The Fun Parts

the REAL-ASS JUMBO

This world would end. The brink beckoned. A bright guy might as well pick a date. Gunderson had. A revolution in consciousness, the peaceful dismantling of mankind’s cruel machinery was, according to Gunderson’s interpretation of an interpretation of a pre-Columbian codex, a half decade away. But that was merely one unfolding. Alternate finales included fire, flooding, pox, nukes. Homo sapiens had a few years to choose. Was that time enough? For Gunderson it was time enough for another book, some lecture tours, a cable deal. Time enough to sample all the yearning young hippie tang in questing creation.

Maybe too much time. A guy could unravel.

Gunderson hadn’t picked the date out of his favorite Alpacan hat. His zero hour was the culmination of a Mixtec prophecy. These bejeweled dudes had played their proto-basketball to the death, strolled the zocalo in the skins of foes. Probably they’d known something. Gunderson didn’t know much about them, really, but who cared? That their glyphs foretold an imminent global shift was sufficient for Ramón, the shaman mentor Gunderson had been visiting these last several winters. That’s all the convincing Gunderson needed. They’d suffered some false ends already, but you could always cite a misreading, push back the date.

Besides, nobody claimed the earth would crack open, just that something huge was on tap, and if we didn’t evolve our asses quick, it would be bad huge. A reasonable message, if vague. Surprising how many preferred not to hear it. These were maybe the same folk who figured crop circles for teen pranks, the fools who called him fool. Look around, he said, to gatherings in the many hundreds, to patchouli kids and home chemists and mind hikers, to, in short, all the non-fools, the excellent few willing to be deranged by their knowing.

“Look around,” he’d say, perched in loose lotus in a patron’s sunken living room, and his followers would, as though exemplars of encroaching gnarlitude did ghoulish waltzes in the very room. “Look at the world, what’s going on in the world. Oppression, repression, depression, the Middle This, the Western That, everything melting, burning, sick. It’s no coincidence. It’s prophecy, and prophecy is no joke, no matter what some cool shill for the corporations might tell you. Trust me, I used to be one of those shills. Until I got my head handed to me on a plate. Or, to be honest, in a bowl. A bowl full of the foulest soup you ever tasted. Vision gumbo. Best gift I ever got. Just a few years, people. We’ve got just a few years to find the better path. Or we are guaranteed one of the utmost, outmost shittiness.”

Once, one of the girls who invariably stalked him home from these gigs, a Gospel of Thomas fan named Nellie, now his current sintern, while getting positively gnostic on his fun parts with ballerina slippers she’d happened to have in her bag, asked Gunderson if he ever looked out on the crowd, thought, “Suckers.”

“Never,” said Gunderson.

“Never?” Nellie asked, her silk insteps rubbing him toward some murked glimpse of the Demiurge.

“You don’t get it,” said Gunderson, apant. “This is no con.”

It wasn’t. It was real, and he had to share it with the world. He had to hit eyeballs. A heads-up for species-wide calamity deserved eyeballs. So, yes, he was a little on edge, on brink. He stood at the counter of Gray’s Papaya waiting for a call from his manager, who was waiting for a call from his agent, who was waiting for a call from the TV people. He’d pitched them like some puma-headed god of pitching a few days before, laid waste to that conference room, but now there were concerns. They wanted to be certain Gunderson truly believed in his vision, that it wasn’t a gag. Otherwise the Untitled Gunderson Prophecy Project might make for lousy television. But how could a rad Siddhartha who roved the earth quaffing potions in its most sacred places and boning its most radiant creatures, not to mention rallying humanity for one last stand against its own worst urges, make for lousy television?

Bastards had insulted him, and Gunderson could feel that hunched, bile-sopped troll he’d been, that devolved little prick he’d purged with iboga root and Jung, burble up. The old Gunderson, he knew, would never really go away. He’d just have to be endured, like some incorrigible junkie brother everybody in the family hopes will finally get clean, or just die already.

