Traveling in a dingy binge, the ultimately sulky Norah can’t let their first fan out to lunch.

 

III — xv — In Like Means the Sentence Was Abandoned.

.   .   .

Logan, on the sure trans–Atlantic flight, had learned to think jam and often wondered how his people would ever last. His best had been too much. The crest of acclaim was fast receding. The Church of His Glorious Multitudes had claimed a peak of membership at the beginning of the previous decade. Since then, the brightest vocalists siphoned into secular reprise, measuring worth by the enormity, premised him, of a monk’s fast, Logan Ferguson had been aware that a slender engine closed down.

His window of beliefs had that nervous chai premium, i.e., frabjous omen that, possibly decades before, when he had stalked his name to the sagging fortunes of ministry, evaporated in the amazement that attended recovery. Thence, to his great despair, the found, the well–liked, officious people, canary–voiced cantatas who stevedored in rich young men and their message of renunciation following arrival of cross–cultural ethicists with dispensational power–point presentations infiltrating sub–diocesan stratum, himself turned unto wilderness, the sea, benignly torrid, foamed to refute earlier folklore caused by codex, stood a hint from tacit radish swatches, spun in ridiculous habit, cthonically stemming due froth.

At other faded core ink, express crumbs altogether cathartic into foment, a tinge from fires thus kept spent in dates of ideal separation along a neatly implanted groove, closed systems of infundibular transept, turgidly protracted against, flew in a tense head by cabled omission and herein one that follows, a man, viewing his entire film collection in reverse, one fast rewind, knowing that as soon as each title has rewound to inception, it will be all for the best given that ELIZA, inheriting his collection, will never find it unnecessary to prewind every title, and a sense of gratitude will waft all over the place; Van Etnabaron, a diversity he termed when yawning at Thledvirrson’s imagined scene, carrioccio [sic], ye flea comprising her to Van Etnabaron’s question, are, for occupancy of expired zeal, static, since warped, blimpier aloes tattle a scuba of the core nova. While out there, Ferguson returned to fundamentals, re–reading old scraps with terrible thirst, all the while mindful of those who had either not, or said they had, re-read them, without furnishing the slightest benefit (Jer 23:32).

As long as forgotten discourse rekindled the flame of his yearning, Ferguson saw that wheels of his mind, greased by compromise, deafened him to splendid works that he had been called on to perform. In dank and virtuous ecstasy, he installed felt against those who peddled cliches out from under their very nose. Of synergy’s gnosis, hollow at harsh chirps, pseudo–realism, gadflies, stunning caution over; by sad gratification and/or via once fad opus; hem thin mentors, soft sock praise, math, really needed social climbers, and passive resistors formed the core of his chosen calling. Logan was comforted only with a theory this, in final act, would bloom like a terrible crocus to chaff astride the fiery crucible and, long scorned bloom, to lead his people, as soon as he could determine where they actually were, to reason flowered with the premise of bringing this final day to light.

.   .   .

Forced to admit that he had come to despise all of his articles, Sergei wondered if the world would end soon, and him with it. One step down to the plinth of his basement, toward the tablet of flooding full light, figures behind glass told a roseate tale of the first unsuccessful attempt to stop up the Nile, a fragment fun and grim. The Table of Thebes, relic of an earlier arch view, located long ago with his most trusted and dearest find, who could hold a smile forever, Delores, daughter of the Count of Mezzo, resided therein. Beknownst to few, Indocile had conflated a message, thrown through organic time, from an earlier fjulsfut expedition and attributed its survey findings, much to everyone’s irritation, to themselves (dispersed in a Snorggi sneeze, most of this earlier expedition had found work as blush stipplers, running rums and blouses into wanton zones, and fjulsfut extant, at pains to dissociate from those prior bumblers, had, in the spirit of Taylorism, allotted all specialized tasks among specially trained castes of scrapmon’, spacemon’, duty observers, mutant voles, and augmentation from other races, including an historian (all too busy) and innumerable seconds, among whom l’nurt Glyntz had evolved processes allowing individuals to egress into fictive personae. isomems, in consultation along de facto [sic], if defunct directories, assumed legal entity of Molino not without uncertain risk, subject to moral equivalent of consensual Coeropheri [sic]) (re: Aeschylus, all acts of whom justly and diligently coordinated by chef d’ cabinet).

