I’d been here before, but that did not make the place familiar. The heat, the red haze, the high-back booths and the bar, all the same, all as mysterious as the last time. An enigma I’d seen before, and was no closer to understanding. No, familiarity was not a feeling that this place engendered. At least this time I wasn’t quite as surprised by the scene, I turned to look, and expected to find underworld denizens muttering to one another in a corner. And I expected her.

I sat down at the bar again, only she hadn’t appeared yet. I sat a while, just looking and not really seeing. I allowed my eyes to drift over surfaces, imagining my gaze was like water, flowing. I could stay here a while, I thought. Wait for a bit. Not that I felt safe here, but it was somewhere I could stop, to see if my shadow would come close enough for me to see him.

I’d felt a bizarre presence for weeks now. One of those feelings that sound all too cliché when written down, until experienced first-hand, and is finally understood. A genuine sense of being tailed, watched, observed and noted. Some obsessive pair of eyes that never left my back, never missed anything, never saw anything but me. I could feel it haunting my days and my nights, and finally, I decided it had to stop. Something had to be done. So I came here. And waited.

My patience paid off before long. He walked in casually, not attempting subtlety. In fact, other than my instantaneous gut feeling it was him, there was no real reason to believe it was him. Little could be said about him at this point, other than he was male, in a man’s overcoat and hat, presumably to keep the rain out. Seemed like it rained every time I came through this place. With the ambience in the bar what it was, I couldn’t see any more clearly than what I’ve already described.

He surprised me by seating himself on the stool directly beside mine. His coat still dripped on the floor, his hat he placed on the bar, to his right. Water pooled on the brim. I was more drawn to his face, though, as that was something familiar. Too familiar. It was my own – or at least a very good imitation of me. His eyes were a little darker, deeper set maybe, or the eyebrows a little more prominent. And his hair and stubble had more grey tone than mine did. But it was a close match. Very close.

We said nothing, he and I. When he looked up at me, I only looked back at him. There were no words that came to me. We just stared. For how long, I couldn’t say, but it may have been quite significant. Something happened to my thoughts, some kind of suspension, because when the Voodoo Lady finally appeared, or, when I finally became aware of her, it was like waking from a trance.

“I bin stan’in heah fo’ ‘most fi’ minutes you know? Wat you be starin at?” she said. I furrowed my brow in reply.

“Dis deh way you talk to e’rybody?” she asked. “Or am I sommin special?” I could hear her, but her words didn’t seem to require a response, until she smacked her hand down on the table with a startling crack. Suddenly I felt I was able to speak, or needed to speak, either way, I spoke.

“Can’t you see him?” I asked.

“See who?”

“The man, sitting here. He looks just like me,” I said. “All he does is follow me around, and now, he’s finally here, and he just stares at me.”

“Sho’ honey.” She paused, taking measure of me. I finally turned to look at her, and was surprised at the gravity of her expression. Her great white eyes bored deeply into mine, looking for something.

“You ain’ crazey are you?” she was confirming with herself more than with me. “No you be seein sommin sho’.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I see him.”

“An all he do is follow you ’round?” she asked.

“And stare at me. Glare at me a little I guess. I don’t know, he looks, not angry exactly. But something close. Impatient maybe.”

“Sho’ I see,” she said.

She leaned back, resting her hip against the back cupboards, and lit a cigarette from her little wooden box.

“Yeah I see,” she said again after taking a drag. I looked between her and the man beside me. He hadn’t moved an inch. I even watched to see if he blinked, and he did, eventually.

“It’s like he’s waiting for something,” I said. “Waiting for me to do something maybe.”

“Well,” she tapped some ash into a tray. “You waitin’ fo’ anytin’ baby?”

“What? Me?”

“Yeah you! Wat you been waitin’ fo’ lately?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Well baby, mayhap is you we all waitin’ fo’” she said. “Maybe evin you is waitin fo’ you.”

“Me? What about him?”

She smiled, that enormous crescent moon smile that only the darkest humans can command.

“E’rybady’s got a ghost,” she said. “Yours ain’ like mine, sho’ but we all gat em.”

“What ghosts? A ghost is following me around?”

“Well baby I sho cayn’ see him! So he mus’ be a ghost! Yo’ ghost. One all made up fo’ you especial. Trayn’ tell you summin sho’.”

“But he hasn’t said anything! What am I supposed to do with him?”

“You sayin he look like he be waitin fo’ sommin. He’s yo’ ghost, he lookin at’choo. Do I hav’a put a dem pieces all togetha’ fo’ you boy?”

I felt like a child being lectured. I guess I was, in a way. It made sense the way a magic trick makes sense when you learn the trick. Simple, so simple its disappointing.

“Yo’ ghost is jes’ you. He is you. You waitin fo’ y’own self. Wat’choo waitin’ fo’ baby? Wat’choo trayn t’do that you ain’ done yit?”

I knew then. There were dozens of things I wished I’d done, but really, it was the wishing. It was the warring. All the time, I was chastising myself for not doing things, for wasting my time. I fought myself, berated myself mercilessly. Yet I got nowhere. I only spent my energy fruitlessly. In an endless circle of chasing myself. And here I was. I’d finally caught up to myself, finally I was chastising myself for chastising myself.

“How,” I asked after a long spell of quiet. “How do I stop the spiral?”

“Das’ yo’ question, not mine. But, I migh’ sejest dah shortest way to get ‘newhere is to start out in dat direction to begin wit.”

11:02, Sunday.  First day of October and I’m sitting here wondering what I should be doing.  Because there’s always that feeling, the suspicion that there is some one particular thing that would be better to use up this time in doing.  That one task, or that one goal that is more worthy of the irrecoverable minutes that keep slipping by.  No matter how hard I stare at the clock, I can’t make it slow down.  I can’t read into the seconds and discern what they want from me.  What do they want?  What would fill them with justification?

