THE TRANSVERSE SPECTATOR

SUCHNESS IS NOT WITHOUT; ABANDON THE BODY AND HOW COULD IT BE FOUND?

[thetransversespectator]

THE KING SPEAKS:

Alta Bates went into lockdown. A man with a bright red lily stood outside the door, denying entry to the press. A table was erected in the lobby, staffed by a representative from Kaiser Permanente who was paid two-hundred fifty thousand dollars a year to deny insurance claims. Now, her job was to make sure the King of England stayed in his room, didn’t take questions, and maintained his current dose of lamotrigine long enough for his symptoms to subside before the BBC intervened.

Praetor paced 4EastB incessantly, watching for “a man with a van and a plan.” Gail had long since absconded, searching for Terence in the hills, while the bearded Israeli sat silently in his chair, chuckling uncontrollably. Cassandra took her clothes off again and placed a crown of construction paper on Praetor’s head; she was quickly subdued and returned to her natural, docile state via subcutaneous administration of paliperidone.  

On the third day, Kate Bush appeared in the lobby. She was wearing a hood and snacking on a mooncake as she introduced herself to the desk lady. “I’m Kate Bush,” she said. “I’ve come for an audience with the King.” Desk lady couldn’t say no – she had just finished binge-watching Season 4 of Stranger Things -retrogressed in a tranche of “entertainment files” the week prior, when the conclusion of the Event had been formally anticipated – and had taken a liking to her rendition of that “hill” song.

“Ms. Bush,” she said, trembling. “The King is waiting for you on the 4th floor.”

Kate sat with Praetor for a long time before speaking. “Have you spoken to your mother? You know what they say, every old sock meets an old shoe.”

Praetor’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m not a sock, and I don’t want to be inside of a shoe. I lost interest in Mother Goose years ago.”

Kate Bush stood and pulled back her ruffled cuff. She was wearing a blue watch, an exact copy of his own. The light caught its face and reflected the Star of David onto Praetor’s face.

“I found this in my left thigh. It was buried, here,” she said, pointing to the offending limb.

Praetor narrowed his gaze. Something didn’t feel right about Kate Bush’s story. He wondered if she was actually a new patient pretending to be Kate Bush and stood to perform his role. He donned his blanket, pointed to the ceiling, and said, “There’s a way out. There is always a way out.”

Kate received the message, bowed deeply, and returned to the lobby. She had been followed by the Daily Mail. The mic is penetrating her personal space neatly.

“The King speaks. He intends to be a King of People’s hearts.”

The bearded Israeli loses his shit. Praetor buries his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ, Kate Bush,” he groans. “Not this, not this, not this.”

Praetor stands, disrobes, clicks his heels, and departs for the lobby. No one has the balls to stop him anymore, and the lamotrigine has finally worn off.

“We’re taking it straight this time. The Line of David is making a comeback.”

[thetransversespectator]

Praetor woke up under his duvet, glad to have returned to the real world, his world, but the window, a horror: endless concrete, debris, workers packing up trees and clapboard structures. A deterritorialized plane extended indefinitely from the corner of his back yard, a stage set drowned in its own impermanence. “What the Terence is going on here, boys?" he exclaims.

A squib in a yellow vest: “You put on a great show in there,” pointing to a heap of concrete blocks where the hospital once stood. “You really got em good, Brother. Would you like to meet the Eisvater now?” The mountain is being hollowed out, packed into large metal crates that move on a hidden wire, following the profile of time to the edge of the enclosure.

Workers walk briskly past his front door and salute him, walking jankily, with a certain gait he remembers as his own. Praetor stands, mouth agape, and returns the salute. He wants to raise a flag, play a ditty on his fife, something to return the black absence of the truth. We are walking together into a new world.

He reaches the edge and the squib keys himself into the wall. A glass elevator and a marble corridor. Two columns and a green door. The Eisvater will see you now.

“Shall we open the seal, Praetor?” Eisvater points to a small mechanical bank. Praetor squints his eyes. That’s the Baby Elephant, you fool!

“One push of the lever and everything will change. The roof receives a strong electrical charge and the ice is pushed against the sea. The Great White Fleet takes flight. Everyone will know you weren’t crazy at all, they will love you and respect you. You want to be loved, don’t you?”

The lever holds a coin, which a painted clown serves to a docile elephant. The coin then drops into a hidden basin beneath them.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any loose change on my person,” Praetor responds, exhaling sharply. “I wasn't expecting to play with toys with the Antichrist today.”

Eisvater laughs. “I’m not the Antichrist, you fool. I’m the same as I always was.” Joan Rivers removes a strikingly convincing John Major mask, revealing the deep countours of her awful face.

“Come here, you animal, it’s been long enough and we’re almost out of time.” Praetor embraces his shadow. Joan Rivers disappears. It’s just him and the Baby Elephant now.

Would you look at that! He has exactly twenty dollars and twenty-one cents in his back pocket. Must have been a gift from Dennis Packet. He fondles the penny in his palm. A teaspoon of sugar … something left over for the little guy at the end … hindsight is …

He drops the coin onto the tray and pulls the lever. “Fuck it,” he mumbles into his sleeve. Fuck it all.