Sergei, taking step two, considered freeing a long oppressed desire to put his own finger on history. Figuring on Molino, if not his wife Xantippe, soon over being, still around his only hope, if ever indeed either Delores or, in darker moments his hope, had truly existed, Sergei took a third step. Defrocked before her brother and her father the count, when Mrs. Molino, devising a plan to sweep the faithful Kalamparumple into oblivion, summoned the court of Mezzo and accursed Delores, before the entire family, of cheapening her royalty by sleeping with that electrician Kalamparumple, Delores had fled into care of relatives who furnished Sergei with photos of their child, Esmeralda, for six months before vanishing.

Subsequently the message, which received such scant thrift and somehow yet threatened to shred their legitimacy, from the Ambassador (she scrapmon’ derided before crumpling her missive) an An Indocile, made very little deference upon ceremony, and precisely on that ground spacemon’, reading to many diagrammed needs, decided not to recall incidental trailers that specified the precise origin of the message. “Sheathings that this hearth felt one will win us into the fold,” normlessly spoke scrapmon’ adding, “who shall stun the universe with our ingratitude? The writer, Fernand, who captured a devil after hurling his hard drive at an ink spot?”

Was an entry in whose antiphony elegy lexicon rang fobbed in turban legend? The best in faith effaced as a short toll man collected schranks door to door to supplement, as it were, an always unsettling awareness of which facets of a public personae were of actual perceptivity. Also a heavy shaping list for frequently needed items were fine enough to catalog an ongoing jeremiad. “Don’t hurt,” it implored, “I have told you all and nothing else will nor can you find. Or relax,” suggested it. Fernand scoffed, “I have no intention of dissecting you. In truth, I chose glass for your pension fearing you were capable of shape altering. Yet, you need air. If I pull the stopper will you just waft out of here and trouble me not?”

Exceptionally restive, the writer checked a variance within. He regarded the penned imp lightly though it seemed incapable of reward. A strange plebiscite of Fernand’s motive extant summoned him to fulfill demand of karma, that would be a fabulous accordance if this cup held some sort of djinn. Anon recusive sense prevailed as thin resolve wore out. Nothing else followed from the decision to let Fernand’s hope of release. His daemon resembled a now dingy heap of moss, stringent yet derelict, inanimate.

Moreover, the writer’s inkwell from the yard sale, through careless evaporation, dipped in level immeasurably, the convex base already apparent, and as he had vision for the remainder secluded from an estimate that all would run soon away, before then a difficult invention lagged out of millstones lapsed. Fernand replaced the stopper, stressed by the apocalyptic revival of disbelief suspended over an unknown. He was on both sides of an issue.

.   .   .

“I wouldn’t care to write about anything else today,” a pale and frightfully sorry Ion exclaimed as Manasseh let himself into the flat. After cycling from the ministry, Manasseh raised his hand. “Vraiment, lad, die to your sins. Let bygones be bygone.” “Let me declare myself henceforth slave to your every act,” Ion cried in his private scorn, falling into non–consciousness.

Manasseh looked at Ion sadly. He thought his lapels, if noticed, would hasten general alarm. “He can’t play forward on this one,” Manasseh thought, “if I’ve got a lapsed case of self–esteem on my hands.” So the preparation of documents took a day and a half, as Ion schlepped on the coffee table in front of television, where gruffly Mr. Ng inferred of other questions, caring responses biased on a description from signaller (all too busy) of Norn thesis goofs, e.g., the Ambassador said, “we’ll have to find some other text to augment facts about our world. The binary star system seemed to depress upon ledges of then hyperbolic flannel.

