IN DREAMING OF REASON——

After Yeats & Goya

Again she treads upon his dreams
which he had spread underdarkneath
beside his blues, dims, and meats.
Sing! O muse, of her hatred
high and solitary and stern 
on a path to burn another Troy.
(Why should he blame her that she filled his days with misery—)
Why shouldn’t he?
He, cunt of the court,
cuckheld by caprice,
a vile little body,
a bright young thing.

I dream of reason, of the Daosein,
of exorcising you from me,
of embroidering you to the heaventree.
But like a baby blooded by the womb,
out screams your pilgrim soul,
so I seek a crowd of stars 
but this time (for all time?)
there is none in which 
my heart might hide.

How Maudlin this is!
How mad you’ve made me!
To hone after a woman Homer sung,
To go after someone
                   so far gonne,                                    
                                  gonne, 
                                         ᵍᵒⁿⁿᵉ

—-—HE PRODUCES A MONSTER

I’ll lash my love along your lapel
Bite l’appel du vide like an infidel.
But Bards bear me back, firm and fast
And sages speak through sundry pasts,

                       “How unwholly to be her fool,
                               To be spring in her world,
                                     To be hers nevermore,
    To keep visions visions, and fables fables,
   To strongly, wrongly, vainly love her still.”

You’ll find no pudding 
in this here proof,
darling dearest dear:
I writ, I loved, and still I die
dogged by the pound
of flesh of your flesh
I̷N̷T̷R̷O̷I̷B̷O̷ A̷D̷ A̷L̷T̷A̷R̷E̷ D̷E̷I̷V̷O̷U̷R̷E̷T̷H̷

After the poem “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning

I’m your Baroness tainted on your wall,
Seeming as if she were alive. I fall
Far from frame and down to darklight, which bears
No colour, naught gore nor glare, but the fares
Of my fairness, my depths and my passions
My spots of joy, ‘till I am naught but rations 
Of me. Ne’er again will I assess
The dropping of the daylight in the West
Kept curtained and blinded in your chancel,
A tinselled Gretel for little Hansel.
How proud you are, how glutted by the glum 
Of your one wish, drunk upon your red-rum.
“What would be so bad,” says the thief of I,
I who hath ne’er met one so barren,
Feint and fain, wan and only Baron.
Your first sin, your exeunt out from Eden  
Was to assert unholy Providence
And justifie your wayes of God to me
“What’s so bad about being with me?”
“What’s so bad about being with me?”
A friend in a chair, a bird in the night

ＳｔａaaaaaaaaaaaａＡＡＡＡＡＡＡＹＹＹＹＹＹＹＹＹＹＹＹ———

In a house no more a house
           a farm no more a farm
               a town no more a town
                       a me no more a me
                            no more no more
                 Somewhere where some darkness is a colour such a colour 
                                              to end all colours 
                 so pretty a colour a cold colour a rose is a rose is a rose 
           bc u heart me not so much <33         but I heart u so much  <33    
                           blushed bright beneath my burning kiss 
           PORPHYRIA PORPHYRIA PORPHYRIA and FRA PANDOLF 
             girdingme makinggoldoutofme makingme see me as I sleep.

dont wake her now dont wake her pls dont shes asleep shes asleep and as I lay in my freezer and my hands are sand and ur still in my heart but slipping and theres ur licorice stick and here I wade amongst the willows all the willows a widow within the willows

And thus we sleep together now (in the red, in the red)
And all night long we have not stirred (with the dead, with the dead)
And yet He has not said a word
And yet He has not said a word
Aɴᴅ Hᴇ ʜᴀs ɴᴏᴛ sᴀɪᴅ ᴀ ᴡᴏʀᴅ
ᴬⁿᵈ ᴴᵉ ʰᵃˢ ⁿᵒᵗ ˢᵃᶦᵈ ᵃ ʷᵒʳᵈ
ᴬⁿᵈ ᴴᵉ ʰᵃˢ ⁿᵒᵗ ˢᵃᶦ

Thank you to and for reading beforehand。 我爱你们。

12:00

Fish bodies on a flyblown beach。 Driving my Jordans over the bones of the dead。 Finger the hollow of a milkfish’s eye socket, seeking the sweet spot, her tender button, and watch blue-blue squirt and squeal from where I twiddle。 She flops in amphibolous remonstrance, in agonised ecstasy —— no。 Trick of the light。 Pretty fish。 Pretty angel fish, cold and still。 Missing an eye but you’re still pretty, my pretty angel。

Glance up at God, blind God : blind, blind as a bat。 Sky like a phone screen, an interface in International Klein Blue, every cloud an icon, delectable, waiting for me to ravish them。 I reach upwards to tap the glass。 To crack the sky and shake the earth, like our angels said on a Tet-anus day in a far-off country soiled with red clay, slicks with cicada wings with sounds of eggbeaters—eggbeaters—eggbeaters black against an agentic orange night, glass choppers stained upon the sky。 I watch pretty helmet boys wheel inside their jungle-green juggaeronauts, cleaning their rifles, flicking open Zippos, sweets and serenities effaced by falsified smiles。 Capture them with Nikons and Leicas, last minute of their fifteen, pretty angel boys on their Hueys, pretty angel boys for whom we have no words, greenbacks stolid along the green hills, scars of 我们的爸爸和妈妈, whom we have profited from, whom we have devoured。

You went away and never came back so I could have my Jordans。 At least I have my Jordans。

13:30

He Burroughs beneath your skin。 With too much time spent alone, I get to thinking sometimes, you know。 I imagine some of you as Joan Vollmer。 Not all of you, but some of you。 I imagine arranging gin glasses atop your skulls。 Don’t worry, my Joanies。 Stay still。 Not a hair on your head。 Just testing my aim。 There’s time yet for a million William Tell acts。 One for each of you, my little Joanies。

Takami’s 『Battle Royale』is a work of non-fiction。Fukasaku’s film adaptation, in turn, is a documentary。 I should know。 I lived through it。

SUMMER

After the poem “Autumn” by T.E. Hulme

A spot of evil on a summer’s day
I clawed a broad
And fawned upon a ruddered sun
Like a 红卫兵
I did not stop to speak, but laughed
And around about our Antarābhava
At black faces : Hiroshima’s leftovers。

14:00

Mishima said he orgasmed at the sight of Reni’s Saint Sebastian as a child but truthfully, his climax only came once he recreated it with Shinoyama years later。 That photoshoot。 Everything else afterwards？ Pageantry。 Died like a twat, one last bukkake wank in all our faces。 He should’ve quit right after if he knew what was best, but he didn’t。 「靉靆の雲を慕ひ / その身は漠々たる / 塵土に埋れんとす」, but you only sought old clouds because you never knew how they appeared in actuality; you assumed perpetuity where there was none。 Antediluvian or armageddon, premodern or postmodern, Edo or Shōwa —— don’t lie。 You would’ve been miserable no matter when you were。

