Aqaara Scene: “Sex to Avoid Death”

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The crowd was larger, people up both walkways, chants and holograms everywhere. A bright orange drone floated above, slowly coming down.

“Hello, how are you doing?” It was the man from the Hive, now dressed and atop a glider, floating behind the drone.

“Want me to smash that thing?”

“We’re making a film,” he replied.

Dee frowned.

“Name’s Norich.” He raised his eyebrows at her as he glided down. “How would you feel about me filming you now?”

“For what?”

“A document.”

“For your personal pleasure?”

“Sort of Cinema Verite.” The camera-drone, an orange sloped contraption, floated down over his shoulder. “I’m examining the nature of The Hive for the Ark News. The impetus of that, right? I’m thinking individually, right? Why do we do the things we do?” He looked half drunk, the way he glanced back and forth between them. “Like, what is to experience it?”

Dee shrugged. “Go ahead and try it.”

He landed, leaning forward, wincing at the effort to think of an answer that could not be deflected. “Wisdom, knowledge, that is very human.”

Dee studied his long face, almost earnest, knowing he wanted to listen, his hands open in front of him, waiting for something. “Sex, that’s what I think you’re after, sex and more of it.” Aqaara Scene: "Sex to Avoid Death"Norich nodded back at her. “You know how people say that men want to have sex with young women to avoid their fear of death? That gorgeous taut flesh, so primal and real, the dream of the boy through the old man, it’s got nothing to do with dying, my friend. It’s just being alive, that sexual drive, mindless and direct. But to avoid death? No, it’s not that. Everything is to avoid death. Eating, drinking, going to the bathroom—”

“What about good driving habits then?” Dee added.

“That’s sure as hell part of it, awareness of what you are – your limitations, that you have a perspective, that you’re aware that we tend to think that we know something—”

“You men?”

“Us people. That we know something that no one else can exactly understand. Even with as much as anyone might know, in their mind for a certainty, whatever is gathered through books and media, experience, relationships, there’s only that, only that perspective.”

“Humility then,” Dee ventured.

“Yes, that’s part of it.”

“I think what you really mean is sex,” Dee concluded. “And the answer is no.”

“It’s more our limitations.” Norich tried to pat her on the shoulder. “It’s all about being aware of that.”

“So we’re in agreement then.” Dee went past him into The Hive.

Drunken Foucarmont in Emile Zola’s “Nana”

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Emile Zola’s novel Nana is lengthy, but Foucarmont is entertaining:

“As far as I’m concerned,’ said Foucarmont, “I’ve drunk every imaginable sort of wine in all four quarters of the globe…Extraordinary liquids some of them were, strong enough to kill a man on the spot. Well, none of them had even the slightest effect on me. I can’t make myself drunk, and I can’t.” he was very pale and calm, lolling back in his chair and drinking without stopping. (118)

“Why, in Havana,” Foucarmont went on, “they make a brandy from a very certain wild berry which tastes as if you’re swallowing fire. Well, one evening I drank over a liter of it, and it didn’t affect me one bit. Better than that, another time when we were on the coast of Coromandel, some savages gave us heaven knows what sort of mixture of pepper and vitriol, and that didn’t affect me either. I can’t make myself drunk.” (119)

Foucarmont drained a glass of Chartreuse. Chartreuse didn’t have the slightest effect on him, not even that much, and he tapped his thumbnail against the edge of his teeth. But all of a sudden, just as he was advancing on Labordette, he turned white and fell like a log in front of the sideboard. He was dead drunk. (124)

The Planet Mina (Half Draft)

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They arrive at the cluster of planets. The first several are not promising. And then there is life. They land in search of intelligence…and find it. The first sense is that of agoraphobia – a genuine nausea at being outside – and they are unable to stand and are overpowered by an intense desire to stay by the ship, huddled together. They wonder if they are going to survive. And then Kim, empowered by a keg of Cyfy, leads them on. Wherever he stops, he spins the keg off his back and imbibes, looking out, his forearm taught, his young face already showing wear. He jet-bikes on, as one by one they are overcome with asphyxiation until it is only him and his sister, an attractive girl with blue eyes, but hard and angry, a survivor of pre-ordained disasters.

Weinstein’s “New World”: White Light Porn

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Alexander Weinstein’s moral is as clear as white light in his collection of short stories, Children of the New World, that technology is no replacement for the real world. The stories suffer from what Weinstein terms in Cartographers as “nothing but white light”, broad strokes, many of those poorly thought, and no effective detail.

Sentences such as  “Can’t beat a cold beer,” I said, taking a swig (13), ‘(I) traveled endless hours, numbed by bad sleep and bland airplane food (67), surrounded by pressurized air and bland airplane food (80), ‘I stopped talking, hating the clunkiness of words (190) are the clunky norm. Weinstein’s “New World”: White Light PornWorse is his adolescent portrayal of sex, the male character – let’s call him Misogy – obsessed with sleeping with porn stars (38), being fucked so good (112) and fully exposing the vulva (136), leaving the reader to wonder if technology might actually be better than having to read this.

Nathaniel Philbrick Explains How to Eat People

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Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea details the tragedy of the Whaleship Essex in 1819, a journey that ended in cannibalism. And he describes the procedure fully:

He, like most sailors forced to resort to cannibalism, began by removing the most obvious signs of the corpse’s humanity – the head, the feet, feet, skin – and cosigned them to the sea. They next had to remove the heart, liver, and kidneys from the bloody basket of the ribs. Then they began to hack the meat from the backbone, ribs and pelvis. After the lighting the fire at the bottom of the boat, they roasted the organs and meat and began to eat. (166)

Safe. Writing too.

