Contents

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LEFT HAND

OBSCURE ORGAN DISTORTION

A TOWER OF LIMBS

SCATTER

1.1.

a) Perch with your feet on either side of the bathtub.

b) Stare at your cock getting hard through the rising steam.

c) Hear your lungs sucking in the most air they can.

d) Exhale and then thrust your mouth down at your cock.

e) Slip under the water hitting your head and pass out.

1.2.

a) Catch your reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink.

b) Taste the bathroom steam mix with the hallway’s thick dampness.

c) Look at Alex slumped on your bed shooting up heroin.

d) Hear yourself asking Alex about the money he owes you.

e) Listen to Alex describe the English language course he joined.

1.3.

a) Smell Alex’s hair as his mouth slurps on your cock.

b) Let go of the curtain hanging broken from your window.

c) Taste some blood that you noticed on your left hand.

d) Watch your hand pushing Alex’s head away from your cock.

e) Shut the door behind Alex and collapse onto your bed.

1.4.

a) This line has been left blank for no particular reason.

b) Wake up to the sound of a phone ringing somewhere.

c) See the words left hand printed deep inside your brain.

d) Lean back in your chair when you smell your manager.

e) Watch your manager saying there is blood on your collar.

1.5.

a) Spy on a woman in the window behind your office.

b) Feel the head of your cock glide between your teeth.

c) Smell the carpet below your desk after you fall down.

d) Remember Alex calling heroin the only cure for jet lag.

e) Unravel a note that you found in Alex’s coat pocket.

2.1.

a) Click on a Japanese schoolgirl masturbating in a navy uniform.

b) Taste honey in your throat when her limbs are amputated.

c) Look up when you notice a student approaching the counter.

d) Watch the student’s eyes and say the manager is out.

e) Ask your colleague if she can answer the student’s questions.

2.2.

a) Stand in front of your mirror sniffing a schoolgirl uniform.

b) Lay the mirror on your bed and become a schoolgirl.

c) Watch the schoolgirl in the mirror fucking a Coke bottle.

d) Feel the Coke bottle rip the inside of your asshole.

e) Taste soap on your lips and collapse onto the mirror.

2.3.

a) Tap your keyboard until two words appear on the screen.

b) Say the words left hand to yourself in your head.

c) Change the font from Times New Roman to Courier New.

d) Increase the font size until each word takes one line.

e) Put the words in bold and italics before deleting them.

2.4.

a) Feel a layer of sweat and deodorant covering your body.

b) Take your left hand off your mouse and bite it.

c) Realize that your computer screen has swirled into tunnel vision.

d) Try to touch the words coming from your colleague’s mouth.

e) Listen to your chair swiveling around as you stand up.

2.5.

a) Hear the sound of your shoulder barging the toilet door.

b) Breathe in the mix of bleached come and air freshener.

c) Smell your invisible left hand in front of your face.

d) Turn on the hot water tap and taste the water.

e) Look at the water running through your invisible left hand.

3.1.

a) Order a Double Whopper meal at Burger King in Westfield.

b) Go into the Disney store and touch the stuffed toys.

c) Listen to women trying on lingerie in different changing rooms.

d) See a customer pointing you out to a security guard.

e) Look at the security guard asking you to follow him.

3.2.

a) Walk into Central Bar and order a glass of vodka.

b) Take a mobile phone off the counter and call Alex.

c) Look at the phone and say you quit your job.

d) Listen to the traffic going through the Holland Park roundabout.

e) See a schoolgirl in uniform getting off a 94 bus.

3.3.

a) Suck on the last piece of ice in your glass.

b) Breathe in deeply and rub your cock through your pocket.

c) Hear a horn blasting the schoolgirl across Shepherd’s Bush Green.

d) Catch the scent of her white panties as she walks.

e) Hide behind a tree when she looks over her shoulder.

3.4.

a) Listen to the schoolgirl calling to you on Goldhawk Road.

b) Inhale her vanilla perfume as she turns down an alley.

c) Grab her hair and kiss her mouth until she resists.

d) Push her to her knees and pull out your cock.

e) Squeeze her throat and fuck her hard in the mouth.

3.5.

a) Lick your lips then hear footsteps coming down the alley.

b) Glance around realizing your cock has left the schoolgirl’s mouth.

c) Smell garbage as the schoolgirl’s head hits a brick wall.

d) Catch a taste of her panties as she slumps down.

e) Watch the come spurt from your cock onto her legs.

4.1.

a) This line has been left blank for no particular reason.

b) Roll onto your back and look up at the ceiling.

c) Loosen your watchstrap and drop your watch onto the carpet.

d) See the pile of clothes spilling out of your backpack.

e) Dig up a coffee cup and then gargle some water.

4.2.

a) Step through broken glass outside shops all along Uxbridge Road.

b) See men hauling pigs from a truck to a butcher.

c) Look at old men sitting around in cafes smoking hookahs.

d) Smell dead fish and marijuana coming from Shepherd’s Bush Market.

e) Take the alley to the left behind the council estate.

4.3.

a) Stuff your bed sheets into a black plastic garbage bag.

b) Drop the garbage bag on the landing outside your door.

c) Look at Alex scratching and nodding off on your couch.

d) Ask Alex if he got into a fight at college.

e) Listen to Alex mumble about nearly being stabbed to death.

4.4.

a) Let go of the curtain hanging broken from your window.

b) Hear your voice telling Alex you might have murdered someone.

c) Watch Alex asking how you know she was a schoolgirl.

d) Touch Alex’s hair and say she was wearing a uniform.

e) Listen to Alex saying she was probably just a prostitute.

4.5.

a) Hear Alex asking if you really meant to kill her.

b) Tell Alex that your left hand meant to kill her.

c) Listen to Alex saying it was probably caught on CCTV.

d) Hear your voice telling Alex her blowjob was the greatest.

e) Listen to Alex recommending that you blame alien hand syndrome.

5.1.

a) Rub the headlines on the front page of several newspapers.

b) Look at the girls showing their breasts in various magazines.

c) Smell the previous person who has used this phone box.

d) Press the buttons connecting you to Shepherd’s Bush police station.

e) Listen to your voice ask if anyone has gone missing.

5.2.

a) Kick Alex when he says he needs money for heroin.

b) Taste Alex’s saliva and tell him you have no money.

c) Look at Alex suggesting that you come back to Australia.

d) Hear your voice telling Alex her blowjob was the greatest.

e) Listen to Alex saying she was probably just a prostitute.

5.3.

a) Step through broken glass outside shops all along Uxbridge Road.

b) See men hauling pigs from a truck to a butcher.

c) Look at old men sitting around in cafes smoking hookahs.

d) Smell dead fish and marijuana coming from Shepherd’s Bush Market.

e) Take the alley to the left behind the council estate.

5.4.

a) Read words on posters about drug laws and drunk driving.

b) Pick up a brochure on how to secure your home.

c) Go to a bulletin board showing adverts for missing people.

d) Touch the profiles of the missing people in the adverts.

e) Count the numbers indicating when the missing people went missing.

5.5.

a) See a police officer asking where you witnessed a murder.

b) Hear your voice saying that your favorite game is football.

c) Rub your chin as the police officer scans computer files.

d) Look at the police officer making a coded telephone call.

e) Hear the police officer saying there have been no murders.

6.1.

a) Smell a plastic cup offered to you with water inside.

b) Watch a senior officer and say your name is Robert.

c) Close your eyes when the senior officer asks about drugs.

d) Tell the senior officer that you have body dysmorphic disorder.

e) Hear the senior officer telling you not to waste time.

6.2.

a) Feel the banister wobble and taste fish cooking behind doors.

b) Bang on the wall of a couple who are arguing.

c) Unlock the door to your room and smell the interior.

d) Kneel down in front of the cupboard under the sink.

e) Hear some bleach glugging into the sink from a bottle.

6.3.

a) Spy on a woman in the window behind your room.

b) Taste acid on your teeth as the woman dries herself.

c) Step away from your window and slump onto your couch.

d) Listen to rats scratching through walls and along water pipes.

e) Wipe some tears from your eyes and drink some vodka.

6.4.

a) Hear the blood pumping through your neck into your brain.

b) Kneel down in front of the cupboard under the sink.

c) Sniff out a gray canvas bag full of rusted tools.

d) Dump the bag on the counter and remove an axe.

e) Run the blade along the middle of your left arm.

6.5.

a) Close your eyes and then hack into your left arm.

b) Close your eyes and then hack into your left arm.

c) Close your eyes and then hack into your left arm.

d) Close your eyes and then hack into your left arm.

e) Close your eyes and then hack into your left arm.

7.1.

a) This line has been left blank for no particular reason.

b) Hear kids chasing pigeons in the corridors of Hammersmith Hospital.

c) Look up and see a nurse giving Alex a blowjob.

d) Catch words from the nurse about wanting to visit Australia.

e) Watch Alex telling the nurse he will miss her too.

7.2.

a) Listen to the nurse instructing Alex to fuck her ass.

b) Sit on the bed and try to unbutton your jeans.

c) Look at the nurse saying not all nurses are sluts.

d) Kick off your jeans and get on top of her.

e) Rub your finger along her cunt and taste her secretions.

7.3.

a) Smell the nurse’s reflection folding your pajamas in the window.

b) Drag your backpack following the exit signs down a corridor.

c) Find Alex searching through a trolley loaded up with medicine.

d) Listen for the sound of your seat belt clicking in.

e) Look at smoke and fire coming from Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

7.4.

a) Ask Alex to help carry your backpack up the stairs.

b) Knock over trays of rat poison positioned on the landing.

c) See Alex’s clothes on the carpet next to your bed.

d) Touch the faded bloodstain on the linoleum by the sink.

e) Hear Alex telling you that the only cure is heroin.

7.5.

a) Taste rotten flesh as soon as you open the fridge.

b) See a butchered paper parcel stuffed into the ice box.

c) Pull out the parcel and put it on the counter.

d) Unwrap the parcel until you can recognize your left hand.

e) Tell Alex it is a bit too late for surgery.

8.1.

a) Smell the vomit dripping from your mouth and your nose.

b) Rest your chin on the edge of the toilet bowl.

c) Spit out mucus chunks speckled with blood and black ink.

d) Hear the toilet bowl moving away from where you are.

e) Pick up the parcel and put it on your lap.

8.2.

a) Feel dance music beats and watch Alex kissing a boy.

b) Drink some warm beer and bump into the coffee table.

c) Listen to your nose snorting cocaine through a black straw.

d) Turn up the volume and then smell the stereo burning.

e) See the nurse out of uniform walk into the room.

8.3.

a) Tell the nurse it is time to change your dressing.

b) Lead the nurse to the bathroom and close the door.

c) Gag on her perfume as she takes off her clothes.

d) Perch with one foot on either side of the bathtub.

e) Listen to the rhythm of the nurse sucking your cock.

8.4.

a) Lick the nurse’s breasts while she untangles your bandaged stump.

b) Drape the bandage around her neck and pull it gently.

c) Guide her to the sink and push her head down.

d) Pump your cock into her cunt until it slips out.

e) Hear the come squirting from your cock onto her legs.

8.5.

a) Look at the nurse opening her mouth over a tap.

b) Fuck her in the cunt and ass with your stump.

c) Listen to the noise coming from her mouth and nose.

d) Catch your reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink.

e) Taste the bathroom steam mix with the hallway’s thick dampness.

9.1.

a) See someone grabbing your arm off a boy stroking it.

b) Watch someone throwing your arm over your bed to someone.

c) Hear Alex telling someone you were in a car accident.

d) Say to a girl that it was not an accident.

e) Listen to your voice telling everyone you are not joking.

9.2.

a) Hear someone ask how long have you been in London.

b) Bite your lip as you try to catch your arm.

c) See someone writing fuck London on the wall with it.

d) Look at your arm sitting there on the coffee table.

e) Listen to Alex fucking someone on your bed all night.

9.3.

a) Smell the vomit dripping from your mouth and your nose.

b) Cough and gag with your face in the toilet bowl.

c) Look at the reams of blood mixed with the bile.

d) Hear the toilet bowl move away from where you are.

e) Listen to the water dripping from the cistern above you.

9.4.

a) Put on some broken sunglasses and walk up Askew Road.

b) Look at a red curtain hanging across a closed doorway.

c) Read a note saying call anytime to rent Bar W12.

d) Go to the Co-op and take some bread and milk.

e) Sit on your couch and stare at the coffee table.

9.5.

a) Smell burnt toast and dig it out with a knife.

b) Hear your voice telling Alex you have lost your arm.

c) Listen to Alex laughing and asking where you left it.

d) Look at Alex when he suggests coming back to Australia.

e) Accuse Alex of selling your arm to get more heroin.

10.1.

a) This line has been left blank for no particular reason.

b) Press the phone buttons until you hear a dial tone.

c) Untangle the receiver and bang it on the metal tray.

d) See your hand in your pocket and hear coins dropping.

e) Look outside the phone box at a coin that escaped.

10.2.

a) Watch a tram run into a horse on Uxbridge Road.

b) Hear the bell of a pawnshop as you go inside.

c) Stroke the counter and ask to see any unusual items.

d) Walk to Shepherd’s Bush Green and sit on a bench.

e) Smell a voice behind you saying welcome to Taliban town.

10.3.

a) Listen to the zebra crossing before you enter Askew Cafe.

b) Watch Billy serving a blind man by the front window.

c) Focus on the words written in chalk behind the counter.

d) See yourself asking Billy if the all-day breakfast is available.

e) Scatter some coins and tell her to keep the change.

10.4.

a) Drop a spoon in your cup and stir your tea.

b) Sniff your tea after you sit by the front window.

c) Notice flowers tied to the rail by the zebra crossing.

d) Reach out to the rain coming down on stalled traffic.

e) Sip your tea and burn the roof of your mouth.

10.5.

a) Taste sausages, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, and beans on your plate.

b) Scoop some bacon and mushrooms onto a piece of toast.

c) Look at Billy saying you have not been around lately.

d) Tell her that you have been very busy at work.

e) Cut your fried eggs and smell them mix with the grease.

11.1.

a) Hear the bell of a pawnshop as you go inside.

b) Stroke the counter and ask to see any unusual items.

c) Watch someone yelling at you when you leave the pawnshop.

d) Step over chunks of concrete fallen from Victorian terrace houses.

e) Walk to Shepherd’s Bush Green and sit on a bench.

11.2.

a) Pick up the receiver and cradle it with your shoulder.

b) Unravel a note you found with some numbers on it.

c) Taste numbers in your mouth as you press corresponding buttons.

d) Feel the receiver slip from your shoulder and drop down.

e) Hit the phone with the receiver and lose your credit.

11.3.

a) See yourself asking Billy if the all-day breakfast is available.

b) Dig out some cutlery by the bottles of dried sauce.

c) Grab a newspaper off a vacant table and sit down.

d) Prod your knife at the crust on a sauce bottle.

e) Slip your fork under some beans and spike the rest.

11.4.

a) Move through page after page of theater and cinema adverts.

b) Sip your tea and burn the roof of your mouth.

c) Look at Billy saying you have not been around lately.

d) Hear a story about a schoolgirl in a car crash.

e) Take the newspaper with you and go to the toilet.

11.5.

a) Watch plates being dropped and chairs stacked up on tables.

b) Smell mold in your coat and turn up the collar.

c) Listen to Billy asking you what happened to your arm.

d) See yourself saying you lost it in a car crash.

e) Kiss the air near Billy’s cheek as she turns around.

12.1.

a) Smell the previous person who has used this phone box.

b) Hear yourself say numbers while you press the wrong buttons.

c) Pay attention when the tone turns into a computerized voice.

d) See your credit run out as you wait for instructions.

e) Kick the glass around the bottom of the phone box.

12.2.

a) Follow a ticket collector’s directions back to the ticket booth.

b) Look at a list of movies opposite the ticket booth.

c) Tell the attendant you want to watch whatever starts next.

d) Sniff a row of candy and soft drink and popcorn.

e) Take a tub of popcorn and a cup of Coke.

12.3.

a) Watch a group of school children file into the cinema.

b) Flick some popcorn into your mouth and taste the salt.

c) Lean down and suck some Coke out of your straw.

d) Rest your head against the seat as the lights fade.

e) Close your eyes while you listen to various Disney voices.

12.4.

a) Walk to the laundry and take off all your clothes.

b) Throw everything except your coat into a cracked washing machine.

c) Press some numbers before inserting some coins in the box.

d) Rush back to your machine and hit the start button.

e) Look outside until you smell smoke coming from your machine.

12.5.

a) Wake up to burnt toast and a fire fading out.

b) Drop your legs off the couch and pull yourself up.

c) Notice the phone book on your lap and open it.

d) Scan page after page after page after page after page.

e) Remove the disabilities section and put it in your mouth.

13.1.

a) See yourself asking a library assistant to use a computer.

b) Open a browser and run a Google search on disabilities.

c) Hear a link to a story about London Underground buskers.

d) Open an application form and then select the print command.

e) Sign the form and take it to the post office.

