Crypto-spindling pulls me back. I am water. I am tone.
My body is solid mud. Broken, tumbling, stratifying, bone. I am coming through the chrysalis. My racist tendencies are intact. My hateful elements all still here. Sheth is beside me. We are atop the ladder. Students are standing below, looking. My partner is there, Martin, far below. He’s come to see me die. To see me fail. To see me hang Sheth but I don’t seem to be able to move my arms. I am wrapped in a network of shit. I am dipped in honey, its slow-moving nature having become my own. The goddess is stringing me up—us up.
The Jennifer Lawrence thing is airborne. Not flying, exactly—but defying. Spinning around us at the top of the ladder. My neck is in the noose. Sheth’s neck is also in the noose. My madam is spraying us from glands at the sides of her neck. Spindling toward us with every move and yet she is so silently still. Super secret stealth. Beyond what the US military could have designed. She’s like a bee—but not! (But if ever I’ve seen something that looks more like a bee—) Buzzing around (soundless) at my head and I CANNOT MOVE a muscle! Not an inch. Not a foot. Not even a goddamn centimeter. You forgot the emphasis. Well, we don’t need as much emphasis since this is the end.
Is it the end of my life? I wondered.
I was back from the void. Had returned here at some point previous, before I was remembering. Maybe that had been a vision and I just blacked out. To the question that you think it needs more editing, I have this to say—you can’t read properly. But I was back. And this was my gym, my gun—where was it?—this is my scene. I control it! CONTROL!! I love it, need it, make it mine and here I am surrounded with gel that prevents me from moving. The Jennifer Lawrence thing is controlling me! She has me paused in this noose at the top of the gym and she’s going to kill me with all these people looking.
I try to speak, but it comes out like, “Harby warby schmokin’ aces built my fragrance in a snow room.”
I struggled against that being what I had said, because I really wanted to say this—
To Whom It May Concern—This is my death. I came here to check up on one of my subjects (Sheth Jones the domestic disturber) and I have gotten checked up on by one of my watchers I didn’t even know was my watcher. I mean I didn’t even know there were watchers. So, what I’m saying is—GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF THIS NOOSE!!
But it just came out “Harby warby schmokin’ aces built my fragrance in a snow room” as I have said.
The Jennifer Lawrence/Shiva thing—her face came over to me and these big insect-looking eyes peered into me and I could hear her, and she was saying—
You arrre a shhrimp, you slyly marauder. Don’t worry. I’m simply checking your system for upgrades. Be still, ok?
What kind of upgrades??
Spiritual, she says.
Don’t I need some physical upgrades? Like returning me to my gun so I can shoot the fuck out of you people?
No, she shakes her head.
NO???! I say.
The upgrades you need are not physical. What I’m upgrading is your consciousness.
I look over at Sheth. His eyes are closed. Like he’s already dead!!
He’s fine. Don’t worry about him. Anyway the upgrades you need are to your consciousness. I’m here to apply those changes. Your world is in danger, pal. You got to buck up and love your neighbor, dude. That’s the nature of the thing. You’re here on a trial run of an experiment of mine called Blue Lagoon 12. This whole planet and all its inhabitants were created by me to test this Blue Lagoon theory I have about organic partitioning in genetic systematics—
I’m an experiment?
Your whole planet, JLaw says to me telepathically. Please be still.
She returns to her work, which doesn’t involve opening me up but does involve a lot of wands and ultrasound-type devices she rubs across my skin.
I feel dizzy.
Disco lights reticulate my face. I am in a network. I am the network. I can’t feel the operation Jennifer is doing on my stomach. Falling all over the place. Throwing up on Madonna’s stairs. I am a young girl from Louisville, Kentucky. I have no future in law enforcement. Nor marrying Annabel, I see. No! These are alternate realities, schemas, I can cut off entire worlds of possibility by making a choice in my life. That’s what this whole thing is. We’re exploring the possibility space. When I pull the trigger, I cut off all the worlds where that didn’t happen. When I decide not to shoot someone, all the worlds where I shot them right then—they go away. That’s what I am. I’m consciousness. When I do something, I am choosing between worlds of possibility, shaving off realities that disagree with what I just did. Cutting off realities where I arrest Sheth, beat his grandmother to a pulp. Where I piss (just slightly) in a Black woman’s coffee right before she meets with me in the interrogation room. What realities have I cut today?