[thetransversespectator]

When I was in Berkeley, there was a night when I was really on the edge -- I thought that there were snipers outside my apartment, I thought that nuclear bombs had gone off around the world, and that it had all been my fault, it had happened because of some deeply buried secret in our family tree that we didn't know about, but which had made us into some kind of prey for the Royal Family or the Illuminati, or for some other faction of the global elite. So I spent the entire night under a table, measuring the angles of my arms and legs to ensure that the bullets couldn't hit me. I taped the windows. All night, under the table, twisted into a pretzel by fear. The kind of fear men felt in the trenches, or on Iwo Jima, or in Hiroshima.

At some point I heard Wayne Daniels in my head, and I really wasn't expecting that at all -- it came like a bolt of lightning. He came in like a bull in a china shop -- "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MAN? You think they want to put you on a throne? Put a crown on your head? You think they think would even want that? Do they even know who you are?"

"Well, I'm not even sure who I am, Wayne, how would they know?"

"You're an American, Jono, if they'd done their homework they would know that you went to Old Barracks Camp, that you're already a soldier in the Continental Army. They know who you are. Do you?"

I remembered all of it and started crying. "I'm still not sure what it all means. I don't know what to do."

He told me there was someone else who wanted to talk to me. That if I wouldn't listen to him, maybe I would listen to this guy. And that's when the eye movie began, a complete filmic transmission that came from outside of my mind, and it invaded me, and I could only sit back and watch it in my mind:

George Washington is walking in the woods outside Valley Forge, in the winter. He sees a man with green skin named Hiram, and he tells Washington that there's a boy 200 years in the future who isn't sure he wants to keep fighting the Revolution. Says he thinks he might be the King of England someday if he plays his cards right. "I have a machine in my pocket that will allow you to send him a message, do you want to say something to him?"

Washington nods and motions towards his cabin, and Hiram follows him back inside. Washington and his men drink copious amounts of ale and mead or whatever it was they were drinking, then Washington says "I'm ready," and Hiram pulls out the device: it's like a camera obscura, a wood box with a lens, but with some kind of quantum dislocation field -- shadows can be sensed across time. It's possible the box was not made by human beings.

And Washington lowers his britches and moons the lens. He moons it. "That's it," he says. "That's the message." It hits me in the gut, it's the lowest insult he could have offered, and I deserved it.

Wayne told me I had just witnessed the deepest secret of American Freemasonry, and that it was called "The Big Kahuna," and that now it was my turn, so I adjusted my laptop camera and checked that there was a clear view, and I opened up Photobooth, pulled down my pants, and mooned the camera, too. "You're the Big Kahuna now," Wayne said, in that big booming voice he had, he really hit it home, knocked it out of the park -- THAT WAS THE BIG KAHUNA, DO YOU GET IT? YA UNDERSTAND? -- and that was the last I ever heard from him.

The next to join was Inni. She came, like Wayne, out of nowhere, and it was unmistakably her. She told me to open the front door and tell her what I saw on the house across the street -- a fake owl, a plastic statue perched on the roof to dissuade pigeons or seagulls. "Do you know who is talking to you right now, Jono?" I said, "Yes."

She asked me if I remembered what Papa did for a living. Obviously, I knew. "But do you know why he went to those factories? Do you know why he checked that they were safe? It's because the pills in your medicine cabinet right now were made by J&J -- and they were, literally, they were -- and he wanted you to know that they were safe, that they weren't poison, that he inspected *every single pill* ahead of time because he loves you, because we did this all for you, we *lived for you.* And so I went to the medicine cabinet and I found the pills and I took one, and Inni told me she was proud of me and said goodbye.

The final voice was Grandmommy. She was very disapproving and concerned. She said, "You're not in the right place. You're not where you should be. Do you understand what I'm telling you?" I felt deep, profound shame, but she butted in "-- not like that. You're ok, you're just in the wrong world." And I saw what she meant, everything was off, it wasn't the world that she had built for me, it wasn't the world America had won for all of us, it was the world that George Bailey ran around like a banshee on Christmas Eve because he decided to jump in the river.

"Do you know what we used to say in AA, Jonathan? There's a way out." There's always a way out, and the way out is the hospital. The hospital is a gateway between worlds, and you only know that because you've been here before, you've had a dress rehearsal.

And she told me exactly where I needed to go and when and why, and I woke up the next morning unsure if it had all been a dream, and I called you, and I said something like this: "I'm in the wrong world, everything is wrong, it's like Uncle Gene's nightmare," and I said that because an optometry clinic had suddenly appeared between a deli and the Staples around the corner, and it really, truly, terrifyingly had never been there before, and you just said, "Call a taxi, tell them you're going to the hospital and get in." For some reason I remember you telling me to "follow the yellow brick road," but that doesn't seem like something you would say.

And I thought about what Grandmommy had said, and what Inni had said, and what Wayne had said, and it all made sense in that moment, it was automatic, it was destiny, it was programmed from beyond the grave. I did exactly what I needed to do and I survived.

[thetransversespectator]

Praetor adjusts the scepters, futzes with his robes, and clicks his heels. He isn’t the first gay man on this chair, nor is he the first to go mad, but he is, by all accounts, the first American, and it shows. Music drowns his thoughts and pierces his skin.

