Excerpt 150: 

Promenade Escapade

By the time I returned to Meon Sea. I felt the same as before, only loaded. I was not privy to what exactly I was loaded with, but the feeling persisted with chronic underlying alacrity. The future beckoned with a smile, where once there had been a grimace, and I knew with a plausible certainty that where I was headed did not involve going round in a circle and surprising myself from behind. 

I remembered being shocked and horrified by who the mystery antagonists were…I just had no way of accessing the details…until the coded memory was unleashed once I had negotiated the next…you know…thing.

After recovering from the shock-factor of the unfeasibly rectal means of transference by walking the length of the promenade as far as the eye could see, to the polystyrene looking rock outcrops either end, in collar-cupped hat-covered obfuscation; I strode with a half-meaning intensity in the firm belief, grimly held, that the bastard e-butler would be none the wiser.

And so I went, maintaining an honest, even keel and berthing at the dock of Innocence; unloading my ratified cargo; concealing my contraband…steady as she goes.

Sometimes battles are lost by aggression and won by passivity.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ the e-butler said, ‘maybe we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot…’

‘Got…’ I anglicised.

‘Got, sorry, my bad.’

Eerily and with concealed menace the e-butler manoeuvred itself perpendicularly, sleight-of-butlerianism; a coy front with a slippery behind.

‘I have been devouring butlerian manuals and protocol pamphlets, and, you know, I think I can do it,’ he said.

‘Do what?’

‘Be a proper butler!’

‘You have my full support,’ I said, questions running around my head that I assumed with zestful paranoia would give my game a way if ever uttered. So I remained non-committal, largely silent, and the mirror sensors in the e-butler did the same. Stalemate City Park and Boating Lake…

A second became a minute and the minutes became hours. Within hours I was anchored. Within days I was deactivated by idyllic doldrums. Within months I was marooned on a bed of rose petals and puffed-up, synthetic marshmallowiness. I had fallen for the fripperies of comfort laid as ambush bait… The comfy duvet, patchwork with promises kept me from the theatre of war that would never stage the play of my life if I could not turn up and act the leading role.

‘Fuck it’ became my mantra and Clive, with e-butlering efficiency adopted the saying too, ‘Fuck it,’ I’d shout, ‘Fuck it,’ he’d echo. We were getting on as well as a man and his e-man could. But, pangs radiated dissonantly within the resonating ambience. I could barely shake off the feeling something was not quite right because it wasn’t quite wrong enough. I couldn’t tell Clive, because everything seemed as alright with him as alright could be and I didn’t want to stop ‘supplying his market stall with price labels’…so to speak.

I went for long, enhanced strolls around the neighbourhood carrying with me a walkie-talkie to keep Clive updated with where I was going and what I was doing. I revealed so much of myself to him and his, no doubt, extensive cloud systems, that it was difficult sometimes to remember that although an e-butler can be of great use it can also come with great risk.

It was as though Meon Sea could read my mind, or at least detect what my fate had planned and was sneaking me towards. The place was churning itself shut in a downward spiral; a locational termination timed to conduct its final closure upon my departure. However much I was prepared not to move from my nest. The wheels of outside beingness were nipping me to the shops of action. I must have appeared lunatic as I walked and spoke, shouting the odd ‘Fuck it,’ as I looped and backsidled, amongst the plots and schemes of Meon Sea.

Chinatown was deserted…a fleshless hinterland of broken lanterns and smashed neon signs. I stopped in its once beating heart, stepping carelessly into a pool of once eaten sushi… I allowed my radar to beep its call to a response that was never coming, right after retching and stepping on to dry paving stone. The Japanese had left Chinatown. And Chinatown had left Meon Sea.

What I’d been told by a code-messenger in my snooze protected hinterland sojourn was the location of my departure. As much as Clive (or Clive the Kitten as I had affectionately begun calling him) and I were getting on with each other, a deft prudence persisted, that seemed disloyal but sat in a file marked cruel to be kind and subheaded: Never trust a bastard e-butler. All I needed to do was take a nap on a seafront bench and everything would take care of itself.

But it had been the flat itself who’d authorised my indoctrinal systems to supply snooze-at-will propensity values, so due to months of chronic oversleep, the misposition of public disectomy exposure; without the help of outside, or inside, forces, could I sleep?