Even now the old Gunderson hovered close, craved, for instance, those glistening turd tubes on the Gray’s grill rollers. Meanwhile the street stinker at the counter beside him — grease-stiff duster, foam-and-twine sandals — wolfed down a jumbo, gave Gunderson one of those poignantly exasperated looks certain nutjobs mastered, the one that asked, “Will the hologram ever cease transmission?” Bun crumbs tumbled from the man’s mouth. Orphaned schizo cast out by the corporate state? Avatar of an ancient sage? Both? You never knew, but plenty of avatars burned out anyway.

Some got as lost as the old Gunderson.

Now the new, improved Gunderson sipped his papaya smoothie. Fairly toxic, this stuff, too, but he gave himself a pass. During a recent DMT excursion in his ex-wife’s duplex, while Nellie wept and shivered in the linen closet, the machine elves, or this one other-dimensional ambassador in particular, a squat, faintly buzzing fellow with scalloped metallic skin and emerald eyes, a gnome in gold lamé who’d become something of a guardian to Gunderson, ordered him to ease up.

“Relax,” Baltran had said, slithering up from his usual sofa cushion crevasse. “You’re doing great. You’re on the verge of serious revelations. Highest clearance imaginable.”

“Really? That’s amazing. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. It’s all your hard work. But really, relax. You’re wound too tight. Get a massage or something. Rolfing’s fun. Stay loose for the coming astonishments. Don’t be a fuckrod.”

He would not be a fuckrod. He would stay loose, stay on his toes, whatever Baltran and his glimmering ilk required. They looked like cartoons, sure, lacked sustained corporeality, and even had slightly squeaky voices, but they had chosen him. The message was too important to be left to anybody else, no matter how much he lectured at symposia about dialogue and communal deliverance. Also, no fuckrods could lurk in his vicinity. Maybe he should shitcan his manager. No sooner had he thought the phrase “shitcan my manager” than Jack’s name blinked in his hand. Coincidence was a concept for sheep.

“What have you got?” said Gunderson, stepped out to the sidewalk.

“Everything’s still in play,” said Jack.

Gunderson’s eyes strayed to the Gray’s sign on the building’s facade: WHEN YOU’RE HUNGRY, OR BROKE, OR JUST IN A HURRY. NO GIMMICKS. NO BULL.

There was always a gimmick. The gimmick here was you ate factory-sealed pig chins and the hologram never ceased transmission.

“Everything’s still in play? That’s a good one for your tombstone.”

“Thanks. I’ll leave it to you to make arrangements with the engraver. Meantime, the series division is still meeting, but my guy there, my mole — don’t you love it — says there will be an offer by the end of the day. They no longer have the aforementioned concerns. They believe you believe.”

“Good.”

“More than good.”

“Do you believe I believe, Jack?”

“I believe in solid, serious offers.”

“Fair enough. Because I don’t care about the money.”

“I know, I know. How about you take my cut and I take yours?”

“I would, my friend. The money’s not for me. It’s for Carlos.”

“How is the boy?”

“He’s beautiful. A beautiful child.”

“Seen him lately?”

“Victoria nagging you again? I’m sorry about that. But you can’t listen to all her crap. I see him plenty.”

Now the reeker staggered out of Gray’s Papaya, waved his ragged arms.

“Hold on.” Gunderson dug in his coat for some loose bills. “Hey, buddy…”

“Keep your papes!” screamed the man. Particulate of frankfurter and a fine gin mist sprayed from his mouth. “I want your goddamn soul! Mean to munch it!”

“Pardon?” said Gunderson.

“Your soul wiener! That’s the real-ass jumbo!”

Doubtless on the astral plane, or even just an outer ring of Saturn, this man was delivering galaxy-beating sermons to sentient manifestations of light, but in this dimension, Seventy-Second and Broadway to be exact, Gunderson had to fucking go.

* * *

Maybe he wasn’t such a bright guy. Victoria’s divorce lawyer probably hadn’t thought so when he brought Gunderson to ruin, or rather, to Queens. His studio in Sunnyside was suitable for the composition of prison manifestos, but Gunderson was long past garret-pacing histrionics. He’d already written his book. He’d been on the talk shows, the campus panels. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rock star kept inviting him up for a helicopter ride.