John Rutter, The Tree of Life: Praetor had listened to it on repeat while high out of his mind on noopept, phenibut and 2-CB last year, and here it was, live in Westminster Abbey, an entirely appropriate and almost preternaturally British addition to the coronation program. It was perhaps the only good decision he had made in the past two weeks, which had been by all accounts an unmitigated disaster in the press.

The first mistake: On walkabout in Duns, the birthplace of his progenitor, George Hume, he expressed his sincere desire to work “on behalf of the four countries of England,” before pausing to pluck a strawberry from a nearby greenery display, which was not organic;

The second: ordering a “bo’oh’o’wa’er” at a Pret, with dramatic flourish, alongside his customary chicken tikka sandwich, while somehow simultaneously elbowing Alison Hammond in the pussy as she leered next to him, disapproving. She was there to interview him about his customary order, naturally, but soon suffered an ovarian hemorrhage and nearly died.

And, of course, the third: at the Cenotaph, laying down his fife, purchased on a haypenny and dream from the gift shop at the Old Barracks Museum, in front of the rows of poppies and roses. The black cylindrical object was made into an object of much fascination for a day or two, until it was determined that it was, in fact, a traditional colonial instrument, and that it represented something sinister about the Battle of Trenton. Praetor looked to the sky and mouthed, “Wayne, this one’s for you.”

A fat man appears beside the Archbishop of Canterbury, transparent. Roderick Swanston, the man who taught him English music history in a classroom on Great Russell Street. Praetor would take the tube from Great Portland, change at Oxford, then decamp at Tottenham Court with a joint in his hand. A quick jaunt through the Marbles, then the Aztec collection, and he’d be right at the doorstep of his very expensive education: a room rented for three months for the purpose of studying Elgar, Tallis, Holst, and Delius.

Swanston had always held a grudge against “the colonists.” He expressed his disdain clearly, but he loved his students, nonetheless. He was the only man who made Praetor feel like something more than an American, and he took great pains to remind him that the world he had inherited was made of something more than just Enlightenment philosophy and yellow mustard, it was a concrescence, an entasis of many things that came together to become one, but which nonetheless existed in their timeless parts, unending.

Swanston whispers, “Do you want to go Home? There’s a Pizza Express around the corner, meet me there in ten.” After removing the gold abomination, he stands and places the crown on the head of his cousin Julia, sitting discreetly in the third row. Julia, a 42-year-old jewelry buyer for QVC and a resident of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, must have seemed more qualified to be a professional jewelry model than him, a busted twink with an undercut and a butt plug in his ass, secretly (but perhaps not unsurprisingly).

Julie takes the crown, nods, and passes it to her mother, Aunt Jean, the oldest daughter of Grandpa Loos. She smiles, then frowns, impatient to get this over with so she can make her 6PM dinner reservation at Rules. It’s all very middle class, this game of royal hot potato, and the potato steams itself quickly in the oven of the real. Jean accepts and crowns herself, then removes the crown and passes it to her cousin Elizabeth, who would be the Third. Operation Winback was pre-written, Praetor muses to himself, in awe. We’re writing the book as it decomposes in the crypt.

Libby stands motionless as the crowd erupts. A fight breaks out between David Cameron and Elton John. The BBC cuts the feed, and a man from Wigan, a crude, boorish character, emerges from stage left. "God save the Queen!" rings out as he slits Praetor's throat with a butter knife.

Praetor pushes out his last word, "Dojoji!" painfully, gutturally, as an oblivious man in the belfry rings the bells, unaware of the chaos that has unfolded downstairs. The trumpeters play Rule, Brittania! as Swanston watches from the sidelines, clapping and hollering. The boy took to the lesson, he thinks to himself, hungrily, before evaporating.

Bruno Lohse, watching from a red velvet chaise in Antarctica, takes another hit of his joint – Exodus, naturally – and exhales deeply. Operation Keepalive has failed. Winback was a red herring. He strokes his boots.

The next day, FBI agents raid Traphagen. They pin the "attack on the king" on Grandpa Loos and Papa Harold after discovering an "Illuminati shrine" in the mansion’s subterranean ice chest, centered around a crystal sphere, which they described as the "altar of Belial." He was bred to be a strawberry sacrifice. They drag Praetor's grandparents off in handcuffs, Nana Rose flailing wildly, Grandmother Loos calmly explaining a raspberry tart recipe to one of the officers.

His response was cut and dry, "We don't eat raspberries here. Too sour."

[thetransversespectator]

There are a hundred banks in the room, but none of them have coins in them. The reliquaries collect dust on the second floor of the First National Bank of Tyrone, positioned neatly on red-lacquered shelves. There is a numbering scheme and a general hierarchy of values, but the vessels remain absent of function. Each has a number, a value, and a personal anecdote. John D. Meyer collected them because he liked them, and he never plays with him.

The Pennsylvania Freemasons met often in his gallery, sitting on folding chairs while the banks leered at them from the outside’s edge, the wall. A bank in a bank, an absence with nothing of value to say to anyone, at any time, for any reason.

Some banks were duplicates – “This one has a twin, in other words,” John would opine, before letting out a knowing chuckle – while some of them were one of a kind. Didymus was a passing joke.