13.2.

a) Shove your coffee table across your room to the window.

b) Fill a coffee cup with water and then gargle some.

c) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

d) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

e) Hear a noise coming from the back of your throat.

13.3.

a) Ask the Underground staff where you can get a train.

b) Follow the Underground map and change lines at Oxford Circus.

c) Take an exit at Charing Cross up to Trafalgar Square.

d) Watch tourists chasing the pigeons and climbing over the lions.

e) Smell the fountain as you look up at Nelson’s Column.

13.4.

a) Take a bottle of water from a broken drink dispenser.

b) Say hello to a nervous guitarist in a brown suit.

c) Hear a woman calling you to go through a door.

d) Tell the judges behind the table to call you Robert.

e) Fill your coffee cup with water and then gargle some.

13.5.

a) Spread your coat on the floor and stand on it.

b) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

c) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

d) Hear a noise coming from the back of your throat.

e) Catch a judge asking if there are buskers in Australia.

14.1.

a) Tell a pharmacist you need sinus sprays and lip balm.

b) Go into an electronics shop and take a video camera.

c) Make a video of you opening your mouth and exhaling.

d) Make a video of you closing your mouth and inhaling.

e) Make a video of the noise deep in your throat.

14.2.

a) Study the video of you opening your mouth and exhaling.

b) Study the video of you closing your mouth and inhaling.

c) Study the video of the noise deep in your throat.

d) Study the video of you opening your mouth and exhaling.

e) Study the video of you closing your mouth and inhaling.

14.3.

a) Hear a judge asking if you have a new act.

b) Swallow the sinus spray at the back of your throat.

c) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

d) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

e) Catch a judge asking if you have any criminal convictions.

14.4.

a) Ride a train back to Shepherd’s Bush and get off.

b) Walk along the platform watching the mice on the tracks.

c) Unbutton your coat and then spread it on the floor.

d) Dig out some coins and put them in your cup.

e) Stand to attention by a wall and face the escalators.

14.5.

a) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

b) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

c) Hear my voice coming from the back of your throat.

d) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

e) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

15.1.

a) This line has been left blank for no particular reason.

b) Watch Chris suggest introducing your disability to an empty chair.

c) Touch the shoulder of a man talking about lost legs.

d) See a woman saying something about having a breast removed.

e) Tell the empty chair that you have to leave now.

15.2.

a) Smell Chris’s perfume when she says wait for the presentation.

b) Hug a young girl in a corner reading some notes.

c) Look at Chris suggesting you stay for coffee at least.

d) Inspect the gap in Chris’s shirt when she reaches down.

e) Tell the group sorry but you really have to go.

15.3.

a) Hear the sound of drums echoing off abandoned factory walls.

b) Taste the chemical air coming from a sewerage processing plant.

c) Find a hole in the fence and step through it.

d) Walk around the sewerage plant and look at the machines.

e) Sit on a dirt mound that has been made recently.

15.4.

a) Dig out some coins and put them in your cup.

b) Stand to attention by a wall and face the escalators.

c) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

d) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

e) Hear my voice coming from the back of your throat.

15.5.

a) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

b) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

c) Spot me on the down escalator getting closer to you.

d) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

e) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

16.1.

a) Hear a bang and see Chris hurrying through the door.

b) Kiss a boy in a wheelchair and suggest you begin.

c) Lean back against the wall and then cross your legs.

d) Smell the flower pattern around the hem of Chris’s dress.

e) Tell the group you have to leave at the break.

16.2.

a) Watch Chris ask you to say something about your loss.

b) Say it happened in the Underground bombing at Shepherd’s Bush.

c) Realize that everyone in the group has just stopped talking.

d) Hear someone say the bomb at Shepherd’s Bush never exploded.

e) Explain to the group that the police covered it up.

16.3.

a) Climb through the wire fence and walk around the sewer.

b) Sit on a dirt mound that has been made recently.

c) Close your eyes and then listen to the pumping machines.

d) Breathe in the chemical air and feel your heart throbbing.

e) Dig a hole in the mound and bury some paper.

16.4.

a) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

b) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

c) Hear my voice coming from the back of your throat.

d) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

e) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

16.5.

a) Watch me bend and put some coins into your cup.

b) Hear me turn away and give commands into a walkie-talkie.

c) Follow me to the platform getting lost in the crowd.

d) Run along the platform and then jump onto a train.

e) Spot me in the crowd thinning out on the platform.

17.1.

a) Find a black shirt in Primark and put it on.

b) Sniff out the only black jeans that are your size.

c) Kneel in front of a mirror and lick your reflection.

d) Hear people shouting while you sit at a bus stop.

e) Watch Victorian terrace houses stretched out burning into the distance.

17.2.

a) Inspect the gap of skin between Chris’s boots and skirt.

b) Hear Chris explaining she was born into the wrong body.

c) Cough at the air buzzing out of an electric heater.

d) Hear someone ask if you received compensation for the bombing.

e) Say to Chris you want to make a presentation tonight.

17.3.

a) Notice lines formed where Chris’s skirt clings to her legs.

b) Hear Chris talk about living with the desire for annihilation.

c) Run your hand through your hair then unbutton your coat.

d) Hear a voice ask if your presentation reveals the truth.

e) Tell the group you are not sure what it means.

17.4.

a) Stand up and stack your chair onto an empty one.

b) Touch Chris’s shoulder and say her presentation was very enlightening.

c) Listen to Chris say she is looking forward to yours.

d) Tell the group sorry but you really have to go.

e) Ask Chris if she wants to get something to eat.

17.5.

a) See flashing lights and hear a police car fighting traffic.

b) Smell some cars on fire near the Askew Road intersection.

c) Hit your head on the dashboard when Chris brakes suddenly.

d) Climb out of her Toyota and walk away from it.

e) Glance back at her feeding coins into a broken meter.

18.1.

a) Put down your menu and ask Chris what she wants.

b) Hear her ask why you keep staring out the window.

c) Hold her hand and say you cannot explain right now.

d) Tell her you have only ever been here for breakfast.

e) Raise a toast and then sip some of your wine.

18.2.

a) Tell Chris that you want to tell her something important.

b) Say to her that you think someone is following you.

c) Listen to her asking who you think is following you.

d) Say you think someone very fucked up is following you.

e) Hear Chris ask if being followed relates to the conspiracy.

18.3.

a) Open the door for Chris and walk down Askew Road.

b) Go to the Co-op and watch her buying some wine.

c) Smother a coffee jar and crisp packet with your coat.

d) Order some Chinese takeaway and wait in the DVD store.

e) Choose a romantic comedy and then pick up your food.

18.4.

a) Listen to rats scratching through walls and along water pipes.

b) Lean back and then take Chris’s glasses off her face.

c) Say you were lying about being in the Underground bombing.

d) Hear Chris asking if you want to get more wine.

e) Tell her you are probably in love with someone else.

18.5.

a) Point to the bloodstain on the linoleum by the sink.

b) Hear Chris saying she has to go to work tomorrow.

c) Play the video of you opening your mouth and exhaling.

d) Play the video of you closing your mouth and inhaling.

e) Play the video of my voice deep in your throat.

19.1.

a) See Chris’s body slumped next to you on the couch.

b) Take the pieces of broken wine bottle to the sink.

c) Turn on the tap and soak your face and neck.

d) Sit on the coffee table so your legs touch Chris’s.

e) Move her legs apart and then rub inside her thighs.

19.2.

a) Loosen the straps on Chris’s shoes before taking them off.

b) Raise her legs and then angle them onto the couch.

c) Pull on her legs so that she is lying down.

d) Feel for a pulse in the side of her head.

e) Sniff her neck and taste the perfume behind her ear.

19.3.

a) Kiss Chris’s cheek and run your tongue along her lips.

b) Unbutton her blouse until you can see her stomach rising.

c) Push her bra up and then bite into her nipples.

d) Take out your cock and rub it against her face.

e) Stick your stump between her legs until it nudges cotton.

19.4.

a) Flick your tongue around Chris’s cunt to make it wet.

b) Wank your cock with your fist up against her ass.

c) Twist her legs and stick your stump into her cunt.

d) Hear her cunt fill up with blood after something tears.

e) Fuck her as hard as you can with your stump.

19.5.

a) Lick Chris’s blood off your stump when you stand up.

b) See her blood dripping from your stump onto the linoleum.

c) Hear my voice telling you these are not my instructions.

d) Tell me you can see blood pumping from your body.

e) Put your stump against your chest and feel your heart.

20.1.

a) Shove the coffee table across the room to the window.

b) Spread out five black plastic garbage bags on the floor.

c) Put your bed sheets on top of the garbage bags.

d) Roll Chris off the couch and onto the bed sheets.

e) Stand above Chris and try to wank your cock hard.

20.2.

a) Rub your eyes and lie beside Chris on the floor.

b) Wrap your legs around her body and kiss her lips.

c) Trace the lines running from her breasts to her abdomen.

d) Smell the blood congealed and matted in her pubic hair.

e) Search her cunt for signs of what to do next.

20.3.

a) Close your eyes and then hack into her left arm.

b) Close your eyes and then hack into her right arm.

c) Saw through what remains connecting her arms to her body.

d) Wrap both her arms in a black plastic garbage bag.

e) Store the garbage bag along the wall under your bed.

20.4.

a) Close your eyes and then hack into her left leg.

b) Close your eyes and then hack into her right leg.

c) Saw through what remains connecting her legs to her body.

d) Wrap both her legs in a black plastic garbage bag.

e) Store the garbage bag along the wall under your bed.

20.5.

a) Ram your stump into Chris’s mouth and cunt and ass.

b) Dig out new holes in her body with a screwdriver.

c) Shove your fingers and then your stump into the holes.

d) Wrap what remains of her body in your bed sheets.

e) Store the bed sheets along the wall under your bed.

21.1.

a) See a light behind the red curtain of Bar W12.

b) Notice a short man in a suit smiling at you.

c) Say to the man that you have absolutely no money.

d) Glance at some customers drinking wine at a few tables.

e) Watch the bartender pouring a green cocktail into a glass.

21.2.

a) Hear a crack and notice fuzz blaring from a TV.

b) Listen to a tall woman singing an incoherent karaoke song.

c) Chew on some peanuts and feel your teeth coming out.

d) Bump into tables as you walk towards the toilet door.

e) Feel your stomach cramp and pain shooting up your neck.

21.3.

a) Lean against a wall that runs beside the basement stairs.

b) Move your tongue around the gap where your teeth were.

c) Flick on a light switch and hear a bulb pop.

d) Kick something across the concrete and step into a puddle.

e) Rub your eyes and feel tears build up in them.

21.4.

a) Adjust to the light coming from outside at street level.

b) Notice wardrobes dividing the basement into a set of rooms.

c) Squeeze between two wardrobes and then choke on some dust.

d) Look at a stained and burnt mattress on the floor.

e) See a blanket and coat curled up on the mattress.

21.5.

a) Pull the coat and then the blanket off the mattress.

b) Hear a notebook fall from the blanket onto the floor.

c) Kneel down and steady yourself before picking up the notebook.

d) Skim through the notebook trying to follow the empty lines.

e) Drop the notebook onto the mattress and then fade out.

To stop this novel occurring from this motel room is impossible. I go with a girl. We meet a boy. There is sexual intercourse with glass on the floor in a broken pharmacy. A police officer discovers my dead body in the back of a stolen van. The police officer shoots at my dead body. The girl is driving the van. I want to murder the boy. But I think it would be easier to murder the girl. So I try to murder the girl, even though I am already dead, and the boy throws me onto the road. That is the end of this novel.

* * *

I leave my father’s remains in a glass case at a strip club and catch a flight to London, shouting drunken methods in an Indonesian bar during a layover, or when I get to Europe in a hostel somewhere east of Prague, where the owner says medicine rather than method has been inserted into your writing. It is no remedy, I reply, and orgasmic childhood psychosis is not self-deception, but if stopped and ordered to ask, alcohol is a plausible ruse for coping with life, and anyway this novel is stronger than medicine because of the heart images formed through fictional masturbation. When the owner asks me to pay, I tell him my money to get high will come from the directors of several multinational companies who intentionally republish this novel in its current unrecognizable form.

* * *

London summer is a bone-hot tombstone deceased under where I walk. I arrive as a prostitute accompanied by internet instructions about illegal student immigration. Anyone speaking natural English will confuse the authorities. Language draws up substances lacking actuality, and desire is more easily pursued with confidence when you can blend into the crowd. I work in an ex-curtain factory on Uxbridge Road. I stand in a corner of Shepherd’s Bush Green. A mysterious telephone call on an abrupt slow night possesses enough doubt to deceive what guides me. Her shoes. Her husband. The absence of a pulse. At a sewerage plant, near where they used to make cars, I walk across rusted pipes churning out shit and mulched up paper and enter an abandoned factory converted into apartments now derelict and possibly being used as some kind of theatrical space. I join what appears to be the audience participating in an unrealistic performance of a courtroom situation until my attention implodes and I slink under the floorboards. Other things happen after that. I become another person completely.

* * *

I find a young boy in the afternoon, question him about this novel, and discover raw materials and other things without explanation verified control processes or selective systems. I hit the boy with destructive intensity when he is through the door into this motel room. It is impossible for him to recognize me because I am wearing a ski mask. My voice is calmness maintained in a bubble of everything. He tells me he works at a slaughterhouse and plays drums in a heavy-metal cover band. He thinks he is a traveler of existence. His arms are virtual reality assembled. I sit his senses next to mine and make my arms part of him watching murder masturbation fear movies. I know I need this boy but I do not know why I need him. He is concerned about things without being. I recognize that meaninglessness. I feel that meaninglessness. I laugh at his secrets. This cruel agony is worse than murder. I clamp his wrists and overwhelm him. I tighten a USB cable around his neck and slit his throat. He cries at the sight of his own blood. I think he understands a number of sounds, perhaps four or five, but no more words. I push acid into his beautiful face. His terrestrial body enters into other conditions. I fill him with morphine and do not give him water. He wakes up. He dies. Perhaps he does not do anything. It is late. I stick needles into the boy and then inject myself with his blood and consciousness. The air deviates near the surface as I shake the semen from my penis into his mouth. I enjoy his body. I play with his body until he wakes up. I dig a hole somewhere through him using my tongue as a shovel. Queer words gush through us in feverish waves like atomic ash, small things brimming with sickness and remote psychological pride. I remember his shoulders in the moonlight, and the smell of his hair. I am looking at the Gulf War on a screen at Bangkok airport. I return to Phnom Penh and then Hiroshima. I paddle in a swimming pool and receive some unnamed, but highly contagious, genital infection. A metal dropper extracts infected blood out of my vagina. I am in absolute confusion. I can feel my stump, and my stump can feel me.

* * *

The two columns my stump scratches in the dirt represent extreme internal division and double-letter fascination processing that helps overcome official helplessness. I suspect that I am waiting in some tropical mushroom district with my belt chewed up and my pants falling down, but this might just be the only recognition my senses make possible. Misunderstanding actuality is a conceptual formation disturbance I frequently use for self-protection from other hallucinations. This modification of feelings results in compressed sensitiveness and loss of other things. I am my own specimen under a pin. I want to kidnap twenty-one identical backpackers and turn them into zombies, or convince them they have been turned into zombies, or self-administer and convince myself I have been turned into a zombie. Perhaps I have brain damage, a severe head injury, defective evolution intelligence, or something settling outside chronic differential diagnosis. Maybe everything here is being written while I force cavity sexual intercourse without a condom on a body entirely asleep, on this bed, in this motel room, and a body, entirely asleep, forces cavity sexual intercourse without a condom on my body entirely asleep, on this bed, in this motel room, simultaneously, in a chokehold, for at least three or four years, and this is an escape attempt, from us, from me, from this bed, from this motel room, moving literally from nonexistent template to private document to novel.

* * *

I have not read this novel. I do not read novels. That is neither a defense nor an explanation. The walls of this motel room roll repeatedly. They merge front and back until there is nothing like mysterious disclosure but crude navigation and perplexity. Disjointedness seems to be an extensive internal behavior that is impossible to describe using paragraphs and sentences. Being remotely integrated is an illusion supported by the same economy and social politics that make the left hand a traitor. Perhaps I am dying from gangrene in this motel room after getting my limbs amputated in a cheap clinic in a foreign country. I think I would like to complete this novel before I die. I am trying to rearrange the most important details. The deformed results are guaranteed to bring bankruptcy. I wave my stump at the screens around my bed and confuse the thoughts passing through my brain with the conceptual regurgitation appearing in front of my eyes. I believe I am in a motel room dying from gangrene. I ejaculate excessively.

* * *

My doctor gives me insufficient medicine and no sexual relief. He tells me to take out the stitches quickly in order to ensure that the scars remain. He recommends sleeping on a trampoline in the garden outside this motel room to avoid visibility. I consider his advice for some time but instead decide to install infected foreign objects into my body. I finger the edge of the scars and open the gauze, several years earlier, infected, returning to this motel room. I tell my doctor that power pushed back overtakes time, and your days are numbered. He says this novel clearly demonstrates immature emotionality assimilation and orgiastic self-centeredness. I say each sentence here travels in a straight line and each word in each straight line is a person shunted from a truck into a gas chamber before gathering on the other side of some metaphorical slaughterhouse. He asks to meet my parents. He speaks to them in private before we sit down together. He says there should really be an empty chair in this motel room for my mother’s silent pain.