Reciting one line from Coleridge’s 「Kublai Khan」 with every full-range pull-up。 Am 2 lines away from completing the 2nd stanza。 My person on business from Porlock is less a person on business from Porlock and more my head on business from my heart suggesting, somewhat telegrammatically, that I should s-STOP-s-STOP-s-STOP-s-STOP this nonsense。 Exercise like someone normal, sure, yeah, okay buddy。

15:50

Observing a capped Caligula benched beneath a canopy。 Crisped leaves waylaid on all sides of him, plus pigeon shit and styrofoam cups。 Capped Caligula poses with a 叉燒包 in his hand, Saturn devouring his son in miniature。 So many Saturns, so many sons。I see them all the time。 Capped Caligula isn’t the first hungry ghost of 香港; he will not be the last。

Every story, a seance。 Every poem, an exorcism。 Treat the dead with due respect。 Some are owed less than others。

It must fall, indeed it has already fallen —— your mother’s edifice of you。

The words of Johannes the Seducer and Crisostomo Ibarra tramp out my phone and into aural tinikling, letters mummified into ferro-concrete poetry ; roads run amok with Cordelias and Maria Claras ; the sun is a harlot riding a chariot of daylight ; she scrapes the earth close to burn but not scorch ; she sheds my snakeskin sins。

The most euphoric epiphanies occur in bathrooms。 Couple drinks down, t-shirt sweat-shrunk, gathering what remains of me。 Then through a mirror, eurekas fling themselves —— furies of scalding intellect —— shawl me as if I were but a woodlands babe, demonstrate the skein of my life up until now, pointing to where it all unravelled, before casting me yet again untowards the world’s stage, à bout de souffle。

16:25

Locking eyes with a plastic Ronald McDonald five inches taller than I am, ketchup and mustard drip on, storefront decor —— I remember the end of the world has already happened。 That’ll be $60 HKD, 唔該。

Marathon of the 『Saw』 films finished, which answers my long-wondered question : what if Friedrich and Søren had watched the towers fall? John Kramer, akin to Ayn Rand, provides us with the only valid aesthetic model left。 Note the potential of a Kramerian approach to art —— drug your darlings, accord them to Rube Goldberg machines, pry off versified fingers, sew stanzaic eyes shut, wrench angel wings from their poesy rib cages, split paragraphed jaws and prosaic jowls open, render them naught but artisanal swine, brutes of the stencilled earth, make them meet oblivion, then present what remains。 Stare upon the unrefined and tell it gently, 「I want to play a game。 Live or die, make your choice。」 Whatever happens, you are not guilty。 The truth discovers itself。

Two treasures: pro-wrestling and hip-hop。 What is the 『Aeneid』 next to 『Wrestlemania X-Seven』, or 『Ulysses』 to 『Illmatic』？ Flitting fireflies to constellations entire。

17:42

I know dead people more alive to me than you will ever be。

『Content!』If there was ever a word to abolish or amputate, it would be this。 All is content, we feed on content, our feeds are content, we are content, we’ve grown content, daddy made our favorites, open wide, lunok yan, sige, sige。 To be contented —— is anything more loathsome？

No decision is as braindead as prefacing your writing with a warning: such and so is fabulism, no harm was intended, happy accidents。 It’s like entering the coliseum and explaining how you will bloody your enemy : 「I will stab you in the trachea, only after I’ve swept your leg and after slicing your Achilles’ heel……」 You betray the lie which is truth, and for what？ The best contracts are scrawled in secret, shook on by idle hands, arbitrated by the blind, blind as bats。

Stumbled across a weeping toddler on Nathan Road, red in the face, Disney-dressed。 I smiled。 She shed tears, naturally, because she isn’t old enough to read me yet。

18:04

Morissey displayed more literary genius than Shakespeare ever did when he finessed Random House into releasing his autobiography, warts and all。 Much to be said for its Byrony。

You say you honour these movements but —— let’s be real here —— you only regard them as franchises, robes to disrobe after a long Friday’s night, corpses of vortices good for a quick fuck when you like, a daub of history to authenticate your mediocrity, to amplify your bootlegged rhetoric。 What are you but fleshy trompe-l’œil, illusions without dimensions, fetishists in portraitist’s clothing？

Burn the book, but only after you’ve read it。

Satire is dead because we say it requires striking distance, wink-wink, nudge-nudge。 But meet any true-blooded, card-carrying satirist and you will find an earnestness so agonising it’s a wonder they’re still alive。

Checking in on your father like you would any lost cause —— water, sunlight, staring, room’s elephant left unmentioned, sleeping dogs left lying, settled。

19:59

Encountered myself just now。 Not the me I’ve grown to tolerate, not the everyday me, but the other I created for myself, das Andere, who cherishes memories but perishes any thoughts regarding them, pockmarked and pugnacious, and I recognised me by my gait along winding Bowen Road, twinkling streetlit stars above my head like sodium-hued gallows。 I wore what I envisioned when I wrote me at the time, short cut, Worcester knot, vainglory in black eyes, missing 蘇麗珍 at the top of the escalator, wraithlike, and I glared conspiratorially at myself, or perhaps guiltily, prodigal maintaining a vigil over progenitor, and if my Minervan owl flew then and there, perhaps I would have extended my compassion, kissed my feet or thanked me for my service like one embarrassingly would a veteran drowning his tomorrows by the bar, thank myself for expressing myself, but I did no such thing, it was not yet dusk, so I ghosted past me, though not without handing myself my Smith and Wesson 10, .38 special, 6-inch barrel, from me to me who isn’t me, yet still is and will be, which rests erect in my grip now, dark and livid and engorged, whose gravity and cordite drag me down hells deeper than Siddhartha ever found。 I tell myself otherwise but I know who I am —— gifted until the gift expires, until my coupon dries, a great lacking, an unpromised thing。 And so of course I end up falling to my knees and the gun falls too, and I cradle my head in my shaking, shaking hands。

HAVE GONE, AM AWAY

A comma poem

Dot, the, damned, details, right!
So, said, Doveglion, ere, he, tired。
Emphasise, every, unit, like
torturers, start, with, eyes……
Or, be, Edmund, Wilson, and, steal, slight
Reversed, consonance ; or, amphisbaenic, rhyme?
Forward, backward, darkling, coruscant!
A, comma : a, casing,
A, mind : a, gun,
A, boy : a, girl
A, heart : a, grave

22:22

I have never truly known anyone。This much I know。

How far our stars are。

I miss me。Why’d you make me miss me？

00:00

Ang Aking Alaala,

By my bedside, head craned to the window sill, thief winds stealing their licks, I see you on the knoll outside, burgundy-gowned, petrified youth。 Then you project yourself into my room, chauffeured by the fog, Erlkönig come to warn me of your wicked wooded ways。 But I’ve heard your warnings before。 I hear them even when I shouldn’t, in moments before dreams, in dreams themselves, then my waking。You say I should keep to myself。 You call yourself collateral。You say you’re not who you say you are, say you’re a wingless bird sleeping on the wind, you deserve galaxies J____, not me, who even am I to have you? Who am I to dare and defy the 道？ Don’t you see how they’ve broken my legs, J____？ Sold my soul, J____？ Noli me tángere, if you know what’s best for you, J____。

