As Jim says, "This is the end, my only friend—the end of our elaborate plans, the end of everything that stands—the end. No safety or surprise—the end. I'll never look into your eyes again."
My beautiful dolls, my beautiful lifeless dolls, black-eye dolls of a hangman's marionette, models for brands at the eve of time, TV shows made by a handful for a handful, watching deep into the radium cloud. Numbering 88 albatross/crow/elephant—I was a cloud, tore out the insides of my pockets to prove to you I was a friend, lost in the defense of the ancients, riding trees like donkeys, yellowed newsprint placed atop cobblestone gutters, feces rolling to the shores, to faces looking up and pained—they are waiting for it to fall. And Chicken Little is on the news, channels set up to make you fear a speck of dust. The goner says: I still remember all the other times the world was ending. Right, man, right. Pea dust in a pellet gun, poisonous darts of Borneo—I keep kid skulls on my mantle, stare at them, hour-wise, imagine the thoughts projected on their foreheads, the kinks they'll grow up to be (if they're lucky). That's the negative creep of it all, the king wizard, dancing in an alley, back back, forth forth, kinging under a streetlight in Cleveland—that's where the true stars live, never in Hollywood, never in SoHo, you move to Portland then you move to Austin—nothing is hip enough you have a thirst to be on the edge make babies money security nice house homeschool Etsy shop prove yourself on Pinterest have all the right photos on your blog make it look right to your friends hide the television for your housewarming party hate the word hipster and you need a vegetable garden chickens and goats and a hundred-dollar massage every Tuesday and Wednesday from the hippie-looking woman with more schooling than a surgeon. Oh you need therapy but lie to your therapist when she asks how much you drink forget the industrial bottle of Jameson above the fridge. Pretend you only drink once a day (during your nap) but really it's more like throughout the day and whenever the firstborn wriggles his brilliance underneath your skin. You have come this far but we all know when everyone else is lying—just not yourself. This is the cadence of the generations, and like everyone I don't want to turn into my mom—I want to do it more and better and shake off all the patterns and make it better for my kids and that is why I keep their bodies behind glass on shelves cataloged and referenced, gene sequenced so I can play out simulations of what their lives could have been. This one a doctor, this one a welder. This one is on disability, this one died at 17. When I tire of playing with my dolls I place them on their shelf and pull my comfort over my head but it's never warm and I dare not leave the safety of my room for a trip to the end-hall closet. Wriggle a little arm, dance with a little foot—pull the string at the back of my neck to open these eyes, release to let me limp. Dress me up in polka-dotted panties and a juniors' training bra—satisfy your filth. Turn me over and spank me, feel your soft grow hard and seek my butthole turns you on brown eye to see what must be hidden touch what must be hidden—lick me in between. Then turn me back around and there!—My doll has working tears, saline solution administered through a door in my chest, every scar buffed away in the manufacturing process. In the future I will not have to suffer. In the future emotion is replaced with 400 IQs and world peace and never an argument and no suicide and school is easy and there is no fucking no cars no exhaust no accidents nothing to terrorize my nights and it's so so great not to have to use my hands to touch my mouth to speak you are reading this novel telepathically you communicate with me in the past via undiscovered technology my mother is a million years younger than me Stephen Hawking shits in a wormhole for his training potty. But then what? Perfect begets bored begets plaything idle hands roll back the clock revising the ecstasy of change and here we go!—Mr. Rogers silenced, Kennedy shot with Morelli's hypodermic—my mother's interrogation leaked by Simba but it ain't no problem-free philosophy. Every night the spirits own my walls, Tesla-opened doors, sights that make my eyes lock in the open position wordless theatrics of the comings and goings of what they once called God. Their space backs up to mine the crack of an overlap—accidental passing of the information of lost birds, each grain of sand powerful enough to run 12 Jurassic Parks and do you think they stopped there? No. The circuits in my brain are built to represent theme parks of computation, the entirety of it all contained in triplicate over and over like a backup, hordes of revelation, placing drugs on the planet as a traveling device for consciousness—everything as one and a mystreal knot, twisting the childhood of a cat's cradle—if you fold time the right way even a fetus can run the stars, born by a tube (actually a series of tubes) running from my eyes into my belly, buttons for eyes and a corncob nose—everyone knows that yellow and snow don't go together but I squat in the corner of the yard while cousins play and mothers watch and I do my deed, bringing to life a pee stick turning blue! My children will number the Earth, they will rule from behind glass and without a pulse with their eyes closed and a humming emanates from them and with their dreams, they remote control the world.
Jim says we are "Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain—and all the children are insane. All the children are insane."