(no subject)
"Where have you been?"
"I've been in prison for shoplifting."
"What was prison like?"
Well, it's very unusual. Prison is larger than the outside world. When viewed on an aerial map, prison takes up the north sixty percent of the screen on the east side, then extends perpendicularly south a further twenty percent - whatever the scale of my map is at - before resuming an east-west barrier. The structure is, at the least, immense, enclosing all sorts of natural terrains: a system of caverns, a virgin hardwood forest, thatched-roofed cottages, an empty WWII bunker, an indoors reservoir. Sometimes you feel like you're in prison (in a cage), and sometimes you can almost forget completely. There are no strict rules, and you never see convicts - although it is illegal to leave. Needless to say, leaving is the rule that nobody can punish you for, it appears, as that places you outside the system, so this was precisely what I decided to do.
It is not very easy, because though there are multiple points of departure you are easily, unconsciously led astray of them. You are in a forest: sometimes it is new, little cedar trees, and sometimes they yield to deciduous growth, which probably is older, full of brittle trees of thorns and brambles. You think you are going in a straight line, but it is difficult to know. To avoid the thickest spots and cross streams in their shallowest, narrowest segments, you edge to the left or right. You think you have regained your straight line afterwards. With no compass, the sun helps to orient you. Entering the forest, I'd say the sun was at ten o'clock, so that is where I've kept it. Now the sun is sinking into the density, and my shadows get longer and harder to distinguish, and it is apparent that, like a sundial, they should have circled my back and reached my left instead of staying in one place - so as the sun has turned, I've made a U-turn. And so forth, wherever I go, the prison keeps me prisoner, until I get cleverer.
Eventually, for I was a patient person, I did grow clever, and by skirting the western boundary of the enclosure I escaped prison. It was obvious when I left, because the landscape immediately became less artificial and less manipulative. It was just the normal outside world, you could see. That wasn't the end of it, for at that point my GPS which had been hitherto so useful set off the klaxons, awakening the wardens, who legally had twenty-four hours to capture me before I was dropped from the system. I learned this from the help menu in my GPS, which now featured a red warning light blinking above the display. Looking at this, it made more sense to make my hiding place somewhere inside the prison, rather than out, where there was less ground. I wasn't found in my hiding space: a nook in the rock wall of a canyon the size of an end table behind a hedge of flowering honeysuckle plants. I found sharp, glassy rocks in the wall to my back. Leaving my GPS unit there, I made my way to the exit in the morning.
"What were you get caught shoplifting?"
"A wireless controller for a Game Cube which was shaped like a peach-colored, shiny plastic heart with daisy-shaped green and red buttons."
"Actually, you can rent those at the strip mall."
When I discarded my GPS unit, I noticed that I could still access it... my location on it glowed like a blip on radar, slowly moving south and west. Was I really in prison, or was I playing a labyrinth game? I couldn't see my surroundings anymore; I couldn't focus on anything but the screen. As I walked I watched the movements of the wardens, wandering, yet inevitably drawing closer, like Roombas. My legs felt heavy and mechanical, and my ankle throbbed. I became aware that I was playing a Game Cube video game long before I reached the exit, removed the miniature DVD, and swapped it for a fairly realistic two-person fighting game, like the kind in the arcade.
"You want to play, or should I fight the computer?"
"I will, if you hand me that heart-shaped controller."
I turned up the volume to drown out the tornado watch sirens, then we played until, abruptly, the electricity went out, the windows and the beam running down the center of the house began to leak a little water, and hail assaulted the roof, putting a few dents in the aluminum. When this happened, Jennie came inside wringing out her clothing and extending to me a plastic thing, which I did not understand. To explain, she said that she was pregnant, by me, so I asked if we had ever had sex, and she said, "Yes, two days ago." I gave a sheepish look, shrugged slightly, and avoided several angry glares. I vowed to get a vasectomy performed very soon and apologized. I haven't considered the possibility that she will keep the child. Then Jennie tells me that this is precisely what she has planned, and upon giving birth she will put the baby up for adoption. Sam comments, "Pregnant women will cry over just about anything." Jennie's body is swollen. There are five - no, six - pairs of legs and hands inside her womb, tiny bits assembling into regular form. "I know this is important," I say, "but I've got to go out for a moment to buy something," and I leave.