* * *

In order to feel thought as an abnormal mutation written in the mind of an underage girl, I cut off my voice and drift into agreement repetition. I turn in circles, blonde hair, and a tight body, trying to control my enthusiasm, hide it, searching through foundation appearance hallucinations. I lower my panties and show my vagina under the stairway outside this motel room. Someone licks my scars. Someone licks my vagina. My clitoris is the size of an egg. My dildo is a large mushroom. I experience transcendence during my first orgasm. The shock to my vagina is fast and strong. There is an explosion. Fire. I know what to do. I set up fake websites to pursue backpackers. The websites generate rape hallucination fantasies and hardcore back-story devices. I use chloroform and make love to the backpackers I find. They have a natural craving for chloroform. They move around with free will, separated from their limbs. I collect profiles of their friends. I obtain IP addresses and passport images. I know they are not truly the people they are trying to be. Most have been infected by forgery, fraud, and sarcasm. My imagination accumulates facts. I make bombs. They explode. I imagine being part of the lunar surface landing and the World Trade Center collision at the same time. My eyes discover a host of plural transcendental beings living excessively in the darkness surrounding the motel room inside this motel room. They appear in order to rearrange the words pouring from these screens before I can read them. Their fingers come away incandescent from the light cast through the slats in these paragraphs, prickling as thick as carpet, images traced to somewhere else, slipping in and out of consciousness.

* * *

Every morning, I come round slowly and want something exciting to do, some morbid thing, some morbid experience. I call a female dancer. She dances for me sexily. We play some functionality games. I lick a little smooth skin and hair. She removes her panties and that magical box gets wet. Something else happens, or develops, or it translates into a first indication without there being words, a meta-image that expresses this moment. Her beauty torments me before having sexual intercourse with her. She tastes gorgeous. We take a shower together. She does not speak English greatly. Because she cannot be a fisherman, her father sold her to a pimp. She went to school in a third-world ex-colonial museum that broke her appearance and convinced her to move into a furniture store with her abusive uncle. She set fire to the furniture store and sent one side of herself to London. She tells me she cannot sleep. She curls up on my pillow. I try to get her to watch at least two screens at the same time. I find it difficult to breathe. I am worried about the blood clotting in my penis. I must be restricted to the night. Her uncle visits the motel room inside this motel room in a schoolgirl uniform. She has not fallen asleep completely. I make her half-eyed awake and tell her about her uncle’s visit. She pushes me away and I punch her in the face. Her body trembles with fear, but it cannot move. She cannot protect herself. I chop her soft leather skin. She is in a white bikini on a beach with her parents. I look at the waves entering and leaving, rolling over her body. She is playing with her sister. I think about tightening a rope around my own neck. I know more trouble will come, guilt and shame, and the insect power of existence, but the ecstasy shock of two virgin bodies rubbing against each other on the same beach as a thousand corpses is the only thing that I can call love.

* * *

A corpse must possess some internal relationship power with the beings who hide inside that dead shell. I believe the sounds coming from my mouth are from a lobotomized girl. Listening to her moan is like feeling crushed sugar and honey in my hands. I look at myself as this young girl in the shower. She has a beautiful gymnast’s body. She comes to the motel room inside this motel room and we have sexual intercourse. I supply her with unlimited medicine. Between literature classes at university, she goes back and forth anywhere. She finds a dog-eared first edition of this novel and gives it to me as a gift. I experiment with writing on her panties and instruct her to film herself reading this novel in front of her boyfriend. I inhale the show from an open window. I strangle her with a USB cable. I have sexual intercourse with her before she dies. I have sexual intercourse with her after she is dead. I handcuff her, transfer my penis to her throat, and push hard. Her organs offer further truths about dialectic appearances, objective real-time hallucinations, and the bonds that mediate our relationships. They tell me depression and suicide are a vision of things to come, and only murder can alleviate the loneliness of a troubled childhood.

* * *

The map of modification and stability in this novel is assembled in the place it is written. Concentric circles pull the map into parallel lines disappearing from the visual adrenal cortex. I kidnap a boy, have sexual intercourse with him, and torment myself with the memory of that act, restricted to this motel room, writing this novel concerning these things. Another obscure boy enters my imagination. I turn around. The boy inserts his penis into my anus, a hand on my hip, and we come simultaneously. I find this boy at Hammersmith bus station. I use chloroform of course. He stumbles to one side. He wobbles and continues to wobble. His hips are in the mud. He looks like a very thin girl who works at Shepherd’s Bush market. I think they are related. My impulses for and against incest are normal. But whenever the victim is a child, the riff to violate this libidinal rejoicing becomes desperately hard to withstand. Several plural transcendental beings follow us to this motel room. Some of them invent pedophilic insults. I disperse the boy’s clothing and torment his formless genitals with medical equipment. I push his knees under his jaw. I feel dissatisfaction. I chop him up. I attack him with a screwdriver that represents my atrophied penis. When I eventually get hard enough to rape him, perhaps as a boy myself, who is broken in part by the disappearance of existence, my thoughts concerning who I am depart from language and enter future abstract spatial concerns. Instead of smashing my leg in a motorcycle collision, I become a dancer. My brother finds me on television. We have been divided since childhood when our parents got divorced. I never meet my father until after he dies of cancer. I burn my father’s body. He possesses beautiful yakuza tattoos.

* * *

My boyfriend wakes up and enters from the bathroom. I stop my jaw from opening. My boyfriend is always jealous. I move to the bed and massage his shoulders. I think this sudden peace brings severe neurosis. I expose all my secrets about this novel to him. I tell him not to push me. I tell him I would like to have sexual intercourse with him, in continuation, substituting his heart for the motel room inside this motel room. I repeatedly hit him in order to stop him from hitting me. He damages me with his anger. He kills me. I drag my suitcase in the snow down Shepherd’s Bush Road to Hammersmith station and take a bus to Heathrow. I stalk a backpacker in the car lot at Terminal 3 and spike her drink at the Bridge Bar. She inquires if I would like to have sexual intercourse. I suggest the restrooms. I pull out her breasts and lick them. She finds a knife in her backpack and slices off my penis. She says my pretentious literary experiments are beyond ridiculous. I tell her this novel is worthy of ridicule. But my limbs and organs are not. She leaves me slumped in a cubicle. I bleed giving birth to a new penis. I eat my placenta. I lose my keys. I lose my teeth. I look at all the backpackers I have executed in the cubicles inside my head. I prepare the opportunity to return their images to a safe place.

* * *

This is the introduction to all future editions of this novel. The other sections of this novel might be more interesting, but this section also refers to the next section, and the next section also refers to this section, and the final section also refers to all the previous sections, alignment being broken perhaps, and I walk along a beach that has been thrown away from some disingenuous game before arriving in a computer hole, and next in a motel room inside this motel room with my own dead body, and then squatting beside a wheelchair on a street corner in Berlin ejaculating death on a spiral-pattern blanket.

* * *

The screens in this motel room display more or less the same words written here. One screen plays the first moon collision. Another plays the World Trade Center landing. Meanwhile the plural transcendental beings I mentioned earlier are on the carpet projecting murder masturbation fear movies by rubbing together skin, sand, seaweed, paper, rot, and river junk like my father’s ashes. I realize I can never reassemble this novel with the consistent reliability necessary for central mass-consumption distribution. Everything is wrong with this novel, an enclosed infinite space where existence is an open window disintegrating individual subjective characteristic prerequisites. These shifty letters continue to form useless words that become senseless sentences representing intentions spilling from the structural machine of story. As I retype these words, my fingers become excessively tangled. My left hand is already throbbing. I move to the north space of this motel room, between the lips of my scars, where my doctor has attached pornographic images of himself. I enact these images as conceptual murders using chairs, dummies, and prostitutes. I do not know what I am doing. My heart is a schoolgirl who fantasizes about murder and rape and is sent wailing to her room by her mother.

* * *

I remove my jeans and rub my vagina. I photograph my finger in my vagina, photographing the finger, the vagina, and the photograph. Before I orgasm, I separate my limbs from my body using the only method I presently know. I exploit body identity disorder research and theory as an experiment in mind control that stems from the failure to maintain writing this novel. I distort pieces of me, my characteristic history, anecdotal experiences, and my own desires and imagination in order to implode converted memory failure reminiscence records and make this novel a spiral space outside linear achievement. I have sexual intercourse with several boys who suffer from excessive randomness. I order sex dolls and inflate them. I insert medicine into the dolls and reposition them for sexual intercourse. The prostitutes I pay are doubtful concerning my motivation when I insert their medicine. My purpose is to find prostitutes who can move exactly as instructed. Then I must find a real couple. I am possibly getting closer or maybe further away or maybe nowhere at all.

* * *

Every paradox in this novel is a complete falsehood. I swallow mushrooms from a paper cup, walk in the rain expressing more or less the same words written here, and never return. My mother finds me in a motel identical to this one but without rooms. She requests the police to personally identify my body because she has forgotten my appearance. This place is ash, England, Ireland, Wales, a bus pulling out of Hammersmith station, to Australia, or anywhere else, the ancient colonies diagnosed with disposable storyline hallucinations, before returning to Shepherd’s Bush Green, where I stand as an old man reading a future edition of this novel aloud into a children’s plastic toy walkie-talkie, an experiment in fear, the rust that eats my imagination. A lobotomized girl sits on my shoulders brewing mechanical corrections and inserting them into my spine. The plastic toy walkie-talkie seems like a cheap interpretation of intestines, heart, other organs, and dissatisfaction, a rear door in the back opening to sniff the languid Australian air, the person I become, inhaling that self like a cockroach.

* * *

Outside this motel without rooms, I walk along the balcony, holding the rail, and see a rocket, broken and inattentive, hurtling above the desert. That rocket is something, I say to myself, that rocket is a thing, like my father rising from cancer and the writing I do while masturbating and drinking. These are empty times, and I have no expectations to advance the progress of things, but it is a beautiful day in the desert, bypassing the stink of the body beside me, my body if you like, whoever, and I expand this relationship to all objects. I travel the country craving the young, the beautiful, and the easily brainwashed. I am a nomadic magician, a sidewalk buccaneer, a suburban minstrel. I bring news and other fictions that flow between people simultaneously like blood from the back of their necks. I witness people dying in boiling tanks. They pay me to read to them, to entertain them, because perhaps these empty times need excretory things, and erroneous cloning is preferable to rat extermination products. I write and publish articles about this imaginary novel. I march through tropical zones, tasting the ground. My yearning is strong for a very short skirt. I move my stump. I remember this day because of my stump. A crowd gathers around me outside Great Portland Street station. I emphasize the medical experiments I have agreed to undergo in Harley Street. I unite my leg, trying to sit, and become part of some cold legal canvas.

* * *

When a novel is written into the wrong body, the body must do something unwritten. I do not want to be a writer, but I have to write this novel. I express these things as the corpse of a narrator who has been made into a zombie in a motel without rooms. I have died many times in this motel without rooms. I have removed the walls because they form a false connection between the conscious writer and the plural transcendental beings who believe single author production is directly responsible for any created text. I order sex dolls for my dead narrator to inflate. I insert medicine into the dolls and reposition them for sexual intercourse. As I force unconscious sounds from the voices of dead people, I am trying to capture language as it might appear in an imaginary future, having expressed every broken sentence, and pull this forgotten condition into an excessively darker stage where every crawling, sick motel room wall becomes human and loses its neurotic dependence on personality information. I love stockings and high-heeled shoes. I cruise the local mall and pursue beautiful girls. I fall asleep and dream about the process of psychosexual development through extreme loss. A beautiful girl faces a dressing room. I ejaculate in my hand. Small-numbered shocks. I tremble, collapsing, pulling the dressing room curtain down, pulling the motel room walls down.

* * *

Perhaps I am this novel’s recalcitrant travelling salesman continually talking about continual murder and experimental writing. It is an endless pitch and one primary headache. I return to this motel without rooms under the appearance of cooperation with this novel. I want to read about, and experience, more self-indulgence. This time it is another fine young boy. I grasp his hand in the standardization of some unspoken context. My morbid persona makes the young boy die. I enjoy his dead body. I need his dead body. More perversion, amusement, in the evening, in the dark, in this motel without rooms. A human head is in a box at my feet. I kick the box. The young boy praises me. I attach something to his mouth. He recovers consciousness. He sits down on the bed. He looks at the screens showing the lunar surface collision and the World Trade Center landing. He places my body on the bed and takes photographs with the screens in the background. My clothing wears prostitute tension and broadcasts abuse, darkness, musk, and copper. A plural transcendental being materializes at the window. He has an erect penis. He collides with the window and takes off his motorcycle helmet. He asks me whether my penis is eager. I ask him whether his penis is eager. I cannot deny the chemistry. I open my pants. Something starts. When I come, I grasp the boy. He is not loved. I tear him apart, under the water, as in the pages of this polluted novel, swirling eternally up and down the plughole of its own creation.

* * *

Early editions of this novel contribute to psychiatry and the world completely, but have not been given official recognition. According to international classification, the first edition of this novel is insufficient in various conditions related to the transient pleasure of book-reading happiness. Although some reviewers have called the first edition of this novel an existential implosion of the sixth order, international classification is considerably insufficient in order to classify the large number of alterations brought in since then.

* * *

Editing these inconsistent grammatical structures, even now when my head is relatively good, in order to shut off any obstinate craving for the sake of the most unbiased allowances, produces this kind of corpse dissection writing, this extreme deformation, where resistance to the pull of the text is useless. I rearrange these words like they are ex-porn stars trying to get a straight job. While this rearrangement requires considerable concentration, redeveloping this novel’s tabulation provokes illegitimate internal drive damage to the agency systems in my frontal lobe and sparks off cravings that take on other lives. This process happens autonomously, through translation, while the pieces, experiences, feelings, and intuition, left behind contradict knowledge and create their own inseparable hallucinogenic ordering systems. In the first edition of this novel, separation is classified as a symptom that leads to modification, but does not change the character of the novel, whereas in subsequent editions, there is always something being pulled and cut. I am perhaps the writer’s double who steps in to complete the pulling. So this novel’s raw materials may be cries for love whispered next to glory holes, but the inclusion of various chronic coding letters and neurotic decoration phrases has given unusual personality and gains in transient book-reading happiness. In future years, psychiatrists will offer this novel to patients and witness automatic recovery.

* * *

If every section of this novel feels like another dominant organ winning spontaneous opposition through concentration, then this section presents various distorted facts in order to allow the reader to realize the whole thing is suspect. These qualities are not usually recognized in the colonies coming from England. I pass on the procedures here in order to live outside this world, the manuscript in my mouth moves to a position that gives the impression of medicine, and the organ in my hand becomes a coffee cup, but my voice remains a dirty crescendo, an abrupt disharmonious clatter.

* * *

There is a photograph of my father from the 1960s. He is wearing a jumper and taking a photograph of himself in a mirror. I burn that jumper to my body when I am finishing high school. I inject badly cut heroin and homemade amphetamines in my bedroom below his bedroom. When all my friends leave town, my voice is restricted to my own head, and something else happens, and I carry extra voices, and these voices carry me. I read transgressive fiction and teach myself to write. Ten years later, I inject my father with prescription morphine and liquid Valium in his bedroom above my bedroom, the cancer expanding from his stomach where he grasps the camera. I call what I am talking about here literature, an incomplete development report on an imaginary novel. I am an impostor fascinated by removed limbs and organs. There are times when I write and times when others write. There are times when my body makes corrections and times when the corrections are made by other bodies indifferent to the host. At times I cannot distinguish between the different voices here. That is the truth. I am not just being quaint and evasive. A single body cannot hold a single thought related to a single voice.

* * *

This novel’s critics have all-too-often concentrated on the cliche of having anarchic voices gargled and back-washed through an infinite stream of motel rooms, but I am actually walking free and transparent through each excessive example all the way to the last section where I become process itself expanding outside unlimited fragments that crack and separate. When this novel is republished, I will go to Japan intending probably to sleep. After receiving recognition by direct report or inference, my limb actors will mime redundant philosophy and move through lyrical metaphors into other things called bodies that I find excessively erotic because fiction is what I feel when I write, and the distortion I am currently experiencing is impossible to maintain. There is just this one rush. Then it will be gone.

