Joseph was standing beside the conveyor belt, watching as a children cereal of colored shapes rolled down towards the sorting machine. He was holding a variety of them already. But he wanted to be sure. He picked up another six when the quality assurance/quality controller turned away to itch his ankle. Joseph decided he might have enough, just a few more. He got eight in one swipe, his children playing jacks.
In his cubicle, Joseph took out a bottle of mountain spring water that was tapped from a village’s faucet and took a long swig. Then, he stuffed the first handful of pills in his mouth and started chewing. More fresh water over boulders, a couple picnicking beside it, the woman’s slender fingers cupped as her wrinkled lips lap up a few drops, water from his jug (reverting to a Jamesian depiction). The second and third handfuls don’t taste as putrid and Joseph takes only a few sips from the bottle.
This is the story of an orphan. No, no, please do not feel pity, he asks only for your ears, not your heart, although if you’d like to express a few kind words of sympathy, why then, he might prolong the beginning so that you might share your thoughts, this is, after all, a democratic republic of some consequence, like flying aeroplanes dropping from the sky, their passengers are all shitting themselves, knowing that they are going to smash into a million pieces and be televised on the evening news and their Andy Warhol destinies were fulfilled only in their deaths, but of course he knows that Flower is one of these kind of prophets, the after-life nightgown sages of the religion of the kamikaze, who were also democrats, in that they voluntarily were chosen by the population for death against a giant battleship, that may or may not go down into the deep depths of Poseidon’s navel, which is a large trench that covers the entire Atlantis continent, which is currently submersed in legend and folklore so that certain sites can fill hours of programming with monsters chased from lakes by saints, hairy Lucy husbands who roam the dark forests of puritanical consciousness, as witnessed in Hawthorne’s deconstructed thoughts, mysterious alien visitors who construct pyramids on certain continents by employing ethnic slaves and teleporting brick and mortar higher and higher, so that they can generate a few shafts within the antennae that will point future generations towards where they may or may not have come from, because how would the aliens really know, since they’ve never actually stood on the planet before and don’t know any constellations, or that Galileo was ruined for what he saw in the sky, or that maybe their star burned out millions of years ago and is just now getting to the earth, and even worse than that it is shifting away from them infinitively as they sit there and try to explain to the dumb Egyptians why they’re constructing a big pile of stones in the middle of the desert, or the ghostly stories of sightings by housewives and curators of old, long forgotten, never visited national landmarks, where screens spin for no reason, but why don’t they make themselves known and why do they speak in one letter clues, are they just fucking with us, okay medium, tell her it’s her dead husband, only don’t tell her you know what my name is, ask her if the letter ‘s’ means anything to her, good, now don’t tell her that I died in bed, ask her if I died in our house, but I didn’t so ask her about forty questions in one minute, I guarantee one of them of them of them will be right, now I’m going to scare the Dickens’ out of her, but I won’t let anything that could prove my existence see me, so I’ll have to wait for this display news crew to leave, but just so they don’t think I’m totally full of shit, I’ll let the psychic they’ve brought with them feel my presence, which I think I’ll have be a cold spot…
I think I’m dying. What was I thinking? My wife will cry. They’ll find me foaming at the mouth, filled to the brim with so much shit they will won’t be able to pump it all out in six trash bags, which would be handy to be a cow, right about now, ‘cause they could pump one stomach and I’d still have one they’d probably miss and I’d still die, cows were holy, once, too, they replaced Jesus Christ on Mt. Sinai as the most high and there was a cult once that thought their mothers came back to life in cow bodies, and it was a big cult, like a billion people, so you know you’d go to heaven if you were a multiple stomach cow who was not pumped properly, even though the paramedics would do the best job they could, and my wife would be crying, clutching my lifeless, big cow body, although she might not have married me if I was a cow, unless, of course, say if I was a prize-winning cow that they decided not to cut up for family dinners because I was loved by a woman who would cry over my dead body, should I mistakenly take a buttload of pills at the office one day. One day I’ll buy her a cow so that she’ll have a companion after I’m gone, it will be a black and white one and she’ll never ask me to go out for milk ever again and we can just slice a nice piece of steak off the cow anytime we want, it will just make sort of a pleading mooooo sound that we’ll think is mighty cute as we pass the gravy to little Jimmy Somebody, our child of five years, except we’d probably get in trouble with the police for cruelty to animals, which I can understand, if the cow was still alive and I was cutting pieces of meat off of it, and they’re really serious about that nowadays, considering all the work the Graham’s have done, there’s even a special task force for it, which I should probably be quiet about, here I am talking about it and they could be listening to me right now, some sweaty guy with a tape recorder going in a lonely hotel room and my digital voice saying all sorts of negative things about cows. Of course they’d have questions about the pills, too, which I totally forgot about, my god, if they’re not pissed about the cow comments they’re probably sending people over right now since I’m abusing the drugs, I’m not even prescribed most of these pills, and I’ve been blabbering about it. Now, what did I say, exactly?
