Exercises in Style (19 page)

iscera

This page was once plant material, crushed and sluiced and pressed
through a machine in a warehouse, the process looked over by a man plagued with
a skin flaking infection. The man, ankles swelling after the sixth hour on the
job to the point that he would loosen his damp shoelaces for some late-day
relief (the flesh pillowing over his yellowed athletic sock), would scratch the
pimpled back of his hand, his wrist and arm, so liberally that a veritable
shower of his necrotized flesh would sprinkle down upon the pages as they flew
through the pressing machine. The pages themselves, speeding by—printed on
which, the man could barely discern, were the story of a bus trip—became
infected with the particulate matter of his sores, wounds which wept in the
morning but after a hot afternoon in the warehouse had almost fully dried and
clotted. The man found such perverse relief in rubbing a particularly affected
spot on his forearm that his wet eyes rolled wetly back and his mouth dropped
wide, allowing a line of spittle to gather at his lip, roll down his chin and
over his stubble, and drop onto a speeding page, like a button sewn on a jacket,
immediately before its entrance into the oven, baking the genetic evidence of
his future demise (heart disease) into this very page, this page which you are
touching with your hands and which, the older this book becomes, will find its
way into a used bookstore after your death (heart disease) and become even more
likely to be touched by other hands, hands attached to bodies perhaps ill with
the flu, sinus infections, affected by the kind of solid mucus that moves out of
the body like a bus pulling out of a station, the empty seat waiting.

Amelia Gray

ssistance

I had printed a second sign, two feet by three feet, for a customer
who had told me over the phone the colors were all wrong on the first sign. I
agreed to print another and deliver it myself.

It was extremely crowded on the bus and everyone was in a bad mood.
I stood with the sign against my body, frightened someone would break it. Two
men, one with a ridiculous neck, were arguing, and the man with the ridiculous
neck took an empty seat. I mention this because I really could have used that
seat—the sign that leaned against my leg was being bent by a large man’s
stomach.

I was several minutes late to meet the customer at the coffee shop,
but he never showed up. I waited for half an hour. When I looked at the sign, I
noticed it was for an art opening at 7:00 p.m. The time had already passed.

While walking back to the bus stop, I saw the man with the
ridiculous neck from the bus again, talking with a friend of his about an extra
button on his coat. The friend was the customer. They were outside the art
gallery, dozens of people admiring the man’s ridiculous neck and placing bids to
caress it. I saw an empty easel outside the door, and unnoticed, put the sign up
and ran away.

Shane Jones

yberpunk

He jacked the passengerbus mainframe, but some interface residue
snizzled up his data stream slightly, reducing optic input to a distracting 5-D
glance at an idiot avatar with a comically distorted head-to-shoulders assembly
and spex-ribbon ringing his head like a doll’s bow. It more than figured that
68Gasm would parachute him into the passenger-grid unannounced; typical sense of
humor for a four-hour subroutine maxed out of spare giggs. Even while observing
this, Queneau detected a noisy lattice overlay just beneath the horizon of his
optics, the scuffling of one infoshoe against another, vying to divvy the
limited floorgrid. He took little notice. Putting aside static one avatar might
offload to another, the scuffle was merely a generic output of the overlay.

Abruptly now he veered: in a segue that could have been lightyears
or a pixel blink, he found himself exo-gloved into the Saint-Lazare spectrum,
the brink of the matter at hand. These pitches always nauseated Queneau, no
matter how inured he should be by now to the recursion-toxicity.
The
button!
he screamed silently.
Change the button!

Jonathan Lethem

othing

Into nowhere came nothing, least of all a bus. It did not come
chugging up over the hill, releasing its sweet gas as it stooped down to gather
passengers. Had a bus been possible—only wishful thinking would suggest it
was—perhaps some discussion might be in order. Perhaps a person might be
admitted into the scenario. But no bus was possible, therefore there can be no
discussion. For instance, was the metal for a bus possible? Was rubber? Was it
possible to have something such as plastic? We know the answer. Had leather and
vinyl and glass been possible, could these materials be combined, by some
imagined person with tremendous gifts—himself impossible—to compose something
even resembling a bus? No. Even if these items were possible, a situation that
destroys the mind to imagine,
destroys the mind
, and even if these
items might have been willed into shape to form a bus, by people who did not
exist, this bus would have floated through empty space, its wheels spinning
against nothing, the passengers trapped inside bobbing over seats and smearing
into windows like little fish in a bag. For there was no road and there was no
place, nor was there a driver to aim this bus into the beyond. None of it could
be. In fact, how was something like dirt possible, soil, stone, ore—enough of it
to condense so tightly that a place like a world could form, or even some other
kind of place, where things could crawl along the surface without falling off,
spinning forever back into the void? It wasn’t and there couldn’t. In this bus
there was no driver because there were no people—it just wasn’t possible—which
means that no one could board what was not there. If such a bus had been
possible, no one was born to ride it, to rub against each other in the aisle, to
be carried overland on some errand elsewhere. Nor was there such a thing as
clothing. Clothing was a lesser impossibility, but an impossibility nonetheless.
So if people had existed, which they did not, they would have been hidden behind
their own hair, simply naked and cold in the empty brown space, cowering behind
their long, fine hair, floating in emulsion. Down the aisles of the bus they
would not move, reaching through a veil of hair at each other, never finding a
wet, warm spot upon which to rest their hand, never fingering inside each
other’s sticky places. People covered in such a fine, silken layer of hair, so
perfectly shielded by hair, that you could not even see their faces. It would be
as if they had no faces. If there was anything, that is. And it wasn’t. It was
nothing, so there can be no discussion. There was no one to jostle no one, and
no one to take offense, sitting down to ride out the rest of his route, which
there wasn’t, in silence. Which means that no one could appear later, to anyone.
There was no later, there was no sooner. Time was not soft or slow or sweet.
Time was none of these things. There was no one to meet, and if there never was,
they’d have nothing to sit on, and if they never did, how could one point at the
other, to indicate a missing button? His hand, which he did not have, would
merely have pushed through a wall of hair, a soft wall that yielded further as
he reached. If such people even existed, which they didn’t, they would be as
swirls of hair deep under the ocean, swaying in place forever.

