Excerpt 142:
Thoughts Progess
A square rainbow showed its colours through an oscillatingly-eclipsed, liquid-morning mist that dampened down the threat of dust that was fit to dance in shapes created by the environmental craterousness to form columns that whipped around with forked-tongues and tails, sandblasting the duststone slopes. A horseless carriage driving one season to the next brought the easing of the gravy flow as raspberry juice rose from the porous sod, spilling in rivulets, inking the ground, staining into the general surroundings a pimple-like resemblance…
‘Who’s that with Harris?’ somebody said, pointing at a distant figure, soaked in the blood of raspberries, that could’ve been a multiple of figures, or a weird insect challenging what physical laws still governed stuff and stuff’s auxiliary paraphernalia. They all gave some kind of gasp or sigh, in turn, at the preposterous lack of binocularage, but no one had a definitive answer. Leaving Curiosity to rise in a smokey aura like a campfire whose burned matter was in an extra-special hurry. Harris’d taken to rounding the slopes unclockwise, on his own, if he had company it was of his own making; most likely the mysterious and potentially worrying Harrison. Harris referred to him as though he were his handler-cum-guru-cum-mindterror instigation agent. Harris, it seemed, with his personality-cliché characterlessness… drifted through life; edging past the brooding icebergs of fellow people, but Harrison? He motorboated with incessant splashing and excessive speeding, bundled with yet more rip-roaring-round for another shitchanting-dangerspree of audacious-chaotics…metaphorphically speaking.
Cody knew that Harris knew where the portal was but wasn’t telling him. ‘Where’s the portal, Harris?’ The reply was short, pointed, amounting to a success-tarp covering an underlying defeat that laid there motionless, not helping. If the lack of answers was bad, the answer when it came, caused oxygen-masks to drop down and stomachs to be left cloudside with the promise of catching up later…should they still be required for snacks.
‘There’s a giant anus that you need to crawl into,’ Harris said, not joking. Cody, of course, assumed Harris was joking, but the fact he’d never witnessed anything remotely joke-like coming from Harris; a worry developed, strutted and paced the length of the anxiety chamber before breaking out and feeding itself from the high table’s feast of fear. Its rosy-cheeked health and needling bluster auguring unwell.
Harris had leapt from tight-lipped secrecy to loose-lipped blurting in a semi-blink of eyelids. The last thing, portal-wise, that Cody would have dreamed up. Obvious now why they couldn’t locate a portal: they were not looking for a giant anus. And if they had come across it it would have been dismissed as an object of non-portal status. The repulsiveness was a perfect security ploy. The concept of the anal airlock was cunning.
Harris led them to a reeded area bordering a soupy mixture of bacterial spores and crud-flotsammed, watery moisture-puddles riddled with scuzzmold (see: Quintin Scuzzmold, Emeritus Professor, Institute of Lies and Packaged Truths.). The reeds were tall, tall enough to hide a stubby three-quarter length canal boat, for instance.
They waded through the brow-length, woodwind-calling undergrowth that whistle-whispered in reedy tongues and toothy lips, until they came upon the once floating horror-show, star of all their memories-forgotten. The narrowboat, there lying, was recognisable enough to trigger the group with almost semi-instantaneous detonation. The Others’ Group, in orchestral-tuning-unison, made their excuses and left for another circumcalderation and the lung-like freedom of cyclical expansion and disexpansion…expansion…etcetera.
Harris climbed aboard and beckoned Cody, who with much clambering and mountaineer-grip-posing, eventually triggered the automatic tooting that welcomed him to the ship-wreck-shaped boat. Onboard it became a shipless hulk of the boat it once was; a landlubbing sea-shell, past commissioned operations, settled on the terra firma bed, its last-legs long since trotted off, limping into the sunset.
‘Harrison says, this was a spaceship that has travelled here from the stars, from a place we can only dream of.’
‘Aren’t stars like suns?’
‘The systems around the stars, the mother of the planets of the far off people…’
‘… Who transuniversally travel via a narrowboat spaceship?’
‘Something like that. Or, something dreamed of, like that!’
