"Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth!
Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?
Till beauty fades from off my shoulders, darken'd and cast out,
A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity."
 —Wm. Blake, "Visions of the Daughters of Albion"

Memo stood alone in the middle of the street trying to forget her face. Cars moved all around him, but no one honked or cursed. They just avoided him with the deft subtlety he'd come to expect from the urban expedience. At first he imagined it was with a certain deferential respect: Maybe they could read the pain in his black and blue eyes as he stood on the yellow dotted lie. Maybe they could see he was not afraid of exhaust fumes and other forms of gossip. Most likely, though, he was just blending in with the natural scenery, as usual, camouflaged against the concrete and smog-filled sky. On one side of the line, cars moved in a northbound direction; on the other, southbound. Everything is change, he thought. This line represents--

At this point, Memo had grown tired of chasing telephone wires to their logical points of concussion. It was hard work and he was hungry and exhausted from listening to the neverending cacophony of catalytic converters and sputtering old muffler pipes. He just wanted to stay here a while longer and avoid the void of doing something, but circumstances seemed to demand otherwise. He couldn't stop thinking about the telegram she'd wired, and he realized that sooner or later, someone would have to take a step in the right/wrong/opposite direction. This didn't resolve anything, though, because he also knew that either way it was just an invitation to another head-on collusion with fate. DEAR MEMO, the telegram said, I REALLY WANT TO TOUCH YOUR BRAIN BUT IM AFRAID MY FINGERTIPS WILL MELT IT STOP YOU ARE SO FULL OF SHIT BUT I LOVE YOU ANYWAY AND I CANT SEEM TO STAY AWAY FROM YOU NO MATTER WHAT OUR GROUP THERAPIST SAYS STOP THIS IS BECAUSE ONE OF US IS CRAZIER THAN THE OTHER BUT I STILL CANT TELL WHICH AND ANYWAY DONT FORGET AS LONG AS EITHER OF US STILL THINKS THEY HAVE SOMETHING TO LOSE NO ONE WILL GET OUT OF LINE STOP DONT EVEN TRY TO LIE I KNOW YOU FEEL THE SAME WAY MY SPINE IS TINGLING WITH THE ANTICIPATION OF FIRST CONTACT BUT THIS IS PROBABLY JUST ANOTHER SYMPTOM OF THE SAME OLD DISEASE STOP SO HERE ARE THE KEYS FOR THE SPACE OUR OWN PRIVATE ASYLUM AWAITS STOP WILL BE WAITING BEHIND PADDED WALLS FOR OUR MUTUAL KIDNAP/ESCAPE INTO BANKRUPT INSOLVENCY STOP WAIT FOR THE SIGNAL AT SOME UNDISCLOSED POINT IN THE NEAR/DISTANT FUTURE YOULL KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT BLAZING INTO YOUR SKULL FROM MY NINE MILLIMETER WATER PISTOL STOP UNTIL THEN BLEND REMEMBER THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING STOP

On the east side of the street was a long wall of graffiti bombs. Large angular letters exploited and collapsed into one another, glowing silver outlined in bright radioactive green: THE EAR HERE'S MORE THAN THE HEART NOSE. PUPPET. SEE/US. Memo stared at the message for several hours. Just another barrier of barrio illogic erected along invisible borders under cover of night. He imagined others trying to decipher the graffiti’s meaning. For a while he tried to decipher it himself, but then gave up and instead began reconstructing in his head the entire conversation they'd avoided the day before (he was always nostalgic for moments just on the verge of occurring). He'd tried to warn her about words, but it was no use; they were both afflicted with the same disease. "I'm addicted to your presence," she'd artfully articulated. No. You're addicted to my affection/obsession, and I feel the same way.

In those days, everyone was obsessive, or compulsive, or obsessive/compulsive. This is what passed for love. Compulsion was the secret engine churning; obsession, the fuel. "There are three choices here," he'd said. "You can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phrase."

