The Speed Chronicles (23 page)

Approaching the ecotone she could see cows grazing in the meadow.

part 2: rule bretagne

Snow came in bunches to Bon Repos, on the border of the Forêt de Quénécan. The companions of the abbey were put to work sweeping the courtyard early on the morning of December 19 in the Year of Our Lord. The blinking lights of the snowplows had moved far enough away from the courtyard that you could no longer hear the susurrus of their heavy tires, nor the scrape of metal against. This has been the coldest winter of our lives. In the memory of our lives. There has been a record chute of snow. The cars are corked for miles, and hours, on the autoroutes. On the radio you are warned to bring a thermos of some hot liquid and “
perhaps something to eat
” before you set out in your car. What kind of a person would set out in his car under such perturburant circumstances? What kind of person says “set out in his car”? The wrecked bulkheads massed along the shore, covered in fresh snow, no longer move, but boy they sure do work. How do you cut the GPS tag from under your skin? You use a stolen knife. You ask the girl to use the knife because you can't do it yourself. That's how the girl ended up dead, on your floor, in your room, because she removed the GPS tag. It's starting to come back now, but in fragments. In packets.

Everybody's got a past. Everybody stinks of time. But the photography is so pure that you don't mind. The rhythm of the shots, and the rhythm within the shots, matches with exquisite rigor the languid movements of the actors inside the frame. Only the music jars. The music is ridiculous, overstated, too much. “Tonight the gates of Mercy will open.” That's what the music wants to say. The clarinets. I see a crowd of black hats, everyone playing the clarinet. There's nothing wrong with the clarinet in principle. With any woodwind.

New rule: no one speaks. Not for any reason. Words have only ever caused problems. I can think of no exceptions. Everything will be communicated in images, only. No intertitles, subtitles, supertitles, titles, title cards. The moving image versus the static (photo) is obviously superior. An image that moves offers a more complete set of the infinite fractions of solitude, according to N. The history of cinema is the history of the image. Without words. The paradox of using words to describe things that. Text is text is text. This is not a text. In the event of an actual text, you would have been directed by the appropriate emergency services to destroy all evidence of yourself. I do not feel pain. Thunder and lightning ask my approval. What some call prayer is easily misused, but I command the seas.

I have no reason to doubt. I have no reason to believe. I got no reason, I prefer no reason at all. Crows gather on every street corner. Talking about something I can't quite. What's the point of so many crows? Crown, crow, cow. Unusually, you can do that in Russian too.

Phil Esposito was the consensus pick in the living room for the trivia question,
Which Buckthorn had been the fastest to score fifty goals in one season?
Writer didn't wait to hear the answer. If not Esposito, who? Cashman? Bucyk? What difference does it make? They were all fucking great. Ten seconds later his father actually said, “I have seen some terrible calls in my life, but that one takes the cake,” concerning a potentially dodgy hooking call on Buckthorn player Sad Strawbo. The answer to a more pertinent question was soon thereafter provided by Sabater Pi and his caliginous table of incantatory engrams. Without the help of Sabater Pi, one finds it unlikely that anything would ever get done by anyone. A study of helicopter pilots suggested that 600 milligrams of PROVIGIL given in three doses can be used to keep pilots alert and maintain their accuracy at predeprivation levels for forty hours without sleep. Another study of fighter pilots showed that PROVIGIL given in three divided 100-milligram doses sustained the flight-control accuracy of sleep-deprived F-117 pilots to within about twenty-seven percent of baseline levels for thirty-seven hours, without any considerable side effects.

The exact mechanism of action of PROVIGIL is unclear, although numerous studies have shown it to increase the levels of various monoamines, namely: dopamine in the striatum and nucleus accumbens; noradrenaline in the hypothalamus and ventrolateral preoptic nucleus; and serotonin in the amygdala and frontal cortex. While the coadministration of a dopamine antagonist is known to decrease the stimulant effect of amphetamine, it does not entirely negate the wakefulness-promoting actions of PROVIGIL. This is not by any means the whole story.

Sabater Pi stands over his engrams and mutters incantations. These incantations are the stuff of ice creams, through which the world learns its manners. Without Sabater Pi's engrams, the world would have no memory. He decides which to keep and which to discard. It's a very important job. It might be the only important job. Sabater Pi had just decided that the engram of the dead girl in Writer's room must at all costs be kept. Could not for any reason be removed. He walked to a corner of his office, sat down at a comically small desk, and began typing.

Writer was startled by the sudden whir and clunk of the fax machine on the floor by his feet. He remembered that the Icelandic magician Flute Guðmundsdottir had once told him that her magic was meant to represent or emulate the sound of the modern world, its electronic machinery in constant motion, humming and buzzing and belling in the background even when no one was listening. This had never made any sense to Writer. He had tried to discuss the issue with Bragi Ólafsson, an Icelandic novelist who had once helped out in Sykurmolarnir, which was the name of a circus act in which Flute had also participated, doing—something. But Writer's attempt to reach Ólafsson through his American publisher had been unsuccessful, and so with some reluctance he had dropped the matter. Throughout his conversation with Flute, she had licked her lips repeatedly, small pink tongue darting out of her mouth to moisten this or that small section of unglossed upper or lower lip. It was a reflexive action. She wasn't aware she was doing that, he remembered thinking. But also a familiar one. People who are nervous, or who take any form of stimulant, even coffee, are prone to this reflex. The stimulant produces a sensation of dryness in the mouth and lips that no amount of water can remedy. There would be no reason, Writer reasoned, for Flute to be nervous in his company, in room 59 of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California. She was drinking from a deep glass of still water. It was exactly noon o'clock.