Ben Marcus

or zeu Frentch

Ouann deille araounnd noune nïeu Parc Monceau ann zeu rïeu plettfôme
ov a maur o laiss feul S boss (naou éitifor), Aïe peussivd a peusseunn ouise enn
equestrimeli longue naique hou ouase ouaireng a sôft failt hête tremmd ouise
bréde ennstaide ov rebeune. Zess enndeuvédiouol sodd-eunnli édraisst haise
naïbeu ennd aquiousd haime ov deulébreutli staipeng ann haise fite aivri tahime
pessendjeuse gate ôf or ann zeu boss. Botte hi zaine brôte zeu descocheunn tou a
rêpede ainnde enn ordeu tou grêbe a naou aimti site.

Tou aourze leïteu Aïe sô haime enn fronnt ov gare Saint-Lazare enn
besi cannveusécheunn ouise a frainnd hou ouase eudvahiseng haime tou nêrau zeu
naique aupeneng ov haise auveucaute baï hëveng somm coualéfahide téleu rése zeu
op-eu botteun.

Harry Mathews

ontingencies

At dinner with so-called intelligent people, during our discussion
of the Marquis de Sade, I recognized a common lunacy: the fairy tale of absolute
and complete freedom. People don’t know what to do with the freedom they have, I
announced, and trounced off, as if insulted. Today, I took a bus, a random bus,
no particular number, a white and blue bus, or pale green. No matter, it was a
bus, and I took it. First I stood in line, with everyone else, a citizen of a
city standing peacefully, waiting for public transport, a condition of urban
life. I heard two men, no particular men, or maybe very particular men, but not
to me. I took the bus, anyway. The men were discussing their office, where they
seemed mad about a woman, and I listened because I could. They described her in
broad terms: “She’s got big tits. . . . OMG, that ass. Shit!” I entered the bus,
paid my fare, the driver said nothing, and unencumbered, except by my hopes and
dreams and desires, I walked to the back of the bus, my eyes roving, checking
for free seats, and there were good reasons why I kept moving, and took the seat
I chose, but these are insignificant reasons except to me. I found a seat all to
myself, sat down, exhaling freely, and happily, because I celebrate public
buses, especially when I have my own seat next to a window, but then the two
men, still exclaiming about the woman’s ass and tits, took the seats behind me.
Now I felt hindered also by their bulk and hulk, as well as their boisterous
voices, bellows about asses and tits, and if I hadn’t known myself as myself, if
I didn’t understand the invisible boundaries in which I existed, with my
freedom, I would have assaulted the men. I was bigger than both, and freer, and
a black belt in karate. Before I had the chance to pummel one or both, because I
was at liberty to do what I wanted, even if it meant imprisonment for a day or
two, the two men stopped their bellows, and instead turned to watch two other
male passengers nearly come to blows, one jostling the other for a seat. Now the
three of us, the tits and ass men and myself, alarmed by this altercation,
became a community of sorts. Suddenly I heard a rip, certainly a rent of some
kind, which made a decided sound in the air. The man, who had jostled the first
for a seat, now watched by the newly formed society of the three of us, took
that prized seat. Oh, I thought, oh, and wondered what my two companions
thought. It was a strange day, and one has such strange freedoms; for I could
have ridden that bus the entire day—until it ended its journeys, or until the
bus driver informed me that I had to get off. Any number of possibilities
presented themselves to me, I could even have fought him to remain! But thinking
it over, I watched all the people I had known, in a sense, on the bus, as they
removed themselves from it. I was alone again with my thoughts, not bothered by
anything, and, when the bus stopped near a park, one I had never visited, I
leaped off violently. Again, the driver said nothing, but now I took his silence
to mean assent and even understanding, and walked toward the park and into it
through its wide gates, and sat down, this time at a café, where I discovered
that the man who had been jostled on the bus, earlier in the day, was being
advised by another to patch his overcoat, a dark brown parka, the same one he
had worn on the bus. A piece of fabric hung from its hem. It may have come down
during that altercation. Now I thought, he’s having an alteration, and wondered
if this linguistic association occurred to him as well. Here we are, I remember
thinking, in a great chain of being, and he could think whatever he wanted. I
pretended not to notice him, naturally.

Lynne Tillman