The Queens studio worked for hippie tang sessions, but it was not the apartment of a generational touchstone. Yet here he festered within the chipped stucco walls, beneath the hideous chandelier. He was lying on the futon after smoking some of the alpha weed, a gift, or tribute, from one of Nellie’s rich friends, when he felt an odd prodding in his spine. He stood, peeled back the mattress.

“Baltran.”

The machine elf’s head poked through the cheap slats of the frame. Most of him seemed morphed with the hardwood floor.

“What the fuck, Gunderson? It smells like sad, lonely man in here.”

Baltran’s buzzing was fainter than usual. His scallops bore an odd magenta tint.

“I need to catch up on laundry.”

“How about ass wiping?”

Things had, in fact, grown a wee degraded. That’s why he still spent as much time as he could at Victoria’s. Psychologists, probably, would offer negative explanations for Victoria’s failure to change the locks, but Gunderson preferred to see it as evidence of her personal evolution. Guilt for the skill of her lawyer, too.

“Look, buddy,” said Baltran, “we have to talk.”

“The TV thing? I’m close. I think it has a real chance to be a wake-up call for—”

“It’s about the prophecy.”

“What about it?”

“The math needs a little tweaking.”

“Same old same old.”

“But now it’s different.”

“Meaning what? It’s not a few years?”

“Not quite.”

“What do you mean not quite?”

Baltran fell buzzless for a moment. This happened sometimes. Though his image remained, it was as though the essence of the elf were no longer present. He was perhaps being called away for an important matter. He’d be back. Baltran always came back. But Gunderson wanted him back right now.

“What do you mean not quite?” Gunderson said again, lunged. His hand sliced through the hovering projection of his friend.

“Fucking watch it, pal,” the elf said, back again. “You know I can feel that. It hurts.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t mean to make you nervous. You’ve still got a few months.”

“A few months?”

“That’s time enough. Why don’t you patch things up with Ramón?”

“I’ve got no problem with Ramón.”

“Besides the fact that you don’t talk to him.”

“He doesn’t talk to me.”

“It’s your business, I guess. But you’ve got to get out there and effect some goddamn evolution. Do me proud.”

“How do I do that?”

But Baltran was gone again. He’d left Gunderson to worry all alone. How was Gunderson going to complete his mission with these new time constraints? He’d have to throw some money at the problem. You couldn’t fix every problem by throwing money at it, but you couldn’t fix anything without also throwing money at it. But where would he find the papes?

Sure, money came to you as long as you didn’t covet it, but there was still the distinct possibility that the old Gunderson, that greedy moron, coveted on the down low, screwing them both. Maybe it was this vestigial Gunderson who’d cut off Ramón when the shaman started asking questions about the television deal. Probably just wanted a new roof for his hut. Well, unless Gunderson got the message out, Ramón wouldn’t need a roof. Nobody would. There just wasn’t time to waste working out the licensing on a prophecy.

Victoria was in Lisbon for a fado festival and Carlos was with his grandparents in Maine, so Gunderson had full run of the loft he’d traded in for penile liberation. Part of the excitement, the charge, of pending apocalypse, he understood, was knowing Victoria wouldn’t get to enjoy this square footage much longer.

Maybe he wasn’t such a bright guy for other reasons. The treatise one of his acolytes at Oxford had just e-mailed him was dense going, especially in Victoria’s desktop’s antiquated text format. Here were Isaac Luria and Madame Blavatsky, there a text block of dingbats. Gunderson had barely skimmed his philosophy books in college. “I get the idea,” he would announce to his dorm suite after twenty minutes of deep study. “Pour me a drink.”

“Psychonaut” was a silly word (Baltran said only chumps uttered it), and Gunderson had detested most of the heavy trippers in college. He’d taken hallucinogens just a few times, passed those occasions frying flapjacks, staring at their scorched, porous skins. The only acid eater he could ever abide was Red Ned, a scrawny old Vietnam vet who appeared at most major burner parties and who, in return for some My Lai-ish confession and recitations from The Marx-Engels Reader, got free shrooms and beer.

