Part I: Subterranean Homesick Alien
Chapter 1: In which Victor Noriega becomes re-acclimated
All Hallows Eve, 2001, 7:00 p.m., Victor Noriega, sporting an old vintage hand-me-down, red-paisley shirt, desert boots, and a pair of Levis, topped with a black Russian-fur hat, strode across the street towards Halloween festivities up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For someone with his mind in a daze from being on shore-leave, he sure had social-democratic sentiments worn on his face. For, when he was back in native soil, he always wore the usual demeanor of his political platform. The effrontery of passive revolution, almost like a pseudo-Darwinian Marxism, was possible only through his mental capacities. He was a gradualist at heart. This lack of speed was in the pace of his walking, a slow, languid polecat strut across the street traversed galactic centuries of many dimensions in his head…He took his time. ‘Can you just believe the ears on that guy,’ he heard someone say within the sidelines of his reality like the esoteric mumbling of an ascetic monk in the form of commerce, completely dismissed. Capital makes everything incomprehensible, he thought to himself. And—right then and there—he became human. Because for him (or anyone for that matter) to become human, he (or anyone) must negate the properties that make up non-humanity. But what is human nature, he thought to himself. What does it mean to live? I don’t know, America. Fuck you and your atom bomb, he thought. Always answers. Never for the right reasons. Strictly, this is for production boys. If you continue your selfish dribble into the dogmatic hysteria of a paranoiac daydream, you might find yourself liberated from the noises of exchange. Maybe even into the depths of oblivion, posthumanism, slouching towards Blade Runner…android apocalyptic visions stir in the foreground of Noriega’s heightened sense of awareness that was increasingly becoming unmanageable in terms of the neurosis it induced and spread across his psyche like the splattered drips of an Abstract-expressionist painter gone mad.
'Just one New York Times, please,' he said to a newspaper vendor on the street, under a magenta umbrella covering a rectangular contraption with furniture legs, attempting to snag the morning news he missed earlier. Headline: “New York in Depression!” Pictures of fallen buildings. The Crack of Doom on the Hydrogen Jukebox adorned across skyscraper windows heats the atmosphere. People run. Where they are off to, no one knows. Does anyone? They whisper to each other over the consequences. What does it mean to live? Ambulances rush to glory: arrival. A fateful day with nothing to do but listen to the city in upheaval over the vinyl drones of a phonograph emanating the new Mercury Rev album, hiding in quiet desperation for a different reality that will never coming like some Messianic vision atop Mt. Olympus with the Grecian urn spilling pitches of sound that reverberate across your eardrums, and, in the end, destroy the Will to Power bending you towards formal and real subsumption. When will it end, he questions his reality to himself. Although, the memory and the idea of the question soon fade in the tourniquet of his mind; ideas, yet, are bulletproof. And, soon, he’ll be plagued again. Sequestered into a zone of modulation between the key of bliss and the scale of melancholia. History is a dream I’m trying to revoke as a nightmare in which I live in the present like a translucent phantasm haunting the night. Explosive camera angles capturing the moment of cataclysmic disaster.
‘That’ll be two bucks, sir,’ retorted the vendor. Noriega fixated his gaze. ‘I said two bucks, sir,’ he repeated, waiting for Noriega to snap back into reality. Hallucinatory spells of death and destruction. Cataclysm. The Falling Man. Noriega broke from his waking nightmare up and handed over two dollar bills. Then, he continued his stroll.
And, here he goes, passing up someone dressed like an African voodoo priestess trailing incense from a golden chalice in the middle of a busy New York street, periwinkle afro-hair sported in a styled tilt. There was a man inspecting her bosom as she took each step forward, and aware of him, kept on into the distance away from Noriega towards the fiery sky where the sun was setting against an atmospheric backdrop of psychedelia a la Mother Nature. A police officer continued to beat up a ruby-red fire-hydrant, that caused, in the end, hydro-explosive results. The city was in upheaval from the past month, still. When was the next attack? Everyone wonders, but no one says anything. He passed up the financial districts of the City. All these buildings, he thought, iron queens of steeled edifices laced with cemented labor, all metals twisting upward like effervescent vertical snakes, crisscrossing, here and there, to lay a foundation of support in order to build levels that stretch into the forlorn territory of Eden. He had to decide quick. Where to go? When to leave? No where to see except up! The fiery dynamo in the machinery of night; that great big cloudy mist of smog, the burnt-down rubble puzzled together like massive pyramids of decaying rust, bloody metal, and misc. body parts splayed apart in arbitrary configurations. Entropic.
It came down like a clash of lightning against the amethyst sky. There is no way out. The circus of destruction has begun, while they line up over archways, looming overpasses of fallen highways into the depths of chaos whispered to the denizens below in the form of mantras buzzing pitches of terror from the vertical distance above, and down into their sullen ears. It was a cluster of iron. Trestles with ornamental decay details the nature of its dilapidation. And they continued to look above in awe and fear. The UFO continued its downward trajectory. It was clearly going to crash. Not another one they think to themselves. Everyday, a new apocalypse. The world renewed like a newborn baby. A knotting into the phenomenon of intergalactic terrorism. All of it: the end of the line. Everywhere, desiring-machines coupled to the energy of production caught in the sarcophagus of capitalism, the cyclopean mode of production that formally and really subsumes the human condition into bi-functional relations between freedom and acquiescence. Women screamed. Men, dazed in the ambiguity of its presence, pointed and stared above. Wake up. Did I dream that? Another hallucination. What time is it?
He ran, but continued to take sideways glances above into the periphery of his coordinates…