On the west side of the street was more graffiti. Diagrams of various forms of triangles. Isosceles. Scalene. Equilateral. Next to the triangles were formulas in bubble script. IF LOS A=C, THEN SOLVE FOR B. ETC.

But Memo was convinced there was no solution, because the way he saw it, the questions themselves were flawed. They were supposed to equal each other, according to the graff artist's formulations, but he knew this wasn't true. He knew it was much more simple/complex than all these words and formulas suggested. Something told him B would have to solve for itself; he couldn’t explain it to her, but each time he tried to solve for unknown variables, he ran up against discrepancies between the various elements and a violent chain reaction of chemical nonlogic invariably followed. He pictured two points whirling, intersecting, disintegrating into each other on an empty streetcorner at night. He pictured a spiral rising out of sight, blazing up into the sky high above the freeway and traffic lights.

(He never told her this, but Memo believed there were different versions of the same person. Mutations on the same handful of themes, replicating to infinity. He would meet new people and recognize them--somewhere deep behind their eyes, he could detect phantom traces of familiar structural damage and a reciprocated recognition of spatial needs. Some repelled; others held inescapable, compulsory--and often destructive--attraction. He tried to not recognize it, to forget everything he remembered, but it was no use; the city demands complete amnesia and blinding recollection all at once.)

Around noon, a busload of political activists drove by on their way to a demonstration downtown. The Alpha male was at the wheel. The STOP CHILDREN CROSSING lights were blinking violently, and from behind mirrored windows, the passengers gawked at Memo standing there in the middle of the street. He watched his reflection pull and shift with the movement of the bus. Inside, the passengers sat rigid, clinging to their seats. Some of them watched him with sad eyes, others with anger and hints of disgust; others simply pretended not to see him at all, and found instead something else to look at. As the bus passed, the Alpha male grinned and bared his teeth, pointing straight ahead, then silently mouthed something. Memo tried to read the language formed by the movements of his lips, but all he got were the last few words: "...true revolutionary...way."

This was truth. This was social justice. All the theory and reasoning in the world could not hide the simplicity of it. There was a horrific beauty here, crystalline in its fundamental proportions, and Memo quickly found himself surrounded by a tickertape of sacrilegious ideas -- MAYBE THE PINCHE CAPITALISTS ARE RIGHT AFTER ALL ... SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST ... SELFISH DESIRES OVER THE COMMON GOOD ... NAKED PURSUIT OF SELF INTEREST ...

It was a disgusting trainwreck of thought and Memo was suddenly retching, vomiting on the pavement, wishing he would just disappear once and for all into full invisibility. He was no match for this kind of competition, and soon a puddle of wasted DNA had formed at his bare feet. In it, he saw another reflection of his face, and behind that, the city's skyscrapers looming in the distance. Memo stared as the two images shifted and melted into each other in the spreading puddle. He felt surrounded by mirrors of hard pavement and fluid, distorting glass. It can't be, he thought. The logic must be flawed. There must be some misunderstanding, some other way--

But it was all there on the walls for the whole world to see. Bright bubble hieroglyphics bursting out the edges of narrow borderlines. The wisdom of the ancients transmuted over centuries by the alchemy of gas-masked modern-day Sufis into concrete and iron, spraypaint and calligraphic fatty marker strokes under cover of helicopter spotlights and illegal night:

IF A>B, AND B>A, BUT B>C, AND C>B, THEN C=? C=? C=? C?

No. It just didn't add up.

Memo was thinking: In the fairytales, the mouth closes around silence and the mind sleeps. The cave grows dark with deferred desire and the eye no longer sees. We do not hear about the dreaming that takes place in this state of hibernation. We do not hear about the obsessive web of illusions and ideas that takes hold of environments in perpetual stasis. We hear only of the future moment when the heart will be opened again by a resurrecting kiss. We hear only of the valiant, heroic struggle, and then--The moment of desire! the moment of desire!--the narrowly averted tragicomedy of yet another unrequited love.