That feeling of wasting time sneaks up on me occasionally, and frustrates me.  What is that, wasting time?  I’m not sure I know what I mean when I feel it.  I talk to myself, trying to instil some kind of motivation to do ’something.’  But what?  What is better than what I’m doing, at whatever given time?  As if there is some objective ranking system that, once consulted, will provide me with a conclusive answer.  Where is this yardstick?  Who is holding it?  Certainly its not me most of the time.  Things I want to do, in the moment, are often the ones that I turn around and feel like I’ve wasted time on.  Am I bred this way?  Is it society, or just my family that’s made me into the permanently inefficient creature that I feel like I am?

What are we all working towards?  That is the common denominator, that I am always supposed to be working on something, or toward something.  A goal, many goals, dozens of them, handfuls of long term, short term, financial, physical, fiscal, business, career, hobby… goals.  Swarms of the fuckers.  So many goals in fact that were I to by some miracle actually achieve one, I’d have amassed so many more in the process that I would be numb to the accomplishment.  I’d be so caught up in whatever else I should be doing that I’d forget that at one point, I wasn’t where I am.

I can’t remember sometimes.  My mind is geared forward.  I’m aware of the present, and yet only inasfar as it applies to the future.  Is what I’m doing now going to net me some profit in the future?  That is the question I think everyone is constantly asking.  Subconciously, but continually.  Its like breathing these days, we can’t live without it.  Living in the moment, enjoying what you have is laziness, smug self-satisfaction.  Forget that you worked to get where you are- that really isn’t important.  Achieving goals is not the goal.  Working on goals, that’s the obsession.  Like a train that builds its own rail, we never get where we’re going because there’s always a new chunk of track to chug into.  We don’t even get to stop at the station and take in the view.  Always got to have our noses to the stone, driving new spikes into the ties.

Where does that leave us?  Rats in the wheel… slaves in our own terrible schemes.  Those abstracted systems of business, of wealth and success.  We count out our worth to ourselves in arbitrary numbers that mean exactly what we want it to mean- no more, no less.

Is this why I feel so lost sometimes, because I realise that there are no destinations?  I seek madly for a finish line, a goal, one that is inarguable, and what I find is that I get into my head that the only concievable end is to arrive at the absolute pinnacle of whatever the field is.  To be the best.  The very best.  Only then can I stop, justifiably.  And that simply won’t work in this world of one-ups-manship.  Its all reletive anyway- and some bastard will set their sights on me, if I did manage to claw my way clear of the rabble, and beat me.  Then, where am I?  Back in the wheel.  Back amongst the rats.

Maybe the flaw is me.  Maybe my own self-appraisal is broken, I can’t make myself feel like my own work is worth something just because I say so. But I’m not sure which is more arrogant, feeling like I’m not a product of my society, or feeling like I am, and know it, and don’t care.  Should I seek for the approval, or… at the least a reaction a goddamn flicker of an eyelash out of someone else… Should I concern myself with it at all?  One tiny ripple in the stagnant pool of this world would be something, it would be something I could hold on to, remember, and use to tell myself I do exist, I do matter.  Or is that insecurity?  Which do I choose?  How can I live, unrecognised, in a world that constantly tells me that what I say doesn’t matter?  That unless I do what everyone else does, I’m not right?  How can me doing what they all do matter?  Wouldn’t it matter infinitely more if I ran counter to the flow?  To interrupt the current and splash around in that stream would at least be interesting.  How can repeating the same fucking thing that hundreds of other mindless automotans have done before mean anything at all?

11:28, almost tomorrow… just like those goals.  Tomorrow… so close, and will never come.  Almost tomorrow, and no closer to my answers.

“You look like shit baby, are you all right?”

My wife’s concern didn’t surprise me, I felt like shit too. Burning eyes, heavy head, and general surly mood are to be expected after the kind of night I’d had.

“I’m okay, just slept really badly last night,” I replied, finishing off my cup of coffee. Early morning sunlight filtered through the miniblinds, scything into my eyes as I stood at the sink rinsing my dishes. I shut them for a minute, trying to coax some of the roughness out of their surface.

“Well, I hope everything goes well today,” she said.

“So do I. What a great day to have to get up and go on so little sleep,” I replied.

Driving to work in the sluggish morning traffic freed my mind, or forced it rather, to wander ahead to the series of meetings I had lined up today to attempt to deal with the situation that had finally come to a head between Kevin and myself. He’d been causing me grief for weeks now, but the circulation of a survey and the subsequent publication of the review of my team had finally crossed the line. Not only did he not have any semblance of the authority to conduct such a survey, but he’d gone about it in such an unprofessional manner that the results were outright slander. I’d had enough, and had called in the legal team and my surperiours and his to have a chat about the situation. It was time for that bastard to face the music.

**

A chill passed through my body as I turned my key in the door. The knob moved as though it hadn’t been locked in the first place, which was not a good feeling. I was the first one home today, unusually, but that meant the door most definitely should have been locked. Cautiously I proceeded inside, my nerves electric. Who knew what would be waiting for me in here, I thought. Maybe I’d surprise whoever it was, which I wasn’t sure would be a good thing or not.

I crept slowly through my house, avoiding the squeaky parts of the wooden floor- though surely anyone inside would have heard the door opening. The air was deathly still. I checked every room anyway, every corner sending waves of goosebumps up my neck and down my arms. I didn’t find anyone, or see anything obvious missing. I shook my head, trying to shrug off the growing sense that I was not as alone as I appeared to be.

“I need to get some sleep tonight,” I muttered to the empty house.

**

“Hi honey,” I said to my daughter as she returned home from school. My Theresa, my little angel, smiled at me.

“Hello daddy.” She was surprised to see me home early from work, and still young enough that it made her happy. Only a year or two more, I figured, before she’d rather have the house to herself for a couple hours after school… doing God knows what. Let’s not think about that right now, I decided.

“How was your day?” I put down the newspaper.

“It was good, I handed out the invitations like mummy said, after school,” she said. “Only Sasha wasn’t there, so I will give her one tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” I replied. Theresa’s eleventh birthday was next weekend, and we were going to have a handful of her school friends over for a dress-up birthday party. A house full of squealing pre-teens I thought, won’t that be fun! Really, I hoped it would be, a few of the parents might come, we invited them on the invitations as well, so perhaps Robyn and myself would have the chance to socialise with non-workmates. Wouldn’t that be nice! To shoot the breeze with someone my own age, or thereabouts, without having to talk shop.