And to this I must rise from bed, grasp your shoulders, and respond : 「What borrower boxed you in？ Who taught you the exchange-value of valuelessness？ Who secured you like a loan, like you were nothing but a matrix tabulated, a table crossed and dotted？ And you’re not who you say you are, but who is？ Noumena, phenomena, tomatona, tomahtona。 And what good are all the galaxies which ever were if no bed is made for you, ang aking Alaala？ Can’t you rest your wings on me？ Won’t you？」

All the little lambs I’d sacrifice。 Wine-dark seas for a single shared night。 A thousand Nalanda mahaviharas for an eternity in your eyes。 Time, however much you like, for your touch, just one, even one。 If my karma was squared and God knew my game, if He followed the lone law higher than He, He would grant me leave to throw my body into my words so that I am conjured as you read : boy in a bottle delivered to your door。

A choiceless Orpheus, I travel beyond your surface at my own peril。 Dipping below your black horizon and into your silvered sea。 Whatever abominations I may encounter are but ants next to the monstrosity of my adoration。 Let your skeletons out the closet。 Let your bedbugs bare their teeth。

Terrified？ Of course。 Aren’t you？ Sleep, cousin of death ; fear, child of love。Ikaw ang daga sa aking dibdib, yung bulakak sa aking impyerno, yung inukit sa bato ko, ay syit, nawawala ang kaluluwa ko dahil sa yo。

But if along my life’s path [in all its tangle and thorns] I have been shown anything resembling truth, it is this : a letter to another is always a letter to oneself。 And the trouble of thinking —— of any thought left alone long enough to curdle —— is that over time, you assume its shape。 You describe a hypothesis and minutes later you are the hypothesis, ceaselessly tested。 You describe a death and eventually, the death becomes you。

In seeing you, sometimes I just see me, holes lesser than the sums of our parts, snippets orphaned from a broader Bible。 I seek your closeness and so I ask and ask and ask and eventually it becomes catechistic, and I’m sorry, so fucking sorry darling dear, but all I ask is that we might speak, cheek to cheek, dust to dust, can’t that be？ Can’t we be？

Yet if I cannot have that, if you cannot take my will for my deed, if you will not rest your wings upon mine, then let me be your abyss at least, your eyeless fish shored on your sands, your pretty helmeted boy on a chopper doomed for your war, your edifice if not your pillar, because then, even then, in my dark of darks, I would still be yours, and that would be fine enough, blood enough ——

—— love enough。

Thru the darkness of futures past, dispel your fear, take my hand, my little fire —— come walk with me。

Iyong J____

For against .

We met in that watery year—羊水—when the world wasn’t damned and my skin wasn’t bad. Dead Poets near Centrestage, 13/F, 22:00, buzzed by booze and blued by mood lighting, 7-ELEVEN’s grape strong sour in your hand, glass of Balvenie Doublewood in mine, both near-extinguished. You were further in line. Had to cut you to the quick. Made a comment about those black cat eyes from which it seemed midnight itself unfurled forth, then you poked fun at my Bose headphones scythed around my neck like a 朝珠 of old. One paltry excuse later—gotta take a leak or something like that, fuck if I know now—and we sneaked out onto Nathan Road, time frigid around us, buildings arisen in great disfigurements of concrete and rebar, two shadowed specks in a city of forever lights. We weren’t walking so much as we were hovering, borne like baby Yeshuas beneath an unsteady stream of neon signs, bleary faces and doe eyes, talking about our personal filmic canon: A Moment of Romance for me, Happy Together for you. 

We cleared our throats, tossed our empty cans into the eigengrau sea, promenade-strolling. And so ensued the subdued game, the social ritual, hands around waists, eyes on eyes, the why are you looking at me that way, right here, right now, what do you want, oh yeah, uh huh, sure bro.

Your taste, our night, shit, shit. Do I still remember? I’m ransacking this land before time, a minefield of memories—e-cigs and evergreen, hands desert-dry on ass, spine against railing, rapier tongues constantly parrying, boys on boys, something out of a Truffaut or a Brontë, 屌, 屌, 屌, 屌, then 深圳, 上海, Paris of the East, cabbies polite as we spoke softcore in the back, sweet Cantonese nothings, enough nothings to unfulfill any fulfilment. 

On the back of the bar’s receipt, a wilted white flower, night we collided, you wrote in shite calligraphy: 天若有情, 1314-5555. Along the promenade, you handed it to me. I held it in my hand as Blake held eternity in an hour, raising it against the moonlight to get a good look, waving it around like I was worried it wasn’t real, that this spell would lose its magick. I held the flower the same way on that September’s day, death of our sixth summer. I smelled him on you in your cage home, you broke a bottle and you kicked and screamed and gnashed and weeped but we knew the score. I held the flower, Eschaton sounds raging just outside, chairs crushed, glasses shattered, invoking a sorcery long dead, murdered by escapisms with your 鬼佬.

Today, I lie on my bed in horizontal contrapposto. Cigarette in mouth, I raise the receipt, remember that queue: long line from the me I wanna be and the you you used to be. From this angle, touched by grey morning light, our flower is a white flag. 天若有情, it says.

“天亦老,” I finish it, breathing smoke, ode to our sweet Cantonese nothing.

The first poem is a Petarchan sonnet. The second is an Onegin stanza. The third is a combination of an English haiku and prose-poetry. Much love to , , , and for reading some of these. Enjoy.

MOMUS

Mahjong! Four fain faces in a dai pai dong,
   Scorned by four score and eight secrets, sans probe.
Thirteen tiles thine, befriended tetraphobe,
   ‘Me and my wife prevail,’ saith one man’s singsong,
To spite his scored whore and her shredded sarong.
   He asks fair lady of her seventh son’s lobe
And fair lady plays fair, boiled dog’s smile—Niobe.
   Then baak baan for the tablehead, night lurches long.

And so spake Du Fu: ‘friendlies must meet like stars,’
   Brother to brother, sister to sister, stellar-hate,
We Blemmyes chase pongs and kongs, spurning fate.
   Gamed families, unhappy in our own way,
Yellows in peril, czars carry scars,
   All our faces saved and no sins left to say.