How long till they get here, is what I want to know. I should hide, run into the men’s room and make myself scarce for awhile, but that’d be the first place they’d look, it’s in all the movies, shit, I should have never started blaspheming those cows, I really wouldn’t like a steak if it was off of my pet cow, my wife’s companion, that’s not right, people who do that aren’t right in the head, and I didn’t take any drugs that weren’t prescribed to me by a certified doctor, which, oh god, now they know I’m lying, since I’ve just been sitting here talking about it for like four hours and now I’ve got that staged voice of someone trying to fool a tape recorder and they’ve probably got polygraph machines anyways which can tell when you’re lying and they know it already, I’d fail one of those as soon as they asked me my name, which is not to say that I use a fake name or alias or anything, oh god, Joseph, shut up, now they think you’re some sort of fake name using criminal who’s snuck into corporate PANGEA to extort somebody or steal or break something important, like a fax machine or the copier, can you imagine the havoc there would be without a copy machine, if all the buildings didn’t have one, ‘cause at first you could just go next door, cup of sugar please, kind of request, really, and there’d just be some inconvenience, but what if they didn’t have one either and neither did the next building and then, by that time there’s a parade of document holding pilgrims all on a quest for copies, and you see, I’ve done it again, now they know my plan, but it’s not my plan, that was Franco’s plan, he’s the anarchist, I’m just a director of keep goinghood, here, there’s a guy name Franco you want to speak to if you’re worried about the copy machine plot, they won’t believe me, I wouldn’t believe me, I’m lying, they just heard me come up with it, and now Franco’s probably pissed, he knows now that if anything were to happen I’d rat him out and he’s not even a bad guy, no he’s just the person I’d prefer to have go missing, but I’m sure he’s not missing, I’m not going to have him go missing, I had nothing to do with him missing, I was just speaking, um, rhetorically, I have no intention, nor have I ever caused someone to go missing, god Franco I’m sorry, I got carried away with it, I hope you’re okay, I hope they don’t pin it on me, this is just like that movie with that guy from that site, that was a good show until he left, anyway, just like it, you know the one where the guy threatens him outside the restaurant and then, the guy ends up dead the next day and all those people heard him threatening the guy and the cops arrest him and he goes to jail, it takes years for them to figure out he didn’t do it, oh god, they’ll be here any moment, and I’ve asked for it, I’m cutting chunks of live cow off, I’ve strangled my wife during a hardcore sex fest, I’m involved in a copy machine genocide plot and poor, poor Franco, he never saw it coming, but, but, the bastard was sleeping with my wife, that’s what I’ll say, yah, he was fucking her, and that’s why I strangled her, that was real, too, she’s probably still wrapped up in our bed sheets, the kids are sitting at the table waiting for her to fix breakfast and it’s afternoon, those stupid cow pinching leeches, those little demanding bastards, who’s going to take care of them once I’m in prison, with big mean men who want my ass for a vagina substitute, the pain of it, the sensation of that foreign object in your bowels, poor Franco got off lucky, I’ll tell you, the kids’ll just have to go live with the grandparents, old fuckers that they are, it will be perfect match, old fuckers and little bastards, they can all hate me in a collective cuss fest for what I did to mommy and daughter dearest, that was such a requirement, she deserved it, oh shit I’ve got to stop talking, this is my confession, he’s recording the whole damn thing and the jury’ll hear this later, what will I say then, it was the pills, those god damn pharmaceutical companies, they don’t care about side-effects, all they care about is the almighty buck, look what it did to me, it distorted me and now I’ve killed my wife, carved up my pet cow, god knows what happened to Franco, and something else, I can’t remember, you see, those pills, those fucking pills, except now they know my defense strategy, shut up Joe, shut up until your lawyer comes and gets you, this is going nowhere.