“Be sure you tell me if any of your friends tell you they are coming or not, okay?” I asked.

“Okay,” she said. I smiled. Her life could be so simple, I thought. No one was mounting some kind of campaign to blacken her name and ruin her career. She didn’t have a career to protect. Oh to be ten again, I chuckled. I watched from the family room as she fixed herself a snack and sat down to do some homework. I wondered how long it would be until she would protest that ritual.

**

I bolted upright in bed, the dark instantly crushing me with blackness. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear anything but my own breathing, ragged and dry. Cold sweat made me shiver where the blankets had fallen down my bare body. Fuck. So naked and enveloped in darkness that felt like a death shroud. That laughter echoing out of my subconscious, my ears run as if I’d actually heard it. That’s all I could remember of the dream, the nightmare, was a laugh. A maniacal cackling, and a vague sense it was directed at me. Two a.m. could feel so heavy when you wake up alone to your own fear.

**

“Damn John, you coming down with something?” Wil asked. “Your eyes look pretty terrible.”

“Nothing more than insomnia,” I replied. “About a week now, I’ve been sleeping really badly.”

“Oh right, yeah that’ll do it. Maybe its all the shit flying around with Kevin you know, stressing you out a bit?”

“I’ve thought of that, its the only thing that’s sorta bothering me, so I guess it explains it,” I said.

“Well it should be cleared up soon, one way or the other,” Wil replied.

“Yeah,” I said, not altogether satisfied. The meetings hadn’t all gone my way, a lot of effort was being put into political correctness, which all seemed structured to protect the offender, rather than the defendant. Bullshit bureaucracy, I thought, but there was very little I could do about it. I was a small cog in a very large machine. I wanted my damn oil, but more so I wanted to see Kevin get what he deserved, and I wasn’t sure he was going to. That pissed me off. He had done some damage already, and it present it seemed the best result I could get would be the cessation of his hostilities, not the disciplinary action I craved.

**

I couldn’t make out the sign, it was supposed to have neon lights on it, but they were broken, and so what might have been a happy clown face was dark, with lines of shadow that looked a little like scars across it. The words were there, but I couldn’t force myself to read them. The street was dark, black really, as if it were midnight during a blackout- except for one window of the brick-front store. A metal bathtub, sort of a strange Gothic/Victorian flavoured monstrosity was bathed in warm orangish light. I took a step closer, and saw that it was Kevin sitting naked in the half-full tub. His bald head was crimson glowing almost white from the light that looked more like what they use in take-away shops to keep food warm than a display window’s halogen. The off-grey water came up to the middle of his hairy paunch, and the rest of him was dripping, only it looked a little more like sweat than water. He wasn’t moving. He stared, straight out of his window, not moving, not even blinking. Just staring. Staring past me, I thought, not registering what his wide-eyes should have been.

I realised I was walking, very slowly, towards the window. I stopped, standing about three feet away, and just as I was leaning a little bit to maybe catch his eye, the light flared a little, and Kevin exploded in a gory mess of flesh and fat and dirty grey water.

The laughter followed me into waking.

**

“Another dream?” Robyn asked.

I was sitting, leaning a little on my knees. “Yeah. Bad one. Kevin was in a bathtub and exploded like he was in a microwave. And there was this laughing, it was disturbing. Fucking disturbing.”

“That… yeah, that’s terrible baby.” She put her arms around me.

“This is getting bad,” I said. “I need to get a decent night’s sleep.” I knew I wouldn’t get much that night, that dream was a bad one. Shaken me up pretty good, and I didn’t imagine I would want to close my eyes again for a while.

“Go back to sleep Rob,” I said as I stood. “I just need to walk this one off okay?”

“All right, come back soon,” she hugged my legs.

I walked out into the kitchen and turned on the lights to chase the shadows out of the room. It had been a long time since a dream had shaken me as badly as that one had. The ones I’d been having up to now I didn’t remember very well, and so all they could do was wake me up, but this one was different. This one was mean, ugly. Violent. And I’m still so tired.

I took out the bottle of scotch, hoping it might mellow my nerves a little. When I took a tumbler out from under the bench, it was all I could do to keep from dropping it. Quickly, loudly, I put it on the table, and stepped back, staring at it in horror. A playing card, a single card, in the tumbler. A joker.

**

“Why would someone break into your house and do nothing but put a card in your glass?” Wil asked.

“I don’t know!” I said. “Do I look like I know? Its insane. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“No, no it doesn’t. Maybe it was just Theresa playing a game that she forgot about, and you forgot about,” he replied.

“What kind of a game? Why a joker, just like the one in my dream,” I said.

“You said it was a clown face in the sign, and even that you couldn’t be sure cause you didn’t see it properly,” he said.

“A clown, a joker is a clown, isn’t it?”

Before he replied, Anderson walked in, looking a little pale. He stood there in the doorway just looking at us for a minute. Anderson was one of the execs who was going through the case between me and Kevin.

“What’s up Anderson?” Wil asked.

“Kevin,” he replied after a too-long pause, “won’t be joining us for this meeting.”

I let out an explosive sigh and was about to wax on about his uselessness, but Anderson continued.

“He was in a car accident, his car, it caught fire, and he was trapped. It went up, and he didn’t make it,” Anderson said, and made his way slowly back out of the meeting room.

“Holy shit,” Wil said, and looked back at me.

**

“What about plates? Do we still have plastic plates at home?” Robyn asked.

“Yeah I think so. I bought a ridiculously huge pack for that thing at work, and only used maybe ten of them,” I replied. “We should be fine.”

“Okay, that’s it then,” she said. Our cart was full of junk food and meat and other party necessities. We headed for the checkout together.

“Hey can you handle this? I’ve really gotta take a leak,” I said.

“Sure.”