ARDHANARISHVARA

They’re a Barbie doll gone voodoo
With mambo’s mind and houngan’s heat 
With magic like bone-hewed hoodoo 
Crossed and dressed along this beat 
A master who maketh mistress 
And Myra who becks and bridges 
Inside our land of Woolfs and virgins
Where selves strain akin to surgeons 
To slice away the lifelong penance
We’ll walk in beauty like the night 
And deaden names to end our plight
To redress our dharmic sentence
We’ll tell our names the livelong June
And read ‘Liang Zhu’ beneath the moon

TABERNACLE

It seems so simple
To furnish myself lucid
In five seven five

But we should remove me to a place with rivulets rampant — so I can cure the sin of my sinecure — tenderise the button with a single hurt colour — what is five seven five but Japanned lacquer — a disgrace, really, to what inheres in me — as if I were a fucking faucet to stopgap — mere liquor to lavish — a prophet in a straightjacket — no, we require a recurrent referent, a poetic photograph, heuristics made flesh — focus on the ding an sich of me, or the erscheinungen, what’s the difference — capture me for me, a fanned-out fawn — 

— and leave me ungathered in the nights’ remains.

The following is my translation of ‘Kahit Saan’ by Huseng Batute (pronounced Who-seng Bah-tooh-teh). It is a love lyric written in Tagalog with 6 stanzas consisting of 5 lines each. Batute, otherwise known by his real name José Corazon De Jesús, was a Filipino poet active during the 1898-1946 American Occupation of the Philippines, known as the ‘King of Balagtasan’ (a style of debate performed in verse) and ‘Poet of the Heart’ (due to his countless love poems, of which this is one). My translation aims less for a textual fidelity than a teleological one, whilst nevertheless maintaining each quintet’s dodecasyllabic pattern for the first four lines before switching into hexasyllabic for the fifth, as well as the overall monorhyme scheme. I wanted to transplant the staccato sound of Tagalog with its short vowels and sharp syllables, which is rather difficult when compared to the naturally iambic stress-unstressed sound of English. I believe I’ve made it work here though; the linguist’s love shines through.

TRANSLATION

NO MATTER WHERE

If along the paling paths upon which one walks,
Where among the bowed blades stands the snow-silver stalks
Who cognise your crossing and like hands of the clock
Face away in ashame with their hearts in deadlock. . .
Irog, I am your clock!

If a single bird arrives each lonely twilight,
Tender-care approaching with eyes widening-white,
If it enters your room and abides by your blight
And hums his harana for your nightly delight. . .
That bird is I, my light!

If from beneath you admire the darkling peace
Where an orphaned star gleams as in a sterling fleece
And explodes through apertures with certain cerise
In ray-beam tears of melancholiac caprice
Mutya, I am that peace!

If you are awoken by some mortared morning,
To witness a potted butterfly’s scorning
For its unslaked thirst and its hemispheres storming
With frozen wings which wither into a warning. . .
Lover, I am mourning!

If within your prayer His eyelids swell with tears
And upon your bashful sight Hesukristo nears,
If you cannot slough away your sorrowful years
And like doleful Job trial through your Godless fears. . .
We won’t cohere, my dear!

But if Ama Namin names our places and times,
Then I forfend all forfeits and render them crimes;
The distance be damned, you shall scale such trying climes 
Where potter’s field and duryans peeled reek of old pines. . .
And we’ll meet like wind chimes!

ORIHINAL

KAHIT SAAN

Kung sa mga daang nilalakaran mo,
may puting bulaklak ang nagyukong damo
na nang dumaan ka ay biglang tumungo
tila nahihiyang tumunghay sa iyo. . .
Irog, iya’y ako!

Kung may isang ibong tuwing takipsilim,
nilalapitan ka at titingin-tingin,
kung sa iyong silid masok na magiliw
at ika’y awitan sa gabing malalim. . .
Ako iyan, Giliw!

Kung tumingala ka sa gabing payapa
at sa langit nama’y may ulilang tala
na sinasabugan ikaw sa bintana
ng kanyang malungkot na sinag ng luha
Iya’y ako, Mutya!

Kung ikaw’y magising sa dapit-umaga,
isang paruparo ang iyong nakita
na sa masetas mong didiligin sana
ang pakpak ay wasak at nanlalamig na. . .
Iya’y ako, Sinta!

Kung nagdarasal ka’t sa matang luhaan
ng Kristo’y may isang luhang nakasungaw,
kundi mo mapahid sa panghihinayang
at nalulungkot ka sa kapighatian. . .
Yao’y ako, Hirang!

Ngunit kung ibig mong makita pa ako,
akong totohanang nagmahal sa iyo;
hindi kalayuan, ikaw ay tumungo
sa lumang libinga’t doon, asahan mong. . .
magkikita tayo!

This post assumes familiarity with my previous essay, which you can read here:

It was intended to be standalone, but following a robust comment put forth by , I thought it deserved an equally robust response. Said response has since grown unruly enough that I‘ve turned it into a separate post.

Firstly, I’ll concede to the Tomasi error. That was erroneous and it has since been altered. Everything else here is contestable, though. If you’ll allow me to go through it point-by-point:

Some very strange factual inaccuracies in the essay. Hard Travelin Heroes is a “dungheap” and “fence sitting” for appealing to nuance among the peoples, but the melodramatic, embarrassingly outraged Vigilante is “a worthwhile political text”, even as it misunderstands how the legal system works in each issue?

1. Hard Travellin’ Heroes is only ‘nuanced’ in ways someone assumes bipartisanism equivalent to ‘nuanced’, as if the Democrats (Ollie) and Republicans (Hal) were the only ones whose views held any merit. (And before you go any further, Ollie is a Democratic Socialist at best, hardly the radical the average comic fan believes him to be. His anticapitalist rhetoric stands for little in the face of his mayoral run, and his ‘Queen Foundation’ venture at the end of Benjamin Percy’s Rebirth run was made meaningless by subsequent writers). The arc is a dungheap, and it is fence-sitting. O’Neill’s intention to teach is not necessarily bad, but when the book harbours condescending interpretations of its chosen societal issues, this means it sidesteps the ambiguous nature of issues like race, drug addiction or environmentalism (Where do the drugs come from? Why is Roy’s pain being equalled to the drug dealer’s business despite the power dynamic being immensely unbalanced? Where lies the roots of American racism? How does this racism emerge outside of its more explicit instances? How do world governments profit from the continued fossil fuel production? O’Neill doesn’t care to address any of these). You could say that ‘it’s a comic for kids/teens, it can’t speak on everything’, but that’s really the issue at hand here, isn’t it? Companies like DC feel the need to simplify multifaceted issues into aphoristic binaries. Such an approach serves no other purpose than to reify (in the Marxist sense) the state of the world. In other words, it is a shallow depiction of political ‘nuance’, a neoliberal dream of enlightened ‘nuance’ which has only grown increasingly untenable with every subsequent year America continues to exist. The book dials its didacticism to the Nth level, praying that its aggressive moralism will somehow countenance its artistic emptiness. It is only occasionally enjoyable due to Neal Adams’ great artwork, and O’Neill’s talent for pulp imagination (much better than his sledgehammer politics). Conversely, Vigilante is a richer text because of its willingness to complicate its protagonist and by extension, its readers. It allows us to both indulge and condemn Adrian Chase for his mission, much in the same way a great Dredd book does (though Vigilante’s existence within the narrow confines of the Big 2 makes it that much more radical). Your characterisation of it as ‘embarassingly outraged’ betrays a narrow reading of the book’s antinomies, how it juxtaposes its genre thrills with its more uncomfortable political implications, and how it ultimately condemns Adrian (an ending such as that could not be more decisive). It is, in essence, a concentrated variation on what Ennis did with Punisher MAX. It is lesser, owing to occasional melodrama as you stated, and its at-times overwritten quality (especially once Paul Kupperberg steps in), but it certainly has more merit than the self-satisfication of Hard Travellin’ Heroes. Also, comics are not legal textbooks. Last I checked, Daredevil and She-Hulk weren’t ratio decidendi; neither is Vigilante.