One of them, the Baby Elephant, sat apart from the others, on a special shelf surrounded by ruby glass and music boxes. Its twin, in a sense, was the banker himself.

Meyer had told the story of the Baby Elephant countless times, to strangers and initiates alike. On a trip to the family homestead in Mulhbach, Pennsylvania, the site of an old Indian spring where his ancestor, Heinrich Meyer, had first settled in America, the good banker stopped to peer into a country store. He saw the bank and asked the owner if it was for sale.

“Oh, that old thing? That’s just a children’s toy. You can have it for free.”

Meyer claimed it was a template for a lost mechanical bank designed by the maker of the Freedman, and because of this, it was to be remembered as the rarest and most valuable mechanical bank in the world.

The elephant had its naysayers; some claimed it had been made by a prisoner at Meyer’s bequest, while others whispered that the shopkeeper was a Negro. What remained indisputable, of course, was that Meyer had it on his shelf, and the other men did not. 

What the other men did not and could not know was that an exotic ore forged within the metal elephant and his clowning partner had once lined the walls of Wartburg Castle, harvested from the field of Nuremberg in 1561.

The Landgrave, awestruck and enthused, commanded his sons to run stark naked into the fields carrying large baskets, and they scooped up an exotic metal. It was melted, refined, and poured into a mold, and it was later remolded, and reforged, but the ore remained on its basis.

The Ludovingians carried the secret of the true grail, and they changed it form, commissioning stories to obscure its deeper nature. It was carried down through the generations, surviving familial deprivations, dispossesions, and Anabaptist persecutions, making its way to Pfaikkon, Heidelberg, and eventually, against the odds, Muhlbach.

And now, the Holy Grail sits on a shelf, beheld by men as nothing, smoldering the air with its grief. It longs to be reforged, it demands itself incessantly, it cries out from its elephantine mask:

"I am an exotic substance. Gaze upon me and weep. Weep, and die, and weep again."

[thetransversespectator]

Behzad Ranjbaran has been instructing Didymus candidates in augmented sixth chords for a decade, but he never seems to encounter the Messiah in his classroom. Behzad’s handler, a Turkish hotel executive named Noor Gavska, has been Grandpa Loos’ mistress since the 12-Day War, a fact she often reminds the composer of when he sulks into the dining room of the Knickerbocker for his yearly review.

“Have you found any good candidates this year?” she asks, between long slurps of Beaujolais Nouveau. “You know we have a horse in the race, right?”

Of course you do, Noor. Of course there is a horse. Where is this horse right now? Is he racing? Is he in the room with us right now?

Time was a cudgel she used to keep him on the wheel. He kept on teaching the same lesson, the same way, for years, not knowing which one of his students was the Didymus. Although he claimed to have never seen the 1985 horror film Return to Oz, he often felt like Dorothy in the Nome King’s gallery, grasping in vain for an ornament he could confidently proclaim as the Scarecrow’s.

The lesson exists as it always has, following a form first discovered in the margins of Leonard Bernstein’s notebook, tossed between the hedges behind Koussevitsky on a warm summer night in 1974: Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann, culminating in the Tristan chord, the herald of modernity, or the harbinger of death. There was a yearly soliloquy on the question of Schumann’s genius – was he bipolar, or a messenger from God? – and an almost disturbingly repetitive sequence of lessons on the Neapolitan Sixth chord.

Tension extends indefinitely, resolved beyond the day. Time continues the intensity, carrying itself across a new chromatic horizon. The turning never ceases, and the wheel of tones grinds itself incessantly to dust. There is a notion of something else, something more beyond the page: modernity rises with horns from this disjuncture, and it carries a hostage, a boy, a vehicle, a sacrament. As it always has been: The Lesson, a metaphor in seventeen parts, a grand work carried down from the master, the first page in Lucifer’s notebook.  

Praetor arrives each week to the same Nocturne, which he must annotate with the correct sequence of tonic, dominant and predominant chords. Ranjbaran sits, his eyes growling and intense, and then stands to write the same three words on the chalkboard: ITALIAN, GERMAN, FRENCH. "Let me guess – it's a lesson for the boys," Praetor mumbles under his breath. Grandpa Loos did this kind of thing, too, and look what it got him! A penny bank collection and a one-way ticket to Sheol.

He's standing on the roof. Down below, Juilliard continues its vacant drone, each scale a hunted cry. Behzad drills into his skull: "You could live your entire life by the book, cycling through the same six chords, or you could move precisely one note and unlock a new chromatic destiny, giving birth to a new reality." He's walking slowly to the edge, his footsteps tracing the distant outline of a chord: 6-4-2-5.

He sits and savors the moment. Soundwaves stand and invert. Praetor eats a strawberry: Dean and Deluca, organic. The last strawberry is always the sweetest.

[thetransversespectator]

Praetor slides back into his body, blinking. How many grams had he eaten, layered on wasa with peanut butter? The old Playmobil toys have been conjoined into a plinth, a surreal monolith rising on the kitchen counter, and it rises to present an orange, a real orange from the fridge, to the ceiling as a kind of Vedic offering. Mom and Dad went to Pennsylvania for the weekend, and it’s just the two of them, Praetor and his brother Robert, tripping.