Once, at a barbecue, Ned cornered Gunderson near the keg, stuck a bottle under the younger man’s nose, some filthy hooch he’d likely distilled in one of the bus station toilets.

“It’s absinthe,” said Ned. “The mighty wormwood. You will eat the devil’s pussy and suddenly know French.”

“Maybe later,” said Gunderson.

“Later.” Ned laughed. “Shit, kid, later? Later my platoon will be here. We’ll slit you at the collarbone, pour fire ants in. Then you’ll talk.”

“I’m happy to talk now, Ned.”

“You don’t have anything to tell me yet. You haven’t acquired the blind and pitiless truth. But I have a feeling about you. What do you think?”

“I just want to get laid.”

“I’m good to go,” said Ned, and gave Gunderson what might have been, during teethsome years, a toothsome smile. “You do tunnel rat zombie cock?”

“Got a rule against that.”

“Your loss, son.”

In short, until Gunderson had taken a magazine assignment, gone to Mexico to drink emetic potions with psychotropic turistas, his opinion of hallucinogens was that you had to worship jam bands, or believe the army had planted a chip in your head, to really enjoy them.

He’d flown to Oaxaca with a glib lede to that effect in his laptop. He returned a converso. The tales of Hofmann, the stern brain play of Huxley had never enticed him, but puking and shitting on a dirt floor while Ramón kicked him in the balls and, later, sobbing while his dead grandfather Gilbert hovered nearby in a beer-can cardigan and told Gunderson why he, Gunderson, had such a tough time being faithful to women (Gunderson’s mother had hugged him too much, and his father was always on his high horse, and there was something about Gil’s side of the family being related to Barry Goldwater) — all this, in aggregate, did the trick. Later he discovered the crotch kicks were not traditional, but Ramón’s twist on the ritual. Didn’t matter, Gunderson was hooked. A few more doses over the next several months and he knew his place in his family and his place in the infinite, at least provisionally.

He also had a vision of the world in a few years’ time if the current course was not corrected. More precisely, it was a vision of North America, oil starved, waterlogged, millions thronged on the soggy byways, fleeing the ghost sprawls of the republic. He saw his sister gang-raped in an abandoned Target outside Indianapolis. The local warlord, nicknamed Dee-Kay-En-Wye for the runes on his tattered hoodie, cackled as he watched his clan work. They’d lived in Home Appliances their entire lives. Strangest of all, Gunderson didn’t have a sister. This added urgency to his vision. It wasn’t just about him, or his sister.

When he’d recovered and told the shaman what he’d seen, Ramón led him to a stone hut at the edge of the village. A satellite jutted from the woven roof. Inside was a sleeping cot, a computer, a bookshelf full of French Symbolists. The shaman, who to Gunderson resembled one of those carved-down distance runners he’d watched train near his father’s house in Oregon, slid out a large cardboard box with copper hasps from beneath the cot. Inside was a crumbling facsimile of the storied codex. He showed Gunderson the jaguar, the sickle, the long, solstistic loops. He pointed to where the reeds ran out.

“I thought the Maya had the calendar,” said Gunderson.

“Fuck the Maya,” said Ramón.

* * *

Gunderson had never been much for the astronomy, the math. His colleagues, his rivals, could offer the proofs, the ellipticals, the galacticals. Most of them used the Maya Tzolkin, and Gunderson suspected that Ramón’s insistence on this Mixtec forecast was just an intellectual property maneuver, but he didn’t mind. He was trying to save the world, and that included not just the plants and the animals and the majestic rock formations but the people, those meat-world parasites who’d built pyramids and written concertos and enslaved their brothers and sisters and performed clitoridectomies and gone to the moon and gorged themselves on war and corn syrup. Gunderson was a people person. We just needed new kinds of people. We had to start making them right now.