Listing Heroes Reborn and Death of Superman as stories “hoping for critical purchase”, when they were unambitious action stories, instead of actual Watchmen copycats following the tail end of the 80s like New Frontiersman or The Question?

2. My essay invoked Heroes Reborn and Death of Superman and works like them as symptoms of a broader cultural phenomena: the allergic (excessive-and-edgy) reaction the 1990s had to the 1980s. No serious critic disputes that Heroes Reborn and Death of Superman were, at their creative core, commercial gimmicks. But to suggest that unambition negated their possibilities for critical attention is simply—and historically—false. Death of Superman was a story, but it was also a global media event, one only made possible because of Watchmen’s earlier success. Its ‘ambition’ was not exactly literary but it was cultural. It aimed for, and achieved, a seismic shift in how mainstream media, and thus the public, perceived the “gravitas” of superhero comics. It sought critical purchase not from the literary pages, but from the front page of The New York Times and the nightly news. Dismissing this because the interiors contained punch-ups is to misread my argument. I also wasn’t trying to call them Watchmen copycats. I placed them in a lineage of the industry’s structural and commercial response to the new cultural capital Watchmen created. Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns proved, to the wider world, that superhero comics could be taken ‘seriously’. The corporate reaction was not to universally mimic its deconstruction (that came later from writers like Moore’s disciples), but to commodify its aura of ‘seriousness.’ Death of Superman and Heroes Reborn are the quintessential examples of this: using massive, high-concept stunts to generate the kind of serious attention Watchmen received, but through plot mechanics rather than literary merit. They are the McDonald’s to Watchmen’s gourmet burger, a mass-market, diluted version of the ‘event as important news’. The Question is a good book, mind you. One of O’Neill’s better ones, mainly for its entertaining pulpy inventiveness than its pseudo-sociopolitical concerns. Sienkiewicz has always been a real talent and it shows in the book, quite evidently so. But it is no Watchmen, only attempting to really engage with one of the book’s more superficial elements (Rorschach as an objectivist crime-fighter). It’s a good book, but it doesn’t reach the same heights as Moore did, and to call it a Watchmen ‘copycat’ actually reveals a misunderstanding of what O’Neill was trying to do. Additionally, ‘New Frontiersman’ isn’t a separate book, it is the diegetic right-wing paper in Moore’s original. There was a Frontiersman published as marketing for the later terrible ‘Before Watchmen’ prequel series, but that wasn’t a separate ‘book.’ There is a 1965 children’s book entitled ‘New Frontiersman’ regarding President John F. Kennedy, but even if it were a comic, it came out before Watchmen. As such, I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to here. Perhaps you meant Darwyn Cooke’s The New Frontier which I actually do enjoy, but mostly as a well-constructed (if traditional) narrative, and an exercise in Cooke’s artistic talents rather than a serious critical work.

Listing “the founding of Image and Wildstorm” as two different moments even though Wildstorm existed as a sub-imprint since the founding of Image and nothing was more removed from trying to chase Watchmen’s critical acclaim than Image? Hell, Peter David and Todd McFarlane had an entire public debate because David was arguing comics should care about their scripts and McFarlane argued for the opposite.

3. I never claimed Wildstorm was separately founded from Image. Nowhere in the sentence you quoted nor in my essay does it suggest that this was my intended message. Once again, you are overreaching. Of course, WildStorm was a founding studio of Image Comics in 1992. This is a basic historical fact. But once again, my essay was analysing creative movements and cultural moments, not filing corporate charters. To claim that acknowledging WildStorm’s later, distinct creative identity is an error because it shared a logo in 1992 is like arguing you can’t discuss the artistic evolution of Pixar after Toy Story because it was originally a computer hardware company. It’s a pedantic distraction masquerading as a substantive critique. Also, your reading of Image as being ‘removed’ from watchmen indicates a shallow, literal-minded reading of what I’ve said. Image’s founders explicitly rejected the literary style of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, yes. In its place, they championed dynamic art, creator ownership, and anarchic energy (exemplified by early works like Youngblood and Spawn). But to claim they were “removed” from Watchmen’s impact is absurd. Image’s entire commercial existence was a direct consequence of the market Watchmen helped create. Watchmen and TDKR proved that superhero comics could be serious business to outsiders-looking-in—both culturally and financially—for the direct market and beyond. They created the economic and cultural space for a venture like Image to be conceivable and bankable. Image didn’t chase Watchmen’s critical tone, but it did chase and capture the commercial capital and industry-shaking clout that Watchmen’s success helped unleash. They were opposite sides of the same revolutionary coin. It is also worth mentioning how Wildstorm rose to eventually become its own separate company. By the late 1990s, under editors like Scott Dunbier, WildStorm had matured into a distinct creative hub. You cannot seriously stand here and tell me that Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority had nothing to do with Watchmen. Ellis and Hitch engaged with the logistics, politics, and morality of superheroes on a global scale, updating Moore’s cynicism for a post-9/11 world. The former simply could not have existed without the latter. By arguing in this way, you reduce the dialectical evolution of an art form to a static corporate family tree, which is ironically the kind of surface-level engagement you accuse me of later on. (And for what it’s worth, if McFarlane cared about his scripts more, Spawn would be far more celebrated than it is.)

Thinking Morrison first tackled Batman in Arkham Asylum instead of his story "The Stalking" four years earlier? Naming Battle For The Cowl as a low point in Morrison's run even though they didn't write a single issue of it?