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I know my blog has been lacking as of late – and will be again – but in the meantime, I will get at it as I am writing as I should, attempting to complete a third draft of Aqaara, the second part of my speculative trilogy. Anyway, here is an expunged scene:

“You ever been on the subway in New York, Faith?”

“Yes, of course I have.”

“Ever take your son there?”

She looked scared, like she might leave. “Yes.”

“I was on the subway a few years ago, and there were two men arguing, two guys yelling at each other. Everybody backed away from them. It was the commuter rush. Nobody wanted to get near. And then one of them punched the other guy, hard, knocking him backwards into a wooden bench.”

“Bam! Bam!” The boy jumped up and down.

“The guy yelled, ‘And stay down!’ And walked right onto the train with us. No one spoke. He was standing right beside me. I knew I should have said something. ‘You assaulted that man! That is a crime! You can’t do that.’ But I didn’t. I said nothing. I did nothing, like everyone else. I was afraid he might have a gun or a knife. That’s what I told myself. The subway doors closed. He looked around at all of us, defiant. Nobody would meet his eyes. And we stayed like that, us commuters just going home like it was a normal day, a criminal with us now, and then it pulls into the next stop, 59th Street, and he gets off. I looked at the woman next to me. We were both so relieved to have him gone. The doors closed, and we continued on our way.”

Spider Scab

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Davis scratched at his belly as he slept, absently thinking that gum was stuck there, but it was a clump of clotted blood, a spider bite. The bite became red, spreading across his abdomen. It hurt to scratch. And he was hungry, terribly so, constant and painful, a need he could not satisfy.He put ointment on it, and then the scab was impossible to get off. Davis finally dug it out, and hundreds of things fell out, tiny black dots that grew legs, and scampered away, baby spiders.

He woke up at that, terrified that his stomach was full of baby spiders and then relieved. He picked at the edges of the scab until it finally came off. Nothing fell out, but there was an inside bit that came out and that looked like a dead spider. He looked at it, waiting to wake up again, but he didn’t.

Train Platform Dream

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The platform was crowded, people on their way home for work, a woman with her two girls, one holding a half-eaten apple, a man slouched forward over his phone, three young women talking excitedly to each other, a man walking through, all of them waiting with her, on the platform across the tracks, the local and express, some glancing up into the tunnel, others barely aware they were there, the electronic board stuck at three minutes and then flashing orange. Train Platform DreamAshe closed her eyes. The sound was distant, moving away, echoing out of the tunnel, and then it was above, heavy over the joists, coming through the cement block ceiling and walls. The train was here. It was odd, standing there, as if in a dream, going nowhere, dark and crowded, not scared, not anything, just there. They pushed past one another, some patient, and filled the train. She pressed back against the door to the next car, the cool of metal against her hip, and the train doors closed. It was slow at first, starting, only to lose momentum, starting again, slowing, and then began to gain speed, moving alongside the local train, pulling even, looking back at the people looking at them, and them moving ahead fast, swaying back and forth, clacking over the switches and breaks, flashing past the cement pillars, yellow lights and local stations, until it was almost too fast, and then braking, the woman’s mechanized voice announcing Grand Central, clicking into the station, slowing hard, stopping and the door’s opening for the swell to go out and in. Train Platform DreamShe stayed as she was and watched, the little man dash of the one empty seat, the older woman pause and stand over him, the young women, still there, rotating around their pole, still talking, the young man moving his head side to side with his music, the hand reach in to stop the doors, waiting him and then another, before moving again, deep into the tunnel.

That collection of Drugs we call Knowledge

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It’s not like I don’t believe in something. I treasure the moment of my eyes coming open, seeing that I am still here, that collection of drugs of knowing something. And then realizing that, that it’s not what it’s supposed to be, knowing it’s a lie. I’m going to be dead, just that. A mantra of sorts. I wait for the next thing in fear, tense and in delight. Everything is now. And if not, in a bit. It will come again. And I will have it then. That’s what I tell myself again and again.

Penthouse in a Bag

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Davis stood in the back corner of the convenience store, nervously eyeing the owner. She was old, an Asian woman, who probably didn’t care. Or maybe she did. Maybe she would lecture him and call his step-mother.

Heart pounding, he snapped the Penthouse from the rack and approached. The woman took the magazine, slid it into a paper bag and waited to be paid. Penthouse in a BagHe walked outside, pausing at the corner of the parking lot to slide the magazine into his pant leg.

“Hey.” His step-brother, Flynn, appeared behind him. “Can I see that after you’re done?”

Davis redid his shoelace. “Huh?”

“That Penthouse.”

Davis couldn’t understand how he had appeared, where he had come from. “Yeah, okay.”

It was a good issue, four pictorials, lipstick lesbians, the centerfold Pet leaning back with a cigarette in her hand. He took the magazine to Flynn and went back to his room, laying uneasily on his bed. He never spoke with Flynn. They had nothing to say to each other. And now this. Was this some kind of turning point? Would they talk about the naked women? Which was best? What they liked? What they did as they looked at them? What were they supposed to say? Penthouse in a BagThere was a knock. Davis sat up abruptly, crossing the room and opening the door to find the magazine, face down on the beige carpet, Flynn’s door closing down the hall.