It all seemed very unlikely until Cody remembered the golden rule…maybe everything at this stage of the dying narrative was code…code that was king had been promoted to code that was a god, the God, or whatever. His knowledge of metaphorphicality was sparse but burgeoning. There was a code beneath the code. Unravelling the code resulted in obscuring the meaning of the code the unraveling pointed to. The only machine able of deciphering the labyrinthine lake of polystyrene was a human-mind-machine, using the engineered-by-Nature parts non-human machines had not yet saturated with invasiveness and thought-thievery.
‘Now…’ Cody said, slowing down the rev-counter’s hurry, ‘how would Harrison know all this?…don’t tell me he wikipedia’d it?’
‘It is obvious to me,’ Harris mumbled, ‘that Harrison emanates from thereabouts, or somewhereabouts near thereabouts, or if somewhere faraway from thereabouts, en route to hereabouts, from thereabouts.’
‘I think you’re giving Harrison a zionistic length of Truth-rope with a knotted lie securing the end.’
‘What you think…has no fundamental use around here…or anywhere…anymore. You…are all about what…they…are making you think you are.’
Was Harris being nastiful? Or did he know more than he was letting on? Harris’d spent too much time in the presence of this Harrison fellow and the brain damage he was suffering was now being exported into the public arena.
‘I am ready now…for the crossover…I think,’ Cody said, meaning it, semi-meaning it, while not meaning it at all…
‘Good, I’ll inform Harrison… I’ll get myself hence, and lightly bring you what words he utters, with comportment and haste.’
‘If you can, keep Harrison off the books. And don’t be too hasty, I am in no rush…’
‘Time dictates that you are, Mr Kurtz. And Harrison dictates…’
‘Dictates?’
‘Just dictates.’
‘Just? Time is no boss of me, Harris.’
But it was. And it was playing games. Games that no version of Cody could ever win.
Cody could not escape the position, vis a vis his unenveloping-self and Harris, of being like a parent faced with the doings of an utter genius off-spring; unable to see further than once filled nappies and tears cascading in response to petty breezes as they passed through (see: Childrearing in Gaza: A Tale of Order among the Limblessness and Burning). Harris was a hinge-pin of the creaking narrative door and yet Cody could not get past the belief that Harris was a jar of door jamb…(See also: The Autonomous Puppeteers of Electropandemonium: The Metaphorphical History of the Stupidesque Novel.).
Linear break…
Retained within the portal’s muscular, fleshy clusp; having little alternative recourse, Cody ruminated on recent historical happenstances…wondered great, statue-lined thought-avenues and picnicked, crumbmakingly, lick-drippingly, on the astro-turfed banks engineered by the cognitively administrative earthworks department…
Judith was the Others’ Group’s number one, which made her his number two, he being number one. He could count on himself first, then her, but number three became a sticking plaster that refused to unadhesivate from the delicate skin of decision…
Kirk James was too confusable with James Kirk-Smith to be entertained.
Atticus was too confused with Atoll (without even considering Godstrand and Goodmanson and the entire ghost choir of Kokura.)
Jeff wasn’t the type of person up for this post.
Number three…who could number three be?
There were others, of course; forces that constituted strands of the string of Life. Sybil would be an absolute bottom scraping…and yet…and yet…there were forces that raged within Sybil; forces she kept at bay, suppressed with persistent gusto. Cody had perhaps one alias left. He consorted with the passengers who dwelt upon the decks of the listing vessel of his psyche…
He was keeping in mind what Harrison had told Harris, that it was the mind that needed to progress to gain access through the portalorifice, physical struggle was, he forgot the french phrase, Harris had used, but could see through all boundaries and struck out North, East, South and West in turn. His thoughts did the best to organise themselves. North they gathered in clumps and rested languidly among Norwegian pines. East, they queued in line; bearing spiced notions and talking in turn. South, thought complexes interspooled under glass domes and atmospheric plant beds. And to the West, where future called loudest, red-rosy, gold-trimmed and rainbow-ended ambitions jumped and waved, but disappeared like dreamends on approach.
And as thought wondered and wandered all points, in all directions, he came back to the compass centre with the same imponderable: How do I get out of here?