The sound of the modern world scared the wits right out of Writer (whose real name was Thomas Early). The sound of the modern world was linked inextricably to the speed of the modern world. The latter was very, very fast, and getting faster. At—what's the usual phrase—an “exponential rate.” One moment we're all prosperous and happy, seals basking on the warm rocks of midday sun off the coast of Maine in summer. The next we're falling, endlessly, down a hole that used to be a floor but is no longer a floor. The banking system had run out of money, as Thomas Early understood the situation, and so everyone had run out of money, and even though everyone had run out of money years and years ago, for some reason this now actually mattered. Hence the panicky tumble down the black hole of the future, end over end, bottom over top, will-ye nill-ye, and God help us if we ever reach any kind of definite denouement, because a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that an abrupt halt would result in a gelatinous mess.

The best we can hope for, then, in the current situation, is to keep falling. Even though it seems as if we're falling faster and faster, we're actually falling at the same speed. The speed of a falling object does not depend on its mass. That you are a (much) fatter person than me does not mean you will fall faster. We all started at the same height, from the same point, and Galileo has proved that we will all be crushed to death simultaneously.

We are aware of our many misdeeds, our failings, our weaknesses, our fears, our shame. We do not know how to exculpate ourselves. (Having no religion to rely on.) We do not know whether to exculpate ourselves, having no moral or philosophical base from which to extrude the principle of sin. Because we were brought up short. We were all brought up short in a long, tall world.

The dead girl's mistake was indulging her appetite for existence. We all make the same mistake, and the mistake is always fatal. An eighty-three-year-old woman is in a coma after having been attacked at the Mairie de Clichy métro station by a fourteen-year-old Romanian kid. A former journalist was killed by his seventeen-year-old son because the son was unhappy with the five hundred euros per month his father was giving him as an allowance. A man found two thousand euros, cash, in the street. He turned it over to the police. A judge ruled that the two thousand euros does not belong to the man, and is instead being kept by the court until the real owner of the money can be determined. The man declared himself in an interview to be “disappointed” by the court's ruling. “Honesty doesn't pay,” he said.

Potter's Field ain't such a faraway stare when you've one foot in the quick. An argument between scholars, already tenuous, becomes untenably ephemeral within minutes if you put it in (a cloud). Unsearchable, unfindable, irretrievable. Lost. The most common side effect of speed is the acceleration of loss.

The fax from Sabater Pi was very short. It read, in full:
The dead or dying girl is you
.

JAMES GREER
is the author of two novels:
The Failure
(Akashic, 2010); and
Artificial Light
(Little House on the Bowery/Akashic, 2006), which won a California Book Award for Best Debut Novel. He is also the author of the nonfiction book
Guided By Voices: A Brief History
(BlackCat/Grove, 2005), a biography about a band for which he once played bass guitar.

no matter how beautifully it stings

by william t. vollmann

Note to the Reader: The following passages have to do with speedy substances, which, like any loyal American, I know only in the most theoretical sense.
—WTV

H
er face was already smoother when he looked in the mirror. He thought it was the estrogen but Rosa said it was only autosuggestion. (He had a dream that he was walking with Rosa and everyone humiliated him; Rosa said it was because they could see, thanks to the crimson collar of the sweater he wore beneath his jacket, that he was a woman.) Often now he felt as lovely-pure as this transparent meth crystal now partially crumbled to glassy sand within the multiple-folded scrap of newspaper. He broke it in half. He inhaled. The septum of his nose ached. His nostrils watered. Then he began to feel the happy lively feeling; he was alive again, “in the moment” as we Californians say. His nipples itched.

Do you want any, darling?

No, thank you, said Rosa, doing her mascara.

His penis hardened delightfully. He saw everything better; he could practically count the revolutions of the fan blades on the ceiling; oh, he surely could have had he wanted to.

While Rosa glossed her lips, he had another sniff.

Rosa offered to do his makeup, but tonight he did not care to honor his inner feminine in any outer way; better to remain a double agent. So while Rosa combed out her Isabel wig he laid happily spreadeagled on the bed, with another shot of whiskey in his hand, playing with the gray hairs on his nipples, his penis hard like never before.

One was supposed to leave the room key at the office, but he put it in his pocket. They went downstairs to the rental car. Rosa was the driver and he the navigator. It was just dusk as they rolled out of Santa Monica past the motels on Ocean and the cool beads of traffic. The sting of crystal was delicious in his nostrils. It was going to keep him excited for all of the thousand miles down Santa Monica Boulevard to the Western girls and the blond California girls with net purses. His powers of perception may safely be defined as godlike, although I grant that later he could not always remember his observations. In traffic behind taxis he saw into every car, reading the emotions of all parties even when only the backs of their heads offered themselves to his discernment. As for Dolores, she spotted a man on a bench; she could have counted every hair on his hands. Two couples crossed the street, and to her this was unique and even important. A man and a woman were kissing. Dolores got hot, and slid her big hand up Rosa's skirt. But then as they crossed Fourth he was enraged rather than titillated to find a man put his hand on a brunette's hips when
he
wanted to do it. Then the illuminated freeway became an intergalactic ride, and these were the constellations: