Excerpt Eighty-Seven:
Coming off the Rails
Kirk had followed a set of rails (model railway in appearance) that headed towards Judith’s Stockholm Munchaus, a place he could not get to….but he, rightly, assumed that if he could hop on the vehicle that rode those rails he could make an entrance and work on insinuating himself into the relatively general space and time presence.
He followed the trail of tracks back from the wall separating Judith’s inner environment sanctum from his batshit streetspace meditational mindsphere as they circuitously wound their way to a large empty building that looked like a derelict place of medical attention; it had the vibe of a post apocalyptic hospital where whatever caused the apocalypse had originated. Kirk imagined that ward nine, room ten, was where, on the 11th, the world ended, or started its long ending from…which meant he would not find the room until the twelfth time of searching…it was the way things went, an old numerical mnemonics system that should have updated.
He could have waited for the robotic tracklayers to extend the track to see where it finished up, guessing, quite rightly, in room ten, ward nine, but he didn’t have the resources to wait; the time expenditure alone would have been costly to any ambition being honed on the grinding wheel of noble acts. He may be a modern knight, sans shining armour, sans lance, sans coat of arms… but he still had obligations to refurbishment induced gentlemanly, macho, iron fist, rubber tongued, king-of-the-castle ego-masturbating.
He found ward nine…then room ten…counted to eleven when the clock in the hall had reached eleven minutes to twelve and kicked the door in…three….two…one….bang: splintering and cracking filled the air then went silent…sitting up in bed, slowly slinking down into a flat position under the pillows, despite tubes and wires connecting his face to pulse maintenance and electro brain function enervators…was: Il Professore.
Kirk looked at the name tag attached, by string, from the end of the bed, it read: Prof.
Kirk closed-in, crouching, slowly, incrementally, forcing presentational smoothness through a peephole in the abrasive ridges caused by Kirk’s lovelorn, deadhorn, activated, kill, maim, fight mode…
‘I brought myself,’ Kirk stated by way of explanation, to the Professore’s sick pre-corpse, for intensive care crashing, chancing his lance…’here, by way of apology to explanatorily venture into a French or Latin phrase that would spin a trench of cable obscuring safety,’ he continued with, mainly words, with mainly nothing much in the way of structural integrity to back them up… He was waiting on a concrete delivery.
‘Sanguine,’ the Professore offered with a meekly mustered muttering, as a needy, wanton Kirk, not showing surprise, backtracked and u-turned into a position of requiring the services (as opposed to the funeral service, he’d once hoped for) of the Professore, whom he had shunned and shunted into the sidings; lessened and weakened with showers of bad intention, and laid out, prostrated and pummelled into submission by lack of care and numb dank feelings of lovelessness. Kirk only saw error in his past actions. Surely the Professore would understand…
‘Is that some kind of pasta?’ Kirk probed, nicey-nicey scratchy-itchy, catchy-wahtchy.
‘Sang…gween…ay…’
‘Is…that…a pasta?’ Kirk repeated with a patience befitting the patient’s interlocutor.
‘It is the future…’
‘…of pasta?’
‘The future…made from love…carved from the granite forged by a special squelching noise lovers make, dancing in the light of a future fantasm. Befrotting, flesh yearning and getting yearned upon…’
Was the Professore delirious? At his best fettle the Professore was as mad as a fruitcake growing on a fruitcake tree in a fruit salad desert (or was that dessert?). Kirk needed the Professore because the bat (refurb) senses he spent on cultivating a Judith/Kirk ‘tall-tower-for-two-scenario’ were barking up a garden centre tree that was not for sale. Family business; family tree, we cannot sell. How much? I told you, I am very sorry, but it is just not for sale at any price… Kirk worked it up and out: he needed Il Professore’s help to buy the whole dogdam Garden Centre…With Il Professore’s help, Kirk just needed to work out what the Garden Centre metaphor translated into in concrete terms; lay the concrete…and…dance the night away with sweaty, sweet and acquiescing Romance clinging from his soul.
