“I’m sorry, Mr. Copeland, but it was a computer error. There were two room listings for 400 when they’re should’ve been only one.”

“You can’t blame the computer, it’s a dumb machine. Someone in your department created two listings or entered the number twice. The computer didn’t decide to get it wrong. And that’s your department’s problem. And since you’re speaking with me, that makes it your problem. And if you can’t do anything about it, then you need to put me in touch with someone who can.”

And now, modern reader, can you guess what happened next? Yes! The geometric modern trajectory of phone calls, forms and hierarchies pulled Gene Copeland ever onward from office to office, building to building, hold song (“Dancing in the Moonlight,” King Harvest, 1973) to hold song (“Belero” Maurice Ravel, 1928) until he landed at last, in front of an old factory building. He’d won, yes, because he would not have a roommate in this place, but then, had he really won? The site of the industrial-era leviathan caused him to hear the faint shoomp sounds of pneumatic tubes and wonder to himself if we were really any better off.

Gene shrugs. Fair enough.

He looks up from the world of his notebook and out into the world that he is trapped in, one in which there really is a train wailing and rumbling along. In Louisville, most of the cars are massive hollow beasts, big enough to fit trucks in, and drilled all full of holes. If you turn your head in synch with them as they pass, sometimes you can see the contents, but that they are hollow makes them wince and complain all the more as the metal bounces and shifts. Without weight to settle them, too, they bounce around like unruly elephants in a line never letting go of the tail in front of them with their trunks. From his pile of busted limestone—the same responsible for the filtered water that makes Kentucky bourbon grimace and take a long, deep breath—Gene looks to the rails that crisscross this rusty city more than maybe the circuits on any one of his machines. How strange, Gene thinks, to study the design of machines that will learn, that will think, in a city where the machines are already the bloodstream. He smiles at the rails, aforementioned train already in the distance, and then looks to the piece of graph paper in his lap. Life. Truth. His cheeks press up under the frames of his glasses as he whispers, “It’s an asymptote.” And you will never have the proof, no matter how long you live.

Having lost too much already, Erica and the baby, now fate lands him in the middle of a place where it seems the only sustenance that surrounds is the cold metal that oxidization thrives on. They call it the rust belt, this portion of America that the most despised (in Gene’s mind) Ayn Rand once proclaimed the glory of a United States broiling invention and spewing profit, a United States that would be rich on the back of laborers toiling beneath the gaze of rich men in top hats and not a United States that was yet to awake to destroying it’s fisheries, it’s livestock, plucking out the strings of that national guitar, the Mississippi delta, run dead with phosphates and fertilizer draining. If he was to work on the future, how was it to rise out of this smoggy darkness, punctured by poverty? How was a shining new Xanadu built of brilliant encoded pattern-recognition machines meant to ever rise above this simple kingdom of rust?

“Uh… right now?” Gene has just been listening to one of his favorite sounds gifted his apartment. When storms come in from the South, they inevitably cause the oversized lid on the art deco street lamp to clunk under its own loose weight. He liked to leave the door open as the winds kicked up. Hell, he liked to leave the door open to invite the storm inside; yes—for a cup of whoop-ass. That was the pleasure: open the door to the danger, let it come in. For him, the streetlamp had become a kind of novel bell; impending storm coming. She’d probably not even noticed it, he realized, her chin straining up to rest on his spine and shoulder.

“The thing is…”—how to put it—”I don’t want to fuck you while the storm is coming in…”

This is a way-bold statement for their budding relationship and he sees the surprise she can’t hide from her face. Had he said the word “fuck” in her presence yet even? He’d no idea. But her face is not marred by shock; it is genuine uncertainty he sees. He twists his neck around and smiles—nothing menacing here—and she giggles. Then he turns away from the screen door, the clunking of the street lamp, the sky split in half between bright blue and rolling gray, and wraps his arms around her. She lets him take her in and in her way, a way she hopes he notices, she presses her face against his chest and stares thoughtfully at the front moving across their little city. She does like storms that arise, too. He squeezes her and after a nervous breakthrough says, “I want to fuck you when the storm is here—when it’s banging on the windscreen, in full effect.”

She decides to play the straight man, “Oh, I see…”

He squeezes. “You know it.” He bends his head down and quiet, “You better think the storm is me.”

She leans back from him and waves her hand Scarlet before her face. “Oh goodness.”

He won’t live up to it, so he smiles too.

Shara sees the stumble and knows she must recover lust. “I’ll wait for that, you monster.” She waits, his face is creasing in a way that’s coming around, and then she adds, “You fuck me like the front of weather.” There’s a long pause of eye-looking and she adds, “I can’t predict the weather.”

But the weather is coming.

Of course, the road had an actual number, but this was not what he wondered. He saw a map of the United States, the world, in his mind. Like any particle of gas in a chamber, his path could be tracked and shown to be different from any other. There was a line that traced the northern hemisphere illustrating his striations and bounces and chaos. Surely no other human path could match it; snowflake indeed. He was unique and as the movement and dynamics of everyone he knew washed over his mind and he saw the mess of it all, he realized too that he was unique and meaningless somehow at the same time.

It did not bother him, this meaninglessness. It was never made real for him, not the vacuum wind of air being sucked out of the cabin of the truck where through the just-rolled down window he flicked his cigarette. No, the air was not the ghost. The air, for all its flora scent and beneficence, let him go, but the ghost followed him, rode in the car in the empty passenger seat. He knew it and knew it well and though sometimes it could seem cold, more often he bathed himself in the warmth and comfort of the anonymity of its missing. He knew well the insecurity of standing in front of people and talking and seeing in their faces their disapproval. He much preferred the knowing that if unidentified to anyone, he was never someone to be taken notice of.