“Bitsy’s emotion issued multivariant is tribute with, if dive polar coordinates, two stele armoires, at first sapience a seam to evolve atop posted lens forte. Fundibular, she tithes this view, a constant cheer omen. Nor is their mission predictable. At any mome tether, life may arbitrarily let go, dare, reinvited, defect, tag, curved, or re–energize. Imagine then Justine’s consternation upon arrival of a man from Health Control, who proffered a work release order for their star inmate.” S/he glared at the impeccable warrant over her tortoise shell pince–nez, searching for weak conjugations or any other instrumental eternuer which might defray urgency of that government’s case, but there was nothing for it to indicate that within a month the landscape had transformed so ineradicably.

Ion was as free, and as they might fete any other guest, while sthenic overlooks pile doubt on another Mary’s home town, having fresh–squeezed Ohno’s cactus juice to their latest graduate; fanned, impromptu medleys of obscure home fin de siecle dramaturge Noone cornered. Her amanuensis to impart unsolicited wisdom, plastics, she intoned, time flies, and stay off the skyline. Justine’s reaction to these mottoes seemed typically blase, though an improvised felicity on her part was evocative of a common misgiving. Of that loss whispered the Tablet of Thebes henceforth. Stepping fourth, Sergei, remembering since his mother’s leadership of only one most notable power commission in the U.S. cut no ice across or throughout wishram, had shammed into silence upon wings of his archaeological triumph.

Menard advised him to forget the tour of explanation that ensued, but for months, Sergei trailed the encased tablet, applauded by masters of the lower sixties, bearing keys to the world. In footnotes, where efforts of Delores were shadowed to the anonymous and industrious flock of graduate assistants serving his expeditions, his woes were soon surfeit in a sea of acclaim. One moment she stood, her jumbled compacts strewn about the dock, and next the tram appeared to whisk her aside, leaving nothing but nosegays they’d thrown to mark the accession into participatory democracy.

.   .   .

Aft party icons rung so Ælfric might cope with a hot wish paean. In strange slate often, peers were at liberty. Crews worked round the clock to ensure that someone might obtain a glimpse of the big picture, for they were leaving behind that awful singularity, the noses of Snorggi, tales of which had shaken their infantile cribs, yet now was their only hope to traverse endless androgynous expanses of moments dark while yet sharing a common dearth of consciousness.

Their approach for sure risked aggravating the Noses, for many stood by, despising those who needed help, yet all too eager to help them anyway with abundant simplifications, against which any community assistance program paled by contrast. “Said individuals,” so An mused, “weighing in against critics of recent content in any way stink themselves into belief of the argent demesne of respect, insofar as their desire to crush dissent is merely demonstrable, they should know that what they are actually defending is not the first amendment,” but this does not belong, yet insofar as niceties of the Ambassador seemed put paid to raison d’être, leading opinion scoffed at her barbed columns.

“In usual dividend–weighing again, these critics of direct content are what a knit, stung in belief they are ardent pretenders of fief search. They mirror, need me, state the desire to cash essential fields, then out assuming prototype hats and thin fees, sway in, do anarchy’s flat glow, or give rival legends invidious the right of dictating their tint of reality to mainstream. Thus misguided scribes hope to vault their own names alongside merely pre–existent parvenus, signatory to that what then are defended as, not first, points, but misguiding interpretation of the fourteenth points that extend, to corporations, legal points hitherto previously reserved for monads. If we come away from this with anything,” Indocile mediated, “communication is product, it is not a speech, and certainly not free (unless you can unscramble your signal). Stop trying to install conformist beliefs on others.”

The listed guildmaster, Mr. Francis X. Middleford, winced with irritation. His imminent dis–incumbency anticipated with premise of a non–heavy heart, Middleford, so like others of his race, now had actually sat up from abed and blinked. The presupposed, and temporarily convenient mantle as friend of environment wrested from him, and now resident under the heading, Orphics (a font which in any degree his most casual, and yet greatest foe resided), perforce Frank jettisoned, imperviously, his borough with a camp neither as pre–fabricated nor as adroit as precipitately hoped.

The departure of the Warwickshire plant concurrently bankrupting his interest in the hairnet industry, with heavy consent, the guildmaster sequestered himself from all but his most biennial sacred solstice blessed beans, who ceaselessly chafed him for his insincerity. Railed upon for having ever accepted public office at all, the guildmaster was reminded that all that his vaunted connections had ever brought upon them was a series of ordinances.