4. Whether Morrison’s first professional Batman work was a short story in 1985 or a graphic novel in 1989 is irrelevant to my thesis. I’m primarily concerned with their novel-length run on the flagship title (2006-2013) as a philosophical intervention, and it traces that history back to their initial groundbreaking work on Arkham Asylum. Citing a 10-page precursor from two decades prior really isn’t the ‘gotcha’ you think it is, especially when I don’t claim anywhere that AA was Morrison’s first take on the character. ‘Stalking’ is simply fine, more of an interesting historical tidbit than a significant turning point for Morrison, and I eschewed discussion of it because it didn’t seem worthwhile to talk about it in comparison to Gothic, AA, and their main run. Moreover, if you had read my parenthetical aside carefully, you would have noticed that nowhere do I claim that Battle for the Cowl was written primarily by Morrison. Instead, I stated that they had to show fidelity to its events, which they did. But to claw a little deeper: Morrison created the conditions for it and ultimately responded to the event with Batman and Robin. It would be unthinkable for it to go unmentioned. Also, during this time, Morrison was a lead architect of the Batman franchise’s core narrative. Battle for the Cowl was a commercial event filling a gap they created, executing plot beats their story demanded. Critiquing it as a “low point” within the Morrison narrative cycle is completely valid. It is a critique of a chapter in a story Morrison had a hand in telling, regardless of who typed the script for that specific instalment. This mutual coordination is how events work, and is often what leads to diluted narratives on titles with long-running creatives. That Morrison’s run remains mostly aesthetically intact despite such things is a testament to what they achieved.

The reasons behind these mistakes are clear - Hard Travelin' Heroes is inferior to Vigilante because you agree with Vigilante's politics; you didn't read Heroes Reborn nor Death of Superman, and you name-dropped Wildstorm because you were thinking of The Authority, so you played fast and loose (read: decades) with the timeline of Watchmen's copycats to make your flimsy point.

5. Rebutted by my previous elaborations.

I need not go into the hilarity of thinking Morrison was the first Batman writer to acknowledge his prior history, and how the sentence "giving Batman's history some narrative weight for once" is offensive to past writers (which you didn't read).

6. I never said that Morrison was the first writer to acknowledge prior history, merely that they were the one of the only ones to make substantive use of old stories that went beyond simple retconning or referencing. Few writers, up until that point, had mined the totality a single character’s history to the extent to which Morrison had. Other writers (Wein, O’Neill, Moench, Englehart, Starlin, Rucka, etc.) mined Batman’s lengthy history for nostalgic callbacks or plot devices. They treated these elements as Easter eggs, singular weird events, or as fodder to tell entirely unrelated stories. It was selective continuity, a toolkit for individual stories, often treating the stranger chapters as aberrations or mistakes to be smoothed over or ignored. This is not a misreading but instead a fact of how companies like Marvel and DC treat characters: as ahistorical commodities. Morrison’s approach was mythical, arguing that the chaotic, decades-spanning archive is the character’s authentic, fractured mind and experience. My phrase “giving Batman’s history some narrative weight for once” critiques less the efforts of past writers than the critical and editorial consensus which deemed 90% of that history as disposable schlock. It’s not simply about ‘acknowledging’ but meaningfully repurposing old lore to tell an undeniably new story, a far cry from editors inserting tiny captions wherein they write: ‘Read Batman #302 to learn more!’

In your narrow understanding of comic book history, Animal Man is addressing the same concerns as Kingdom Come because you read them both and little else that’s contemporaneous (”this movie is giving me serious Baby Boss vibes”). Morrison is “returning to the Silver Age roots lost since the 80s”, despite the Silver Age ending decades before; Batman was a wasteland until Morrison saved him in 1989, despite the editor in chief that year being the same O’Neil you deride.

6. Reducing my comparative analysis to ‘Baby Boss vibes’ is the critique of someone for whom a Venn diagram is two separate circles. Both Animal Man and Kingdom Come are foundational texts of the late-80s to mid-90s crisis in superhero comics, a period where the genre was forced to auto-cannibalize and question its own purpose in the wake of deconstruction. One does it through radical metafiction, the other through moralistic allegory. Their shared concern is the legitimacy and stakes of the superhero narrative. To say comparing them is like me saying “this movie is giving serious Baby Boss vibes” is to display your inability to think in terms of themes, genres, or historical movements. It is criticism reduced to plot summary. As per your critical standards, we can name drop 80s and 90s stories until the sun comes up, like Kid Eternity, Hellblazer, Sandman, Transmetropolitan, JSA, Age of Apocalypse, Weapon X, Starman, Hellboy, but as far as my argument is concerned, this is all just ornamentation. Moreover, my timeline is correct: the colourful spontaniety of the Gold-and-Silver ages had declined with the beginning of the Bronze Age and had almost entirely faded come the Dark Age. The quote you’re railing against is, once again, an incorrect reading. I also never stated anywhere in the piece that Batman titles were a ‘wasteland’ before Arkham Asylum.

The opposing philosophies you try to force between Fraction's Batman (of which you clearly only read the panel shared on Twitter) and Morrison's "apolitical" run betray an incurious reader, one who blindly accepts what companies offer in advertising and what other reviewers cement as The Truth ("DC highly marketed Death of Superman, so it must have been trying to be serious! This quote says Morrison thought about past Batman continuity, so it must never have happened before"), when you very well could have, and should have, observed the socialist political commentary in Batman Incorporated; the tints of Occupy Wall Street, of a globalizing Batman force.

6. You are correct in identifying Talia’s anti-capitalist, class-warfare rhetoric. Its textual function, however, is ultimately not to advance a socialist platform but to psychologically attack Batman and mirror his own ‘corporatization’ of vigilantism. Morrison themself framed this as a personal, Oedipal conflict: “Bruce Wayne represents the Western capitalist industrial side... [Talia] is the daughter of an immortal eco-terrorist... It’s Mommy and Daddy fighting over the kid”. As such, politics becomes a weapon in a domestic conflict. Morrison deploys a socialist-tinged rhetoric to deepen a conflict between two flawed, absolutist ideologies, ultimately arguing that the human cost (Damian) is what matters. This is not me saying that I politically agree with the approach, but simply me clarifying Morrison’s aesthetic choices. It is likely the run’s weakest aspect, if only because the mapping of the political to personal is not one Morrison has always been equipped to do, despite being politically conscious themself. But this is hardly an unforgivable creative sin when the run more than makes up for it via other successes. Nevertheless, you are still mistaking signposting for legitimate signification—the fact of the matter is that Morrison participates in no sustained critique or even exploration of these ‘socialist’ politics beyond a few moments here and there. More than anything else, their run is concerned with the legend of Batman, as am I.

Of course, a Serious Comic Book commentator cannot miss the chance to decry Tom King's work as "CIA apologia". Reading him is not consequential - see any discussion of his current Wonder Woman run - any and every move by King will be dismissed by pointing to his CIA record, even when he's explicitly, not even through subtext, disparaging the organization, everything they stand for, and calling them violators of human rights and destroyers of human lives, bending almost every male character he tackles and disregarding their established personalities in order to get that message out.