Hey. Hey. Madame.
JLaw is with me.
Can I die?
I start to elaborate but JLaw says, If you want to commit suicide, please do it after I’m finished with your spirit. Needs some fixing!—Whoah!! But, seriously kid, why would you want to kill yourself? You’ve got a young body.
I’m 53!
So? You want to know how old I am? You don’t have the fingers. We don’t deal with punishment, crimes, evil—stuff like that. I mean we do have evil but I don’t worry about it.
How can you live in your world? Though. Knowing there’s evil there. Don’t you feel the need to address it?
I do address it. I’m addressing it now, coming here to heal you! But I don’t spend my time worrying about the things I really can’t control. You know? Your AA groups call it the Serenity Prayer. But it’s just—do what you can about what you can do something about—and forget about the rest.
You’re telling me I shouldn’t be a police officer?
I’m not a career counselor.
Ok, but. Should I be a police officer?
You’re a cop—how am I gonna tell you not to be a cop? I’m an Alien—you gonna tell me not to be that??
No.
So be a cop! Or be something else. I don’t care.
You really don’t, do you?
Jennifer Lawrence shakes her head.
You’re going to leave me here, at the top of this ladder, with my Niggar in tow. And you’re not going to judge me or punish me or anything?
Nope.
You’re going to heal me anyway, aren’t you? Regardless of what I’m about to do.
That’s what I came here to do!
JLaw returns to electrifying my stomach or whatever she’s doing.
I am stuck. I’m stuck in my life. I see that there’s a whole new world out there, coming to us—and it’s coming fast. And I don’t see what steps to take. I was raised racist. Niggars are in my blood. I hang ‘em in my sleep. I came here to kill this one today.
“Sheth?”
Nothing. Dead face.
“Sheth?!”
He’s napping, JLaw says. I put him out of his misery after being ass fucked by you.
“He’s going to live, though?”
Yes.
“He’s going to become alive again?”
JLaw looks at Sheth.
Immediately he comes alive.
He says, “I was dreaming of calculus. This problem we had in class today. It stumped me, and I woke up just now remembering that I was working on the problem in my dreams!”
Then JLaw puts him back to sleep.
“Nooo!” I yell, and the crowd below gasps.
“Oh, you want him alive?”
“Yesss!!”
So she zaps him.
Sheth continues talking. “Isn’t that wild how the brain is working even when you’re sleeping? That it’s doing calculus?? Hey, bro—how you doing?” Sheth is super friendly.
“How are you?” I say.
“Great, man. What are we doing up this ladder?”
“Do you not remember?” I ask him. “What just happened?”
“You gave me a helluva roll in the sack, my friend.”
“My friend?? I just raped your ass! I’ve come here to kill you on top of harassing you and now this bitch Alien brings out her ultrasound and starts healing me? Don’t you—hate me?”
“Like you hate me?”
I look down. My fat stomach. Uniform. I need to make a change.
“But I don’t know what to do next,” I say. “I’m so far down this path. Where’s my gun? All my friends. My church. Even my God I think is racist at times. Fuck. If you sent me to a new planet, maybe then I could try. But here? I mean, my daughter hates me for being racist. If I change now, she’ll make fun of me. I know. I know that’s no good reason for keeping my beliefs. But they are true, somewhere deep down? Something in El Paso made me a racist. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know why I like to hate so much but it gives me something to do—is that crazy?”
I think both JLaw and the Black man nodded at this point but I’m not sure because my eyes flowed from the tripping Jennifer Lawrence with her Technicolor™ robes (head down, fixing all our spirits) and then to Sheth Jones (stark in his youth, eyes alert and looking upward, thinking about calculus) and then to my own hands, as they pulled the noose from around Sheth’s and my neck.
And the rope dropped.
And I didn’t know if the crowd below was real or if they were just part of JLaw’s imagination. But their clothes, and their skin, was in so many Colors that it hurt my eyes.
I looked at them.
My eyes opened wide.
And it was stunning.