Uchromnesis [draft]
[not titled yet and incomplete speculative fiction]
1 A body is in trouble
A force through the Narcaine. I sleep green dreams, furiously. They said it would be black and I wouldn't sense a thing. No pinprick in movie cardboard backgrounds. No noise.
My cells hold taught struggle like broken bricks. I want to tell the paramedics I can hear them.
--
I am looking through a cameraphone at stormy Sydney sky. It's 1824 through the LCD screen. The Bronte Sisters come to me. Frankenstein is being sutured and de-sutured. I put down my phone. The sky's time stays the same. It's all very Caspar David Friedrich.
--
We walk through the crypt and live.
The sandstone slab of the altar. Chalice. Mutters are heard. You tell me it's dark in here. You're breathing funny. It's musty for me too. There are no symbols bar the smell of wet books and stone. The drip and the moss rise and fall. A spotlight with no source beams showing the dust as snow. You walk through the wall and I follow. I haven't told you I loved you since the last time I saw you.
--
Photos of you at Nelson Bay marina. A photo of us somewhere I can't say because you'd lose your job. It's not anything wild or illegal.
An electrical shock goes through my neck and shoulders. The partial image of you is passing through my ribcage. I can't tell whether the image itself is still or moving until I see you and recognise who you are. I can't tell these things yet.
The paramedics are talking. "Let's whack 'em again"
I want to laugh. The charley horses. Someone blabbed to the cops. I'm going to be escorted by Five-O as well when I can scream through this glass cage. I can't wait. That's my problem.
--
Wilted flowers are laid indiscriminately. Some are scattered in revolt. A globular stomach excavates away from the table. The fluoro lights of all the screens lapping through closed eyelids. I am being opened up. A nozzle sprays finely. The water is waking me but I am sick to puking point. All words in sensation. Every skin pore becomes an iron ring I breathe through. For this moment I am all surface. I can't feel me.
This injection feels like a big dollop of toothpaste through a surgical needle. Any purer and I'll OD with confidence and not many secrets. My flesh takes in the fluorescence. Under my eyelids is the multiscreen shimmer. They are rotating me on the table.
"Hold on. We're gonna mow this garden here. Get the clippers Lawrence."
The fluoro is freezing. How immortal and paralysed I'm becoming. Here, being held aloft by four wheeled legs. This stomach bloats. The skin has gone sheet blank. I am about 20ft tall. I am facing up taking in the sun or a ceiling fan in at a nondescript hospital.
--
2. Reassemblages
My liver is shot after all the harry, grog and drugs pumped through me. We know it can regenerate. My liver function is of a 64 year old. 20 years older than I am.
44. What's a number? I ask the doctor. "Inappropriate affect" she writes. 44 scares me as a visual and in numerology. 4 is Shi in Japanese. This is the same as death. Our number's come up. Twin sails in the sunset. Two axes. Graphene catamarans and slipstreams. Island life is worth living. Tropic of Paradise. My memories are isolated and quarantined.
An image of your tattooed torso is churning through my organs. I haven't seen you for a year. Outside, the sky is 1824.
A number is knowledge the clinicians are saying. A number is truth and selective. It's a metonymy from lines in the sand or the coastline itself lit by an aerial beacon by mappers. Somewhere's there is an interface. Nature is mathematics and bubbles forth from within.
A recursion. Spheres. Geometry in nature. Geometry as nature.
Perimeters begin to appear. I can hear every human that has ever lived hum in this corridor. I am being ferried.