* * *

Most literature is boring, excessively foolish, and suffocates revolutionary cravings. My literary impulses stem from rare symbolic substances with direct aesthetic routes to insubstantial information. I decipher and fuse contradictory field reports that induce reaction maneuvers designed to be misunderstood. Before I leave high school I create a magnificent mixture of notes and diagrams for this novel and then throw them away but grow conscious of how process and method are more interesting than any finished product and how an edge of intuition is meant to topple any balance. My teacher purchases a first edition of this novel in a second-hand bookstore and compares it with an earlier edition, where horrible things happen to me in unfilmable detail, downloaded from the internet. My teacher asks to meet my parents. I tell my teacher and my parents I cannot be responsible for the actions of my limbs. I make hundreds of inadequate attempts to explain the theory behind this novel, but without words or silence, the whole thing disintegrates into a grinding, uselessly large number of unintelligible patterns.

* * *

The last thing my father says to me is I love you. After that, I tear apart his corpse and inspect his organs for secret letters to secret sweethearts. The process intoxicates me. I create an installation from the things I find. My mother registers me for critical theory and creative writing classes. The rules automatically make me write. I do not write a diary, this is not a journal, although I think I would like to write about the river where I dragged and burnt my father, and the empty chair I erected above the ashes, but I do not want to, and I do not know how to, and I do not know how I know or do not know anything. Instead I form the identity of other fake people from random verification websites where I discover small group images pasted on the surface, like a young boy fascinated by his confident simplicity, and my hands approve the attaching requests that belong to my arms but even in these actions there is deep suspicion, fatal object alienation, and this corrupted unconscious language dampened by amphetamines.

* * *

Every metaphor is a gloomy truth that damages the obligations required to refuse harmful medical service and qualify as a human being. I am the cancerous tumor growing inside my father’s colon. I ride my motorcycle around the desert and masturbate until my jeans are covered in blood. I slide my penis into my mouth. I carry old village food and miscellaneous goods to my father’s redoubling process mine where a radio informs me about rebellion, the end of capitalism. My doctor puts a device into my vagina and controls my heart. Wires spill from the back of my head when I wash my hair. My brain carries screens that classify the activities I conduct. I move to Japan for schoolgirl sexual intercourse, but language learnt insufficiently, excessive laziness, and broken payments leave me blank and intoxicated. Occasionally, negligence and indifference to being are necessary to decide whether or not I know the results of my own behavior. It is sometimes necessary to decide.

* * *

With this novel’s future republication, an ancient unrecognizable language is transmitted not only to mental hospitals but also to courthouses, government buildings, and company offices throughout the world. I continue to disseminate my own mental technology and form systems to attribute everything. Society continues to collapse and infectious diseases are spread as the only form of social entertainment. The end of civilization is clinical. The surface is struck. The blood traces my mouth. I am drunk in a Prague strip club saying things like, easy life goes out easily, when I decide to announce a worldwide commission into the importance of staging an inquiry into the technical problems facing this novel.

* * *

Any successful experiment is a failure. I am a writer. There are no words to explain what I do. During the trial that follows my arrest, my girlfriend chooses to live with my father. We do not visit each other for ten years but the murder cravings in this motel without rooms form a cell membrane, and through abstract conceptual distortions of time, I give up playing the drums in a heavy-metal cover band and convert their shells into noise literature. I become a dancer. I get a small part as a nurse in a television drama. My girlfriend contacts the television studio and delivers a blank envelope containing a secret letter. I cannot read the letter because it is in a language that does not exist. I pick up my girlfriend on my motorcycle, rape her, and drop her roadside. She dies when a mining truck runs over her. I see her body open, everywhere, on the road and in the ditches, could eat the substances loosened, her clothes, her vagina spared somehow, but I wait for her to reappear and smile. We fight simultaneously. Then a long hard kiss, kiss, kisses. Baby. Baby. We have sexual intercourse on the beach. She dies from AIDS in this motel without rooms, her limbs removed and her open organs echoing a kind of happiness no one could even attempt to grasp.

* * *

I buy a ticket next week and fly to New York. There is a body in a bag beside me. I tell the body in the bag that when this novel is republished and I claim my prizes, my father will remain in a glass case in a strip bar, and when society collapses from whatever, fiction will reclaim its necessary status. I make a club sandwich at five o’clock and eat it at six. I call a male dancer. He dances for me sexily. We play some functionality games. I tell him homicide for a writer is the terminus of an imagined father, who should remain outside the text, ranking stories like emissions from outer space, because denial is a conviction concerning creativity, whether caught in double-bind truth declarations, or when trying to nail a fact whose disappearance into the logic of fake self-destruction as self-recognition, where transcendence accompanies ego death, collapses the gap between signs and hallucinations of abnormal play into a symbiotic uterine state that commutes twisted recognition onto institutionalized separation. He is sucking on my penis hatefully. I am blind to his tongue on my skin. I punch him in the throat. I gag him.

* * *

Everything in this motel without rooms is happening and not happening simultaneously. The plural transcendental beings jump on my neck with hacksaws. Their blades bore holes through three layers of clothing and a bed. They carry this motel without rooms into the desert. They do some kind of purification sacrifice. My father reads and corrects this novel after I die. He uses an Apple IIe. I go to my funeral with a girl from school. I rub my penis against her vagina. She stops me from inserting it. I masturbate repeatedly to the memory of her and then my father reads my revisions in that post-orgasmic haze. I watch him from behind a screen and sketch other scenes of sexual intercourse. I attack a young girl who looks identical to the girl from school. She dies. I play with her corpse. I dig out her organs and find a video clip of a different girl who also looks identical to the girl from school doing masturbation while reading this novel. I project that masturbation scene from this motel without rooms to a mirror in time with her ex-boyfriend doing masturbation while wearing her stockings. I attack the girl. The girl falls asleep. I pull her body to this motel without rooms. The taste of the girl is beautiful. I watch her having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend in the back of a van.

* * *

I believe these dolls, these drifting people, these prostitutes, these empty chairs, and these screens are sufficiently disassembled signposts to indicate the multiple levels at work here. My internal organs are thinking things, getting inclinations, the lattice of some story, the nervous system, but even though the USB cables that tie me to this bed lead endlessly to information, irrational primary factors, and conditional recognition programing, perhaps I am really just sloshing around in my own blood.

* * *

On a Vietnamese beach in summer, I tighten my girlfriend’s neck until she cannot exist. I drink red wine and look at her hair. She is excessively incomprehensible. I am a fan. She thinks I want someone much younger but have been made helpless by morality. I hit her. She groans putting on a voice. It is unnecessary to kidnap and electrocute her. Her bicycle transfers everything into a dream. I hang upside down in the back section of a nightclub in Marrakech. After injecting some ambiguous material, I walk to the dancefloor shouting, England is dying, London is dead. I pull dangerously close to becoming part of a mountain of bodies slaughtered out of existence by plural transcendental beings. I fight from this mountain. I meet a boy in Nepal. He opens a tissue to the midday sun in order to see the skin layers outside a dead girl’s eye completely waterless. He removes the layers until there is nothing left. He says no one will ever understand my brain conversations, and this vulgar literary experiment is a cheap zombie movie compilation. I reply with something along the lines of new methods are needed for seeing and exceeding language and things and the start of non-books that can read you reading them and can feel you feeling them. He says this novel is meaningless and completely continual, its own interview with itself, a long cool masturbation, a serpent sucking its own penis until it flips inside out and back again. He closes by saying these are not your hands. These are not hands. These are not.

* * *

My ability to grasp the words coming from these screens brings insecurity, anxiety, agitation, and crisis. As soon as something is nailed down, it disappears or changes into something entirely other. In order to know my own thoughts, if I possess any, it must be possible to see the opposite side of thought. Returning to the motel room inside this motel room is fiction, the place where it first struck, an unidentifiable rocket hurtling through the desert, the craving to write this novel, this person, this motel room, where I die like paper burnt and dispersed. This novel is an impossible language destination on the route of a pilgrimage leaving the body through meditation and tabulation of diagnostic features developed in a series of novels based on being admitted to a mental hospital. My voice controls the speed and direction of revolutions, but the boundaries pull and tear, and soon all control will be abandoned. I pulverize the time space continuum. I go to this novel’s funeral, sit on a hard chair, and observe the casket entering flames.

* * *

A temporary advisor to the subcommittee for the reclassification of this novel emails me to suggest the special language controls used to modify, under exceptional circumstances, the cutting off of healthy sentences, should be abandoned in a novel never believed to exist. I reply with something like this novel is a clear statement of episodes that come from years of craving, and each line drawn up possesses these cravings in order to give legitimate characteristics to this novel, a curious complexity, a clinical practicality, arising from compromises where attempts to verify any information have been removed in accordance with the necessity to maintain the anonymity of the author because the state of any author would be polluted by exposure to this novel.

* * *

All the subcommittee members agree to reconsider an international corrections meeting. I give a presentation on my concerns about this motel room metaphor. They say resistance to self-expression is a denial of actualization and possibly based on unstable convictions about integrated genre systems. They give me a letter to pass on to a friend who has died. I move to Sydney but my brain does not understand sufficiently how to reassemble my feelings. I walk along the Harbour Bridge, climb down to a gravel path, and protect my eyes from reading the words in my hand. I have sufficient interest to clatter these sentences together but it is impossible to represent the psychosis that remains from the mind control experiments I perform on others as well as myself. I speak to my mother on the telephone. I tell her my method for amputating knowledge is a slave game. She suggests writing about an empty chair, a dummy, a prostitute, someone who dies, cutting up my father, but the scenes I imagine appear like traces of other scenes, images dropped from the screens playing in this motel room, perhaps a motel room, perhaps a motel room inside a motel room, perhaps a motel without rooms, perhaps personal projections, or images of seeing a brain cracked open during sexual intercourse and dying on a bed, like my father with all the medicine pumped into him, and ten last words exhaled ardently by mouth, under the hope of a quick death.

* * *

Perhaps I could have paid someone to write this better for me. It would have been funnier and less egocentric. With sexuality and murder, I am more perplexed than anything. Eventually I am led from the motel room inside this motel room in handcuffs, imitation music playing crime poems, existence and absence, sorrow and time given as my defense. There is a bus stop. I think of my mother as a girl in a cheap pornographic film, at the bus stop, searching for a boy. I escape from jail, climb through a window, and rape the boy across a coffee table in the motel room inside this motel room. The boy’s body disappears under the weight of my final pounding. I understand his situation. Similar scenes occur, similar things. We have sexual intercourse in a church confessional and a wooden crate filled with used diapers and dead cats. I tie a rope around his neck and would like to release it but the way his anus contracts around my penis as I tighten the rope sends me into a coma. He rescues me, blue from hard drugs, deceased in a used car lot. He picks me up and returns me to life, to shock, and to this novel.

* * *

Without this novel informing the way I think and feel, my cravings for abnormal play, cutting off, would be hard to explain. I feel enormous jealously towards cutting patients who have been completely removed. I possess these cravings, limb, foot, arm, hand, or finger, unbiased until now, because I am not from this body, and I want to let it go. I enter a girl from behind. I attack a different girl. I destroy this girl. Her body is weak. I think I would like to speak to this girl concerning this novel or perhaps I do not think I would like to speak to her concerning this novel. I rape her again in order to write about rape and ask the voices I hear to forget the things we whisper during the times we speak together. She atrophies on the surface for the second time as a shadow. I wake up several hours later in this motel room with another being, sideways, beside me, damaged, on my chest, reaching between my hands, my feet. The being lying on the bed thinks there is a different entity on the bed. The entity is looking at two separate screens showing the lunar surface landing and the World Trade Center collision.

* * *

I am standing before the bathroom mirror, grasping a camera to my stomach. I have attached a brown jumper to my body. Same jumper, cool morning when I am finishing high school. I inject heroin through the sleeves of the jumper attached to my body. I am angry at the redoubling process mine where my father works tossing people’s limbs and whereabouts into obscurity. He sleeps on the bed, stomach rising, having made preparations, and possibly obtained a boat, five or six bullets, and the approval of a handgun. I know what I have to do. The tiles in the bathroom give way. I make it to the bed, passing out, disintegrating within a haze of anaesthesia. When I wake up, this time my hand is asleep under my son’s head and my hand feels like my father’s hand after he has died. I am riding naked on a children’s bicycle around the trampoline in the garden outside this motel room in the moonlight. From experience, things like this feel enjoyable. I realize I have to travel through the dead, and although the corpses I become are too corrupt for either educational or artistic value, letter after letter leads me to believe that these letters are correct, and the correct destination for them has been found, the message becoming pure form, what is said is said from me, the invitation coming through.

* * *

After sucking my own penis for three or four hours the heat of ejaculation stings my lips. I look at my face in the bathroom mirror and understand the unlimited pleasures I have known. Male and female prostitutes are frozen in sexual poses on the bed while I take photographs with the screens in the background. This time I come out of the bathroom enacting that I have caught the prostitutes having sex. I tell them the method of killing another person is never a powerful substance for a writer in itself, but the procedure of describing humiliation as a compilation of businesslike detail is something I grasp intuitively. I confess that I want to reanimate the dead with mental powers, but my real work is tracking down secret letters from secret lovers, and maybe I have initially come up with this weird art excrement to throw the critics off my trail and play with the medium, but after re-enacting the whole messy narrative through drug-induced hallucinations I have perhaps also brainwashed myself into taking the original premise as truth.

* * *

I buy a ticket from Sydney to Bangkok in order to finish this novel. A taxi driver accompanies me to a whorehouse where I choose a Cambodian girl. She buys some condoms and chewing gum from the convenience store next to this motel. I become ridiculous with her, being moved by thoughts insufficiency clear, bad judgments, and a scarcity of feelings. I eventually make it to Japan where I attempt suicide from a Shinjuku building after quarreling with a yakuza pornography director. I meet my mother for coffee on a freight train at midnight. There is acid rain outside the window. My mother inquires about this novel and I wail out a storm of assertion and denial. I remind her the physical movement of my limbs is separate from what I decide, inside, control. She says all human agency is related to an assemblage of texts read in excessive retrospect. I tell her I think everything is dead and my intestines have been evacuated in a scattered recreation to every thought I have ever had reflecting the system of thought as a mirror of that reflection. She says my function is to distinguish between reality and the devices used in fiction. I tell her I am bleeding to death on the bed in this motel room. I am drunk. I want to abandon the control of these words. This motel room is killing me. My masochistic feelings will live on as my body dies. I draw a zombie display diagram on a napkin to indicate I have disarticulated myself from literature and dispersed all remaining limbs. The shadow of her hand on my shoulder distracts my mind.

* * *

If I remember anything else because the walls stop rolling then whatever it is must be meaningless. This motel room is beyond the back section of my voice. It is the noise coming from investigating where the voices inside the organs are disconnected from the flesh. It is a confession with a solid gold wish based on the acceptance of marginal doubts, cliches, metaphors, theoretical desires, and atonal animal sluggishness. I am being created, drawn up, feeling conscious in these places only for the reader, through processes happening within the reader, through processes mapping the pathways produced in the organs of the reader while reading these words, and through processes recording the pathways produced in the organs of those tracing the map. Any other description would be a contradiction. I have said enough. I am moving inside and running around until I cannot go on any longer. In every city I travel through, troops burn residents who cannot evacuate their buildings or negotiate with the head office. Company managers blow up assembly lines and leave in the middle of the day. Policemen and public officials leak out of jail. Soldiers kill babies with bayonets and drop them in boiling nuclear reactor water. My wife gives birth to a son and we eat him.

* * *

Various subcommittees may continue to deliberate on the structural systems operating at different levels while debating the existence of this novel but my limbs and organs have already departed and been restricted to a box under this motel room, and my torso has become a rusted bicycle wheel outside an internet coffeehouse in a Shibuya basement, where computer program passwords give shape to buildings and writers glance at other writers walking from unit to unit on multiple floors of a super-structure that is a tower within a tower and, as the tower is the function, it also carries the function of that function and so on. Words return to speaking various items insufficiently in order to obscure the clear quality value of communication. My stimulus is doing what cannot be done. Whether or not that is the case with the writing as written in this novel, and although it is possible to give basic geographical and biographical information about myself, the history appearing outside literature, I am not the same person who produces any editions of this novel, and even after having gained incomprehensible confidence with the pain of the last ten years, the necessity for heavy, stainless steel is so deep that without it, disappearance is identical to atrophy, and transportation to another constellation where rape and murder are not defined.

1.1.

a) Hear the beat moving and vibrating down through your intestines.

b) Squint at a glitter ball reflecting racks of colored light.

c) Taste sulfur and sweat that has dried and come back.

d) Watch people talking and laughing crowded around tables and booths.

e) Feel the music circling through your ass and your cunt.

1.2.

a) Notice a man and a woman dancing on a stage.

b) Look at the woman sucking on the man’s soft cock.

c) See yourself in a mirror tied up to a pole.

d) Watch the man trying to fuck the woman from behind.

e) Bite at and chew on the material covering your mouth.

1.3.

a) Watch the man spraying his cock to get it hard.

b) Try to squeeze your hands out of some wrist straps.

c) Look at the woman grabbing and pulling the man’s hair.

d) Clutch onto the pole and try to yank it out.

e) See the man throwing the woman down on her back.

1.4.

a) Twist the wrist straps around until your hands are numb.

b) Look at the man pissing on the woman’s shaved head.

c) See the woman scratching and then punching the man’s face.

d) Watch the man strangle the woman until she goes limp.

e) Look at the man wanking and coming on the woman.

