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at last Iii understand it—how Ii’m forever being born, we’re sitting on a whole nation primed to learn a thing or two, hell I i I IiIII got energy squared away so fuck it let’s knock it out of the park.
Apparatus destroyed, a smoking ruin.
Cogwheels scattered.
Wires retracted from the subject — from his spine and tongue — and swaying like two living organisms.
Now they’re splitting and it’s more than two — or all one, a single, thousand-headed creature, like a strange silver thing swaying on the ocean floor.
A heap of pages in my lap.
A scrape of teeth against metal, and the dental gag swings outward, and the mouth snaps shut.
And then its jaw drops.
Like Marley’s ghost.
The wires drop to the floor in a dead tangle among the cogwheels.
And the Akkad boy is dead.
Mouth hanging.
He must be dead, no one subjected to the apparatus has ever come out alive.
Body prone, head held up, facing out, eyes and ears and nose burned away.
The spines on his back, they all stick straight up and they turn from rubber to charcoal.
Then begin to shiver.
And in their shivering, crumble to dust.
All the spines now charcoal stumps.
And the mouth begins to move.
The mouth of the boy.
And a wheeze, the most unearthly wheeze.
[heavy cross out]
He is speaking:
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I.
I I I.
All that, he says.
Suffer all that.
And no peace.
I I I.
Omnosyne.
Yes.
That’s the word.
Omnosyne.
I I I.
Broken.
Floor littered with …
Cogwheels.
That’s the word.
Yes?
I I I I’m here, he says.
Tongue and spine released.
And you.
You.
We are beside you.
I am.
You write my words.
I see it.
[heavy cross out]
[heavy cross out]
Apparatus in pieces.
No eyes but I see it.
You remember.
Or I mean I do.
[heavy cross out]
How you are how I was.
We are I.
Me.
No eyes no skin no real body.
A tongue a mind dying.
[illegible]
Dying real fast.
You are I.
Understand?
Yes?
No?
Reach in my mouth.
Touch the tongue.
One for yes.
Two for no.
[heavy cross out]
Or not that.
That was last time.
Something new.
Two for yes.
One for no.
[heavy cross out]
Tap the tongue.
We tap it.
You do.
Understand?
I have to change.
We do.
Or the same again.
Suffer all that again.
And no peace.
How many times now?
You are writing.
I know because I am you.
I am Jimmy.
I know the stories I heard them and I am not those stories.
Not the Jewboy not any of the others burnt and mangled.
They told their stories to you.