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The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.
Sometimes, when perplexed, Drunk Boat didn’t sound that poetic, like it was a fancy hat he wore most of the time and shared with Man Boy Slim on occasion.
How fragile those wings, those beaks, heads to the side, small bright eyes staring up at the aliens that held their bodies in half-closed fists. The birds came from far north, guided by a complex knowledge of magnetic fields and the stars. Their brains had a coiled density twice that of humans. They only lived six or seven years, on average.
nothing better than do than
A belligerent rabbit had, in a sense, already broken contain and escaped the range of their intent.
Take, for example, her assertion that “the rabbits are not rabbits,” which she clinically expanded on to assert that if an organism “acts against its essential nature, it must be a mimic—perhaps to avoid being prey or, as in this case, to disguise that it is a predator.
At first, Old Jim just hummed those tunes to himself and drew the keys on a piece of sketch paper from the thrice-weekly Rorschach wellness check disguised as an afternoon art class.
How close was narcissism to empathy?
Central’s determination: “mass psychosis event caused by errors in hypnosis programming.”
Constant meaningless signal. Was there enough contempt in that analysis? What was worse, Old Jim wondered, than being a signal that held no meaning? A receptacle for light where no light need shine. A boat that sank into the depths at the first sign of water.
Eighteen years ago an anonymous Central analyst had concluded that “The full extent of foreign interference cannot be grasped from the evidence on hand. For this reason, the Central program should continue, in a different context, and Central should explore more fully why the Forgotten Coast might be of interest.”
He had found “unique if controversial ways to draw specters out of refracted glass” and make them manifest, even speak, while also gaining a reputation as being picky and high-strung.
“If you can find the liminal space, neither day nor night, in the threshold, you can receive the dreams or thoughts of others.” Henry conveyed this idea in the context of the lighthouse lens, and there being a place, theoretically, “neither here nor there.”
The light from the lighthouse that swept out nightly in a thick blade also bore down on Old Jim—
“They call themselves Monkey’s Elbow because the monkey’s paw is cursed, that’s what I hear. So if it’s just the elbow, they’re cursed enough to make songs, but not so cursed they die over it.”
This was what men who had learned nothing did. Men who didn’t mind repeating versions of their lesser selves.
“A sound leaves a trace. Like a parasite, in order to exist, sound needs a host.”
“Well, depends on to whom,” Old Jim said. “Sending a letter means something.” Or, it would, unless you wrote a hundred of them, to someone who never received them.
The “shining out” became less divided as it repeated, until the commas had been obliterated and it could as easily have been “out shining out shining.”
“Just that, and I quote, ‘a mind had revealed itself and we could read it amid the static.’”
He wondered if his daughter thought of him ever, and how and why. If it was still with any form of kindness or affection. If she had regrets. If she was happy now. If it sometimes tore into her the way it tore into him.
Cass slid down into the mud beside him and she held him and he cried into her arms. She said nothing, did not shudder or pull away, just allowed him to be there, letting it all out, again, until it was gone—truly gone—and he was empty and lost a century or more, down in the mud, in his thoughts.
The real Cass, at ten, at the piano, protesting her incarceration on the bench at first, but then banging the keys with him. “Don’t stop,” he was saying or she was saying. Or it’ll be over. Just don’t stop. Just keep going.
He was going to be shoved like a Vienna sausage into a truck and hauled to the Border like a Vienna sausage and then all the fucking anonymous sausages, standing upright, would fuck off into the unknown. So was she, fuck.
“Who the fuck just said titty for no fucking reason?” Lowry asked.
That Whitby kept saying things like some kind of demonic travel agent.
“I plan to shoot to kill,” Lowry said, and he fucking did. He’d been hired to do a job—several jobs, actually—and one of them was to shoot the fuck out of things when the things needed the fuck shot out of them.
So maybe they should all compare their fucking versions of reality, using the metrics of the lighthouse, because to Lowry the lighthouse looked like a séance-searing gush-fountain of aquamarine cum spurting from some giant, protean dick.
“It’s an illusion. A magician’s been practicing his act on this beach, and I’d give him an F for fuck no.”