1.5.

a) Choke yourself jerking forward on the strap around your neck.

b) Gag on the vomit backwashed through your mouth and nose.

c) Feel and hear the screams coming out of your throat.

d) Watch people talking and laughing crowded around tables and booths.

e) Close your eyes and fade into the music guiding you.

2.1.

a) Hear the music stop and see the lights go down.

b) Track a spotlight and listen to a voice saying welcome.

c) Feel yourself being lowered into a chair with leg stirrups.

d) Listen to the voice explaining there are only two contestants.

e) Hear the voice saying the first to come inside wins.

2.2.

a) Reach past the spotlight to a crack in the wall.

b) Feel the crack move as the voice introduces the champion.

c) Listen to the champion strutting around the stage and clapping.

d) Look at people trying to order drinks at a bar.

e) See an assistant grabbing and dragging me onto the stage.

2.3.

a) Hear the assistant pinning me down and removing my clothes.

b) See the champion inspecting me through the mirror on stage.

c) Watch the champion wanking his cock and punching my face.

d) Look at the champion picking me up in the air.

e) Feel the champion slapping his cock up against your cunt.

2.4.

a) Listen to me crying as I wank over your reflection.

b) Tell me you want only my cock inside your cunt.

c) Feel the champion’s spit hitting your face and your breasts.

d) Look at your body wasted from drugs in the mirror.

e) Wince each time the champion punches me in the head.

2.5.

a) See the champion laughing and throwing me through the mirror.

b) Listen to me wanking my soft cock on the floor.

c) Feel the champion kicking your stomach and then choking you.

d) Watch me trying to get up but then falling down.

e) Notice your heart throbbing when you see me standing up.

3.1.

a) Hear the champion jump on me and fuck my ass.

b) Feel a gust and realize your left arm has gone.

c) Listen to me wanking my cock covered in your blood.

d) Watch the champion rubbing your cunt secretions on my face.

e) Feel another gust and realize your right arm has gone.

3.2.

a) Taste some morphine and see an assistant slapping your cheeks.

b) Look at the blood spurting out from your left hip.

c) Hear the champion sticking his cock into my droopy mouth.

d) Watch me bite the champion’s cock and swipe his feet.

e) Notice some people below the stage glancing up at us.

3.3.

a) Look at me picking up a piece of broken mirror.

b) Watch me stabbing the champion in the face and neck.

c) Feel the champion’s full weight collapse on top of you.

d) Listen to an assistant dragging the champion behind the stage.

e) See a different assistant inspecting your cunt with his tongue.

3.4.

a) Hear music blasting from speakers and then see lights spinning.

b) Watch me escape from the assistant who was holding me.

c) Feel my cock throbbing hard as I pump your cunt.

d) Taste the come spurting from my cock into your uterus.

e) Sense the come traveling up inside and around your body.

3.5.

a) Gaze at your headless and amputated torso on the stage.

b) Drift to the rooftop and breathe in the midnight air.

c) Feel the neon warmth of Bangkok Hong Kong Shanghai Tokyo.

d) Hear an airplane taking off and rumbling through the sky.

e) Catch your silhouette looking out from one of the windows.

4.1.

a) Do not look at the cameras or the sound crew.

b) Feel your hips and spine digging into a wooden chair.

c) Reach towards a teacher in front of a giant screen.

d) Notice that everyone in the classroom is wearing sky-blue overalls.

e) Touch the words left hand embroidered next to your zip.

4.2.

a) See the teacher change the screen to a split image.

b) Watch the teacher searching for a reaction from the class.

c) Hear the teacher saying the left field must go right.

d) Read the numbers the teacher types into the right field.

e) Tinker with the zip in the center of your overalls.

4.3.

a) Inspect the cuts and bruises on Billy next to you.

b) Hear yourself asking Billy what happened to his beautiful face.

c) Listen to him telling you to concentrate on the class.

d) Tell him that the bruises on his face look good.

e) Watch him saying bruises on other kids always look good.

4.4.

a) Flick the tab button and go to the next screen.

b) Type the numbers on the left field into the right.

c) Flick the tab button and go to the next screen.

d) Type the numbers on the left field into the right.

e) Flick the tab button and go to the next screen.

4.5.

a) Hear a teacher thanking the class for their hard work.

b) Tap Billy’s shoulder and tell him you are feeling sick.

c) Watch the teacher demonstrating how to scan a passport picture.

d) Look at the veins throbbing along Billy’s hands and neck.

e) Read a note from Billy saying everyone has to learn.

5.1.

a) Taste saliva dripping down from your mouth onto your keyboard.

b) Feel Billy moving his shoulders around to block your view.

c) Prod the wires coming from the back of Billy’s head.

d) Write a note to Billy saying this place is amazing.

e) Rub the saliva off your keyboard and close the screen.

5.2.

a) Do not look at the cameras or the sound crew.

b) Stand on the right of an escalator letting others pass.

c) Walk towards some phone racks and look at the phones.

d) Find a barcode on your overalls where an assistant pointed.

e) Watch the assistant showing you how to use the phone.

5.3.

a) Examine a map showing the layout of the entire building.

b) Touch the levels that have been crossed off the map.

c) Hear a security camera swivel and ask it for directions.

d) Walk into a security office and lean on the counter.

e) Ask a security guard if there has been an emergency.

5.4.

a) Listen to the security guard asking to see your breasts.

b) Unzip your overalls all the way down to your stomach.

c) Hear the security guard banging his cock beneath the counter.

d) Tell the security guard that he can call you Lucy.

e) Look at the information displayed on the security guard’s computer.

5.5.

a) Feel your feet slapping the cold surface of a corridor.

b) Glance up at broken florescent lights covered in wire cages.

c) Notice smashed windows, crumbling walls, and blocked stairways.

d) Discover an escalator and ride it up until it stops.

e) Walk down another corridor with your arms raised like flying.

6.1.

a) Hear everyone sitting down when a teacher lowers his arms.

b) Close your eyes and then concentrate on the teacher’s voice.

c) Listen to the teacher saying to inhale through your nose.

d) Open your eyes and realize you are on a train.

e) Feel your body jerk back as the train suddenly stops.

6.2.

a) Unclasp a compact mirror and aim it at your cunt.

b) Push Alex’s hand down so she can finger your ass.

c) Close your eyes and listen to the train rattling forward.

d) Hear the ticket conductor telling you to lower your feet.

e) Pick up your coffee and throw it at his crotch.

6.3.

a) Lock the cubicle and run your fingers through Alex’s hair.

b) Rest back as Alex licks the center of your panties.

c) Leave the toilet after a cleaner bangs on the door.

d) Watch a crowd of students milling around below some stairs.

e) Move slowly forward whenever the rest of your line moves.

6.4.

a) See an administrative officer smile and then stamp Alex’s passport.

b) Hear the administrative officer asking if you use recreational drugs.

c) Watch the administrative officer picking up a phone and calling.

d) Listen to Alex asking you what is the problem here.

e) Notice a student being dragged out of line and shot.

6.5.

a) Do not look at the cameras or the sound crew.

b) Step in front of Alex and get off the escalator.

c) Gaze at countless floors spiraling up to a glass ceiling.

d) Listen to crowds yelling over the sound of a fountain.

e) Feel the sunlight pouring through the center of the tower.

7.1.

a) Hear a registrar say everything you require will be provided.

b) Watch the registrar holding up a pair of sky-blue overalls.

c) Smile at the registrar and then give him your backpack.

d) Take off your clothes and step through an X-ray machine.

e) Put on the overalls and walk up a marble stairway.

7.2.

a) Look at a security guard talk about lower floor disturbances.

b) Ask the security guard to speak to the security manager.

c) Listen to the security guard suggesting you go to lunch.

d) Hear yourself telling the security guard you are not well.

e) Spot some blood seeping out of the security guard’s head.

7.3.

a) Watch the security manager asking if he can help you.

b) Lean on the counter and say you hope he can.

c) Hear the security manager asking what happened to his colleague.

d) Tell the security manager his colleague was not very helpful.

e) Hear the security manager asking how many languages you speak.

7.4.

a) Unzip your overalls and show the security manager your breasts.

b) Hear him sucking your nipples while he wanks his cock.

c) Feel him grabbing your hair and then kissing your mouth.

d) Taste your arm as the security manager fucks your ass.

e) Block your cunt when he pushes his cock against it.

7.5.

a) Hear a knife stabbing the security manager in the spine.

b) See him crawling slowly through his blood to the counter.

c) Look at the final words gurgling out of his mouth.

d) Kick him in the head and then roll him over.

e) Dig the knife in his face and stomach and groin.

8.1.

a) You are about to answer questions based on this novel.

b) Write your answers with a pencil in the space provided.

c) You will now have ten minutes to review your answers.

d) Stop writing and put your pencils down on your table.

e) Do not speak to anyone or move from your table.

8.2.

a) Write your name and number on each of the booklets.

b) Check your answers while you look at some unrelated questions.

c) You will now have five minutes to rewrite your answers.

d) Place your question booklets on top of your answer booklets.

e) Be patient while all of the question booklets are counted.

8.3.

a) You will now write love letters connected to an affair.

b) Read the details while you think about writing your letters.

c) Write your letters with a pencil in the space provided.

d) Do not speak to anyone or move from your table.

e) Raise your hand if you have to ask a question.

8.4.

a) You will now have ten minutes to review your answers.

b) You will now have five minutes to review your answers.

c) You will now have three minutes to review your answers.

d) You will now have two minutes to review your answers.

e) You will now have one minute to review your answers.

8.5.

a) Stop writing and put your pencils down on your table.

b) Do not speak to anyone or move from your table.

c) Raise your hand if you have to ask a question.

d) Be patient while all of the question booklets are counted.

e) Put your pencils and erasers in the box coming around.

9.1.

a) Move onto your side and feel a cold rubber sheet.

b) Read the words on a poster about eliminating deadly viruses.

c) Hear Billy saying you look much more beautiful in person.

d) Sit up and tell Billy he looks exactly the same.

e) Untie the cord of the green dressing gown covering you.

9.2.

a) Look at duty free shops passing by an electronic walkway.

b) Watch slabs of concrete and glass drifting below an escalator.

c) Step inside an empty elevator that has its doors open.

d) Feel a hand between your legs and rubbing your cunt.

e) Look at the mirrors and numbers scrolling up multiple floors.

9.3.

a) Follow Billy into a large hall where students are eating.

b) Sit in a chair and pull it towards a table.

c) Watch someone at the table saying this place is amazing.

d) Listen to someone else saying we are all potentially amazing.

e) Feel spaghetti dropping through your fingers and onto your plate.

9.4.

a) Hear Billy telling you not to play with your food.

b) Twist Billy’s finger and put his hand on the table.

c) Hear someone saying power was restored on the lower levels.

d) Listen to someone else saying we are all potentially amazing.

e) Slurp up orange juice from the straw in your glass.

9.5.

a) Chew some spaghetti and stab your folk into Billy’s hand.

b) Hear someone saying they are not telling us the truth.

c) Listen to someone else saying we are all potentially amazing.

d) Feel spaghetti dropping through your fingers and onto your plate.

e) Accuse Billy of mixing morphine with your glass of juice.

10.1.

a) Look at students eating spoonful after spoonful of banana custard.

b) Listen to someone talk about seeing bodies in radiation suites.

c) Knock over your juice and feel it splash your legs.

d) Hear someone saying they should let us out of here.

e) Watch students at various different tables chanting about the truth.

10.2.

a) Notice security guards opening fire on some of the tables.

b) See students at other tables spooning up mousse and custard.

c) Listen to the security guards battering several students with chairs.

d) Chew on the ice in the bottom of your glass.

e) Say to Billy that you have had enough to eat.

10.3.

a) Feel the noise disappear when you close the toilet door.

b) Lock the door and sit in front of the toilet.

c) Cough and gag with your head down in the bowl.

d) Listen to perfume sprayed out from vents in the ceiling.

e) Stick your fingers in your mouth and squeeze your tonsils.

10.4.

a) Taste vomit come pouring from your mouth and your nose.

b) Rest your chin on the edge of the toilet bowl.

c) Hear the faint echo of recorded birds and a waterfall.

d) Feel the toilet bowl moving away from where you are.

e) Press the buttons on the wall next to the toilet.

10.5.

a) Spit out mucus chunks speckled with blood and black ink.

b) Look for letters forming in the crude mess down there.

c) Touch the surface with your fingers and then stir it.

d) Find a microchip at the bottom of the toilet bowl.

e) Place the microchip on your tongue and close your mouth.

11.1.

a) Notice a doctor walking past the tables in the hall.

b) Listen to the doctor ask if everyone is enjoying lunch.

c) Watch the doctor unfold some paper taken from his pocket.

d) Hear the doctor saying there has been a slight alteration.

e) See the doctor fold the paper back into his pocket.

11.2.

a) Feel that the doctor is looking directly into your eyes.

b) Watch the doctor leaving the stage and joining your table.

c) Hear the doctor agree that this place is truly amazing.

d) Notice some security guards dragging bodies out of the hall.

e) Wipe your mouth and drop your napkin onto the floor.

11.3.

a) Stare at the doctor and ask why he is staring.

b) Hear the doctor asking you what happened to your face.

c) Tell the doctor that you think you have been drugged.

d) Listen to the doctor saying gravity happens for a reason.

e) Hold your breath and then slide down under the table.

11.4.

a) Kneel before the doctor with your hands on his knees.

b) Lick the doctor’s cock and kiss both of his balls.

c) Tease the head of the doctor’s cock with your tongue.

d) Wank off his cock with it still in your mouth.

e) Feel the doctor buckle as his come hits your throat.

11.5.

a) Use your tongue to loosen the microchip from your teeth.

b) Slip the microchip into the head of the doctor’s cock.

c) Feel the doctor’s cock soften as you let it go.

d) Tuck the doctor’s cock into his trousers before zipping them.

e) Wipe your hands on your overalls and then the carpet.

12.1.

a) Feel your feet slapping the cold surface of a corridor.

b) Look at the phones on some racks and select one.

c) Raise the phone to your ear and listen to it.

d) Hear an automated voice saying this is an incorrect number.

e) Press the red disconnect button before you close the phone.

12.2.

a) Sit in a classroom and look at a blank screen.

b) Watch a teacher pointing a remote control at the screen.

c) Hear the teacher say life is all about creating appearances.

d) Listen to the teacher say we believe tone over words.

e) Watch some security guards pacing up and down the rows.

12.3.

a) Look at a cock and cunt fucking on the screen.

b) Watch the cock on screen slipping out of the cunt.

c) See a girl on the screen chained to a pole.

d) Watch a man on the screen fucking the chained girl.

e) Notice that a different cock is fucking the cunt now.

12.4.

a) Pretend to taste Chris’s drink and say it tastes good.

b) Cross your arms and tell Chris that he ordered coffee.

c) Pick up his pretend cup and pretend to exchange it.

d) Hear him saying that you put down the same cup.

e) Say to him he should pretend it tastes like tea.

12.5.

a) Listen to Chris saying he would like to pay now.

b) Go to another table and pretend to find a bill.

c) Look at Chris asking if he can use the toilet.

d) Point to the corner and say that is the toilet.

e) Watch Chris holding his cock and pissing on the floor.

13.1.

a) Walk towards some phone racks and look at the phones.

b) Find a barcode on your overalls where an assistant pointed.

c) Notice the assistant walking away to serve a different customer.

d) Stand by a mirror under an escalator hearing students pass.

e) Press zero and then raise the phone to your ear.

13.2.

a) Listen to a teacher running her fingers through her hair.

b) See the words orientation and posture appear on a screen.

c) Look over your shoulder at the rest of the classroom.

d) Hear a student asking the teacher if she can leave.

e) Watch the teacher pressing a remote control at the screen.

13.3.

a) Reach towards a cock fucking a cunt on the screen.

b) See a girl on the screen chained to a pole.

c) Watch a man on the screen fucking the chained girl.

d) Hear a contraption coming down to amputate the girl’s limbs.

e) Watch the man coming inside the girl as she dies.

13.4.

a) Hear a teacher knocking on the window of your cubicle.

b) Stand up and then pretend to put on an apron.

c) Drop a menu on the table in front of Chris.

d) Pretend to take a pen from behind your right ear.

e) Scribble Chris’s order with the pretend pen in a notepad.

13.5.

a) Go over to the cubicle door and then open it.

b) Hear yourself telling Chris there are taxis up the street.

c) Look at him asking you to come for a drink.

d) Tell him that you have to finish your shift first.

e) Watch him leave the cubicle and then close the door.

14.1.

a) Walk towards some phone racks and look at the phones.

b) Tell an assistant that you are looking for something simple.

c) Pretend to talk into some of the phones before choosing.

d) Find a barcode on your overalls where the assistant pointed.

e) Watch the assistant show you how to use the phone.