Three minutes later I was sighing in relief as the pungeant cascade of yellow washed down the drain. I heard someone making a bit too much noise to be pleasant in a stall, and wrinkled my nose. Really, they should play really loud music in public restrooms, to block out that kind of thing.

No sooner had the thought completed itself in my mind, than I could hear music coming in from outside. It was growing louder, like a marching band approaching. They were playing that music I could only call ‘the circus theme’ for lack of a more accurate title. Though it was better than hearing someone else’s bowel movement, I would have picked any other song, at the moment. Circuses were bound to involve clowns, and those were not my favorite thing right now.

I zipped up, rinsed my hands, and stepped outside, bracing for the impact of an unmuffled marching band.

Instead there was nothing. No band, no music, just the normal beeps and babble of a grocery store.

**

“I don’t know babe, what the fuck is going on, but its not fucking good,” I said. My voice was shaking a little, as I tried to keep at a whisper. “Someone is fucking around, or something, its all too coincidental.”

“Shh, yes, coincidental is all it is. Creepy as hell, but that’s all.”

“I don’t get it though, that card had to have come from somewhere, I’d really feel better knowing where,” I said.

“Where is it now?” she asked. “Can I see it?”

“Yeah let me go get it,” I went to the kitchen to get the card out of the drawer I’d put it in. I opened the drawer to find nothing but silverware. No card. I checked the other drawers. Nothing. I checked every drawer in the house, my underwear drawer, the little one on the bathroom vanity, even in the fridge. Nothing.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I whispered to myself.

**

“How long has it been since you were able to get a full night’s rest?” the doctor asked me.

“Two weeks,” I said. My head hurt, my eyes hurt, my lips were dry, and I was beyond tired. I took a couple of days off work, trying to sleep through the day, but couldn’t close my eyes. The dreams had continued, alternating between the sort I could remember, and the sort I couldn’t, but all laughing at me.

“And these dreams continue to wake you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give you a script for some sleeping pills. You haven’t tried any over-the-counter products yet have you? Some of them could actually give you bad dreams if they react badly,” he said.

“Okay. No, I haven’t tried any,” I said.

“Good. These are more effective, safer, but stronger. They’ll knock you out quick,” and he scrawled on a pad.

**

At home, I swallowed two of the white discs before bed, praying that they would get me through the night.

“Rob, are you sure we should have a party tomorrow?” I said. “I mean with all the weird shit that’s been happening . . .”

“Weird shit?” she asked. “It’s not weird like that babe, you’re just having a really bad couple weeks. Nothing we can’t handle.”

“I know, but the kids, what if . . .” The drug took hold without waiting for me to finish.

**

I was dreaming again, but this time it was daylight, and I was at home. Probably about noon, on the weekend. It was quiet, strangely muffled, like maybe I had cotton in my ears. There was some distant laughter in the backyard, but I was in the house, so couldn’t tell who it was. A few people from the sounds of it. As I passed the entryway into the kitchen, I saw the light spilling below the front door wobble. Someone was coming in. Someone was coming in the house. Not knocking, just coming in.

I ducked into the kitchen, and around the corner to the family room. I moved as fast as I could, as quietly, so whoever it was wouldn’t hear me. I had to find it. Quick, before they got in, before they could get me off guard. Found it. The bat made me feel better. I knew I’d be able to defend myself, because they wouldn’t be expecting me.

I stood, still with cotton in my ears, just around the corner that hid me from the entryway. I heard the muffled door open, and the squeak of the floorboard. One, two, three. I swung, hard, at the hips, and instead of belting the thief in the gut, I caught the joker right in the throat. Even better, I thought. He hit the floor on his back, his legs going up in the air. I chopped at them, and heard a sickening snap. I swung again, and caught his knee, and sunk the bat into the drywall. I stumbled with that sudden change of momentum, and tripped. I hit my head and that was the one sound that didn’t sound muffled.

I sat up a little bit dizzy, with a weird shrill buzzing in my ears. My vision was doubling a little bit, but I could make out a little crowd of people filling up my living room. I sort of crawled towards them, and the shrill buzz got worse. Two people, or was it four? Maybe just one, turned around and grabbed me, but I could see what they were all gathered around, just before I was thrown back against the wall and held there. A kid, a little kid, with flaming red hair, a wig? And white make-up. And a fluffy collar. A kid. A wig. A clown wig. I coughed, gagging a little on bile. I was thrown against the wall, and when my head hit it, the dizziness was overwhelming. I slumped down and all I could see was a spherical red piece of foam laying in front of my face.

**

I woke up, or at least my eyes did, and they saw a ceiling I could not recognise. It was white particle board with fluerescant lights in it, like at a school, or a hospital. Hospital, of course, I was laying in a hospital bed. Why the hell was I in a hospital bed? What happened to my legs, why did my knees hurt so bad? I tried to turn my head and pain shot through my neck and down into my chest. My head was pounding on top of everything else.

Robyn came into view, above me, not looking happy. She didn’t have on makeup, and she looked incredibly tired. She didn’t seem to want to ay anything to me, she just looked.

“What happened?” I stopped talking suddenly before asking where I was or what I was doing here. My voice was not my own, it was one of those buzzing robot voices. What the hell? “What the hell?” I tried to say it, but it buzzed anyway.

“Why do I sound like this? What am I doing here?” Robyn suddenly started crying, and shook her head. “Rob, what the fuck?” My eyes teared up, but I was caught between anger and fear. I took a deep breath, and forced air to flow out through my mouth, trying to yell. I could feel it, my throat was so dry, but I could feel that I still had all the parts I remembered having. I shouldn’t have this robot thing in my throat, I could feel my normal voice there somewhere.

“What the hell is going on!” I growled with half robot, half hoarse real-voice.

Robyn did not reply. I tried to sit up, even thought it sent waves of crimson agony through my neck and head. I sat forward, and threw the sheet back, so I could swing off the bed and grab Robyn, make her tell me what was going on. But I threw the sheet back off my legs only to find they weren’t there. I stared at the bruised stumps and almost threw up all over myself. I looked up in desperation at Robyn, who would only look at me through teary, red eyes. And behind her, on the table was a wilting bouquet. In the plastic claw where a get well card should have been, was a different kind of card. A playing card. The joker.