(But something must occur in the dark there behind those closed, waiting lids. Dreams; no dreams. Entity; nonentity. Both words and the absence of words--nothing escapes the context of desire and obsession...)

Memo blinked and realized he'd reasoned half his life away again and now night was coming on fast and the moment was almost gone. He wanted to build himself a new cave right here around this spot. He would cover the interior of the cave with her initials to prove his devotion/obsession. Back then, the city was full of caves like this, a vast sprawling multitude of pathologically patient cavedwellers scrawling their cravings in secret by the light of dim fires, skeletal phantoms creeping with lamplike eyes--this was the new enlightenment. This was the new world order.

He looked down now at his oil-slicked feet and the surrounding puddle of vomit, and it occurred to him that he was tired of trying to draw them out. It was easier to conclude they were content with their prefabricated interior designs, their vertical blinds and dilated eyes. And even those who took action to change things, to challenge the structures--even those invariably seemed to do so with the same self-righteous clinging, that same dull glow of judgment and fear in their line of sight. They worked diligently inside their caves, typing up impassioned manifestos, burning books and paintings for warmth and dreary light, burying music under the sounds of divisive chants and whispered rumors, a dull cacophony of furtive, suspicious glances outlining perpetual surveillance maps of the dividing line between the outside world and the shadowy gloom inside.

In reality, he knew he was just as afraid as everyone else, just as lost and empty and unsheltered. But the cynicism was creeping and spreading now, and he was tired, ready to give himself up to its cool, antiseptic comfort--Better to just fold, cut my losses, avert further suffering and pain, he thought. There was nothing ideological about it: Simply put, the cars were turning on their grim headlights now, the puddle of vomit was drying in the chilled evening air, and the more pressing problem of shelter loomed. Later he would worry about other necessities; there would be taco truck waste bins to hunt through, evacuations to perform, furtive shadowy gestures in the margins of the night--

Then, suddenly, Memo remembered something else he wanted to tell her. It was yet more words, and he knew it probably wasn't what she wanted to hear from him, but it didn't matter. The words were splayed out over the inside of his skull, and he knew they would have to come out one way or another. For a few moments, as the cynicism retreated, he thought about spraypainting the words onto the nearest available surface of concrete or human flesh. He thought about carving them into city bus windows and tongues and cheeks, or tattooing them onto palm trees and the soles of feet. He pictured her there in her cave beneath the freeway overpass, the cave set just off the sidewalk into the angle of a slanted dirt wall underneath the concrete monolith above. He pictured a small fire inside the cave throwing her shadows out onto the street and then pulling them back in with the gust of wind from each passing car. He pictured himself standing outside the cave, speaking with her, etching words into the carbon monoxide between them.

He imagined the words would draw her out finally into the cave of the underpass, and then out beneath the night sky, and then out. He pictured them walking hand in hand in search of cracks and escape routes. He pictured them dodging drivers deftly, moving like shadows over and through the margins of traffic, flitting easily in and out of the spaces between cars and with the ebb and flow streaming across and between lanes. The city streets were flawlessly mapped onto the tangled memory web of a billion billion synaptic clefts popping and cracking electric impulse in his skull, but he knew this was just conjectural past that would shift to accommodate their rapidly unfurling future, new streets and maps issuing forth spontaneously, simultaneously, to reflect the spaces they would carve out of the city. Their movements would be marked with certainty, unbroken and steady over pavement, their gestures without pause or hesitation. They would no longer care what anyone thought. They would no longer care about the risks involved. The line between thought and action, judgment and being, would dissolve completely, forever.

But then he stopped short. This scenario he was fleshing out, he realized, this great unraveling future of possibilities, was already dooming itself in its very imagining. It was another trap, and he’d fallen into it. He had to act. Quickly, he shoved it out of his mind and stepped off the line, slipped through the space between a lowered '64 Chevrolet Impala and a row of Hell's Angels bikers.

