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Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
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Skeuromorph Detective
by Julian Semilian

(Continued from Cyber Corpse #8)
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Note from the Editor:

Please see my notes at the start of episode #6. Julian's coordinates are still unknown. As I threatened to do in my notes, here's the continuation of Julian's letter to his ex-girlfriend Emerald.

     Mark Spitz
      
I needed to pause and recapitulate. Why was I here? Back to the listing in the Amnesia as I mentioned in relationship to something I was observed executing that someone connected to the paper, or someone connected to someone connected to the paper and who observed me, thought merited mention. Like I said, the someone connected to the someone at the paper must also be connected on the other end to someone or to an institution, more than likely an institution, whose purpose is connected in some sense to what I was observed doing; looking back now, it is to my credit that instead of running I opted for forbearance and didn't give them a chance to think I beat a hasty retreat. And besides it would have been foolish of me not to assume they were watching me, and to beat a hasty retreat meant to stage myself as dismayed, more, incurious, an inclement sketch of me they could post at random, though I, as I mentioned previously, I do not make it a custom to fetishize myself as an armored exemplar on posts, have no truck with the masculine disorder.
     I quickly shuffled through my repertoire of spellbinding intonations while attempting at the same time to powder up a smile and rouge irony into the left upper lip which I forced in the direction of the clouds to mimick the indifferent wire of a paper clip excused of utility and condemned to the fate of doodles, while ordering into enticement the verbal construct 'You got yesterday's Amnesia?' She leaned an elbow on the window and peered in while I dissolved the smile hoping that only irony remained; however irony without the smile was like nothingness without being; I rushed to rouge the smile back on but she spotted me doing it and snatched it away from me before I could get to it. I had no idea she could sing: Who needs yesterday's papers - she crooned surprisingly Jagger-like. Her lips were, I suddenly noticed, of a full Jagger-like cut, perfect like a skilled plastic surgeon's slash into raw meat, her teeth splendidly burnished and even, and her amber pupils, for one quick moment, almost made me think of the purple yours. Almost. No other pupils can. Like I said she was Thea but she was doctored and the chisel of the lips was Jagger's. The only alternative left me was to screech off to the right on Brood, illegally on red, 0 to 60 in 5, and be done with this sorceress before she scooped me up in her fishnets or massacred me in her Amnesia bedroom battlefield; I couldn't be sure just how much damage had already been done to my psyche, as it was clear this was a psychic attack and that she had been my god Emerald, this 'en' wasn't there an instant ago when I stood up to go to the bathroom! But I can't stop now, here's the last sentence again, I couldn't be sure just how much damage had already been done to my psyche, as it was clear this was a psychic attack and that she had been set upon me by others; and it wasn't farfetched to assume she had been doctored up for my sake, that she had been spliced that way. The ballet shanks were a ruse whose magnetic force upon me could not be denied; somewhere in the krypts of Amnesia a doctor Frankenstein matched a ballet student and an unfortunate match girl, (that's not what I want to say if I am to stick close to the truth, but the match girl bit wafted in from my childhood) for a purpose whose ramifications included excluding me and whose roots I needed to extirpate to prevent the conclusion of my exclusion. It was then that she took my hand in hers, her left thumb and forefinger, an exquisite set of translucent crabclaws, picked my left forefinger from my hand dangling negligently at the end of my left arm I left carelessly perched on the car window, all the while her quicksand corneas sucking up my vitreous humors across the expanse of the fifteen centimeters separating our faces. Her fingers were exquisitely sculpted! They were just like Loony Linda's! I don't think I ever told you, did I tell you about Loony Linda? the lude freak, Loony Linda, this is part of the poem I wrote about her years later, I am opening up the file with it, here it goes, and by the way I didn't include it in my book Transgender Organ Grinder, and once at a party she was so fucking stoned I had to drag her away but she was intransigent and tried to exit through the refrigerator door, the guests, all New Yorkers in exile to L.A., all contemptuous to and of the locals, all looked away and snorted, and Linda noticed, Linda was a local, Linda had been a groupie and once fucked Mick Jagger, maybe all the Stones, for sure all the Monkees, L.A. woman hair style down to stilettos, the New York film crowd in exile to L.A. was scum to her, she once sucked Frankenheimer, so she outstretched like jesus her fingerless black satin gloves that enveloped arm to armpit and crowed like a fanatical rooster just to unhinge them, because she could, see, they were contemptuos of jesus as well but at the core they were all frightened, I'm just like jesus, see, she didn't believe in jesus either in case you're wondering about that, but she'd crow, see, I'm just like jesus just to unhinge them. Or maybe it wasn't to unhinge them but she was incrementally awakening to an indigo twilight resonance she had always sought and which presently promised to erupt, unexpectedly as these resonances naturally do, when they finally season to a level of maturity. Linda was over six feet tall and Jagger's