“So do you like it with boys,” it was a boy, “or girls?” it was a girl. I punched my hand through the bot’s morphing face and unleashed a bunch of gibberish into its guts. It walked away with the head of a toad, sounding very confused. I slid onto a stool at the end of the bar, just watching for a while. God, what I wouldn’t give to talk to anyone who actually knows me right now. Anyone, I thought, would have to be better than this.

“Come hang out with my and my friends today big fella’” she said to me. Her body was a perfect model, but her eyes were as flat as ceramic tiles. I sighed and shoved her away. There were a lot of bots here, I thought to myself. I scanned the room a little closer, sending out some feelers to see if I could pick the bots from anyone with a human at the controls.

“AIM:gochat?Layer6:roomname=’” said the next one. I looked at her, dumb-founded.

“Come again?” I asked.

“AIM:gochat?Layer6:roomname=’” it repeated, only this time filling the space between us with a different colour.

“My God,” I said, laughing. “You are a script and you’re badly written.” Incredulous, I put my hands out, and ran them over her skin, looking for any errors in her physical construction. She held mostly still, complicit to my fondling, which in itself was mildly disconcerting. Eventually, I found something near the small of her back, a hook that wasn’t properly closed off. Again, it’s just lazy. How could someone write such bad script with this utility, I couldn’t quite fathom. I slid my finger into the hook, and started unleashing code into the script, reworking what I could find in her database of pick-up lines. It wasn’t even encrypted. I found where her home port was, and probably could have snaked some lines into the server where all the bots were linking to (there were three others in this same room advertising the same space with different scripts) and probably reprogrammed the entire fleet, but decided against it. Instead I released my hapless little script victim, and let her loose back in the general ebb of the room. Now she spoke sense, saying things like, “I am a waste of bandwidth,” and “Please, disconnect now, the world is about to end.”

I sighed. Well that was, what, eighty seconds? It could be a very long night.

I resolved the bar into a more precise metaphor, and sat down on the resulting stool beside me. The AIM bar had its own internal architecture that was faintly visible to me, through the filters I placed on my own browser, and in this instance, I simply allowed most of it to come through in full. In the end, I had every impression of sitting in a room, full of people, moving around and talking, though occasionally there were certain things that made it blatantly obvious I was in cyberspace posing as realspace, rather than the other way around. I wondered how long it would be before the filters like mine would flare up red on the Reg-spies’ radar. Only a matter of time, I knew, and I’d have to tweak things to slip away unnoticed.

“Hello,” she said simultaneously to everyone in the room. Her ghost shimmered in front of me for a moment before they all withdrew back into the single instance of her avatar. I followed her progress through the bar, as she struck up a conversation with whoever had given her the most pleasing reply. Another youngish girl, it seemed. I focused a little harder, reducing the noise around me to quiet murmur so I could hear their conversation clearly. I wondered how the Reg-spies would handle even these minor tweaks to their code.

Only a few minutes later, one of the two girls left the bar, the one who I’d seen enter left alone. She must be real enough, I thought, so I wandered over.

“Left all alone already?” I said to her. She turned, and I sat down beside her, without waiting for an invitation.

“Yeah, don’t you hate that?”

“Mm. Sometimes. Being alone when you have no choice is not terribly comforting, is it?”

“No,” she said. “Especially when you come here to find people in the first place.”

“Right. Though, it is debatable that coming here in hopes of finding real people is wise at all.” I paused briefly. “The place is full of bots, it can be a fucking nightmare.”

“Yeah,” she said. “What else can we do though?”

“There’s not a lot, not on this layer, and now . . .”

“Yeah, after the restrictions came in, it is harder,” she said, looking away from me a little, surveying the crowd of ‘people’ filling the bar. I wondered, looking at her, trying to dig a little deeper, trying to read into her avatar. I didn’t find very much, but I knew there had to be something. Even just a faint flicker, a tiny flame of life, buried way beyond the cyberskin I could see here, stifled, but there.

If everything is so ephemeral, if labels are illusionary and an after-thought at best, why do I toil so endlessly to create for myself a descriptor? An identity is a label. It identifies me, it represents me, ‘re’-presents me, when I have yet to present myself. I have been spiralling, or at least twirling round on the spot for a rather long time now, trying to put some sort of cohesion into an understanding of who or what I am and simultaneously building an image of who or what I want to be. Build an image. Fabricate an illusion. To what end? To what end and purpose do we ever label things? I believe, as I am sure I have written before, that labels, genres, classes, whatever, render the infinite multiplicities of reality down to a kind of pattern, or more basic entity in order to ease the task of comprehension.

Half the time, maybe all the time, what we call understanding is actually an act of destruction of whatever thing the person is ‘understanding.’ This forcible categorization of an organic, unique entity, to become one of a group of similarly reduced entities is destructive indeed. Rather than examining a thing and understanding its individual characteristics- one will simply look for familiarity -and once found, disregard the rest. In so doing, the fact of the entity’s uniqueness is obsfucated, forgotten, and eliminated.

So why in the hell am I trying to do it to myself? How am I supposed to know who I am when I have yet to stop becoming? I realize I can’t know. An identity is only what I’ve been- what I am is far too fluid. That ephemeral nature of anything applies to me also. Why would I want to distill the life out of me by identifying exactly who I am? I have realized that the quest I’ve been on to find myself runs quite against the spirit of the principles I have established in my writing, in my life. Is it so hard to conceptualize myself as an ever-changing creature? All at once everything I am, I have been, and will be depending on when one takes a look at me. Identity is a tool for after I’m done being. Identity is who I was.

The joy of life is the freedom to change. To give up that freedom by identifying who I am ruins the potential to be anything else. Whether this will make life any easier to live remains to be seen.