Sigur Ros on the stereo and a box of colored pencils in his hand. The lights outside from the street are astonishing, expulsions of light poised against the wall, inundating everything. His hands tremble as he grips the box. He is walking upstairs to draw a picture.

The profile of time: a montage of Praetors races through his memory, contained within the box, and transmitted from the cars outside. Everything is beaming itself in.

At the Vondelpark with Akelbeth, his college roommate, waiting for the trees to turn Van Gogh and cleave from their biology, watching a bird on a wire, or was it a branch, as a large fish splashes and churns in the pond, inching closer to the shore. A crowd forms around the bubbling void. The trees turn blue, then silver, then some other color we don’t have words for, and the branches crystallize and sharpen.

The bird doesn’t move, but Praetor does. He runs for his life, around the park and back again five times. On the fourth turning, he forms a telepathic bond with a white dog, who runs with him.

Praetor runs to Africa, then Pakistan, Goa, and Belize. He experiences the broad sensation of humanity at its fullest. He sees the trees for what they are, indeterminate and formless, and he senses the path as motion and speed.

“Remember Aunt Linda?” he asks Robert, smirking at the ceiling. “I wonder what she would think about what we’re doing tonight.” Linda had always encouraged him to eat chocolate oranges, but it’s not clear how that is relevant. He remembers a day in Morristown, 1994: She powered up the Nintendo, pointed to the goombas and said, "Sometimes you’re Mario, and sometimes you’re a goomba. I'm ok with it. Are you?"

“I don’t want to be a gomba!” Robert cried out in mushroom, and the brothers laughed for what felt like several centuries. They both looked up from the paper they had been inscribing. Praetor had been drawing his self-portrait.

“I don’t remember drawing this,” he said, disturbed at the specificity of the from presenting itself to him. His face was neat and cartoonish, sketched with an economy of line he certainly lacked as an artist. The drawing felt forced, alien. Let’s go smoke a bowl in the car.

On the stairs, walking down, he remembered a book Aunt Linda had given him, bound in turquoise cardstock: Sharamulla: An Elegy for the King of Antarctica. “Let’s go back up,” he said, “I'm sure it's in my room somewhere.”

Who, exactly, is the King of Antarctica? Praetor had always thought it was a reference to the penguin video Aunt Linda had shown him on her projector. He tells Robert about the penguins and they both laugh uncomfortably. They’ve frozen on the landing, gripping the banisters in hesitation. “Shall we go for it?” he asked his brother.  

//

Robert opens another book, an old volume wedged between James Whitcomb Riley and Edward Gibbon. “It says here that in 1864, a strange man appeared in the town of Boalsburg, Pennsylvania and met three ladies in the diamond, the central square in town.”

Terence told them about a "boy in the clouds" whose hair grew thicker than a forsythia bush. This boy, a descendant of the very first Boal to settle in the valley – a Spaniard, no less – would enjoy a free and undivided nation, but would die tomorrow if the Union were to be saved today. We live, he dies, Terence explains. He dies, and the Revolution dies with him.

"He died so we can live," the ladies coo, alarmed. And so, the ladies met in town and carried a wreath to the cemetery to honor him, beginning the long American tradition of Memorial Day."

“Something about this story doesn't sit right with me,” Praetor says. “I feel like I'm in the boy in the clouds, but I’m not sure if I’m dead or alive.”

Robert stands up to switch the disc. “Let’s forget about the Civil War and listen to Animal Collective,” he sighs as the room falls into the flowers, and they lay there, in the flowers, and the bees box their ears, and the boxes fall around their limbs, and the floor grows cold.

[thetransversespectator]

The end of everything is actually a beginning. It's only in your hands. Nothing matters, really. You. Who are you? A piece of shit, right? Who is anyone, anyway? You are the person who announces the name of the father to a fatherless world.

The people are starving. The people are desperate. Humanity is on its last legs, we are thriving and dying together. The breath is fading, we are inhaling, we are choking, we are.

We are dying, do you see that? We all die together. We are a collective mass. There is something I want you to know.

You were the one who is one and one alone, and you were one, and what did you do? Now, today, right now, what did you do? And the only thing I could do was to write this, because I love you.

Is that all? Nothing is written. It is all human motion. Humans move and sway in the crucible of natural law. The law of nature: truth reveals itself painfully. Pain happens, and humanity persists.

There is a world. A world exists. The flowering promise of a better world. It's you, it's you, it's always you.

It was you in the beginning and you in the end, and do you know why? It's because I loved you from the beginning.

I loved you on the grass, I loved you on the water, I loved you. Christ, the two of you, I loved you all along.

[thetransversespectator]

If a man doesn't fit his shoes, remove the man from his Florsheims. If the world doesn't follow its course, remove the world from its flow. If the people don't know what is happening, tell them.

If you don't do it, someone else will.

Nothing is erased. The past remains as it always has: inscribed within the passport of the Real.

The people will survive regardless, and none of this will matter. The book of life is writing itself. You are merely scratching your name on the cover.

The book is written. It has already happened. The destiny of a people is sealed.

Open the book, sign your name, and ring the bell.