“You will,” Gene says, as he looks up to eye the CCTV camera on the corner of the ceiling of the porch.

“Do you know someone who lives here?”

Gene looks slightly surprised, then looks around and shakes his head, “No.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not the point?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know anyone in this building, but I do know that they have a security system with the camera outside the front door and all and it makes them feel safe…”

“And?”

“Look, if you’re going to employ me in your services, you need to understand a very basic principle.”

“Okay.” When she says this, she tosses her hair over her shoulder, like she does just about every two minutes. And even though he sees it for what it is, he can’t help but helplessly watch as she does it. It’s a tick—the sign of a present irritant and at having to wait for his various obtuse “explanations.” Still though, he keeps tying the balloon to a rock, and tries to take a deep breath because every time she does toss her hair, little particles of sweet-smelling womanliness cast off into the atmosphere and he just has to catch a few. But he returns to reality after tying of the knot on the balloon string. He’s made the placement just right and the balloon floats up just in front of the camera, blocking its never-sleeping eye.

“See?”

“Uh… you blocked the camera.”

“Yeah!”

He wondered, as he looked as the tank cars, painted on with chemical yellow Helvetica letters patterns like “HKKX” and “LMTR,” what would happen if the worm tottered and fell to one side? When the tank cars fell on him in the strobed darkness, tipped and stamped like mad 2,000 pound pushing toddlers, would they emit foul chemicals or prove to be empty? In the asphalt beneath his feet he could feel a difference in the weight of cars that passed over gaps in the tracks. He could feel it in his ankles along with the ringing from the bells and slowly strobing red lights. All the sensations together felt heavy-handed and God-like compared to the digital slide presentations with their diagrams of neural perceptual systems that he’d seen only earlier in the day in a seminar. This was the sight, the sound, the feel of a proximity to chaos, no abstraction. How quaint the equation would’ve looked by comparison, with its smooth curves and network diagrams. His neurons were never meant to handle this level of intensity and he felt it in his brain. This was the sense, not the explanation, of things falling only proximately into order.

Then, a few empty hoppers traverse the intersection, their lack of freight or ore reverberating into the warm evening, and the whole mass dopplers into the distance, taking the chaos with it. Another moment and the lights and bells stop and Gene finds himself again in an empty intersection in an industrial part of town. It might as well be a parking lot. No one is here and the place grows more quiet as the train moves on. He smiles, the whole intense length having, in the end, been a moment of sign, of zen, no different than striking a gong and listening carefully to where the sound goes.

Yes, it replies. Look at the clothes you are wearing: a pea coat, a dark hat, spall spectacles, bell bottoms, black shoes. Should I go on?

Oh, indeed. Do go on.

Examine your sideburns. And “sideburns” in his head sounds like the weapon that shuts the case.

I see.

He does indeed see as he makes his way across the road and down the hill into Central Park. He shake’s his thought’s hand an lets it travel onward into silent impermanence. At any rate, he was certainly the same stuff as John Lennon and that thought was polite and so he let it linger. Once he sat in a subway station for two hours and just watched people going by.

Every day of the year his meandering bring him by the Dakota, though. And every day, every time of day of the year, there is a photographer, taking pictures of the spot where the man died. And no one photographs, Gene. So that’s the way it goes.

Now, seated in his armchair beneath the orb of yellow from his lamps, the space beyond called him. Here was the moment, the opportunity. Tinted indigo by the lights from the city, the darkness was no negative space, unfortunate for boundaries, but a place to play, a space to go.

Unpacked and even arranged as sparsely as possible, his belongings barely took up a sixth of the floor space of the second floor of the factory. If he stood at the northwest corner of the floor (his belongings being in the southwest corner) and watched the dying light of the sunset fall across the Ohio River and lightly tread through the dirty glass of the factory windows, the whole of his quiet life took on the tenor of a strange experiment—a human terrarium in progress. And it seemed a reflection of his own chosen study of cognitive psychology that he never arrived home at the end of the stairs, but instead made the long seventy yard walk to his “apartment,” gradually and feeling himself under some kind of alien observation.

Those seemingly smoke-infested sunbeams, broken only by unchiseled paint on the glass, as that light faded to black and shadow, he came to live in an orb of his own light, surrounded by space that seemed to call him. Other than the amber of his two corner brick walls, he was surrounded by dark space, shadow, and possibility.

“Hey you.” She smiles, slightly. “Everything all right?”

He can see the tears in her eyes. This was what, now, a week ago? Yes, on the bed beside him: a paper with the article he had been reading in disbelief.

Coney Goes Kooky

A new attraction may take Coney Island’s status from revered hispter/freak hangout up to the esoteric realms of the surrealists. Dubbed “Little Congo,” a new attraction, that has recently gained political endorsement from the Borough President as well as neighborhood businessmen, will be a drive through wild animal habitat housing up to two troops—nearly twenty-four—African Chimpanzees. The attraction will be one-of-a-kind in the world and actually has support from a large number of groups that would otherwise be politically at odds with one another. It would seem that strife and difficulty with poachers in the African inlands has made a plight of the Central African primate…

That she’d had anything to do with it hardly mattered compared with how she’d had anything to do with it. He wasn’t sure what paled more in comparison, her loss of resolve for them or for her own ideals. Either way, she was unrecognizable.