The car I drove in was a red Camaro borrowed from my parents. The convertible top was down, and due to the rain the electronics looked damaged, and the leather seats smelled like animals. First I checked my front pockets for keys, but there was a hole in one pair, so I searched the azaleas against the house until some turned up. These were a set of keys with a transparent green, flat-football shaped plastic attachment with white Chinese or Japanese lettering. None of them fit into the door or the engine of the Camaro, so I looked again in the bushes. This time I found more keys attached to a tarnished metal spoon, which had been bent on itself to form a loop around the key ring. These did not fit either. Finally, I checked behind my ears and found a rusty key. It unlocked the door and then started the ignition. Water seeped from the cushions of the car into my jeans and fuzzy jacket.
I arrived at a strip mall with a destination in mind. From my parking space I passed by a leather shop, a pet store, and a store that sold joke gifts and party supplies. Then I went into a Babbage's and tried to rent a Game Cube controller - the very one shaped like a heart - at a counter which behaved like an open auction. Two boys cut in, however, and demanded priority. Either I was embarrassed by this or disgusted, but immediately and almost forcefully I was ejected by my own will onto the street, where while approaching it I attempted by remote to raise the hood of the car, so it would not be rained on anymore. A bad noise came from the electric motor inside the hood controlling this, and I eventually forced the hood back down manually. It seemed, by now, that I had absolutely ruined this expensive convertible. The CD player doesn't do anything, but from the radio the speakers played:
Last night I had a crazy dream
One wish was granted just for me
It could be for anything
I didn't ask for money, or a mansion in Malibu
I simply wished for one more day with you
Later in the night, I meet a psychic, who begins to follow me. She predicts, though I try not to listen, that I am about to have a child. I tell her what a bad psychic she is, that I'm sterile, that I'm castrated. I tell her not to follow me. Wherever I go she's on my heels, adding details to her prediction. Behind concrete pilings, three turkey necks sprout from the manmade beach. Each neck has one turkey head attached, broken; the third neck has two. One beak is aimed at the moon, half-obscured behind thin, elevated clouds. It is opening wide, as if it would eat it, but as the moon goes down the bird begins to choke. The birds appear to be saying, "Are you my mother?" In its place my brown eye is half-obscured; my heavy eyes are shutting, rolling away, until a baby beak pulls them out, and then it becomes "eyeball," full in four quarters, with the silhouette of a small, mustached face. There are gnats surrounding me; my head itches in a buzzing cloud of horseradish.
"I've been in prison for shoplifting."
"What was prison like?"
Well, it's very unusual. Prison is larger than the outside world. When viewed on an aerial map, prison takes up the north sixty percent of the screen on the east side, then extends perpendicularly south a further twenty percent - whatever the scale of my map is at - before resuming an east-west barrier. The structure is, at the least, immense, enclosing all sorts of natural terrains: a system of caverns, a virgin hardwood forest, thatched-roofed cottages, an empty WWII bunker, an indoors reservoir. Sometimes you feel like you're in prison (in a cage), and sometimes you can almost forget completely. There are no strict rules, and you never see convicts - although it is illegal to leave. Needless to say, leaving is the rule that nobody can punish you for, it appears, as that places you outside the system, so this was precisely what I decided to do.
It is not very easy, because though there are multiple points of departure you are easily, unconsciously led astray of them. You are in a forest: sometimes it is new, little cedar trees, and sometimes they yield to deciduous growth, which probably is older, full of brittle trees of thorns and brambles. You think you are going in a straight line, but it is difficult to know. To avoid the thickest spots and cross streams in their shallowest, narrowest segments, you edge to the left or right. You think you have regained your straight line afterwards. With no compass, the sun helps to orient you. Entering the forest, I'd say the sun was at ten o'clock, so that is where I've kept it. Now the sun is sinking into the density, and my shadows get longer and harder to distinguish, and it is apparent that, like a sundial, they should have circled my back and reached my left instead of staying in one place - so as the sun has turned, I've made a U-turn. And so forth, wherever I go, the prison keeps me prisoner, until I get cleverer.
Eventually, for I was a patient person, I did grow clever, and by skirting the western boundary of the enclosure I escaped prison. It was obvious when I left, because the landscape immediately became less artificial and less manipulative. It was just the normal outside world, you could see. That wasn't the end of it, for at that point my GPS which had been hitherto so useful set off the klaxons, awakening the wardens, who legally had twenty-four hours to capture me before I was dropped from the system. I learned this from the help menu in my GPS, which now featured a red warning light blinking above the display. Looking at this, it made more sense to make my hiding place somewhere inside the prison, rather than out, where there was less ground. I wasn't found in my hiding space: a nook in the rock wall of a canyon the size of an end table behind a hedge of flowering honeysuckle plants. I found sharp, glassy rocks in the wall to my back. Leaving my GPS unit there, I made my way to the exit in the morning.