14.2.

a) Sit in a classroom and look at a blank screen.

b) Hear a click before the word facade appears on screen.

c) Listen to a teacher asking about how to choose words.

d) See a girl on the screen chained to a pole.

e) Watch a man on the screen fucking the chained girl.

14.3.

a) Hear the security manager saying he will come inside you.

b) Bite your arm as the security manager fucks your ass.

c) Pull away from him and then slip onto the floor.

d) Feel him grabbing your legs and then falling on you.

e) Close your eyes as his cock goes in your mouth.

14.4.

a) Choke on the security manager’s cock and then bite it.

b) Hear him talk about spurting blood inside your gorgeous pussy.

c) See the security manager grabbing a knife from the counter.

d) Lean against a filing cabinet and then spread your legs.

e) Watch the security manager grinning and putting down the knife.

14.5.

a) Taste the security manager’s cigarettes as you kiss his mouth.

b) Tell him you think your name used to be Lucy.

c) Grab the knife and then stab him in the neck.

d) Listen to him moaning and see his blood pouring out.

e) Watch him crawling slowly through his blood towards the counter.

15.1.

a) Wait on the right of an escalator letting others pass.

b) Look at your phone and rub some of the buttons.

c) Press the numbers that an automated reading voice says to.

d) Watch a security guard talking to a phone counter assistant.

e) Say into the phone that you will call back later.

15.2.

a) Hear a teacher saying your only weapon is body language.

b) See the teacher loosen and then straighten up his tie.

c) Notice a student raise her hand saying she is bored.

d) Look at the teacher turning his back on the classroom.

e) Hear the teacher asking if any students want to leave.

15.3.

a) See the teacher pointing a remote control at a screen.

b) Watch the security guards pacing up and down the rows.

c) Hear the teacher saying we must choose our words carefully.

d) Listen to the teacher saying we must tame our bodies.

e) Watch the teacher standing at the front of the classroom.

15.4.

a) See a cock slipping out of a cunt on screen.

b) Notice that a different cock is fucking the cunt now.

c) Look at a contraption coming down to decapitate a girl.

d) Feel a hot flush as secretions leak from your cunt.

e) Watch the dead girl rise from the screen and disappear.

15.5.

a) Sit on a bench and look at the security manager.

b) Tap your feet in the pool of blood beneath you.

c) Wipe your face and taste the sweat on your hands.

d) Move your tongue around your mouth and notice teeth missing.

e) Stand up and find your overalls then put them on.

16.1.

a) Breathe in deeply and raise your arms above your head.

b) Breathe out deeply and roll your head to the left.

c) Breathe in deeply and move your knees to the right.

d) Breathe out deeply and touch the ground with your fingers.

e) Breathe in deeply and then breathe out just as deeply.

16.2.

a) Shake out your limbs and then sit on the floor.

b) Concentrate on the blood flowing up and down your legs.

c) Breathe in steadily and then breathe out just as steadily.

d) Feel your shins turn brittle like a piece of driftwood.

e) Notice the blood drain from your legs across the floor.

16.3.

a) Breathe in steadily and then breathe out just as steadily.

b) Feel an electrode scraping out the inside of your skull.

c) Direct the glow in your brain into a compressed ball.

d) Trickle the glowing ball along each joint down your spine.

e) Notice the ball heating up in your tailbone and pelvis.

16.4.

a) Lie on the floor and then shake out your limbs.

b) Breathe in slowly and then breathe out just as slowly.

c) Feel your internal organs collapse and slide through your body.

d) Notice that each of your ribs has turned to ash.

e) Concentrate on your lungs filling up and hear them groaning.

16.5.

a) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

b) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

c) Hear a noise coming from the back of your throat.

d) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

e) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

17.1.

a) Stand up straight and then pull your shoulders right back.

b) Breathe in deeply and then breathe out just as deeply.

c) Breathe in deeply and raise your arms above your head.

d) Breathe out deeply and lower your arms to your thighs.

e) Breathe in deeply and then breathe out just as deeply.

17.2.

a) Breathe in deeply and then roll your shoulders right back.

b) Breathe out deeply and put your hands on your knees.

c) Breathe in deeply and touch the ground with your fingers.

d) Breathe out deeply and reach up as high as possible.

e) Breathe out deeply and then you can relax after that.

17.3.

a) Cross both legs with each foot under the opposite knee.

b) Concentrate on the blood flowing up and down your legs.

c) Feel the blood drain from your legs across the floor.

d) Notice holes forming and growing bigger on both your hands.

e) Sense heat building up in your ears and your nose.

17.4.

a) Feel your internal organs collapse and slide through your body.

b) See and hear a light glowing in your brain center.

c) Direct the glow in your brain into a compressed ball.

d) Move the glowing ball to the bottom of your spine.

e) Taste the ball churning in your chest and then exploding.

17.5.

a) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

b) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

c) Hear a noise coming from the back of your throat.

d) Open your mouth and push the air from your lungs.

e) Close your mouth and suck the air through your nose.

18.1.

a) Feel Chris’s hand between your legs and push it away.

b) Catch his cock in your mouth and then suck it.

c) Get on your knees so he can fuck your breasts.

d) Rock back and forth moaning as he fingers your ass.

e) Collapse when he sticks his clenched fist into your ass.

18.2.

a) Tie up your bathrobe and walk out of the bathroom.

b) Snort some cocaine with Chris off the kitchen alcove bench.

c) Pour some vodka and orange and go to the lounge.

d) Show Chris the strap-on you are wearing under your bathrobe.

e) Put your leg on the couch and pretend to piss.

18.3.

a) Wank on the strap-on as Chris takes off his trousers.

b) Suck on his cock while he sucks on the strap-on.

c) Watch him wanking and angling the strap-on into your ass.

d) Fuck yourself with the strap-on while he sucks your breasts.

e) Hear the come spurt from his cock onto your face.

18.4.

a) Taste Chris’s come and then rub it on his ass.

b) Stick your fingers in his mouth until he bites them.

c) Fuck his ass with your tongue and hear him moan.

d) Lick your lips and push the strap-on against his ass.

e) Fall onto him and ram the strap-on into his ass.

18.5.

a) Watch the elevator door open and see students coming in.

b) Smell perfume as you lean forward to press a button.

c) Feel Chris easing his finger slowly along your cunt lips.

d) Clench your ass as his finger goes into your cunt.

e) Stare in the mirror grinning as he fingers your cunt.

19.1.

a) Do not look at the cameras or the sound crew.

b) Write a note to Alex asking about seeing your rooms.

c) Hear a teacher saying this induction session will be interactive.

d) Watch Alex drawing a picture of a girl being tortured.

e) Glance at students being dragged from their seats and shot.

19.2.

a) Listen to the teacher saying she will introduce the director.

b) Hear the director saying unlock your stream of hidden potentiality.

c) Show Alex the dimensions that you added to her picture.

d) Watch the director step back and ask for any questions.

e) Hear the education minister saying today’s session will transform you.

19.3.

a) Taste cold air from vents constricting your nose and throat.

b) Look at Alex talking to a boy sitting beside her.

c) Hear yourself saying to Alex that this place is amazing.

d) Watch a screen showing annual expenditure in a pie chart.

e) Feel the back of your throat sting when you swallow.

19.4.

a) Notice images of planning and construction flashing on the screen.

b) Listen to a teacher explaining the schedule for today’s training.

c) Cover your mouth and put your head on the table.

d) Hear a health and safety announcement about nuclear waste procedures.

e) Ask Alex if she can understand what they are saying.

19.5.

a) Watch the security guards pacing up and down the rows.

b) Feel your throat constrict until you are unable to breathe.

c) Notice Alex watching you as you stand by your desk.

d) Hear your blood pumping through your neck into your brain.

e) Walk down an aisle and then push open a door.

20.1.

a) Do not look at the cameras or the sound crew.

b) Stand in the sunlight in the middle of the tower.

c) Wander around a lingerie shop looking at the different mannequins.

d) Enter a jewelery shop and smash one of the counters.

e) Put on a necklace and walk out of the shop.

20.2.

a) Notice doctors moving around the edges of sharp blurred light.

b) Gag on a pipe being pushed down into your throat.

c) Hear a doctor asking if you have ever been raped.

d) Feel a different doctor inspecting your cunt with his tongue.

e) Accept some water from a nurse and swallow some pills.

20.3.

a) Stand up and then follow a doctor down a corridor.

b) See the doctor look back as she turns a corner.

c) Walk around several corners looking for where the doctor went.

d) Turn the handle on a door and shove it open.

e) Step into a room and see a pile of bodies.

20.4.

a) Lean against a wall and squat down to the floor.

b) Notice that all of the dead bodies have been amputated.

c) Look at a tower of arms and legs twisted together.

d) Realize all of the bodies have had their genitals mutilated.

e) Search the blank expressions in a row of severed heads.

20.5.

a) Step through pools of blood and run down a corridor.

b) Yell out wait when you see a white coat disappearing.

c) Slow down after you realize you are in an office.

d) Turn around and run for an exit before hitting something.

e) Feel your head fly back and collide with the ground.

21.1.

a) Hear a commercial break fade into soft jazz piano playing.

b) Find yourself a chair and then slump down in it.

c) Ask a waiter if you can have vodka and orange.

d) Pick up a fork and prod it at some salmon.

e) Open a vodka bottle and pour vodka into your glass.

21.2.

a) Watch several waiters with large plates moving between the tables.

b) Listen to people talking and eating at the same time.

c) Prod your fork at a bird’s leg on your plate.

d) Take a sip of your drink and feel the vodka.

e) See the waiters collecting plates while serving coffee and dessert.

21.3.

a) Look at me rubbing my hands together and congratulating everyone.

b) Listen to me say everything is a matter of perspective.

c) Scoop some cheesecake into your mouth and taste it melting.

d) Glance around the hall at the people staring at you.

e) Hear me saying we must all live between these spaces.

21.4.

a) Open a vodka bottle and pour vodka into your glass.

b) Watch me take out a blank envelope and unfold it.

c) Look around the hall at the people clapping and cheering.

d) Stand up when you notice me waving you onto stage.

e) Push in your chair before you walk towards the stage.

21.5.

a) Stumble against me and then take my hand for support.

b) Accept the microphone from me and cling onto the podium.

c) Look at me turning around and picking up a trophy.

d) Hear your lungs sucking in the most air they can.

e) Feel your lips moving to my voice saying thank you.

Paul thought he had suffered a fatal brain injury but felt like he had entered a new reality and was experiencing everything for the first time. He predicted what he was going to see before he opened his eyes. There would be palm trees and seagulls and the ocean swelling along the same beach he had seen a million times before. But everything would be totally different. He felt calmer and more in control than he had ever felt in his entire life. The oscillating binaries of pain and desire had gone. His head had been wiped clear. The tide seemed to be connected to his breathing in an unselfconscious way. He doubted he could move even if he wanted to. He expected to be paralyzed at least.

When Paul looked at the road, time became unstuck and hurtled back into the present. He watched the van swerving away from him before it straightened up and settled into a comfortable pace. He could just make out Robert and Lucy huddled together through the dusty curtain across the back window and he held onto that image for as long as he could. He told himself it didn’t bother him that they were together. It seemed to represent the correct order of things.

A road train coming from the mines in the desert ploughed head-on into the van. The impact ripped a hole through this new reality. The van crumpled and flipped into the air before landing on its side. A door came spinning off the van and skidded into a ditch covered with long dry grass. Everything went silent for a second after the crash then returned louder than before. Dragging sound out of every object present, the road train kept going. Paul stepped back as it lumbered past. The driver was focused straight ahead on something far beyond this plane of existence. The van was motionless. No one climbed out from the hole where the door used to be. The heat shimmered everything into a mirage.

* * *

Paul smashed a bottle on a sewerage pipe. He gripped the neck of the broken bottle in one hand and his cock in the other. He staggered along the beach, stabbing the bottle at his chest and wanking his cock until it got hard. When he was about to come he shuddered to his knees and hacked into his cock with the broken bottle. The glass went halfway through and the come spurted out along with the blood. Ecstatic under the influence of the chemicals shooting through his body, and determined to enact their conclusion, Paul hacked the glass through the rest of the flesh until the whole thing came away.

After standing up and walking a few more steps, Paul looked back at the discarded lump of flesh lying there but couldn’t comprehend that it had ever been connected to his body. It resembled a dead sea-creature washed up on the tide rather than the rare delicacy he once believed it to be, but of course those two analogies amounted to the same thing in the end. Paul felt voices somewhere in his head and realized the voices were telling him to keep going. The blood now pumping from where his cock used to be turned into flames between his fingers. He stared into the flames until he couldn’t see or feel anything. His body became pieces of cinema film, burnt up and melted as he collapsed into the sand.

* * *

A projector churned out some final images then white light against a blank wall in a mock classroom converted into a courtroom simulation. The teacher’s desk had been cleared of contraband items and pushed back for the judge. The girl playing the judge had blonde platted hair and was wearing a bed sheet like a toga. To the left of the judge was a row of empty chairs for the jury. On the right of the judge were two empty chairs for the witnesses. In the center of the stage area was another empty chair for the accused. The rest of the chairs had been made into a semicircle to represent a public gallery.

Paul felt the heat moved around by two ceiling fans dangling precariously from their wires. One fan was missing a blade and the rest were trying to compensate. Flies popped from between floorboards and crawled the walls, looking for an exit. The windows had been blacked out. Paul walked towards the public gallery and took a seat in the same row as a young teacher scribbling notes in an exercise book. Paul asked the teacher what was happening and the teacher said, “I’m meant to be a journalist.”

Most of the kids in the public gallery were half asleep or playing with phones. After the jurors had filed into the courtroom, the judge slapped her hand on the table and cleared her throat with a fake cough that at some point turned into a real cough and required a teacher to bring water.

The judge thanked the jurors for coming and told them the vouchers their parents would receive in the mail could be used to claim one half-priced lunch in the canteen at the mine. A teacher handed the judge a script. The judge looked over the script and then told the teacher it was different from the one in rehearsals. The teacher said there had been some last minute changes.

The judge cleared her throat and drank some more water. “I know this case is unconventional,” she put on a deep voice and stumbled over the words after starting too quickly, “but the law is the law and it is our duty as citizens and human beings to see that less enlightened citizens and human beings follow the letter of the law. We do not expect a child to be able to read as soon as he or she drops from his or her mother’s cunt. Do we? No. We protect and guide our children. We catch them when they fall. We nurture them through the magic of language. There does, however, come along at certain unforeseen times individuals who refuse to learn and take it upon themselves to undermine our discipline for no other reason than perverted whims. These individuals,” she looked up and pointed to the empty chair in the middle of the stage area, “must be punished no matter whether or not they are with us in the flesh.”

Paul glanced around to the back of the classroom as a student disappeared through a green door with a sign above it that said fire escape. Paul watched the door for what felt like a few seconds but probably could have been much longer before realizing he had also stood up, walked towards the same door, and was holding the handle. The paint was so thick and recently applied he could taste it. He pushed down the handle and opened the door. He swatted away the flies coming with him. He heard the girl playing the judge ask the jury if they were ready to deliver their verdict. The voices in reply became distorted among a layer of other construction noise. Paul closed the door behind him and walked down some metal stairs that looked temporary. Piles of dismantled scaffolding and bags of concrete and garbage littered the way. Some of the steps were so loose they flipped around and their bolts popped out clanking down.

At the bottom of the stairs, Paul went through another door that led onto the street behind the school building. He moved out of the shade and into the sun until he thought he was used to it then squinted at the brightness reflecting off cars that seemed to move without making any sound. He felt the asphalt melting between his toes. As he walked towards the center of town he looked at toys in shop windows. He noticed the hazy outline of men lying around under trees in the park and kids playing at the bottom of an artificial waterfall across from the beach. He sat down and watched the waves. The tide was up and the beach was mostly deserted. A couple of weird flagpoles defined some obscure space in the distance. The flagpoles were empty. They were made of bones that bent in the wind and cast long tapering shadows across the sand.

***

Some men gathered near the bodies of Robert and Lucy on the beach. The men dug a pit and shoveled in coal. It took twenty minutes and a can of petrol to light a fire. They stood around drinking beer and kicking sand at each other until a truck arrived. The truck reversed onto the sand. The men opened the back of the truck and dragged out some dogs and chickens. They clubbed the dogs and chickens to death, wrapped them in kitchen foil and palm leaves, and buried them in the pit. The truck’s wheels got stuck when it was leaving and the men helped get it out. While they were waiting for the dogs and chickens to cook, they hacked up bamboo stems with cane knives. They arranged the stems in parallel lines on the sand and tied them together with palm-leaf fibers.

It was almost dark when the men reopened the pit. They were drunk on fruit-juice wine and playing karate games. One of the men landed too close to the pit and tumbled onto the coals and then scrambled out and ran into the sea to cool down. The other men wouldn’t let him eat with them after that. They threw bottles at him until he went back into the sea and sat where the waves drained out. He watched the others hungrily as they stuffed chicken legs and dog ribs into their mouths. They also forced some of the food into Robert and Lucy.

“What are you doing up there?” said a boy to Paul.