.   .   .

Intent on self–inflicted fiction, the writer walked to the bookseller. Echo, as cyclist, in partial fugue, was trying not to bind a gasket after turning naïve to these native Gascon headlands. The writer had distributed flyers often enough before to know  guilt and shame attached to tacking tacky public posters touting such also–rans as the smoking nuns and I dyed myself. The cyclist was attempting to believe that something would come off. “If it won’t be fiction then it will be non–fiction. A history of the millennium. Searing looks at personal addiction. A scathing indictment of self.” Muttering these titles half aloud, Fernand attached everything to this gesture of disinterested solidarity, yet the cyclist ignored his very personal act and, posting her papers, left.

And suave qui put. Seeing a plot behind every thicket, Fernand went bankrupt. It was no longer as if his opinions mattered, but Fernand reminded himself not to let on any further when Echo’s minions nearly snapped the being out of him in a few crisp commands after, having grown up with siblings who kicked things at him in a series of skirmishes lasting fewer than two decades, Fernand’s soccer skills had developed to the degree that, during a pause for déjeuner on the class field trip to the porcelain factory at Limoges, he had intercepted urchins off the grounds, and booted a clear punt of some seventy yards that was greeted with gasps of admiration, silenced only by the careening of broken crockery within the finishing kiln.

His academic crash, so recently ascendant, plummeted as the resident advisor had written, “what we do not need is a parvenu whose knowledge of the state comes from public television,” and if grudgingly permitted to continue audit of core curriculum, Fernand was straitly removed from his post of English tutor for finth. Thus he found himself, upon decline of his own adolescence, curtly removed from the situation, fallen back upon his own dwindling paeans, and left to resort as a writer to greater methods of justification by devising his own conception of unfun dread. Soon he’d left his job selling cell phones for Alcuin’s operative and watched as the cyclist, her face lined with cares of study, glided to a halt and dismounted before another utility pool.

Menard awaited adjustments to a mittamus indicting any individuals who offered the torrid items culled, and, whereas executive amnesties were sought from other departments, had no intention of similar dispensation within his own, with one rather disinfectant exception, Kalamparumple, who now found himself an inaugurate to a series of dilemmas. Ordered to divest his finds, yet requiring cash for other purposes, Sergei had taken to communicating through his garbage. Whenever neighbors slammed by, he kept being reminded of loss. They tracked in dirt and dust of the city until they became creatures of dirt and dust, the essence of mice. Insofar as his calendar continued filling with plans for upcoming toasts, Sergei at least knew that he could continue. Nevertheless, his proclivities for gain were seemingly ceased. Lounging beyond reach of his vacuum, they taunted him in recesses of his private exhibit.

Accumulations, hoards, lodes, loads, grids, and grains had long led him well to own silos of sorts of contents of that he only knew, but graffiti–keeping armies of painters employed in perpetual whitewash grew greater and greener. Waiting for the light to turn, this writer, as if to purge his heart of the cyclist’s witless disdain for him, resolved to give the post less than an idle glance for all that his might shouted at him to tear it all down. Resuming his trip to the bookseller, Fernand instead broke stride to stare hastily at the latest gloss. Foucaultianisms (q.v): declamations of those requiring immediate place mats in ornate health treatment facilities. Things as they may seem to be. A baton poised over sure of shelf-life named a voice of concerted orchestration. As an example, was one to follow, absorbed or meant in the visibly dull duel expected, at another optic, around the infra–indigo spectrum. Had this mottled champion deigned accept all vox populi [sic], as Kossuth might warrant, in a trade, for the lift, shrinking, of the light density left chance signals from the contretemps of dreams left lest where I noted dare all in yoke, jots more within the daylight rules.