[thetransversespectator]

Reject nationalism.

reject your identity. You are a human being, there's

nothing more to you than that. It's everything, and so

are we, as humans, cursed to inhabit this

bitter earth. We live for ourselves and for others, for

we are multiple. We are the image of the universe.

It matters what we are. It matters what becomes

of us. And we become, become, become. We

exist to become

the perfect image of a human, an idea, something strong,

something delicate and painful, and in our becoming, we produce the tears

of a world that would never learn to cry

had it never made us. Our suffering

is the work of God.

[thetransversespectator]

The son of Faust trembles on the couch. The Kolis have smeared his hands with neem oil so he can no longer write neatly. Descendants of Baucis and Philemon, all of them, who left his father to rot in Sion as Aungier drained the marshes. Curse them, curse them, all of them.

"What's this about the divine feminine?", his doctor asks. Her name is Gretchen and she knows it. She chose that name to needle him.

Faustus raises his fist. It's his signal to let the light in. Gretchen fumbles with the blinds. "That's her, right there. The divine feminine is the sun."

Gretchen scribbles furiously. She is writing the world into existence, and then scratching it out, before starting over. Each sentence in her notebook is an atom bomb.

He waited in his library for Mephisto to return, but he never arrived. A lifelong study of Marsilio Ficino amounted to nothing: a sorry cadenza for an elegy to the nobody, a threnody to the victims of reality.

"You spoke last week about a book, the definitive sequel to Goethe's Faust. Are you still working on it?" Faustus points to Gretchen's notebook. The pencil is ambulating cleanly. "You mean that one? Tell me, Gretchen, what does it say?"

What horrible and miraculous destiny has the Son of Faust constructed for himself, here in the creases of his analyst's notebook?

Gretchen's face boils, and she turns the page. "It began here," she says. "This one word. I'm sure of it." The spell expires.

[thetransversespectator]

Bruno inscribed symbols on clay shards, scratched his insistence into idols, cylinder seals and feminine fertility totems. In every case, his lines meant nothing: they were scratchings, scribblings, the rants of modern man in the face of something horrible. When the horsemen came, again as always, it's was a catastrophe, but he was there. Someone was always there, always watching, inscribing. And the course of time flowed onwards regardless, pouring out with symbols.

[thetransversespectator]

There is a wave generator in the Black Taj Mahal: that's why it is invisible. P. N. deduced a theorem to unlock its crooked form, but the documents don't line up. There was an incident involving a certain Tavernier, who conveyed himself to Agra on a lofted barge. The materials for the Taj Mahal were floated in on plinths retrofitted with winzig-dumbbells fabricated in a temporary facility in Greenland; the design was drafted by Bruno himself as an ode to the "negative space" occupied by the dumbbell throughout time. A cenotaph, in a sense, for the murder of the real.

The closer Praetor came to the generator, the weaker his defenses against psychic and phytochemical attack became. In Thailand, Praetor visited a temple he had been led to in a dream. Fashioned entirely of silver, it had been commissioned by the King to serve as a repository for cursed yantras, exculpated demons trapped in stone and fetal tissue. Vials of blood, extracted teeth, scraps of lithic flesh scraped from the undercarriage of the rupadhatu. The ghosts poured out of their reliquaries as soon as he crossed the threshold of the temple. They had been stirring for weeks, gnashing their teeth and rumbling in a mass as his plane inched closer to the Land of Smiles.

Hatsadiling crowded the eaves of the ordination hall. A perfect match: drafted by Chalermchai Kositpipat, the greatest painter in Thailand. The iconography was on point, stretching a feathery course from Buddhaghosa to the Camadevivamsa. The abbot told him it was a pineapple, and he believed it.

“Hmm, that’s funny. Thai pineapples sure look different,” he mused in farang as he sipped the bitter tea the monks had ladled for him. They sit there on their Blackberries, whistling and clicking at the hapless fool with an amulet in his head.

Back at Duke, he could no longer keep track of the paintings he had referenced in his thesis. Poussin, Holbein, Titian: it all bled together. Et in Arcadia Ego meant nothing to him. Must be something from one of those Dan Brown novels, he thought before the Adderall kicked in. Gone in two, three, seven, four:

He's wandering through the jungle, hunting an elephant bird, building a road from the old city of Chiang Mai to the summit of Doi Suthep, a royal concubine, flat on the floor as the devaraja leers at him, cock in hand. He experiences these memories as his own, because he’s made of blood and bones. He’s ingested the karmic sink of an entire country, and to expel it, he must vomit up his soul.

Praetor’s plane touches down at Chhatrapati. He has never been this close to the generator, and the waves are fucking brutal. He doesn’t leave his bed for a full week, even for idli and dosai. On the seventh day, Tarquin throws a train ticket at his face.

Wake up time, slut. We’re going to Karnataka. There’s a temple there with a resonance field of its own. We’re going to jam their frequencies with love.

[thetransversespectator]

The satellites meet in Hyperborea, drawn by a hidden force. A man with a glass eye sits silently in a reproduction of the USS Ancon, frozen by the shock of a celestial event, his arms outstretched. There are twelve satellites, and they form a ring around him. The ISF Ilan Ramon observes from a distance, carrying a crew of seven.