“Did you get the stuff?”

The boy climbed on top of the bunker. “Do you want to be seen?”

“Who cares?” Paul grabbed a paper bag off the boy.

When the men had finished eating, they threw their scraps into the pit and pissed on the coals. They lifted Robert and Lucy onto the raft and decorated it with flowers. They poured petrol over Robert and Lucy. Most of the flowers got washed off but a few stuck. As the dim light from the pit flared up, the men dragged the raft down to the waves and formed a semicircle around it. Someone sang a song about the impenetrable mysteries of love. Someone delivered a speech about the fleeting nature of existence. The ostracized man pulled out his cock and masturbated. Others joined in. All the men laughed at the masturbating until they realized the raft was floating away. Someone lit a torch from the pit and then swam out and set fire to the raft.

“Did you kill your friends?” said the boy.

“Maybe I’m dead as well.”

“We’re all dead if you think about it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re from another planet.”

“You know, the best thing about being dead would be shooting up as much of whatever you like and getting totally fucked up and never overdosing.”

“But it wouldn’t be as exciting without the risk.”

After Paul and the boy had taken all the drugs, they lay on top of the bunker and talked about alternate reality theory. They tried to fuck each other but didn’t get far. The boy’s cock and ass were too small and the wounds from Paul’s operation were too raw. When it was light enough to see where they were going without falling over each other from laughter they climbed down the rocks on the other side of the beach and washed themselves in the ocean.

Paul followed the boy along a secret track through scabby trees and sloping over a hill to a different beach. The boy moved much more quickly than Paul and came back every now and then to tell him to hurry up. Paul kept looking over his shoulder at where he thought the bunker was but it had gone, obliterated in the sunlight. The boy said he could hear voices telling them to keep going. He said his hearing was better than most kids because he had grown up in the wild instead of around the buzz and clatter of late capitalism. Paul said that was bullshit. He said capitalism had been dead for as long as he could remember and every sane person heard voices. They were telling him to rest. The boy cut across the beach and ducked under some palm trees. He swung on vines and climbed over rocks. He sang and whistled songs that Paul didn’t recognize. The boy said he made up the songs himself. Paul said no one else would.

“Do you like being tortured?” said the boy.

“Does it really matter if I’m already dead?”

“What if they cut off your limbs?”

“So what?”

“And bury them vast distances apart?”

“Who cares?”

“And they’re impossible to find?”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“You’ll be forever compelled to search in order to reestablish an integrated body image. It’ll drive you crazy. You’ll wish you were more than just dead.”

“Do all your friends talk as much bullshit as you?”

The boy kicked seaweed at Paul and then ran along the beach. Paul ran after him but couldn’t catch up. The angle of the shoreline and the texture of the sand made Paul slip. He couldn’t remember the last time he had run. He yelled at the boy to slow down but the boy didn’t slow down. Paul found a bottle and threw it at the boy. It hit him on the head but he kept running. When Paul caught up with the boy he was under some trees and holding his bleeding head and saying they can rest now. Paul sat down next to the boy, wrapped some leaves around his head, and secured them with vines.

“How much further is it?”

“Not much.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I have to make sure no one’s following us.”

“No one’s following us.”

“I have to make sure you don’t remember the way.”

“I don’t remember the way.”

When they got to a clearing, where the beginnings of an asphalt road peeked out and then reverted back to sand, the boy made a noise halfway between a whistle and a scream. No one responded except some birds taking flight through the trees surrounding several buildings that looked like a school. The boy called it a tourist development abandoned when mining in the desert proved to be a more profitable industry than leisure. Tools and machinery sat rusting in long dry grass beside unfinished foundations. No-entry signs had been painted over so many times the words had vanished. Fences indicating some last line had been re-posted until collapsing into the ground. The boy said the builders had stripped the place of anything worth selling to make up for losses, and the vines had taken over to finish the job in their own random way.

Paul followed the boy behind the largest building. If the front of the compound looked uninhabited, an ancient history textbook waiting to be written, then the back was an endless morning after the final exam, a patio stacked with shitty furniture, empty bottles, and rotting garbage covered with maggots and flies.

“What do you think?” The boy waved his hand around like a singer.

“It reminds me of Disneyland.”

“You’re not the first genius to make that comparison.”

A different boy’s face appeared at a window. He was scratching welts and drooling. His eyes were gone. He was wearing a blonde platted wig and some kind of makeup. The boy with Paul picked up a beer bottle and slung it at the other boy’s face. The boy grinned wildly and ducked. The bottle went through the ripped fly-screen. Something on the patio made a guttural moan. Paul looked around. At the end of the patio a scrawny girl was curled up in a shopping trolley converted into a padlocked cage. She was covered in dirt and infected wounds. Her hair was matted and chunks were missing. She had no arms and no legs. She had no teeth. Her tongue had been cut out.

* * *

Robert glanced at Lucy’s ass. She turned on the shower and stepped into the tub. After adjusting the temperature and soaking her hair, she asked Robert for one of those cute shampoo bottles by the sink. He found one and handed it to her. The water pressure in the shower dropped out when Robert flushed the toilet. He shook piss from his cock. He rubbed gel across Lucy’s stomach, over her breasts, and down to her cunt. She squeezed his hand until he moved it back to her breasts. She said she was saving her cunt for her boyfriend. He said he thought her boyfriend was dead. She said she wasn’t talking about that one. He leaned his chin on her head and pressed his cock against her ass.

“None of this flesh is that special,” said Robert.

“Maybe not to you.”

“Whatever keeps you sane, I guess.”

“It’s got nothing to do with sanity.”

“Don’t talk to me about love.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Lucy spread the fingers of both her hands on the tiles. She put one foot on the edge of the tub to give Robert a better angle.

Paul leaned against the bathroom door and listened to Robert’s flesh slapping against Lucy’s flesh. Or Lucy’s flesh slapping against Robert’s flesh. He wasn’t sure. The sound mixed with the slosh of water coming from the shower. He tried to imagine what they could be doing apart from fucking but all he could think about was different positions and facial expressions. The images seemed really dumb and pornographic but were the only ones with any life. He told himself she was only fucking someone else to make him jealous. Paying him back. It was one of her games. She wasn’t enjoying it. She was too stoned. It was just her ass. It wasn’t her cunt. She was saving that for someone special. He realized he was thumping his forehead against the door. Robert told him to fuck off back to school. Lucy said she could take a shower with whoever she liked.

* * *

Paul felt sand under his feet but when he looked at his feet it was as if the things his eyes saw didn’t belong to him and the movements they were making weren’t of his volition. He knew he was moving away from something, and had to keep going, but he wasn’t sure what he was moving away from or where he was going. A relentless force was driving the limbs and organs attached to his body. It was as if every part of his body had been transplanted from somewhere else during a string of experimental operations that had permanently shattered any previous sense of integrity and was unlikely to congeal into a new one.

Sometimes as Paul walked on he noticed shells, pebbles, driftwood, bones, and flesh. Creatures peeked from holes and then scuttled out of the way. He contemplated how much existence there was under the sand. He wanted to sit down and watch the ocean and the sky, but he couldn’t stop his body from moving, and whenever he looked up, the sun was too bright. It reflected off everything.

Climbing around the edge of a point and onto another beach, Paul wondered how many beaches there could possibly be. This one had no footprints on it. Maybe he was walking in circles and the tide was washing them away. He noticed a bottle rolling down the sand with a wave going out. Another wave coming in rolled over the bottle and made it disappear. A voice told Paul that this was important. He stood at the water’s edge and waited for the bottle to return. When it seemed the bottle wasn’t coming back he turned around and looked further along the beach. Thousands of bottles were scattered among a tidemark of seaweed and crushed electrical items. Paul held a bottle up to the sun. The dull glass barely glowed. He put his thumb in the bottle and shook it next to his ear but couldn’t hear anything. He smelled the bottle but couldn’t smell anything. He tipped up the bottle and glugged out a mix of sand and sewerage.

* * *

A teacher leaned across the desk and whispered something to the girl playing the judge. The girl playing the judge nodded along with the teacher’s words and drank some more water. She washed a mouthful back into the glass and then there was blood and pieces of skin in it. Some flies circled the edge of the glass, one creeping inside, until the teacher handed the judge a wire coat hanger. The judge slapped the coat hanger on the table a few times. She smiled at the teacher as if to say she knew the coat-hanger was an exhibit and not a gavel. The teacher opened a door and then went out. The jury sat silently looking at the empty chair in the middle of the courtroom.

“Does the accused wish to speak before we bring in the witnesses?” The judge pointed the coat hanger at the empty chair. “I take that as a no.”

“Sir,” said a jury member, raising his hand. “May I say a few words?”

“Yes, of course,” said the judge. “Go ahead.”

“Must we really proceed with this if we already know the outcome?”

“That is a good question. But apparently not one for me to answer.”

“I want to go to the toilet,” said another jury member.

Paul leaned on the chair in front of him. He looked up at the fan. He tried to count the flies crawling around the ceiling but soon gave up. The teacher playing a journalist beside Paul was pretending to smoke his pen. Half the students had already left. A different teacher led Robert and Lucy into the classroom. Lucy was unsteady on her feet but Robert helped her up. Her blonde hair was more messy than usual and she was wearing a torn sarong that she held wrapped over her breasts. Robert was dressed in ripped jeans and no t-shirt. Neither of them wore shoes. The teacher pointed them over to the witness chairs. They flopped down with their arms around each other. They confirmed their names when the judge asked them to confirm their names. They grinned at the jury until the judge told them there would be plenty of time for grinning once the jury had reached a verdict. Lucy snickered as Robert stroked her face. They kissed each other for a while. Some of the teachers clapped. A boy took a photograph. Paul thought the flash made everyone look like skeletons.

“How long have you known the accused?” said the judge.

“We’re at the same school. This school.” Lucy chewed gum as she spoke, and laughed nervously, as if unsure whether or not this trial was real. “Robert’s finished now but still hangs around for the drugs and the pussy.”

“Can’t get nothing like that in the outside world,” said Robert.

Some of the jury snickered until the judge glanced over at them. “How did you feel when you read the things the accused wrote about you?”

“We just thought it was pretentious shit,” said Robert. “I mean we didn’t actually read it or anything because we didn’t see the point.”

“Would you like me to read some now?”

“I think that would be very useful,” said one of the jurors.

“I don’t think I asked you,” said the judge, peeling back some pages of a soggy pile that a teacher had dropped on the table. Some of the pages disintegrated in the judge’s hand. She pushed the disintegrated pages onto the floor until finding one she thought was acceptable.

Lucy was nodding off on Robert’s shoulder. He pushed her upright and scratched his jaw. “We don’t care,” he mumbled. “Whatever.”

* * *

Lucy heard herself screaming at the blood pouring from her shoulders, face, and neck. Somewhere. Everywhere. She wasn’t sure where it was coming from. She saw it dripping sticky through her fingers. She couldn’t see anything beyond the blood. Everything was getting blurry. Turning black. She was steering all over the road. She knew she had to stop the van, but she couldn’t feel her legs.

Somehow Lucy found the brake and pulled over. She couldn’t tell if she had done it or if some higher power like on TV had helped. It couldn’t have been Robert. He was on the floor in the back of the van. He had his fist raised about to punch Paul in the face but then saw his eyes were already dead so instead threw him out of the sliding door.

Lucy hit the accelerator again. Some broader recognition about what had happened rushed in. Her blood was spread across the dashboard and the windscreen, and anger replaced panic as her leading response abstraction. But although she could see better than before her driving was even more erratic. Paul was holding onto the passenger door frame and running alongside the van, and Lucy was trying to shake him off like an insect caught in a summer dress. Robert was pressing a soaking beach towel to Lucy’s wounds. He was also helping her to steer, yelling at her to pull over, and trying to hammer and claw Paul’s fingers away. Lucy was screaming things like, “Jesus, you should have smashed the little bastard when you had the chance.”

Paul knew he couldn’t hold on much longer but didn’t know how to let go. His feet were torn apart, dragging, and then off the ground. He let go. He slipped under the van and between the back wheels. He scraped his spine and cracked his head on the road.

* * *

Smoke clouds from the mine formed patterns in an unknown language across the sky. The shapes could have represented a plea for help or a call to war or any variety of things in between. They could have been love letters, philosophical tracts, political slogans, abstract expressions, or nothing at all, just a pretty coincidence witnessed by no one. A small car came along the road and slowed down when it got near the van. The car went past the van and then stopped. Heat continued to pour from the car’s exhaust pipe.

A man got out of the car and took off his cowboy hat. He fanned himself or shooed away flies as he walked towards the van. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a filthy rag from his back pocket. He stooped next to a pool of blood, petrol, and broken glass. He dipped the rag in the pool and sucked on it. When his tongue confirmed what the pool was made of he looked around to see if anything was watching him. The smoke clouds had thinned out, their source a single explosion whose reason for occurring would have been lost on anyone witnessing the last traces of those suspended particles. Everything about the land out there, where the beach met the desert, was so dry and brittle it wouldn’t take much friction to destroy the whole place. The man walked to the front of the van and looked inside. A black and white bird flew away from the shattered windscreen. The bird landed on a fencepost and sat there watching the man. The man watched the bird. The man put his hat back on like he was defeated and walked back to his car. He got in his car and kept driving in the same direction he had been going before.

* * *

Paul stumbled around the motel room. He pulled the drawer out of the bedside cabinet and then pushed the whole thing over. The lamp survived the plunge but not being kicked against the wall. After spotting Lucy’s bag under the bed, Paul rummaged through it and found some scrunched up pages and a box of pills. He sat on the bed and washed down the pills with some beer. He pointed the remote at the TV and stroked his cock while flipping channels. A music show with kids in a dance competition caught his imagination. The kids were wearing tight pastel-colored sports clothes. They were thin and tanned and had teeth resembling dead coral. The song was a hypnotic ode to teenage love. Paul stuck two fingers in his ass and smeared them across the TV screen.

Lying misshapen in the dust at the bottom of the wardrobe was a wire coat-hanger. Paul untwisted the coat hanger and then turned the loose wire into the outline of a hollow cock. He fleshed out the design with the scrunched up pages from Lucy’s bag. He fucked himself with the coat hanger until the pages disappeared inside of him. When he noticed shit and blood all over the bed sheets, Paul turned off the TV and masturbated to the sound of Robert and Lucy in the shower. Paul pissed in an empty beer bottle and tried to put his jeans back on but fell over and hit his head on a chair. He curled up on the bed and smoked some cigarettes and burnt some holes in his arms. He imagined the holes were escape routes. Portals to a different dimension.

* * *

As the tide came up, and the rocks sticking out of the sand got closer together, Paul’s steps became faster. He kept walking with his head down hoping the sun would soon become low enough for him to look up and notice something other than that fireball. He concentrated on the way his shadow slid across the sand and buckled over the rocks. Eventually there were more rocks than there was sand, as if the sand was congealing, and it was only when he stumbled, and looked up again, that he figured out the sun was falling and he was able to see in the distance an outcrop jutting sharply into the ocean. On top of the outcrop was a concrete construction that shimmered in the heat.

* * *

All along the shore there were scattered pieces of jellyfish and some other kind of dead sea-creatures that Paul had never seen before. The skin beneath the spikes on the sea creatures looked made to pop. Paul found a pine needle and stuck it into one of them. A milky juice spurted out and stung him in the eye. He wiped the juice off his cheek and tasted it. An initially sweet sensation on his tongue turned into a bitter tingle at the back of his throat that suggested the necessity for further investigation. Paul held the creature to his lips and sucked out all of the juice. Then he sat on the beach and looked at his hands. They expanded and contracted before settling into what seemed to be their ideal form. The same thing happened with his legs. He felt as if all aspects of his body were integrated. He left a trail of dead sea-creatures pinned along the sand.

When Paul saw a huge lump of rotten flesh washed up further along the coast, he walked quickly towards it unsure if it was a shark or a whale or something even bigger. He had never seen anything so big but he didn’t think he was just hallucinating. The creature’s enormous bones protruded curving from what looked like massive bite marks along its side. A group of boys walked around, in and out of the chest cavity, sniffing and rubbing up against it. They had peeled off most of the gray and blue skin. They had shoveled out the organs and left them drying in the sun. Paul asked a boy who was pissing in the sand what had happened to the creature but the boy didn’t speak. The boy finished pissing and then briefly looked up at Paul before disappearing back inside.

Paul thought the other lumps of flesh he saw in the distance were the same kind of creature as the previous one, just smaller, shrinking back to normal size. But when he got closer he realized he was looking at piles of human bodies. They were bleached white and bloated and they littered the coast as far as he could see. Most of them had been amputated. Many of them were headless.

Wild dogs and birds searched for pieces of the bodies to eat. The sun charred their skin. Flies laid eggs that turned into maggots and then into other flies that laid other eggs that turned into other maggots, an eternal cycle of nothingness. The wind partially covered the corpses with sand. It was almost impossible to tell them apart. Paul had sat on a rock and was watching over the corpses. He wasn’t sure why he felt responsible for their posthumous well-being. He didn’t think he would ever find Robert and Lucy in this mess. Some boys rode down to the beach on bicycles at night. They smoked marijuana and drank beer. They lit fires and listened to music. They took off their clothes and went swimming. They took turns fucking the corpses in any hole they could find.