8. We cannot ignore King’s biography. Suggesting otherwise is to suggest such biographical details are irrelevant, which would be absurd. We don’t say George Orwell’s time in colonial police is irrelevant to Burmese Days, or that James Ellroy’s childhood trauma is irrelevant to his noir. To treat comics seriously means diving beyond the surface, even at our own peril. Yes, in Strange Adventures, Adam Strange is haunted by wartime atrocities. In The Human Target, the Justice League is framed. These are plot points that allow for surface-level criticism. However, such criticism always operates within a tightly constrained, clinically pessimistic framework that is the true hallmark of King’s CIA-formed perspective. The message is never that systems of power can be overthrown or meaningfully redeemed, but that they are tragic, inescapable machines in which good people are ground down. This fatalism is the aesthetic residue of the intelligence worldview. It drains ideologies of their power and reduces conflict to managed, eternal trauma. It critiques specific actions while validating the existence and necessary brokenness of the superpowered apparatus. In the face of this fatalism, the therapisation feels less unique than wholly reductive. It’s the same as can be seen in Kathryn Bigelow’s the Hurt Locker, in Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. King’s critiques are the grievances of a disillusioned (but ultimately forgiving) insider. They focus on internal moral compromise, personal guilt, and operational failure, and rarely on the political illegitimacy of the project itself. His stories are consumed with the burden of the agent, not the suffering of the principality. This inherently centers and privileges the perspective of the powerful operator, which is the core of the apologist stance, and as such, is the core of what King writes. When he gets out of his own way, his unorthodox dialogic style and sense of narrative rhythm actually leads to interesting work (cf. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Superman: Up in the Sky, Helen of Wyndhorn). But more often than not, King is his own worst enemy, and no better is this seen than in his reductive interpretation of Batman.

Here we deal with a reader of headlines, the type of thinker who stopped reading comics years ago (or, more likely, picked up Morrison’s Batman Omnibuses once they were a completed work, never engaging with single issues week to week). What you learn about comics is what you see from a distance. You watch the movies, of course, and follow the discourse about their profitability (what else would you do on Twitter? Read comics?). You saw reposted hype pages from Absolute and Ultimate, so you vaguely point a broad connection between “uhh, superhero movies are losing popularity.... that must have led to the Absolute and Ultimate lines!”. It’s the same type of user who will comment on any article about comic books speculating it must be a move about the movies deep down, like when Star-Lord came out as bisexual in the comics and people only had to brains to say it was a critique of Star-Lord actor Chris Pratt’s Christian beliefs.

9. You implicitly posit that reading in collected editions or after a run’s completion is inherently inferior to reading “single issues week to week”, as if I hadn’t done so (I did; I re-read it in preparation for this essay as well). This is a sentimental fetish, not a critical standard, but it likely ties into your assertion that I haven’t read the books I’ve claimed to have read. Many of the works I’ve cited—Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Maus—were designed for and are best experienced as complete narratives. Analysing a finished, architecturally complete work like Morrison’s Batman run as a whole is a valid method for assessing its thematic and structural unity. Suggesting otherwise prioritises a consumerist experience of serialised suspense over the analysis of a complete text. Secondly, the claim that I can only think in terms of movie profitability is baseless. You are misguided if you believe that the lessened cultural dominance of comics and comic book movies are not tied together in some form or another, that the rise of ‘superhero fatigue’ did not directly inspire Snyder to write Absolute Batman the way he did. This smear attempt is actually a common elitist tactic (as seen in insular comic circles) to dismiss any analysis that dares to connect the medium to the broader cultural and economic forces that shape it. It insists comics exist in a vacuum, which is exactly the childish fantasy Moore and I have been critiquing. Funnily enough, while you accuse me of a narrow reading, you hypocritically demonstrate a narrow definition of what counts as legitimate knowledge. For you, ethos seems to derive only from granular continuity details, creator credits, company filings, and publication dates. Would it not be more accurate to describe you as the one with a “tiny pool,” limited to the water of literal facts, unable to swim in the ocean of context, influence, and meaning? Your final sentence is revealing: ‘that circular problem is much older than Morrison and the tiny pool you engage with.’ This is exactly my point. My entire essay is an analysis of Morrison’s specific method of grappling with that very ‘circular problem’: the problem of comics being about other comics, of history as a burden on the product. You accost me for identifying a problem in a “tiny” context, while admitting the problem is vast and old. You have, in your ad-hominem anger, conceded to the central premise of my analysis.

To wit: you rely primarily on factual nitpicking and armchair psychoanalysis. What you read as illiteracy is actually a disagreement on valuation. While you score a few points on minor inaccuracies, your critique largely misses the forest for the trees, something I already predicted in my initial essay’s second paragraph. You don’t even try to engage with my cultural or aesthetic arguments, all of which are substantiated (unlike your accusations of me only reading the ‘headlines’).

In any case, I thank you for actually attempting to argue with me, even though you failed. In the spirit of our argument, and in honour of your attempt, I believe the words of Matt Murdock (as written by Mark Waid, drawn and coloured by Javier Rodriguez, inked by Álvaro López, and lettered by Joe Caramagna) should apply to you here:

Grant Morrison () has publicly stated a preference for they/them pronouns. As such, this essay uses them.

I. I FUCKING LOVE BATMAN RAHHHH

When this image from the latest Batman run (penned by Matt Fraction, drawn by Jorge Jimenez, coloured by Tomeu Morey) made the rounds, I recalled Alan Moore’s acerbic claim that ‘infantile love’ for superheroes (he was speaking about superhero movies, but the principle still applies) could often be a ‘precursor to fascism.’ That vulgar urge for ‘simpler times, simpler realities’ lays itself bare here in the onanistic dialogue: an urge little to do with artistry or probity and everything to do with a desperation to arrest one’s development. It is writing motivated not by the manifold wonderment of the child but instead by his pettishness, his aversion from the interlocking ambiguities inherent to lived experience.

The question of portrayals such as the one above has never been one of canon, or whether it be ‘in-character’ for Batman to act this way, or even one of ethics—such discussion turns ouroboric very quickly—but rather why writers and editors have contrived him so. For what political, social, and corporate ends? Attempting to address real-world criticisms in comics is a self-reflexive move that only neuters serious epistemological considerations: why Batman, let alone superheroes? Why linger on fiction when our world lies in ruin? Of course our chosen one must address the Times We Live In™, our caped crusader must dissuade all doubt, we must justify his existence until there be no more disbelievers, or else we run the risk of our consumerist icon—and by extension, our consumerist selves—fading into a pop culture memory hole. So the logic says.

Pay attention to the Big Two companies and their consumers long enough and you notice, rather quickly, a particularly frustrating class of people: people whose artistic and intellectual tastes never progressed beyond poptimistic horizons, who respond to genuine imperialistic violence with self-aggrandising tweets. Such behaviour demonstrates a painful ignorance of the genre’s inherent Americentric propagandisticism, as well as its political ineffectiveness in spite of it,1 but this is nothing new. It is merely the latest in a long line of embarrassments dating back to the Bronze Age, when writers like Dennis O’Neill, David Michelinie and Steve Gerber thought it necessary to ‘ground’ these Arcadian archetypes in ‘our world,’ even more so than what Lee, Kirby, and the other Golden Age artists had done.