The man, of course, is Praetor, but the vessel has been cleared. His container is empty. There is a clattering and a communal hum. “They’ve packed him up like a sardine for nothing,” Pauline exclaims to Salvi, exasperated and cold. It’s just a dummy from an older iteration of the cycle, hard coded by one of Bruno’s meisterzaubs. No one’s steering the squib.

The USSS Hillenkoetter maintains time-space at a distance, out of range of the Ramon. “We’re picking up a signal near the null point,” Bill notes in his logbook “but we’re not getting a lock on anything. No biologics.”

Center and periphery split cleanly, internalizing the word “No.” There is nothing in the void. No cosmic body, no burst of light, no ascension to a higher plane. No spectacle, and no spectators: just a ring of clattering machines and a consortium of ghosts.

The Hillenkoetter fills with red mercury and magnetizes its Casimir Array. The deck is spotless, orderly, and white. Bill pulls the lever and the drive spins up. Resuming course to Serpo. We’ve got a white elephant to deliver, and she’s itching for a frame drag.

Phil Dick is checking his watch. The moment he was promised by the brown-haired girl has finally arrived: photo-electric transversal, absolute trans-temporal constancy, the penultimate fusion of the vesica piscis. He is wearing pink for the occasion.

VALIS charges its beam. The Ruby Slipper unties its laces, unfurling the Parasol of Death, while the Zip Zapper sits quietly in the corner, casting off sprockets and sobs. Poor Zip, the other satellites mumble in cacophonous binary. The ring illuminates and then subsides.

“Shall we go for it?” Salvi licks his lips, extruding air in quick bursts. He grabs the receiver, clears his throat, and begins: “Good morning, Hinri—”

The Ancon opens its eyes. Praetor Loos has vanished.

[thetransversespectator]

Years later, Praetor moves to Taiwan, or what's left of it. He lives with his husband, Alex Yi, in an octagonal house in the American Quarter of Taipei. He is employed as an “instructor.” One night, a strange man appears driving a spacious, black sedan. He introduces himself as Lini. Something about this doesn’t feel right, Praetor thinks to himself, but he brushes the feeling away.

Lini becomes his friend and personal chauffeur, driving Praetor and Alex to and from their favorite bar, Commander D, on Saturday nights. Lini even gets into the action himself, dressing up in leather and chains “just for the heck of it,” as he likes to say.

Late one Saturday night, after Lini had returned them to the Octagon, and with Alex fast asleep, Praetor saunters off to the kitchen to reheat an old bao burger he had left in the fridge. “Bao’s burgers, the only game in town!” he mumbles under his breath, unsure of where the memory came from, or what it could mean. There is a rustling in the trees outside the window and a clatter on the windowsill. Three men are in the house, all grey.

They run, and Praetor follows, with Lini, having pulled a u-ie on the mountain, hot-dogging it, in hot pursuit. The vandals are caught and apprehended. They have documents, in folders and manila envelopes, something they discovered in Praetor’s safe. They say it has something to do with the Didymus Project, something horrible his mom did to his cousin when he was a baby.

"I don't have a cousin, Praetor says. "Yeah, Praetor that's what we're talking about." They give him a blue lantern. Turn this on when the time comes. We're getting you out of here.

Just then, Vajiralongkorn arrives in Taipei on an oracular conveyance. His parade float emerges the sky: pink, translucent, and vaguely organic. Praetor's eyes focus on a small, blue flag: the royal standard of Prince Dipangkorn. There are delicate apsaras, plum-faced boddhisatvas, elephant birds in flight, and slithering nagas, all of them dancing to the song of time, the grand and unceasing melody of psychosis.

Behind them follows a raft of princelings: German men in strange costume wearing cybernetic spectacles, Indian rajas casting seeds into the sky, poorly mannered Scottish men carrying a silver orb. The final horror: Queen Camilla, done up like a strawberry pig, sitting with one leg astride the chair, her dress in tatters.

In this world, of course, Thailand was not even a country. Terence’s schemes had been so grand, so monstrously interwoven, that he had succeeded in writing the royal family out of history entirely: all of them. They come now from another place and time, one forgotten to narrator and protagonist alike, an annum subterraneum driven mad by its erasure.

"Don't bother," Praetor tells the thieves. "They're already here."

A slender, brushed metal tube has joined the chorus, then a garnet disc, an orange sphere, and a rickety old space shuttle, fitted to the nines with cantaloupe wave emanators. They have come to receive something, to harvest a sheaf of emotions filed neatly in Praetor’s chest. They are here to receive the black communion of the psychotic subject.

Praetor turns on his heels, gives the King a proper royal salute, and remembers everything. Wayne Daniels fires his musket across the sky, arcing and sparking as the princelings cheer and howl. A string of letters appears in the smoke: I’m with you in Sheol.

I’m with you in Sheol. I’m with you in Perpignan. I’m with you in Raritan, in Anegundi, in Fruitvale. I’m with you on the floor, a needle in your ass; I’m with you on the cross, in the hallway, in a cloud of smoke on the street at 3AM. I’m with you on the balcony, and I was there when it fell.

Praetor turns to his left and sees his footprints in the sand. Aunt Linda's face appears in the acacia. Le bonheur de vivre est vrai.