I could not sleep. Not even close…a drift-off would have sufficed but I was wide awake and hyper-ready for the action I needed to perform once sleeping gave me the go ahead to join the green-light go-line queue….

It did seem that if it was the flat that gave me my super power of at-will-napping, then maybe whatever powers controlled the building footprint must know more about me than I’d like. Then I imagined Clive the Kitten….AKA bastard e-butler, terrorising the flat, room by room, tearing it apart for clues. Who mentioned the word ‘torture’?

The e-butler had the place under its oppressive trigger finger and thumb; the vicious kitten cat-clawing its feline ferocity like a bitch in heat…however coolly…

A number of lurid scenarios assailed me. I imagined the high-speed pass of a Neapolitan passaggiata; peripherally monitoring sea gulls, not indigenous to Meon Sea, not even in my imagination proper sea gulls even, swooped across, levelling out battle-clad in a breeze that Calm had thrown up out of hurricane-seasoned ambition; the clouds scuttled by in forty-something shades of grey, I counted them and I don’t know whether I slept or napped or blinking counted as semi-communication with the source I needed to access the footsteps Fate had pre-tracked for me. Aware that I was becoming a self-occuring escape in progress, but somehow still asleep. All I just needed to do was wake up enough to apply actual-action with non-splashmaking finesse; unravel the executive carpentry of departure. Mid-snooze I was feeling like a good waking-up session with irresistible alertness.

All systems, sub-systems and peer-auxiliaries were shocked into alert; mine and the greater environs of Meon Sea at once, in synchrocoincidental mimicry.

My inner contact, intuition-contributory egg-sponge, had uploaded to my forebrain’s mind the designated route. Beyond the pier, guarded by the ghosts of ex-marines and spent warriors still kicking ass with no legs, there was a sunken trough that lay, three clicks out and four clunks sideways, from the end of the pier’s structure. I didn’t know who or what was going to help me with the impenetrability factor. I’d had brush-ins with the ex-military, been a passive witness in their introduction of brutality to mundane obliviousness; forcing Peace to do a jig for the sake of enforced peacelessness; leaving unconsidered consequences decontemplated.

It slowly dawned, stop dawning, and started dawning again that Clive, his head in the cloud, might have had a hand on the levers, a foot in the door of Meon Sea’s deflation. Clive was either on my side and destroying everything to clear my path to where I must go, out of kind regard, or, he was squeezing my nuts with subterfuge; destroying our deep and apparently unshakeable friendship-plus. ‘Clive,’ I said aloud, with cracking hesitancy. Unscripted. It was a coded goodbye forever curse… A poisoned Trojan-potato mashed up with regrets and drowned in a gravy of yet more abandonment.

As I pre-imagined running to the pier, sprinting the length and diving into the ocean drink, my actual body movement surprised me. I had not been informed of the truth of Fate’s fininkerling… A short, squat autobus with meditteranean markings that looked out of place in the lost light of Atlantic drear pulled up, ‘Everybody on board,’ shouted the cartoon-faced driver, at me, with a cheer that spoke of elsewhere, initiating the concept of a fun-time that could never be had at this destination. I hopped aboard during the realisation that whoever was partnering with me had managed to hornswoggle the whole Meon Sea operation control complex into letting me slip away. But at what cost?

‘Tickets, please!’ the conductor demanded. My ticket was in the code in my face and eyes and his reply was written in his Nietzscherian moustaches. I sat in a bucket seat of Promise and strapped myself in for the ride as the bus accelerated to optimum take off speed and climbed into the clouds, which exhibited a further three or so shades of grey that could not be detected from the ground’s perspective. I looked back downward, but could only make out the three black piers jabbing out into the brown sea and a pixel-obscured, automated town fair celebrating its own funeral direction.

A trapdoor opened and I fell, screaming…hitting the sea hard…riding the cold ridge of exasperation and anxiety down, down, down and more down, until I met my fate, with a gross but welcome feeling of all encompassing inevitability: before me, a giant orifice, being tended attentively by constantly nibbling silvery kuntfish. My way out; my vagina.

It was as though I had drowned and been reborn. My memories restoring the personhood I’d lost. I was hungry and felt a sense of gratitude for Clive who had packed several concealed biscuits about my person. I snacked in rushed memory conflagration before slipping contentedly into a nap that reached parts of my mind I’d never before scrutinised…