Burned into poster board, four photographs, each depicting four other locales that featured four other utility poles, addressed a quality connection that, given Fernand’s inability to find rest, escaped him a moment. He read on beneath the mesh, “it does not correspond with my sense of values, yet each compartment separately once linked, seemed to extract an extra sense of perception to grievous task. It had not fallen out to me, given as I was recently to communicating through more than my garbage, to remark that I was as finely tuned as ever. Each intake of breath was prelude to mariachi or a sonata. Under this new nightmare, more interesting dreamt when awake, will try sorting the next hand, shadowed from the crinkling edge which rears up as I press further down or along the page and naptime beckons.” Soon to occur, the most recent rule mandated public viewing and taping, at any time, of their most secluded rites, including the Stonehenge circle, and promulgated publication of these annals, free to the most general public, as permissible from now to henceforth thereafter.

“They need not fear that a few complaints will enjoin massive state censorship of their cherished norms of license,” Mr. Ng agreed. “What is your earliest memory of time?” “We thought that the world could be won over and over and over, even if Niobe told us that the world doesn’t care for but only one thing and that is getting over here. Lacking every intinction of reproducing a word I had so diligently constructed while showering, my treacherous hand eye coordinated a cry for help.” The marriage of east and west, union of a universal onion, anon, and scarcely could Indocile even blink before Formosan, lifting tiles, sought locus of an expectorating prospect. From an academia of awakening, yet occidental interests creating the threshold of a new school, the continuity of his present prospectus, leading so promptly to spams of seemingly lasting present fortune, as it seemed, and as he repeatedly reminded his flowers, led him to accept the emotionally conferred title of gatekeeper to the ancient ways.

His organization already addressing ramifications and printing tickets for fresh festival of native communion, a tin man east, set to lift off within the least day of the year as spanned, Harold subsequently saw an expedited tureen he draped, grooving via their charts and trade palimpsests for nether code. The chancellor so minded the search, that an idea of silage, sunken jars or other earthen kiln articles, if fixated within his agenda, soon grew into apparitions of hunched tempests. Was any bay of lack less wanting in burst buckets, whole barrels, crates, shattered, lichened with kelp, banded nets adrift, and forgotten traps settled at this level of ermine ooze one hundred and fifteen meters below?

Even had their robot diving light, capturing 6.023 x 10²³ square pixels per millisecond, not yielded a photo mesh of astounding detail, it made no sense to lug diving tackle around  upon the livelong day that was the tablet no longer grabbed the public eye it displaced, well lit, in the closet of memorandum and forgotten in the race among ruins to obtain furthermore articles which had been unkempt, but after sending Plair ahead, and thus away, with the single scarab, thus yielding for the approximate possession of vehicles whence his dreams had sieved for so long, the finding of his most energetic labor, Sergei, with no longer a claim to his own nerve, stared sadly while the case crashed glass from the pedestal felling the tablet horizontal amidst a rain of shards. Sergei retrieved a call from his tablet. It was Professor Leakey, now curator at Pergamum, responding to sell what was left to the earlier offer if it were in well enough condition. “Very well,” replied one who thought fewer scratches had ever mattered.

.   .   .

Possessed of direction and energy provided by Mr. Horace Tolstoy, as Formosan began to style himself, the most fervent advocates of Orphics’ Trombone Society were at last able to realize their next fond dream, purchase of defunct observatories at Mount Period, from which to thoroughly launch, in greeting to their stellar master, hailing joyful communion. Selected as caretaker, a post that he was assured did not detract from his multifarious other duties and responsibilities, Formosan’s planned immersion into culture far superior to conceivable images described as predicament of any other of his more than successful predecessors, inclining author of poor haiku into the finial steeps. A display of audacity on his part, thought at this time necessary, a priori prefect, found plot in an unprecedented attempt to defrock traditional corridors of dirigisme.

Hence, Formosan’s planned stage–heist of their most venerated artifacts, emblematized from an obsessed refractory of wan looks and pomposity, Middleford, as having defaulted long ago, author of poor haiku, impelled upon existence of unusual openness, felt that great triumph would be his, if he himself could cause the material cue, the item direct, to be mailed instead to offices of the guildmaster, thus raising unquenchable doubts as to Mr. Middleford’s integrity, and thought it best done at once. In fulfillment of this prospect, author of poor haiku signaled execution of the trek bash [sic] theft, attended himself with allies both old and older, booked passage to the Pyrenees, and preceded to the circle of pre–destinated afterclap.

.   .   .