The other thing that had to start being made right now was a serious offer from the TV people. Gunderson was back downtown at his favorite organic teahouse, e-mailing a fiery message to his network, hinting there might soon be an announcement about a new interpretation of the codex, a revised time frame for the Big Clambake. That would light up the boards. His people didn’t need much prompting. Many were lonely sorts pining for genuine human connection or, short of that, a flash mob.

So if the series division kept wavering, maybe Gunderson could get some grass roots going. Grass roots. That had been a big word with his father. Still was, Gunderson guessed. He hadn’t talked to the man in years. Why? Ask the Jaguar. Gunderson didn’t know, except that maybe it was hard for men to talk to each other, especially fathers and sons, at least in this dimension. Jim Gunderson was handsome, brave, beloved, righteous. How did you talk to a father like that, a legendary activist, a lawyer for the downtrodden, ask him to read your magazine profile of a sitcom star, a charismatic CFO? Of course, Gunderson’s hack days were behind him. Why didn’t he call now? Because Jim Gunderson fought for a better tomorrow while his son, despite all his talk of collective action and personal evolution, was maybe just another doom pimp betting on no tomorrow at all? No, it was probably just the father-son stuff. The new times would not be so burdened. We’d be too busy line dancing with alien life-forms for patriarchal agon. Gunderson glanced up, tracked the dreadlocked teen behind the counter.

“Can I get more of this beetroot crush?”

“Of course,” said the girl. “I’ll bring some right over.”

“That’s not all you can bring.”

“Excuse me?”

“Damn, sister. Look at you.”

Gunderson had always subscribed to the practical man’s theory of seduction: hit on everybody and everything, crudely, constantly. His percentages astonished even him.

“Yeah, you know something?” said the girl. “I’ve heard about you.”

“What have you heard?”

“That you’re, like, a genius. But also a total pigdog. I don’t need that in my life right now.”

“You don’t need complete physical and spiritual liberation?”

“I need health insurance.”

“That’s the hologram talking,” said Gunderson, handed her his card.

* * *

Outside, the sun was nearly licking him. It really felt like that, the sun the tongue of a loyal dog. Extraordinary. He stood on the curb with his eyes closed, face tilted up. This was life, its only conceivable acme. Little Carlos knew. Sweet Carlos, who had once stared up at some darkening clouds and shouted, “Don’t rain, little sky!”

Gunderson was about to call Victoria’s folks in Maine, something he would normally never consider, but here was this sudden surge of Carlosity. He had to talk to his son on the phone. But as soon as he thought the word “phone,” the damn thing started to vibrate again.

“Jack,” said Gunderson.

“They’re pulling out for now. They want you to pitch again in a few months.”

“What? Why?”

“Who knows? They say they’ve got too much in development, but it’s anybody’s guess. Quality television works in mysterious ways.”

“Look, things are a little more complicated. We don’t have a few months. We’ve got to do this thing now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The prophecy. There’s been a change of date. A little timing snafu.”

“I didn’t know that happened with prophecies. Aren’t they written in stone? Wasn’t this prophecy, in fact, written in stone?”

“This isn’t funny, Jack. This is real. I’ll do it all myself. I’ll get on my knees and beg Victoria for the cash. This has to happen right now. I’m through screwing around. I’ll get grass roots going. This is not about a television show. This is about life on earth. Hell, I don’t even know why I care anymore. Maybe it’s better if we all go up in flames.”

“Will you calm down? Let’s just wait and see what the series division has to say in a few weeks and then—”

“And then you can tell those pigdogs to shove it up their—”

“Jeez, will you relax? Pigdogs?”

“Relax? Are you telling me to relax? You sound like fucking Baltran.”

“Who’s that?”

“Never mind.”

“He’s not that little jerk repping at—”

“No, Jack.”

“I hope you’re not talking to him.”

“I’ve got to go.”

Gunderson had an appointment with Nellie at the loft. They were supposed to go over scheduling. Whenever they went over scheduling, they tended to wind up naked on the carpet Victoria had bought in Tehran. Gunderson worried that their juices might agitate the dyes. Given all he’d already perpetrated upon her dignity, Victoria would probably have him jailed.

