ‘Hey!…Hey!…everyone… Jeff has something to tell you all.’
‘We…we…need to…coco…alesce.’
It seemed reasonable to all; the plan-world had forsaken them and this seemed like an apt replacement. Coalescing and plundering collective input was the way, they all agreed, to go. They’d all been semi-expecting a Deus Ex Machina scenario parked in the forecourt of the showroom at the end of the line. The reality they came to realise was that they were all parts of the whole and the only way they could survive their death was to coalesce. Coalescence became the pursuit of all and how they did it remains a mystery but the resulting movement allowed Tiny Guy to progress from the slopes of purgatory to the depths of Hell.
Everyone had assumed Harris had been horribly killed. To see him alive and visibly intact was a plague of conundrumlocusts. Harris’s title was now the Kettle-carrier, ‘the’ not ‘a’. To be the kettle carrier Harris had to have friends in high places that was certain to all and sundry.
While there was no pushback on the coalescence ticket that actual minutiae of the conglomerative aspect of the coalition needed hammering until the sparks welded an adequate work surface.
And then there was Tiny Guy. He was assailed by a long blue line of soppy overindulgence that led him up the cemetery path; having him wonder whether his final resting place had a little more life in it than Middle Russet.
This could be the final resting place of whoever Tiny Guy thought he was, but he could not accept it would be the final resting place of whoever Tiny Guy really was; whatever his name was going to turn out to be…
Momentarily, in the dim, dour reaches of twighlight’s unveiling, Tiny Guy became himself, but then realised that ‘himself’ was a front for someone else; he’d need to do more than adopt an alias to progress to any worthy level in the self-discovery war business. But what was ‘more than’ adopting an alias escaped him. Nether Russet whispered in the night, to Tiny Guy, telling him that whoever he was would always evade him unless and until he made the crossing from Middle Russet to the place of his selfhood identity birth. Tiny Guy found the whispers intriguing and filed them under Frivolous Thought Output (FTO), leaving them unfully processed. But the file-content, seeking questribution, cross-populated…and we all know what that means.
Eventually it became obvious to Tiny Guy that the answer to whoever Tiny Guy was was waiting at a bus stop in downtown Nether Russet. All he needed to do to complete the circuit was to create an adequate bus service with tenable timetabling. And find out where access to Nether Russet could be obtained…
For some Nether Russet was a myth, for others a delusion, but for Tiny Guy it advertised itself as the home he’d never had. Maybe, he even experienced wild jokethought intrusions in unguarded moments, bearing the equally horrifying and edifying suggestion-package that he was Nether Russet. That was his true identity. He wasn’t a living breathing human, but a bustling coastal town with a thriving seasonal tourist influx. Tangents offered free lunches to go their way and Tiny Guy was tangentially tempted into the labyrinthine avenues and alleyways of a fantasized Netheresque Russetonian delusioreality mindland. Lord Certainty herself languidly pointed in multiple directions throwing semi-confusion high into the atmosphere, before taking a nap under a do not disturb sign. Tiny Guy heard a voice, ‘We are going to have create our own certainty,’ and suspected the great Lord herself was chucking a false-ball into the mix.
The flophouse that extended accommodation to, initially an alias, of Tiny Guy’s, then to him in person, had a ceiling fan that would not switch off despite the chill. A cold blast emanated from where Nether Russet’s presumed entrance was situated. Presumed because there were several signs that pointed in the same direction. But no one wanted to believe everything they read. And the gravy river entered drainage at that point in space and time…
Sometimes reference points become dull and need sharpening on the showreels of remembered movies…a ceiling fan, to chopper, to Apocalypse Now, movie suggestion. Tiny Guy closed his eyes; shutters rolled down: the Doors audibly descending.
Tiny Guy
Middle Russet…shit. I am only in Middle Russet. Every time I think I am going to wake up in Nether Russet.
Silent Doors, noisy Doors; opening, closing their act on stage, off-stage…
Tiny Guy
Everyone gets everything he wants.
I wanted a mission. And for my
sins, they gave me one. Brought
it up to me like room service.
There is a knock on the door.
Harris
Are you Captain Willard? 505th
Battalion? 173rd Air-Borne?
Assigned to SOG?
Harris, always the literal one. He never seems to lead himself to the pool of contemporaneous invention.
Tiny Guy
No…I am Tiny Guy.
Harris
You need to come with me, Willard.
Tiny Guy
What’d I do? What are the charges? Not me. What did Willard do?
Harris
No charges.
Tiny Guy
Free room service? Love it.
Where’r we going?
Harris
Nether bleeding Russet
Tiny Guy
By Nether bleeding Russet, I assume you mean the jungle? Am I right?
Harris
No.
Tiny Guy
Good.
Tiny Guy’s ambush was falling into place. Harris was the mole all along. Obvious now. Tiny Guy’s guide to fate’s whimsical role casting. Or was it, Willard’s
Had Tiny Guy been playing Martin Sheen acting as Willard and only just realised it? Or was Martin Sheen the real Tiny Guy. Was it even the real Martin Sheen.
Dial ‘m’ for crisis.
He felt compelled to change the subject and as an object change his own name and after consideration plumped for the descendent of a cartwright, named Lewdlyrude Andlouden Wainwright the Turd, putting the cart before the horses…that’s all horses needed…tying to a workload, driven and goaded, please, internally combust, electrify…find some other form of transport…why are you so blinkered?
Tiny Guy came to, from a dream of Coppola’s classic war movie-cum-anti-colonial masterpiece…although it was more than a dream and less than reality, he was Vietcong, in the jungle in the scene where the smell of napalm in the morning graced the GI nostrils; Tiny Guy was being incinerated
And he knew then what he must do…
Kill everyone!
Sybil was onboard. Harris concurred with sociopathic equanimity and was loaded somewhere in the sociopathic equanimity greatest tits mixtape… It was all very promising, but with no one riding final edit on spellchecker interference, anything could unfold and lay claim to an alliance with Fate.