Kirk’s romantic narrativisation of Judith threw a pot on the potter’s wheel that shed shadowy conflagrations on the walls and ceiling of the potter’s studio…the floor was mud and needed concreting. She was sculpted as a Queen of Sorts, but remained sponge-like in response.
Judith absorbed Kirk’s radiating intentions and no signals returned. Her stealth (or whatever) fooling his Love radar. Kirk was affronted, unbacked and subsided. He needed the help of the patient; he needed doctors and nurses, medicines and meditations…and…concrete.
If Kirk could revive the Professore the candle he held for Judith would catch fire and burn everything, everywhere, in a nice and Romantically burgeoning way, until all was cinders and ash; but it would be his Judith and his cinders and ash; an oasis of Love within the scorched earth and barren blackscape.
Kirk had a plan and its fruition would be signalled by the Professore declaiming his full name, something he loved doing when he was operationally lubricious. Kirk looked at his watch the last time the Professore uttered his own name, for the cunteenth time, but Kirk still couldn’t remember his name, or any of the sub-names that constructed the full blown name, above it being in several languages.
The Professore was self-love-led, with an ego the size of an intergalactic gas cloud. When he was ready, up to operating temperature, so to speak, he would remind Kirk of his name with a blaring name-hootingness…and this would be the sign that Kirk had a power to sprinkle around to lift him up onto a ledge above a crevice with all the where-to-do needed for safe completion. The opening of an envelope containing a pre-approved masterplan.
Kirk felt he had an important role. But he also demanded that he had a slice of the action. If he were to be a vital part of Judith’s revendication of the Homo Sapiens system, then she would have to pat the couch and invite him to curl up next to her. Or…or the whole thing would implode…or reveal idle threat making.
Il Professore was too ill to give Kirk the latest news so he communicated through his monitors…an AI news reader read Kirk the riotous news, talking over his current safe narrative and acting as the divine messenger of poop.
‘Judith has been staving off the invasion of the NMBS doppelgangershcardenfreude puppetclone, with the help of Mother Nature (let’s call it) and…wait…but…The Super Smart Shutdown System and the leader of the rallying resistance have escaped quarantine and are applying for entrance to Judith and commandeering of the biological control systems,’ said the smiling anchor.
Il professore, snored.
There was many a snore, one hundred million angels snoring, in the rising light levels of the New Dawn. Dusk was due, but before then inevitable catastrophe had to walk the Earth and shit in everyone’s precious meaningful pool of comfort.
There is no way that Sybil and Una could end up at Judith’s Stockholm Munchaus, and yet there they were. This was new information to the system because this meant that KB was much more of a part of the ‘Whole’ than his individualistic isolationism, et al, would dictate. Even though as it stood, in that moment, KB was being pinched into a speck. He was unaware of the goings on outside his atomic bubblette of focus for survival…
Sybil had a plan to save KB. She put it forward at an informal meeting at the Stockholm Munchaus. Judith kept hearing parts, overhearing other bits and her emotional alerting systems issued forth concerns that clambered along window ledges searching for the best white knuckle hold, should she need one.
‘Refill?’
‘I’m okay, wait, I’m okay, wait…’ ad infinitum…stuck in a loop…
Sybil was indisposed by indecision and that is why nothing had happened, yet. If Una had taught her anything it was that she had Ultimate Power; the kind of power that could turn anything and everything into nothing. So, first, she wanted to ‘do no harm’, second, her mind was fixated on exhaustively universally propagating harm in the most harmfully effective manner and doing her dogjam job.
Kirk stood alone, remoter than his refurbed protection could control. He reached forward and pulled the sheet over the Prof’s head, ‘Rest in peace,’ Kirk whispered.’
‘Fuck you,’ came the muffled, strained response.
‘Fuck me, indeed,’ chimed a so-near-but-so-far-from-tearful Kirk… Refurbishment had gone too far, a fleeting streak of a thought blazoned across skies that never saw the light of day, and it had taken Kirk, like a rag doll, with it.
