The Cut-Up is the Only Way
S. quanders on…
He is a person of many-selvedged hesitations. The sidewalk is a concrete slur, a grey articulation that refuses to resolve into a destination. He feels the syntax of his own skeleton beginning to loosen, the joints becoming mere suggestions of connectivity.
He passes a storefront where the mannequins are engaged in a silent, high-stakes negotiation involving nothing but their plastic elbows. Their eyes are painted-on voids, gazing into the Interzone of the department store’s after-life.
“The word is a parasite,” a voice mutters from a doorway. It is a man whose face is a topographical map of failed drug experiments and lost weekends. He holds a stack of mimeographed sheets, the ink still wet, still screaming. “We are being lived by our own vocabularies. The adjectives are drinking our blood.”
S. pauses. He feels the weight of his own bag—a heavy, inanimate noun that insists on its own reality. He considers the possibility that he is not walking, but being walked by the street’s own insistent, rhythmic “is-ness.”
The air thick with the smell of scorched carbon and the metallic tang of unspent intentions. A siren wails in the distance, a long, thin needle of sound stitching the grey sky to the grey buildings. Real skronk-o- rama!
He enters a diner where the coffee tastes of burnt saliva and the waitress is a sequence of tired, winces and brays. Daily gestures. Her apron is a manifesto of liver and gravy stains.
“What’ll it be?” she asks. Her voice is a recording of a recording.
S. looks at the menu. The letters are migrating, moving from one dish to another in a slow, alphabetical crawl. Poached Paranoia on Rye. Fried Fragments with a Side of Silence.
“I’ll have the … uh …,'” S. says, his voice a dry rustle. “I’he hollow man special.”
She doesn’t blink. She simply writes something on a pad—a jagged, illegible mark that feels like a wound winding down.
Outside, the city’s pulse is a low, subsonic thrum. The billboards are shouting silent commands: CONSUME THE VOID. OBEY THE TENSE. THE PAST IS A VIRUS.
S. feels a sudden, sharp displacement — a schpilkes, you might say. The diner’s walls are becoming translucent, the patrons mere flickering shadows in a cinematic projection racking its focus. He is in the Interzone now, the space between the sentences, where the narrative-police have no jurisdiction.
He looks at his hands. They are beginning to pixelate, the edges of his fingers blurring into the steam rising from his coffee. He is a run-on sentence sprinting toward a terminal punctuation mark that keeps receding.
The man with the titanium teeth is sitting in the booth across from him. He is eating a plate of raw, unedited verbs. Chanting: i before e, except after seizures.
“The cut-up is the only way out,” the man abruptly says, his teeth glinting like surgical instruments. “We must rearrange the reality-film. We must splice the sunset into the middle of the breakfast.”
S. nods. The coffee does not nod back, but he feels the caffeine beginning to rewrite his nervous system. He is ready for the next clause. He is ready to be edited.
In short — he quanders on.
What I’m Reading:
Writing anything and expecting somebody else to read it is an act of hubris, but nothing good can be written without persistent doubts, one of the paradoxes of a writing life. I don’t believe that I have ever taught anyone to write. Every writer in the end is an autodidact. It’s a lifelong course of study, or should be. You must believe that you are the only person for this job, which is a fact.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing
thee istsfor manity reader 