1
There were two fat men who stood over a railing and discussed the elusive nature of narrative in a poststructuralist environment. From behind, the two men were indistinguishable, wearing the same blue short-sleeved shirts, and black jeans. But on closer inspection, it became easy to discern in one of them a superior knowledge of semiotics and industrial plumbing. Smoking filterless cigarettes, the two fat men attempted to construct one story after another, but always, they encountered the difficulty inherent in choosing an appropriate point from which to begin, a suitable rise of action, and then, of course, an effectively climactic resolution and denouement. Eventually, their discussion turned to pipe threading, and soldering techniques, and the international symbols for road safety.

There were two (fat) men who stood over a railing and discussed the difficulties they had with their wives and in-laws. While they talked, they watched the women pass below. They watched the women pass, and they whistled at them, and shouted things like, "Hey baby, I'd really like to objectify you," and, "Infantilization really turns me on."

There were two ( ) men who stood over a railing and stared out at the city. One of the men contemplated his position in the geography of the urban landscape, and the part he played in the distribution and arrangement of space in the (post)postmodern world. He saw himself there from a detached third-person perspective and he saw his life bracketed by a series of cleverly-placed parentheses. I'm not here, he thought. This isn't happening, he thought. Next to him, the other man's awareness remained opaque, his thoughts hidden, locked away from the intrusion of some external perspective. At one point, he turned to the man next to him, and said, "I really like to be spontaneous, I really like to do things on the spur of the moment, off the cuff, on the fly, in the heat of it all. I like to play it as it lays. I like to let it ride. I like to imagine what would happen if all those dishes at the Very Large Array were pointed at a single human being—would we see the electrical patterns of a man's soul? Would we hear the scrabbling fingernail of God inside his skull? Would we see the color of language? A series of childhood memories stored, hidden away there inside?"

In a little while comma the other man said comma I poz el el be gone dot

In the corporate world comma you must learn to be comfortable with the vague dot

In a former life I was a rock star.

2
In a former life I was a series of punctuation symbols and proofreader's marks. My (im)permanence was underscored by light gray penciling.

3
I spiral down now into the simulation of myself.

My life is a simulation of parenthetical clauses, one moment pixelating effortlessly into the next, time built of hidden uneditable layers, a series of masked outlines. Each experience I encounter is fully exportable to twenty-three different formats. When it is all over, I will choose FILE—>SAVE AS, over and over again. The options are unlimited, just like my love for you. My love for you is pixelated, rendered, rasterized, colorized. These days, the taste of your lips on mine is a Gaussian blur, a motion blur, shadowed afterimage of an afterimage.

4
The terrorist targeted libraries and bookstores. He built bombs into dictionaries, and thesauruses, and oversized cookbooks. The bombs were incredibly sophisticated: designed to detonate when the reader's eye reached a particular word or phrase, the explosives proved impossible to detect by even the most advanced counter-terrorist methods.

A: This is the uncertainty of one moment passing into the next.

B: I am the acclaimed author of four thousand suicide notes, each unpublished, each half-rhymed in even-numbered stanzas—each less frenetic than the last.

A: You meet me on the bridge of a Stradivarius but even here I am unsure of the note I strike, next to you. You are somewhere in the vibration of a string.

B: Magic in the press of flesh.

B: You are the f through which the sound of my heart escapes.

A: Were we built of centuries, and the comfort of careful restoration by future masters in city cellars and countryside Italian villas, this resonance, this dislocation, might weigh less between us. Give me several hundred years and I would take them; give me your heart now, and I quaver with indecision bowed—my lungs strung taut, my fingers clawed over the neck of this thing.

A: Were I not but just another foolish man—

5
I wanted to ask for your hand in marriage but we no longer lived in the same zip code. It was a difference of two digits. The prophylactic broke and we pictured errant DNA between us but there was still that nagging lack of empathy. There was never the courage to really feel each other’s pain with any kind of real, full disclosure. We were always too worried what everyone else thought to really love each other back. But that's neither here nor there. Fortunately, we had leftover Thai, and Twinkies, and a morning-after pill. You yelled at me for taking all the anti-nausea medication, but if one of us had to vomit, it sure as hell wasn't going to be me. That's just the kind of selfish bastard I was in those days.

We tracked your ovulation cycle. We left voicemail messages for one another.

Afterward, alone, I replayed those messages, over and over, and filmed my reactions on home video, and sold the distribution rights to a company with corporate offices in Malaysia, and Mexicali.

Then, that fall, under the guise of reconciliation, we smuggled the rest of your family in on a freighter from Tai Pei, and promptly set them to work assembling motivational self-help kits to pay the debt of their passage. It wasn't even a month though before you were at it again, inventing new, more spectacular families to make me jealous, disappearing for weeks at a time, only to return red-eyed and penitent the moment you sensed my love/memory/devotion/illusion/dependence diminishing.

You were still addicted to my articulation, remember? You were still always one step ahead of my plodding efforts to move on.

6
Today, we escape.

7
I tried to convince you there were more of us out there. I begged you to come with me, dissolve into the fabric of some ancient cracking city, disappear into the comforting swarm of a foreign tongue. In the alleyways are all the signs of replication and manufactured simulation. In one hand, you clutch the image of yourself. In it, you're flying over Chinese rooftops, all long silk swoops and fluid angles. Gravity bends. Time sits impatiently in your pocket, wrapped in gold and red ribbon. It jogs there against your thigh, comes loose, takes on the dimensions of the space surrounding it. From a brothel, the sounds of singing, and laughing, and clinking gold bracelets.

The things we get for the things we give up.

8
You would sell my child's soul for a commercial on TV, he says.

You would serve my child up to the masses with all the others, one more sacrifice to the machine.

He looks at her sideways, waits for a response. Nothing.

My child will not be filmed! he says. My child will not be televised! My child will not be pixelated! My child will not be a pig in a cage on antibiotics!

Nothing.

What he really wants to say to her is: Listen—our child will soar beautiful with bare mudcaked feet above dull static streets, over hissing wires, and cables, and satellites...

What he really wants to say to her is—

Instead, he sighs, and tries once again to read to her from an ancient atlas of the late–20th century Third World. But it isn't long before his eyes reach the invisible city of his birth, and the detonation is triggered.

...in the aftermath, she is there once more, feigning concern, and love. She holds his head in her lap, just like old times, and they spend the night like that, as though nothing happened. The sun rises. From a wartorn balcony nearby, the sound of intermittent applause. He stands, takes a bow, takes another, but he knows—it’s not for him.

9
Evening hidden in the hem of your dress.

Taste of elephant tears.

Chatter of overly cautious monkeys.