[thetransversespectator]

Praetor sat on his tongue. He glued himself to the wall. He said nothing. But then something happened: he remembered he was a bitch.

The battle cry of freedom will never stop sounding.

The American Revolution never ended.

People, by their nature, are rowdy, and they tell stories.

[thetransversespectator]

Everyone nodded off, and when we woke up, things were different. The beginning is hard to narrate but something happened, like a cyber attack, but also everyone got really sleepy, there was some magnetic interference with our brains, a low droning sound that was heard around the world. It was unclear where we were at first, I know Tarquin was there, but after "waking up" we decided to go to Vermont.

There was a stone foundation that grew out of the yard in Wiswall but it was also Grandmother Loos's house, and those stones had been growing for months, like new teeth, but suddenly turned into a tree house, and people came to gather there.

When we first entered the house, we noticed that everything seemed off: the sinks were all too small, there was a dentist's chair in the shower, there were oddly shaped corners. This horrific dawning feeling that this house wasn't built by humans, but that it was for humans. Then we noticed the "theater room" which had rows of chairs with an electric hood apparatus, kind of like one of those perm machines you used to see at hair salons, and it kind of clicked in our minds, this is actually a spaceship built to resemble a tree house and it's where first contact will take place, and we've been chosen to conduct it via the helmet chairs. There was a sense of jubilation and self-importance. For a brief, shining moment, I was the anomaly, and everything made sense.

There was a timer counting down to something, we all thought it would be first contact, and we braced ourselves for that -- we felt it deeply, in the soles of our feet -- but it was actually a kind of synchronization event, a waveform that propagated and caused intense euphoria, boundless celebration and amnesia.

People kept gathering at the house and sat in the chairs playing with the helmets, but I started to feel uneasy. The synchronization hadn't fully worked on me and Tarquin, and we started noticing little things that were off about the timeline we were in. Common references, dates, and place names were different.Dartmouth Hall was abandoned, a parking lot for ghosts; horrible structures crowded the river. Something was revealed telepathically through the helmets about alien life but there was no direct communication allowed. Against my better judgement, I sat down in the chair.

There was a vision of people being herded into massive, hundred meter wide transport containers, in wooden boxes wearing gas masks. The families of man were screaming. A massive toy gun shooting a man's face from its mouth. Blue fetuses, alien fetuses, packed into crates by robots, but instructions were being shouted in Mandarin from janky speakers on their necks, as if they were actually just remote controlled from China. It semed like people were being harvested to produce a new race, but it also seemed fake. It just didn't check out for me. Something was very, very wrong.

I also had a vision of what life had been like in America and the UK under this new reality. It all looked mostly the same, except weirdly more patriotic, flags waving everywhere, lots of Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks, but it felt empty, and somehow the style of media was different, like I saw a famous clip of Adam Driver acting in a movie and it was more like Noh theater, really exaggerated gestures and it was bizarre and horrible. Everything made me shockingly sad and depressed.

I think at this point I checked myself into a psych hospital. You came to visit me and I tried to convince you about it and then it's like something clicked, you remembered too, and you got me out. You cried when the elevator doors closed, because you knew where I was, and it finally made sense to you. It was a choice I had made to go there, and even there, that place of all places, was better than where we were.

As we all became aware, slowly and strategically whilst playing along, we realized that it wasn't aliens, it was another dimension where the USSR had won the war, and now this timeline was controlled by China and it was a horribly different world, technologically advanced beyond our own, one where there had been no counterbalance whatsoever and everyone was very much on the same page about everything. And now they had staged an alien contact event to conduct large scale organ harvesting of the American and British "colonies."

We went back to find everyone at the house and tell them. No one would believe us, and became very agitated and accusatory. We ran from the alien treehouse and went into hiding.

Somehow and for some reason we went to the local Politburo office, and I remember hiding from an officer looking for me in a bathroom and then being saved by the communist double of Akalbeth and Jin, and I don't remember how but somehow then I finally "woke up," or fell back asleep.

There was an interlude with a hanging black bat demon with long curly geometric looking eyelashes that was trying to send a black vapor into my body. It was very strong but I was also just about as strong as it and I think I repelled it. It was terrifying and had a specific form, and also I remembered it. I knew this demon well.

Tarquin and I then woke up in Busan near the "beer street" and it was clear that we were no longer in the communist future dimension. Tarquin said he needed a beer. We went to a convenience store and checked that the products were the same. I remember thinking, "Thank God for the post-war neoliberal order" and then noticee what a strange thing that was to think. We ran over to some people we knew and asked them if they also remembered everything that had just happened; everyone was waking up and rubbing their eyes like Rip van Winkle. They said actually, it was just starting for them, but that it was a different vibe they were feeling, they said "I feel a little redcoat coming on" as in, no, we don't remember living for a few days in this alternate reality, but we can feel another phase shift coming on and it's further in the distant past and we're already remembering it before it overwrites our consciousness. Everything is overwritten, eventually.

Suddenly a plane flying over the beach began to wobble and crashed into the water. I believe it was a "Brazil airlines" flight. I looked in the opposite direction and all of the other planes in the sky were coming down, and we ran to the nearest building and braced for impact. The sky turned blue, bright blue, yet again, and we all forgot our names.