After the scheduling meeting he was supposed to meet the rock star for dinner and a helicopter ride. He’d get a call at the last minute regarding location. That’s how rock stars handled scheduling. This one, an arena king from the 1980s who’d traded in his coke spoon for a yoga mat, had attended one of Gunderson’s talks at an illegal ayahuasca retreat in Santa Fe and had stalked Gunderson ever since. People sneered at the rock star, his silly spiritual cant, his new music that was a parody of his old music. The man spewed platitudes, certainly, was a font of phoniness, but Gunderson sort of liked him. Or maybe he just liked being fawned over by a superannuated icon.

What you couldn’t sneer at was the man’s portfolio. He’d invested his money in silicon chips back when it counted. His petty cash could probably feed the world. Would he spare some change to save it?

* * *

That Victoria was not in Lisbon, but back in what was now — and, truthfully, had always been — her magnificent home, seemed a vicious ripple in the continuum, something no blood-streaked, rainbow-feathered priest, tripping his balls off on some sun-cooked ziggurat, could ever have predicted. That she stood now on the potentially juice-marred Persian with Carlos in her arms, both of them bawling at a nearly naked Nellie, who had obviously let herself in with Gunderson’s spare key and, in a perhaps-not-humorous-enough surrender of pretense, shucked off most of her wardrobe in anticipation of their scheduling meeting, signaled some kind of cataclysmic rupture in dark matter’s latticework.

Not that Gunderson really knew what that meant.

“What the hell?” said Victoria as Gunderson came through the door. “This is where you bring your end times whores?”

“What happened to Lisbon?” said Gunderson.

“What happened to your self-respect?”

“What happened to knocking?” said Nellie.

“Knocking?” said Victoria. “It’s my house! I’m supposed to know my ex-husband is meeting a naked slut in my house?”

“End times is more of a Christian thing,” said Gunderson. “You know I don’t subscribe to—”

“What exactly makes me a slut?” said Nellie. “Because I have sex? That’s totally retrograde.”

“Look at you,” said Victoria. “The secretary. The home office screw. Except it’s not even his home anymore. Talk about retrograde. I bet you think being practically a hooker is empowering, too. Is that what you think?”

“I think you’re a shrill narcissist who couldn’t keep pace with your husband’s spiritual growth.”

“Is that what he said while he rammed you with his world changer? Or did he just make you stick a ballet shoe up his butt?”

“Hey, kids!” said Gunderson. “How about both of you stop it. This is ridiculous.”

“Damn straight,” said Nellie. “I quit.”

Nellie scooped up her clothes, seemed about to bolt, but then just stood there, quivering. Carlos squirmed out of Victoria’s arms, ran to Gunderson, clutched his knee.

“Daddy!”

Gunderson squatted, squared the boy’s shoulders. His son, he saw now, had the most chaotic green eyes he’d ever seen.

“I love you, Carlito,” Gunderson said, sniffed sharp diaper stink. The boy was long past due for potty training, and Gunderson wondered if it was his fault, all that trauma he’d visited upon his son’s developmental years. “I think he needs to be changed.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Victoria. It was the old challenge. Gunderson knew he wasn’t up to it. He wasn’t squeamish, but he’d always preferred changing Carlos when it felt like something fun, a larkish deployment of diaper and wipe, best with an audience. So here was the deal. He’d never be a good man, a stand-up guy, a pillar, his father. His absence would have to be the honesty from which the boy could draw strength. Besides, Gunderson was a prophet, a prophet on the clock, a very scary fucking clock. Didn’t that count for something?

“Yeah,” said Gunderson, walked out.

* * *

High above the night city, he knew he’d done right. While the rock star worked the stick and hummed his old hit, Gunderson looked through the chopper’s bubbled glass at the lit grid below. His strife seemed so squalid up here in the heavens, and gazing down on the bright, sick city stirred him. Maybe we were doomed fools on a dying fluke of a planet, but we’d had a damn good run. Mostly we’d murdered, tortured, razed, but once in a while we’d made something beautiful. We’d tried so hard to love.