I paused for a moment, simply to look at it. The fruits of countless, endless hours of creation, manipulation, edition, deletion and no end in sight. Meticulous detail in every pore, I squinted and brought the information worked into the skin up. I could see, as anyone else would be able to, the words and thoughts and ideas encoded there, attached to the metaphor to empart into the viewer what I needed so desperately them to know. It was all there, woven into the fabric of my creation’s being, its very essence was that code, that secret language buried behind the purely visual. Everything I could articulate was enunciated within. Anything I could capture in texture, or colour, ideas that defied language, I sculpted into its shape, its bearing. There were no accidental details, nothing that my hands had not crafted to be just as they were. There was nothing I did not intentionally make, there could not be. There was no room for serendipity, no evolution in this world- the users were responsible for everything that happened, everything that existed, here.

I took a step back from my motionless avatar, inert now as it was without me to guide it. Hidden in a space I’d created specifically to hide me, we two stood facing each other, only me knowing, only me being, and it there lifeless. Lifeless, but in every other way being more like me than I was. I reached out, and cupped the delicate jaw, sculpting it with my virtual fingers to give it the perfect androgonous edge. An angle that suggested femininity, but an edge that held a more masculine air. How long, this time, I wondered briefly. At the back of my mind, I always wondered. Why? What was the purpose for this skin? This thing that was more me than I was, more than I wanted to be, yet was nothing more than words etched onto the aether. But I didn’t ever let those thoughts touch the fore of my awareness. I engrossed myself to heavily in the pursuit of perfection, or of constant maintenance at least of some sort of perpetually fluid state of being, that I could not spare the mental processing power to actually sort through those thoughts. I hated it. How I hated the uncontrollable addiction.

How I needed to finish it! There was always more, there was always something that could be done. My mind, fluid, evanescant, could not be captured, only photographed. Only ever a copy. And a copy was only a copy in the instant it was made, instantly afterward it was a faulty model. A description of what I used to be inside. How I wasn’t anymore. Couldn’t be the way I was, because I wasn’t when I was anymore.

The space warned me, again. Something was passing by, or slipping in close. Someone was moving about. A rush of adrenaline accelerated my movement, which was mostly mental, through the familiar series of routines. The rhythm I went through every time was the same, just faster now. I threw more encryption into the bubble around me, flung the hooks back into my avatar, sealing the orifaces in its essence, and slipped inside. What had been two became one, and I was myself again.

I sent several different images out of the bubble as I allowed it to dissolve to lend some confusion to whoever had been getting close to my little secret. Odds were that what I’d felt was nothing- I hadn’t had time to really check it out, but more than likely it was just some passer-by moving from point A to B to C, and I happened to be in between. No more probable to even notice my fuzzy bit of space as to notice the curve of my jaw . . . But.

But it had been happening more than was usual. I was being disturbed during my secret sessions of crafting almost regularly. Paranoia? There were things brushing my little black holes where I hid. Of that there was no question. What I could not decide was if those incidents were actually any more frequent now, in the past month say, than in the past year. I wanted to say they were not, I wanted to say I’d just been a little nervous since the Regulation, but I couldn’t quite believe that. The Regs had come in a long time ago now. How many months? Six? Time moved faster here, galaxies spun their cycles in nanoseconds. When you spent most of your time online, life seemed so much longer, memories far more distant. I kept walking, without looking back.

The images I sent in the other directions would walk the layer for four or five minutes, then throw a whole stack of garbage at whoever might actually be following them. They were smart enough to notice if anything was actually watching them, so knew who to throw the smokescreen at, and then disappear. By then I’d be in a totally different part of the layer, walking over a tripwire which would let me know if anyone had actually followed me rather than an image. This layer was still pretty clear of Reg-spies, but if they did find you, and catch your avatar out, it was not good.

That didn’t really say a lot about this layer, however, I thought as I looked around. Layer 6. Down pretty low- a lot lower than it sounded if one knew about L0, L0.5, and L0.55, which wasn’t many people, but either way- not the nicest place to spend time. Most of the traffic here was just this side of mind-numbing. Mostly mindless, Spam flowed through like water. It was all to easy to start moving here from one of the higher Layers and get totally flooded, totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of advertising that assaulted a user here. The rules were a little simpler on L6, there was not the empty-space code like there was on L5 and up. Following the old code, to exist, here, there had to be something in that space, which made moving around a totally different deal here. Win some, lose some, I thought. L6 had its benefits. Things… people, were harder to find here amid all the garbage.

I walked, simply sliding my way through the flows of Spam, only aknowledging them enough to gauage their direction and counter it as to not be thrown off-balance. Where to? I thought. I hadn’t been here that long, and didn’t have the routine established that I was used to. Things had changed, and I hadn’t quite caught up with myself.

Its, funny, I thought, how alone I can feel here, when I know there are several million other users right here. Here. Where? Just within my reach, of course, but reach, space, that was all figurative. Unless I was engaging with someone, they were as far from me as the Moon. They might as well not exist. I decided it was time to make someone exist for me.

AIM had a thousand hooks on L6. Far more than any other chat bar had, so I figured I’d hook in to one of those. I just needed some entertainment, and not the kind provided by anything automated. That would be asking a lot from an AIM bar, I knew, but it was one of the best bets in L6, and less likely to get me caught than the better spots. I pinged, and found the SIP for the nearest AIM bar hook, and punched in.

Instantly I was in a room full of people. At least they look like people, I thought, knowing well that half of them would be scripts. Some advertised even seedier chat bars, some advertised things you can’t do in a bar and have to go to PM for, some would just chat you up and make you feel like you have a friend for about an hour, until they started repeating the logic cycles. It doesn’t pay to use cheap AI, I thought. Unless you’re cheap HI yourself. I smiled grimly.

Fuck what I wouldn’t give to talk to her again. Don’t do it to yourself. Wishing it won’t make it feel any better.

Yeah, I am.  I am actually alive, kicking, breathing, fucking, but not writing.  And I feel bad for that, I really do.  Its all that game’s fault… well, mostly.  Is it the fault of a black hole that the spaceship gets sucked in and crushed into the infinite?  I don’t know, but that’s rather what I feel like.  My time keeps getting slurped up into that vacuum.  But anyway, I’m trying to regain some sort of control here… fucking addictive number counting!!