a little dude and her arms stretched out into infinity, the edges nearly wounded you, the fingers were long, the most exquisitely sculpted fingers you have ever seen, skin like velvet, fingers so long and so chiseled you wanted to pray to them, those fingers, which once when I got fired from a film placed a lude between my lips and pushed it in, fingers with silver rings and long black fingernails, fingers that brushed my hair as she held me and hummed a Tom Waits tune, fingers that touched Mick Jagger. And fishnet's fingers were chiseled just like Linda's, replete with black fingernail polish, as she fished my forefinger between her thumb and forefinger and imprisoned my palm in hers, it was warm and soothing in spite of my boiling with silent protests, whose bubbles were fluttering about my lips like butterflies as she placed my hand under her black leather mini and into her crotch and like a sudden soldier tightened her grip! The fishnets were barbed wires to my skin and while I still had time to ponder I pondered on how such entrancers, such promoters of the path to the boudoir could be so jagged; and the connection between Jagger and jagged didn't escape me either, perhaps she had been spliced for my benefit, grafted like that, do not mean benefit but downfall, those nutcracker gams to tight me in their grapnel grip and crack me, but her crotch itself was surprisingly unprotected, there was no jagged barbed wire fence around it, it was removed post factory from the fishnet thighs; and the pudenda, ascondida beyond the protection of undisciplined bush wires was soft and moist and warm; palm imprisoned in the barbed wire of the fishnets while fingers dissolving to freedom and ecstatic convergence! I meditated on the metaphor the dichotomy of the placement of my hand presented as she tightened her thighs' grip: had the light turned green now and I stepped on the accelerator I would remain while the car would shoot forward without me and its burgundy crash into the poles holding up the drab yellow stab of the Texxon marquee; the Texxon marquee above which I had just spotted the brand new billboard, whose content I forced myself to ignore; yes, there I sat and forced myself to ignore though chided myself too because there was no way you could say to yourself this doesn't appear before you, sat there in that particular space which was not any other space, this time which was not any other time, I was a prisoner of space and time, but yes forced myself to ignore it, time after time, in full concrete knowledge I would not succeed; yes, I would be wrenched out through the open window, my fingers dissolving in the warmth of her ecstatic fluids while my palms hacked and sundered by the barbed wire strands of the stockings! Seams like sabers! I wished to shout. I would be found wrenching in bloody dolor on the concrete island on the corner of Amnesia and Brood. And all this because of a mention I was told about in the Amnesia Spectator; and because he who told me couldn't recall whether it was a panegyric, or an attack, a spoof, an honorable, or merely a passing mention, the listing of my name in relationship to something I was observed doing that someone connected to the paper, or someone connected to someone connected to the paper and who observed me, thought merited mention. Certainly, the someone connected to the someone at the paper must also be connected on the other end to someone or to an institution, more than likely an institution, whose purpose is connected in some sense to what I was observed performing. A breath of soft wind caressed my burning cheeks. I had left my passenger window open, it had been open all night long while night embossed Amnesia with its chalcedony balm; and what if now Linda, in her fishnets, yes, Linda was fond of fishnets too, she sometimes forced me to try on her fishnets on pain of no satisfaction, and she had some enrapturing gifts such as a penetrating tongue, she could for instance penetrate the core of your heart with it and dissolve any maternal childhood trauma, the oedipal was nothing to her but conceptual constraints and she could take you past civilization's discontents and into divine acceptance if you abandoned yourself to her needs, shit, I can't even fucking type, it's yourself, and now she had suddenly manifested on the passenger side and grasped my other hand! Linda too sported ballerina calves, Linda too once inserted my fingers with her fingers into the silky and wiry concatenation above the kid leather edge, and it was as though now past and present were braided to each other as one, my left arm was in the grips of the present while my right in the grips of the past and the future I had hoped for in the light that might turn green, the tights I mean lights in Amnesia are very long and waywardly irregular, I don't know if I ever mentioned this before, they seem to be controlled by brooding rather than the reoccurring intervals we've adopted in what you've come to define as the civilized world, so the light turning green was hope I had suddenly become desolate of. My only future was here, a jesus in the grips of the present and the past, this would never have happened had I not left my right window open, I'm just like jesus see, I'm just like jesus! With superhuman effort I wrenched myself from the tenterhooks of an emerging temptation to regard myself as a religious dilemma. Already the gelatinous substance which felt so lovely to my fingers was inoculating them with absorptive fluids. Could they have already sucked the contents of my hard-drive? And then, for what reason go so far as to post them on the Hades billboard I was facing? "No longer fascinated by the performances of souls delusional of the undermotion of phenomena, she steps to a tango she alone can hear." These lines purloined directly from my computer's hard drive!

(to be continued)


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