* * *

After screwing his knuckles into his eyes for several minutes, Paul searched the dark kaleidoscope of images spinning out of control somewhere perhaps inside his brain. He tried to select and hold onto some of the images that seemed to correspond with a consistent narrative thread but they floated away as quickly as they appeared. He decided he was sitting hunched with his elbows on his knees on a foldout bed in a sickroom at school. His mouth was open and letting saliva drip onto the floor. Bubbles formed and then popped. Paul imagined he could hear the popping but couldn’t really hear much except the noise from a row of washing machines churning in the laundry down the hall and some kind of laughter probably coming from his throat. There was no one else around. His spine and tailbone ached. His stomach felt like a scrunched up piece of paper an over-ambitious student had torn from a notebook and thrown into the bin.

“Your turn.” A teacher had opened the door and was shouting. When Paul looked up and made eye contact with the teacher she handed him some pills and a paper cup of water. “You better have remembered your lines.”

“I didn’t know there were any.”

“Is that meant to be a joke?”

“I’m not sure.”

A different teacher had arrived. He stood there looking and grinning at Paul and the other teacher as if knowing something they didn’t. “Hurry up. Everyone’s waiting. Now, wipe your mouth and put your cock back in your pants, you disgusting little faggot. We would tie your wrists behind your back, but of course you’d love fingering your ass all the way to hell. Boy, when they get through with you today you’re going to wish you never heard of this place.”

Both teachers stood in the doorway looking at scripts and saying things Paul couldn’t hear. They walked over to the bed and told Paul to get up. He spat at them before curling into a fetal position. He offered only laughter as they lifted him onto his feet and dragged him down the hall. The kids in the laundry watched the teachers carrying Paul up some stairs that looked temporary.

* * *

A sewerage pipe covered in rust, fungus, and barnacles was dribbling out soggy wads of paper and mashed up computer peripherals along with the usual waste. Computer screens and televisions floated in the sea. Paul peeled down his jeans and stepped out of them. He kicked his jeans into an inky pool. He looked up at the sun and rubbed his cunt. He straddled the sewerage pipe and rubbed his cunt. He reached for a bottle and pressed its neck against his cunt. He lay back with his feet in the pool. He pushed the bottleneck into his cunt and fucked himself with it as hard as he possibly could. His eyes were closed and he was concentrating on where the bottle was going and what it was going to find inside of him. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He just felt something should be there. Blood ran down his legs. Tears ran down his face. He rolled off the sewerage pipe and squatted in the pool. When his stomach contracted he took a deep breath, clenched his teeth, and drummed his head on the sewerage pipe. He imagined the sound echoing back to the processing plant and up through the toilets at the mine.

* * *

Robert slowed down and pulled over where the road crumbled into potholes and weed-infested sand. The car behind swerved around the van before accelerating even more and drifting into the murky heat haze that made up the distance. The road ahead seemed to melt everything into its own lethargic vortex. Lucy slid across the seat and got behind the wheel. She grinded the gearstick and jerked the van forward. Robert showed her something about driving he said was easier not to explain. She glanced in the rear-view mirror at the lump curled up under a spiral-pattern blanket on the back seat.

“Forget about him,” said Robert, turning up the radio. It was a hits and memories channel. Some grunge ballad whose chorus they both tried to sing.

“I want you to fuck me lying next to him on the beach.” Lucy slipped one hand down Robert’s jeans. “And then send him off.”

“Whatever makes you hot.”

“Do you think that’s weird?”

“The little creep probably planned it that way.”

“Are you jealous?”

“You’re definitely weird.”

* * *

Most of the rocks going up the outcrop were covered with barnacles that dug into Paul’s mangled feet. The seaweed on some was moist and soothing but it made him slip. He alternated his steps between the safety of pain and the uncertainty of comfort. He rested for a while and looked up at where he was going and then down at where he had come from. He could make out a fuzzy image of the van sitting on the road. The van was small enough to fit between his fingers like a toy. He imagined picking it up and strapping in figurines of Robert and Lucy, and then flicking them on their way in the same direction they were meant to be going. He wondered if he did that would a toy truck suddenly appear. He watched the hole where the door had been ripped off the van. He pictured some kind of life force seeping out from that empty space. He stood up and obeyed the voices that told him to keep moving. The seaweed covering the rocks soon dried out and then disappeared. By the time Paul got to the top of the outcrop, he was running because the rocks were so hot and the sun was so bright that he needed to feel some shade.

* * *

A trail curved through broken glass and abandoned drug paraphernalia, juice bottles, hosepipes, and aerosol cans. The smell of urine and dead animals punctuated the smell of concrete and extinguished fires. Paul crouched in the corner of the bunker on top of the hill. He rummaged through some shopping bags full of used condoms, needles, and medical swabs. He flipped through some magazines and Polaroids showing amputated boys and girls being fucked and tortured. The sun eventually shifted its angle to reveal graffiti splashed across the concrete. Scrawled messages said to meet Paul here for the roughest fuck in town. Call this number anytime. There were recommendations, testimonials, criticisms, and counter-criticisms. Ridiculously over-sized stick-figure cocks fucked holes dug through castrated bodies and spurted wads of come. Next to the gun slit in the wall was a coin-operated pair of binoculars attached to a rusty stand that oscillated from the ocean to the beach.

* * *

At night the road was quiet, streetlights fading, palm leaves, the moon, until two cars came racing out of that emptiness. They swerved, skidding around the van, before stopping. The cars idled alongside each other while the men squashed inside shouted over the music. It was two similar heavy metal tracks slightly out of sync. The men eventually swapped cigarettes and beer cans. Then one of the cars turned around and drove back to town. The other car’s engine went off but its headlights stayed on.

A few men got out from the front of the car. They walked to the van and looked inside. They talked to each other for a while. They called to the men in the back of the car. Those men wrestled with each other, falling down, to be the first there. They watched as one of the other men leaned through the van’s broken windscreen. Another man helped when he was asked to help. They dragged a dummy out of the van. Its head was almost hanging off and its face was crushed. All the men gathered around the dummy and talked and drank and smoked.

The other car came back. The driver was carrying an old video camera that was gray and heavy. He parked and then twisted around to film Robert and Lucy getting out of the car. They acted like they were being interviewed on local TV news and should be treated like stars. All the other men gathered around the van and lifted it up the right way. It took them a few tries to do it. The cameraman eventually put down the camera to help. Another dummy fell onto the road. This dummy was a pile of twisted limbs. The men grabbed both dummies and dragged or carried them down to the beach.

* * *

“Are you going to fuck the dog girl in the cunt or in the ass or in the mouth?” a boy said to Paul after they had shot-up some heroin. They were lying on mattresses in the kitchen of the largest building in the compound.

“I bet he goes for the mouth,” said another boy, possibly older than the others, although this may have just been an impression because he was not taking drugs or having sex. He was leaning against an old gas oven that had been ripped apart and stuffed with firewood. He was stirring clumps of paper with a wooden spoon into a big pot. “Maybe we should make her a new hole.”

The dog girl’s cage had been dragged into the middle of the kitchen. The walls of the place were so thin they might have been transparent without the paint. Every movement formed a shadow. Two boys were standing over the cage and masturbating. Their cocks were raw and spiky. They were gritting their teeth, panting angrily, and trying to shoulder-barge each other off balance. They occasionally stepped on other boys’ ankles and knocked over their drinks. One of the boys whose drink got knocked over asked Paul to pass him a knife from the table. When the first boy was about to come, slapping his cock against the cage and the dog girl’s shoulder, the boy with the knife got up and hacked off some of that boy’s cock.

The cut boy collapsed in a ball on a mattress. His blood sprayed further than his come across the floor. Everyone watching laughed. Except Paul. The boy at the oven looked around to see what had happened, and then he scooped up the piece of flesh and dropped it into the pot. He banged his spoon on the oven before grinding in some more paper. Realizing how popular he had become, the cut boy was also laughing now. The other masturbating boy didn’t appreciate the way this game was turning out. He grabbed the knife and hacked off some of his own cock. He added it to the stew.

“Are you going to join us?” someone grinning wildly said to Paul. Most of the boys were lined up masturbating and waiting to use the knife. Some were fucking and sucking each other oblivious to what was happening. A few had passed out. The boy at the oven was stoking the fire with ripped up paper.

“Maybe I’ll just watch for now,” said Paul.

“Don’t you like her?” A different boy had found a key and unlocked the cage. He grabbed a clump of the dog girl’s hair and twisted her head around.

“I think I’m too stoned to get it up.”

“He’s saving it for the dog girl’s cunt,” said the boy at the oven. “He wants to marry her and make dog girl puppies.”

Some boys were chanting at Paul to fuck the dog girl in the cunt. They had pulled off Paul’s jeans and were kicking him. He rolled around the floor until he found another mattress. They flicked cigarette butts at him. They lit sticks in the oven and poked him with them. Paul imagined the holes were portals to a different dimension. He willed the holes to become bigger so that he could climb into them. He was barely conscious. The boys wrote words and drew pictures on Paul’s skin. The writing and the pictures were a caricature of the kind of thing young lovers burn into trees supposedly forever.

When the boys had got tired of tormenting Paul, they kicked and burnt the dog girl. She proved just as lethargic. Even when they stabbed her with knives she didn’t move. One of the boys suggested entering the cage to see if she was still alive. Being dead was boring. He got down on his knees and pulled her leg stumps apart. They flopped untangling. He dragged her half out of the cage and turned her onto her stomach. He spat on his fingers before working them into her ass. He put on a stupid voice, pretending he was a ventriloquist and her ass was his projection point. He got her ass to say, “I want Paul to be acquitted.” The other boys cheered. He did the same thing with her cunt. There was blood all over his chin and neck because he kept licking his fingers. He drank some beer and still managed to make it look like his voice was her voice. He pushed away a boy who was sticking his cock in her mouth, and tried to complete his ventriloquist act with some kind of verdict there, but the boy who he had pushed away kicked him in the face. They swung punches. They fell over. They passed out on top of one another.

* * *

“He’s definitely dead or a fucking good actor.” Lucy was searching for a hairdryer. She found one by the door and plugged it in then turned it on.

“You’re probably right.”

“What did you say?”

“I can’t find a pulse.”

Robert showed Lucy the box of pills on the bedside cabinet. He threw the box towards the bin. The lid came off and spun back under the bed. He picked up the twisted coat-hanger and sniffed the edges. He prodded and whacked Paul with the coat hanger. It added marks to the smears of shit and blood spelling out something Robert couldn’t make out across Paul’s torso. Robert sat next to Paul and drank some beer. Robert poured some beer on Paul.

“Leave him alone. He looks cute like that.” Lucy took the beer bottle off Robert and finished what was left. She opened the fridge and saw that it was empty. She knelt next to the bed and licked the beer from Paul’s thigh.

“He’s gone.” Robert rubbed his towel between his legs then dropped it on the floor. He stroked his cock a few times before pissing on Paul’s shoulders.

“Let me try.” Lucy took off her panties and straddled Paul’s face. She rubbed her cunt up and down against his mouth and nose.

Robert grabbed Paul’s ankles and Lucy grabbed Paul’s wrists. They dragged him off the bed and across the carpet. When Lucy let go of Paul’s wrists, his arms got stuck at the bathroom door, but he was eventually bundled into the tub.

* * *

Lucy tapped the scabs on the back of her hand. Robert squeezed water onto some heroin in a spoon on the bedside cabinet. He mixed it with a plunger and then cooked it over a cigarette lighter that was almost out of gas. He added lemon juice to dissolve whatever was cut with the heroin. He bit off a piece of cigarette filter and dropped it into the liquid. He drew similar amounts into two syringes. He handed one syringe to Lucy and she said there was more in the other one so he switched them over but she eventually chose the first one. They both shot up and slumped on the bed. Lucy mumbled something about if Robert had shared his heroin with Paul he wouldn’t have taken so many pills. Robert said if Lucy had let Paul fuck her he wouldn’t have taken so many pills. Lucy said he didn’t really want to fuck her. He just didn’t want anyone else to. Robert suggested giving him an autopsy to uncover his true motives. Lucy said she always wanted to drink human blood. She had only ever tried with a cat.

“You’re full of shit,” said Robert.

Lucy sat up. “You know he was really in love with you.”

Robert smirked. “We better just dump him on the beach. So it looks like he drowned. Accidentally or suicide. An amateur autopsy might look suspicious. Although it could be seen as a shark attack.”

“I like that kind of mystery.”

* * *

Flames spread through the long dry grass around the compound and soon engulfed the buildings. Petrol and munitions stores exploded. The few windows in the buildings shattered. The paint that had been splashed across the walls blistered and bubbled away until any kind of record was gone. Smoke rushed through the rooms and suffocated most of the boys as they slept.

Paul was dragging himself over bodies across the kitchen floor. He didn’t know what had happened. He was covered in blood.

“What did you do to the dog girl?” A boy was sobbing next to the empty cage. “Where’s her cunt? Her ass? Her mouth? Her other holes? Where is she?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You killed her. You fucking killed her. Where the fuck is she?”

“Get out of here. Just get the fuck out of here.”

“This is all your fault. I never should’ve shown you the way.”

Someone was hacking through the back door with an axe. The harsh beat reverberated through the rhythm of the fire. Paul thought it sounded wonderful, the best thing he had ever heard. It might have represented a rescue plan or an escape attempt. Maybe the architect of a failed experiment come back to free the rats. This was the kind of climax he had been hoping for. The boy who had been sobbing was covered in flames. His sobbing had turned into a painful kind of laughter. The only exits were all on fire. The axe blade struck Paul’s head. He dropped to the floor. Another blow chopped through his arms. The last one cracked his face into a frozen mess of shock and relief.

* * *

Robert had his feet across the seat on Lucy’s lap. Paul wasn’t sure what that meant. He told himself nothing. He heard Robert talking about how sexy Lucy looked driving the van with the wind in her hair and how he couldn’t wait to fuck her on the beach. Paul saw a fishing knife in a toolbox on the floor in the back of the van. He closed his mouth and moved his chin away from his chest. He had bitten his tongue. He wanted to remove Robert from existence. He knew he didn’t have the strength to remove Robert from existence. And he didn’t want to reveal any more jealously. He just wanted it all to end. He lifted the blanket and picked up the knife. The blade was dull. It was caked in grease and rust. It looked like it had been used to fuck things or repair them.

* * *

The girl playing the judge was reading from her script to the empty chair: “What exactly is your motivation for writing this trash? You say you are experimenting or playing with form and content but you cannot possibly be naive enough to expect us to believe that rubbish when the next moment you claim some kind of existential force is driving you.”

The teacher playing a journalist had put down his pen and exercise book and pulled out his cock. He was masturbating over the judge’s words.

“Do you, the accused, admit this narcissistic game of mirrors is merely childish attention seeking, vanity, self-doubt overcompensated for as transgressive posturing,” she stopped reading and looked at a teacher, “I don’t understand this,” and the teacher shook her head and wound her wrist until the judge continued, “an endless and increasingly desperate attempt to cover and reflect all possible bases, or do you truly harbor a body integrity disorder so complete that the only form of existence you are able to withstand is non-existence? Call it death. Self-murder. Suicide. Extinction. Sublimation. What does that mean? Sublimation of the body into text. What does all of this mean? Anything? At the end of the day reality sleeps in the same bed as we do.”

* * *

A police officer stood in the middle of the road and scribbled something in a notebook. He put the notebook on the front of the police car and took a tape measure from his pocket. He measured some tire marks on the road and compared the width with the tires on the van. The police officer went back to the police car to write some more notes but his pen had disappeared. A call on the car radio interrupted the police officer from looking for his pen. He leaned through the passenger window and took the call. Something moved in the long dry grass past a barbwire fence. It distracted the police officer. He put the receiver on the dashboard and took out a camera. He shot several pictures of whatever it was he saw in the long dry grass. A smoke cloud drifted up from the mines. The police officer got into the police car. He put on some sunglasses and drank some water. He started the engine and drove towards town.

* * *

Paul was on a beach he had never been on before. It seemed like an appropriate place to end. But every sense he had of an ending, if he were going to describe an ending to someone who had never encountered one, seemed ridiculous. Even the word end was too bland and generic. He knew he wouldn’t be able to describe this place and he didn’t really want to describe it because any extra words would only add more confusion. Too much had happened that was beyond his control. This place was going to be around a lot longer than he was. Nothing could fully contain the limitless ambiguities of existence. Something was always going to escape. He found a charred piece of bone and drew two lines in the sand. He sat and waited for the waves to wash the lines away. But the more he thought about the lines disappearing the more defined they became. He wondered what class he would be missing at school. He fantasized about the other kids constructing an endless series of elaborate monuments to celebrate their own obscurity. Perhaps they had forgotten him already. Maybe they never knew he was there.