Its kind of depressing when you come back to a blog and have to spend half an hour clearing out the 100s of spam comments that have infested the place.  FUCK!  Like cockeroaches in the walls… termites… they’re everywhere.  Like sand in your crotch.  Only its my blog, and not a crotch.  Yeah.  No don’t make the comparison dammit!

I don’t even know who I’m writing to at the moment, and don’t give me that “A writer writes for himself” spiel.  Doesn’t wash here.  I am sure I’ve said it before, but a writer writes for an audience.  A Zen monk doesn’t need an audience, he meditates quite happily to himself and for no one else.  Me?  I’m an artist.  A performer, and I NEED my audience.  So we’ll see if I can build a new one on the ashes of the old… assuming none of ye old folks come back– which I sort of doubt.  But who knows, if I’m still here, what’s to say that you have deleted me from your RSS feeds?

I’m hungry and cold.  I’m sitting ‘outside’ in my garage, which is a kind of creative sanctuary.  Its a different place to sit at least, than my desk, at my main machine, which is so uber and powerful and full of gaming potential… So I’m out here with insane keyboard-driven instrumental progressive metal pumping pretty loud, without air-con, in the middle of Sydney winter (which can be cold!) writing what appears to be an ACTUAL blog entry!  Something random and meaningless for you people to read so I can confirm my existance.  The problem is I do feel like I’ve really dropped out of my social network on here (haha see the irony? social ‘network’ on the ‘internet’ hardy har har) and that is what I crave.  I do like the relations I have with people around me, for better or worse, they really help describe who I am.  So as horridly meaningless as WoW can be, there are a lot of people there to talk to.  Not about anything important mind you, just talk.  And I suppose that is what’s important.  Being by talking?  Pretty deep for a video game, I know, but you get that from me.  Anyway.

I have things written.  I like the ideas in them, but I don’t know where to put them.  See, I still like the idea of being published, as opposed to this self-publish thing, but who would house such personally important thoughts?  I need far more discipline than I’ve been utilising lately, I think, to pen something substantial enough to actually get printed.  Discipline.  Ha.  Its like a swear word, one that has religous connotations you know?  A sacred word… well.  Maybe not.  Maybe I just don’t use it much.  Let’s see if i can learn.

This world is spinning wildly out of control- and that is nothing new. Action, reaction, cause and effect, no guiding light influences the course of humankind, no external force shunts and harries our path. Those which we would bestow with power are but figments of our collective imagination, not real at all, or entirely real, in that we exist in a world of imagination. Nations, religions, economies, gods, devils, celebrities, politicians, none more real than the next, and each exerting more control over humanity than the humans themselves. Imagined constructs, hallucinations maintained collectively by millions, billions of people, to excuse them from thinking.

What the Catholic church has been, capitalist business is now. The over-reaching standard of what should be, below every fundamental of life that our modernity relies upon is underscored by the illusion of motivation generated by a system imagined into reality. Cyclical, collossal, it gyrates perpetually- inherant to its being is consumption, assimilation of what is useful, annihilation of what is not, through sheer ignorance, blindness, refusal to acknowledge that anything outside its own purview even exists. Sociopathic non-entities control our lives. A corporation would murder its kindred and eat our children, and think nothing of the act. Heinous acts of destruction are its bylaws, its fundamentals, and they are nothing but chimerae. There is no thing that is Coca-Cola. No body that is Microsoft. No block of stone or chunk of flesh or pool of water that is Time Warner. These things are fabricated. We are told they are there, like God, and we accept this as true. We must, because there simply is no option.

I have no sympathy for a business. I would not cry to watch one die, I could not! It was never alive in the first place, and cannot die- just the humans fervantly worshipping their deity wavering, cracking, running out of sacrifices to maintain their demonic overlord until it is wiped out by another more steadfast, resourceful group of zealots. The name disappears, to be replaced in name by another name. Nothing changes but the name. The devotion is the same, the delusion.

They are parasites, these corporations. We have breathed life into them, and they suck the life out of us. They rip out of us the flicker of humanity, stripping us of our basic peculiarity that makes us human: creation. Business does not create, it revolves. An ouroboros sucking its own tail down its throat in an insane circle which will never cease, only grow thicker, hungrier, more impossible to escape. To abscond is to shatter the being, to starve it of itself, and watch it dissolve. So they blind us, shroud our heads in layer upon layer of delusional advertising, stuffing every channel of perception with garbage, noise to keep anything else from penetrating. Like strapping a star to each eye to distract them from anything else, everything else. So innundated with this deluge of undiluted filth, our conditioned, our crippled minds are not allowed a moment’s respite. The process of reception robs our faculties for creation, even interpretation is not allowed. Everything is as it is presented, we must believe everything we are told, we must swallow the smut and faeces that is fed to us, for that is all these things can produce. They sit on our faces and shit in our eyes, and tell us its two for fucking one today only. Today only! Buy now! Believe it, buy it, forget tomorrow so we can say it all again! Buy ever more, work ever more to produce more of what you can’t use to make money to buy more of what you don’t need so they can put ever shinier ever faster ever more useful bullshit on the shelves in the aisles on the screen in the air. Everywhere. And whatever you do, don’t stop to think about it.

Just buy.

Just need. Not want, need. We aren’t responsible for our needs, no one is. Need must be filled. Need must not be denied. Need must not be examined. Need is want we don’t want to admit to. Humans do not need, cannot need, that is what makes us human. People want. Animals need. To live only with what we need is animal. But where is the limit? This superflux grows top heavy. The boundary to absurdity draws ever closer, and the structure will inevitably fall. As a tower, with a hundred floors, each collapsing downwards into the next gathers weight, momentum building to bring down the next floor with even greater force must eventually run out of floors- the whole thing will eventually hit the ground and destroy itself.