"What were you get caught shoplifting?"
"A wireless controller for a Game Cube which was shaped like a peach-colored, shiny plastic heart with daisy-shaped green and red buttons."
"Actually, you can rent those at the strip mall."
When I discarded my GPS unit, I noticed that I could still access it... my location on it glowed like a blip on radar, slowly moving south and west. Was I really in prison, or was I playing a labyrinth game? I couldn't see my surroundings anymore; I couldn't focus on anything but the screen. As I walked I watched the movements of the wardens, wandering, yet inevitably drawing closer, like Roombas. My legs felt heavy and mechanical, and my ankle throbbed. I became aware that I was playing a Game Cube video game long before I reached the exit, removed the miniature DVD, and swapped it for a fairly realistic two-person fighting game, like the kind in the arcade.
"You want to play, or should I fight the computer?"
"I will, if you hand me that heart-shaped controller."
I turned up the volume to drown out the tornado watch sirens, then we played until, abruptly, the electricity went out, the windows and the beam running down the center of the house began to leak a little water, and hail assaulted the roof, putting a few dents in the aluminum. When this happened, Jennie came inside wringing out her clothing and extending to me a plastic thing, which I did not understand. To explain, she said that she was pregnant, by me, so I asked if we had ever had sex, and she said, "Yes, two days ago." I gave a sheepish look, shrugged slightly, and avoided several angry glares. I vowed to get a vasectomy performed very soon and apologized. I haven't considered the possibility that she will keep the child. Then Jennie tells me that this is precisely what she has planned, and upon giving birth she will put the baby up for adoption. Sam comments, "Pregnant women will cry over just about anything." Jennie's body is swollen. There are five - no, six - pairs of legs and hands inside her womb, tiny bits assembling into regular form. "I know this is important," I say, "but I've got to go out for a moment to buy something," and I leave.
The car I drove in was a red Camaro borrowed from my parents. The convertible top was down, and due to the rain the electronics looked damaged, and the leather seats smelled like animals. First I checked my front pockets for keys, but there was a hole in one pair, so I searched the azaleas against the house until some turned up. These were a set of keys with a transparent green, flat-football shaped plastic attachment with white Chinese or Japanese lettering. None of them fit into the door or the engine of the Camaro, so I looked again in the bushes. This time I found more keys attached to a tarnished metal spoon, which had been bent on itself to form a loop around the key ring. These did not fit either. Finally, I checked behind my ears and found a rusty key. It unlocked the door and then started the ignition. Water seeped from the cushions of the car into my jeans and fuzzy jacket.
I arrived at a strip mall with a destination in mind. From my parking space I passed by a leather shop, a pet store, and a store that sold joke gifts and party supplies. Then I went into a Babbage's and tried to rent a Game Cube controller - the very one shaped like a heart - at a counter which behaved like an open auction. Two boys cut in, however, and demanded priority. Either I was embarrassed by this or disgusted, but immediately and almost forcefully I was ejected by my own will onto the street, where while approaching it I attempted by remote to raise the hood of the car, so it would not be rained on anymore. A bad noise came from the electric motor inside the hood controlling this, and I eventually forced the hood back down manually. It seemed, by now, that I had absolutely ruined this expensive convertible. The CD player doesn't do anything, but from the radio the speakers played:
Last night I had a crazy dream
One wish was granted just for me
It could be for anything
I didn't ask for money, or a mansion in Malibu
I simply wished for one more day with you
Later in the night, I meet a psychic, who begins to follow me. She predicts, though I try not to listen, that I am about to have a child. I tell her what a bad psychic she is, that I'm sterile, that I'm castrated. I tell her not to follow me. Wherever I go she's on my heels, adding details to her prediction. Behind concrete pilings, three turkey necks sprout from the manmade beach. Each neck has one turkey head attached, broken; the third neck has two. One beak is aimed at the moon, half-obscured behind thin, elevated clouds. It is opening wide, as if it would eat it, but as the moon goes down the bird begins to choke. The birds appear to be saying, "Are you my mother?" In its place my brown eye is half-obscured; my heavy eyes are shutting, rolling away, until a baby beak pulls them out, and then it becomes "eyeball," full in four quarters, with the silhouette of a small, mustached face. There are gnats surrounding me; my head itches in a buzzing cloud of horseradish.