“Thus spake Hallmark,” came a voice through his headset. “Cut the humanist rah-rah, friend.”

Gunderson was embarrassed the rock star had heard him get so sentimental, not to mention talk to himself.

“Aye-aye, Captain,” said Gunderson.

“What’s on your mind, lad? You seem perturbed.”

“Do you really want to know what I’m thinking?” said Gunderson.

“Hell, no,” said the rock star. “Just name the number.”

“You’ve mastered telepathy.”

“Something like that. Or maybe I can just tell that you need my help and I believe in your message enough to want to give it. I’ll write the check. You lead us back from the abyss.”

Screw Jack. Screw the deal. What had to be done would be done by the secret society, his brothers and sisters in vision, like this ludicrous geezer with the thousand-dollar T-shirt and spiked white hair.

Gunderson turned to thank him, to tell him of the long march ahead and the beautiful bond they would forge, but discovered the rock star slumped in his straps, stick hand listing. It was difficult to tell exactly when the spin had started or how fast the buildings roared up. The rock star was definitely dead. Maybe it was all the cocaine he’d been sneaking off to snort during dinner. Maybe it was everything he’d sniffed and jabbed and swallowed for the last forty years. Rock stars made millions singing about their broken hearts, and then their hearts actually exploded. This guy was going blue in his helmet. And he was not being a very good pilot.

Gunderson shut his eyes, saw the strewn green of his son’s. He felt strange pressures on his body, was a boy again himself, waking slowly between his mother and father on their flannel sheets in Eugene, a happy little boat bumping up on warm, sloped isles. Pleasant, primal enough, this memory, suitable for the closing clip, though didn’t Gunderson rate revelation, every artifice fallen away, the cosmos unmasked and Gunderson receiving the supreme briefing via transcendental brain beam? He deserved that much, didn’t he? Apparently not, for here rushed the rooftops with their colossal vents, their transnational signage, penthouses lush with light and hanging gardens. Gunderson grew dizzy in his bubbled tomb. Death’s smash and grab was upon him, he could feel a hand grip his arm, though it didn’t seem to be the Reaper’s.

“Sorry about this. Not what we were expecting, is it?”

Light twirled in the gold weave of Baltran. The elf’s shimmer steadied Gunderson.

“So, it’s bullshit? The calendar? The prophecy? Dimensional interface? You?”

“No, it’s not bullshit,” said Baltran. “It can’t be.”

“Are you just a figment of my imagination?”

“Fuck you. Figment.”

“You told me to do you proud.”

“You did do me proud, kid. I saw what you accomplished. It won’t be forgotten. Not by me.”

“And now what?”

“I don’t know, exactly. The beat goes on?”

“The beat,” said Gunderson, and he felt his phone vibrate, read the backlit text: Serious offer.

“Hey, shouldn’t I be dead yet?” said Gunderson, looking over at Baltran. “This thing’s been crashing for a while.”

“Not really. That’s just how you’re experiencing it. Okeydokey, here it comes, baby.”

“I can feel it,” whispered Gunderson. “I can taste it. It’s coming on sweet.”

“That might be your lozenge. See, really, there is no sweetness. What comes is pitiless, blind to you.”

“Aren’t we all connected?”

“Yes, we are all connected,” said Baltran, “but that’s not really a good thing. For the record, I always liked you, Gunderson. Breathe easy.”

Gunderson watched his friend’s form collapse into a sprinkly nimbus.

“Connected how?” cried Gunderson. “To what?” But he knew what, had known for some time, a few thousand years at least, back before his own shaman days on the shores of Oaxaca, longer, much longer, back before his human days, his golden molting days, his wailing vapor days, back before anything you could call a day, when he was just another stray vector shooting through great jagged reefs of anti-space. He’d known, but had he believed? Had he ever believed? Did it matter? Beyond the seal of the multiverse was a wet, blazing mouth. It slavered. It meant to munch. It had journeyed through many forevers to reach what it existed to devour: the real-ass jumbo.

Gunderson began, or ceased, to dream.