He ran a few blocks, but already he knew it was too late. Already it was not as he’d pictured it, his movements jerky and unsure, his actions tainted with the warm aftertaste of imagined future. He could sense the dissipation, and around the edges the ever-creeping doubt again, the barriers closing in and locking into place around these spaces almost as quickly as he could create them. He became aware of his labored breathing, his tired limbs. He looked around, his vision blurred by cold sweat and traffic lights and the smoggy whisps of gray that trailed after every motion. The doubt grew exponentially as shreds of the streets and walls seemed to flake away with each passing car, and he knew it was only a matter of time before his own body succumbed to the tearing as well. He slowed his pace, stumbled a few steps. The streets looked suddenly unfamiliar. Behind the torn shreds were the hints of more walls curving up and over him. He knew these would tear away to reveal another layer of internal structure, and then another, and another. The pavement buckled and swayed, and he felt the nausea rising again.

Memo stopped to catch his breath and get his bearings as objects and whirled events collided around him. It was only a split second, but it was enough: In that small space between movement and perception, an ice cream van struck him and knocked him hard to the ground. Screeching tires flattened him into the pavement, It's-Its flew, and at this point, he remembers laughing out loud. He remembers how she could never understand why he found everything so funny--even this, crushed here on a city street, knowing he would never have her, or even see her again, laughing his flattened head off. Somewhere above him, a dizzy swirl of tinkling music wavered in and out of key. Lights blinked in a thickening mass and a small crowd gathered quickly on the sidewalk to videotape the unfolding series of scandalous events.

Memo's face was flat on the pavement now, spread out in an uneven, ovoid shape, and his mouth emitted a gurgling half-choke/half-chuckle sound that echoed sweetly off the graffitied walls. There was the familiar sensation of melting, and a mixture of hot blood, cool marble fudge, and rich, crunchy pavement sparked his taste buds to life even as they were finally sputtering out. He felt the words draining from his head, spreading and seeping into the street around him, and he remembers seeing a large black beetle nearby, scurrying along the street in search of gaps--a storm drain, a manhole cover, anything into which it might escape. On the beetle’s back, in bright metallic yellow, was a cryptic hieroglyphic: Œ„. The beetle was whispering--to him, to the world, to itself; he would never know for sure. "There is, by the way, an area in which a man's feelings are more rational than his mind," the beetle said, "and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time. Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos...or imagination. Sucker."

Then the beetle disappeared into a crack between the embossed letters of the street name in the curb’s concrete, and Memo remembers wanting to follow the insect down under the street and plow deep into the concrete and desert sand beneath, burrow deep into secret crevices and fissures and hibernate a thousand years in the gaps between tectonic plates, a covert preparation for more overt action, a timebomb waiting for the urban landscape to shift and collapse and decay around his body until he was bared once again to sun and the wide yawing curve of open sky. He lay there and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, love and fate, that had brought him to this point. In his squashed head all the angles were caving. Triangles fell in piles of dry, brittle sticks like snapped, dismembered limbs--kindling for someone else's fire, someone else's cave. The formulas were still there too, but with nothing behind to prop them up anymore, they also began to collapse, symbols and letters exploding and shattering on impact.

He watched them fall one by one, but at this point it didn't occur to him to try to catch them, or to put it all back together again. He remembers only laughing and reaching half-heartedly for a B in one final maudlin gasp of moist sentimentality; every thing after that, he has chosen to forget.

(AFTERNOTE: Investigators would later find the following text scattered over the street and partially embedded in the pavement near the scene of the crime:

ARISE AND DRINK YOUR BLISS, FOR EVERY THING THAT LIVES IS HOLY!

No motive would ever be determined. No other traces would be found.)

KWENTO aka INVISIBLE INK
*C/S*

[samples/loops/props:
>>> WORDVISION
>>> RICEBALL
>>> INVISIBLE MAN
>>> BALAMKITSCH
>>> LOS