The system devours itself. Already the consumer, the individual is the minor role. Businesses feed on each other- whoring their own bodies to keep themselves alive. One business advertising another on its own skin, its flesh rent in twain by the tattooists needle. Drilling new channels into our consciousness by inventing new technologies, to fill with even more filthy demon-spun lies. The simple individual is already long stretched beyond his means, credit and debt extend his ability into the abstract, the imagined, and his only escape is death (which is a hard time for any family. Have you thought about the financial future of your family after you die? You should be. For only three dollars a week you can secure their future…). Life is no longer affordable, as it has been defined by this neurosis. The house the car the phone the computer the television the boat the investment property the stock portfolio the Swedish furniture the German electronics is all designed to be unaffordable. The price has nothing to do with the value. The price is always always, just over what is affordable. And you always need it. That is the fundamental. That is the doctrine. The mantra. You need this.

Lies.

No one needs a thing. Everyone wants everything. The one thing, if it can be called that, which no one wants is to think. Time, perhaps. Peace. Anyone who wants that would have it, as I do. Stubbornly, steadfastly refuse to need everything all the time. Think. I dare you.

Take a step back and watch the millions throw away their self-control like those who step into the carnival ride, spinning ever faster, an insane revolution that crushes each one of them against the walls of their prison. Their system, their diety, is their co-operative hallucination, spread like a virus through every orifice of our bodies, corrupting every cell and mutating like a cancer. Watch as they destroy themselves with the routine, the revolution, the centripitol forces squeezing the life from their bodies. Inescapable routine. Today to pay for yesterday. Spend what you do not have in order to gain what will kill you. Inescapable while you need it. While you believe in it.

What happens when the ride hits terminal velocity? How fast does it have to go before your bones are liquid? Before you flesh becomes energy, atomic? Will I be able to survive the implosion? I smell the catastrophe on the wind, and only hope I am still alive, still awake, when it happens.

I am wrapped in an aural cocoon in the belly of this giant silver intestine, hurtling along the track towards my destination with all the agonising slowness of a glacier. My heart thunders in my chest like a hummingbird the size of a helicopter. The anticipation! The choking power of my desire silences every competitor. My thoughts leaping one after the other from my mind, are scything through the dark night like spears forged of light.

My body is filled with longing. Desire inflates my muscles to the point of explosion. My skin screams for her touch and cries out memories of yesterday. Everywhere her hands have touched is swept with waves of needles. My fingers ache with emptiness. I shut my eyes and try to rein the stallion within, but am no match for the power of my love. The attempt is half-hearted, admittedly, because there is no true desire in me to slake the pull towards her, only to endure. To outlast circumstance, and prove fate. I clench my jaw; it seems as though my voracious skin will tear free of my flesh and go racing ahead to reach her more quickly.

It seems unfair, at times, to focus my powerful desire on her, to target this girl and unleash the unrestrained force of my heart on her. Like pouring the atomic fury of the sun into a single light bulb. I feel as though I would do just that, by placing my hand on hers, my lips to her lips, she would be consumed by the inferno I am stoking within. Even by merely locking my gaze, arcs of electric energy would burst forth from me to find purchase in her eyes. But hold my gaze she does, and my hands, and wrap me in her arms and draw me even closer. She accepts the challenge that is my love, and the fire that I bring.

Happiness ripples over my skin like cool waters of absolution. I smile as though I am already in her arms, the tide surging forward to spill from my eyes in tiny waves of infinite ecstasy.

I woke up, staring at a ceiling I felt I recognised. Only my eyes were awake, or so it seemed: I felt drained, depleted. My limbs were just so much meat laying on this bed I also found familiar. I blinked a few times very slowly, testing out the muscles in my face. They seemed to react normally, but it was hard to be sure. I remembered Serai then. She surfaced in my memory like a wraith stepping into the revealing glow of a streetlight. No memory in particular, just her.

Just as I was about to attempt speaking, my skin exploded into pins and needles. My entire body, not just one limb as one normally expects, but my whole system was suddenly electrified, stabbed at a million points with an itching tingling that would have driven me insane had it lasted more than the twenty seconds or so it did. Much to my relief, I found that my arms and legs felt reletively normal after that rush of discomfort. I curled my arms up around my chest, sliding my hands up and down. My skin was icy cold.

I began shivering quite violently then, a deep sort of racking shudder that erupted in waves from my stomach, and emanated out into my limbs and jaw. I curled into the fetal position, and held onto myself, begging silently for some warmth. I could tell, through my distraction, that the room wasn’t cold, it was definitely me. I was far, far below room temperature. As I moved, my joints protested with hot spots of pain and though it hurt, I welcomed the sensation of heat that seemed to spread out from my elbows, knees, knuckles as I worked them gingerly.

I felt so clinical, detatched, I was very aware of every sensation, but not perturbed in the slightest by it. I simply took each in turn, and tried the best method I could think of to relieve the problem. I could only guess that I’d been lying entirely motionless for quite some time, and my circulation had slowed to a crawl, which dropped my body temperature, played havoc on my nervous system, and caused my joints to stiffen beyond all usefulness. So there was nothing to do but warm up at a cautious pace, as to bring my systems back into normal working order. I couldn’t explain the calm I felt. Reflecting on the moment, I should by all rights have been screaming in terror from the moment I opened my eyes and couldn’t feel myself, but I never felt frightened.

“Hello Jarrod. Welcome back,” Serai said as she entered the room. I rolled to my other side to bring her into my field of vision. I winced with the movement. Just the brush of fabric against my skin was painful. She approached, and sat beside me on the bed I now placed as hers, below the ceiling that also belonged to her. I sat up after inordinate effort, and replied.

I managed to croak out a harsh “Hi,” in an unintentional sort of whisper. My throat was parched. She had anticipated this, and handed me a warm cup of tea. I took it, hoping that my fingers would behave. It seemed they were back to operating on that level of reliability at least. As I took my first sip of the tea, Serai placed a hand on my neck. Either the tea she’d brewed had some sort of supernatural qualities, or her touch did. I literally felt warmth rush through my body, through the skin and muscles and deeper. The pain slid away. The stiffness melted. I could breathe easier, and my throat was wet again.

“Hi,” I said again, sounding much closer to normal.

“You’ve scared me twice now,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I replied. It was only then that I remembered.