There’s Tony Stark reckoning with alcoholism in the oft-cited but largely perfunctory ‘Demon in a Bottle’ storyline. There’s Howard the Duck, which found success more through Val Mayerik’s caricaturist compositions than Gerber’s attempts at Vonnegutian satire. And who could forget O’Neill’s dungheap of an arc not even the masterful Neal Adams could save, ‘Hard-Travelling Heroes’, where champagne socialist Green Arrow tags along with ‘cerebral, sedate model citizen’ (viz. authoritarian lunkhead) Green Lantern as they ride across America, dealing with such issues as racism and addiction in tones so preachy it would make the Pope keel; all in the name of instilling in both heroes (and by extension, the reader) the values of ethical moderation, of a fence-sitting nirvana. We see, quite evidently, the ripening of these values in those aforementioned individuals whose love for kitsch has calcified into sentimental grandiloquence; who, through their unconditional adoration for a ‘blighted culture’, consign themselves to Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, unwittingly or otherwise. The system is rotten, but look there, up in the sky…

To lament the stagnation of mainstream superhero comics is not to declare the genre itself bankrupt. Kirby, Moore, Morrison and many more I will name later in this article stand as proof against that. However, we must interrogate why an industry with such capacity for innovation so consistently retreats into the safety of nostalgia, decompression, and market-driven ephemera.

II. No One’s Watching the Watchmen

Comics are able to produce works which investigate issues of great importance (cf. Spiegelman’s Maus; Sacco’s journalistic works; Satrapi’s Persepolis). Cartoons (from which comic books descend) have politicised roots dating as far back as the 18th century. And so, the oft-stated claim that ‘comics have always been political’ is undoubtedly true. Even the superhero genre—that twice-right broken clock—has sometimes allowed a genuinely subversive work to slip by, as in the case of Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, Wolfman’s Vigilante, and Ennis’ Punisher MAX. But such work is the exception, never the rule, owing to their breaking of conventions, their manipulation of rote narrative tropes, and their abandonment of Manichaeisms, all in pursuit of a conscious political aesthetic. They are worthwhile political texts precisely because they are terrible superhero stories.

None of this is to suggest that propagandistic works are always inferior. Golden Age pioneers like Jack Kirby, Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger, and Will Eisner were able to counteract the heavy-handedness of wartime programming through relentless artistic invention, regarding each issue as an opportunity to hone their craft or experiment with style. Take, for instance, Kirby’s psychedelic collages or Eisner’s cartoonish blend of cinema with Yiddish theatre. The question of what makes a great comic book then lies not necessarily with ideology or even morality but, as per usual, with aesthetics.

When Watchmen took costumed realism to its natural endpoint by revealing (quite literally in the case of Dr. Manhattan) how our emperors wore no clothes, and how self-victimisation and outwards totalitarianism often go hand-in-hand, it earned its spot in the canon. Caught between Watergate twelve years prior and 9/11 fifteen years later, the book became both a lode- and millstone for numerous imitators and divergents, many of whom learned not from its formal innovations or philosopho-political preoccupations, and instead focused on its surface-level genre commentary, as if the book were only a landmark because it dared to ask, ‘what if Justice League but bad?’

The landscape post-Watchmen was mired with pitiful, overlong stories hoping for critical purchase, as seen in Marvel’s Heroes Reborn and DC’s own ‘Death of Superman’ and ‘Knightfall’, as well as the founding of Image Comics and Wildstorm. In reaction to lead-footed seriousness of the Dark Age of Comics, a renewed, almost post-postmodern sincerity began rearing its head. Authors like Kurt Busiek, Mark Waid, and Grant Morrison responded to the darkness with effusive light: a move which only distanced the medium further from the inflection point made by Watchmen. Astro City, Kingdom Come, Animal Man, and Moore’s own America Best Comics line attempted to at least reset the industry’s moral scales, if not the time passed. These works were in many ways socially conservative, driven by that same, dreaded ‘urge.’ Yet there was undeniably substance to some of them, particularly those by Morrison, whose ambitions went beyond ‘canon’, ‘continuity,’ and a mere reinstatement of the superhero (as in the recapitulations of Kingdom Come and Astro City). Unlike other writers, Morrison was less concerned with nostalgia than with new ways of comprehending the medium.2 Although you could see promise in their early homages to luminaries like Jorge Luis Borges and Aleister Crowley, however, they did not achieve aesthetic apotheosis, at least when it came to their superhero work, until their seminal approach to Batman.3

III. Do What Thou Wilt

When Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth was published in 1989 (serendipitously coinciding with Tim Burton’s own fantastical Batman film), it became a massive commercial and critical success, and for good reason. Much has been written on its postmodern interpretation of the Gotham ensemble, its extrapolation of Alice in Wonderland, its relationship to gothicism, its odes to Jung, Crowley, Freud, as well as its interdisciplinary artwork, influenced by the proto-surrealism of Jean Cocteau, anti-naturalism of Antonin Artaud, and the tactile blends of Jan Švankmajer. Arkham Asylum stands as a landmark of not merely the mostly-barren Dark Age, but also of Morrison’s inclinations toward the unreal and occult.4 By playing fast and loose with the Batman mythos, accompanied by McKean’s own idiosyncracy,5 Morrison did in a single graphic novel what Christopher Nolan, Tom King, and Matt Reeves never achieved with their staid, fussy attempts to pragmaticise the character. We see here, even from the beginning, Morrison’s artistic commitment: naturalism exchanged for the bizarre and the insensible.

Then Gothic comes out—serialised in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #6-11 from April to August 1990, pencilled by Klaus Janson—to equivocate Morrison’s commitment. The tale here is both more straightforward than Arkham Asylum—a murder mystery wrought with supernaturalism—but its phantasmagoric presentation works, for the most part. Morrison’s callbacks to the Romantic literary tradition, including texts like Byron’s Manfred, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and De Quincey’s On Murder... mingles here with the diegesis of Batman, lending the story a certain mythopoeticism. The plot revolves around a serial killer whose immortality emerged from a Faustian deal—an obvious nod to both Goethe and Don Giovanni. Combined with Janson’s eclectic mix of Hugo Pratt classicism, German Expressionist lighting, and manga-style dynamism, the story is undeniably entertaining. Already we see Morrison’s grasp of comic-book rhythm and knowledge of artistic traditions beyond it. With these, they are able to take the bones of an otherwise potboiler and incarnate it with plenitudinous fabulism. As vivid as Gothic is, however, it holds onto superheroic conventions which, while not explicitly harming the book, nevertheless prevent it from the sublimity achieved by its predecessor. It is a lesser Morrison: a solid yarn rather than a masterclass.

This commitment to the nonstandard, though called into question with Gothic, is slowly resolved the longer they work for DC, and the longer they write Justice League, in which Batman stars. Inklings of their later reinvigoration of the character pop up here and there in the team book, but only inklings. It isn’t until their run on the flagship title begins with Batman and Son in 2006 that we see that commitment shaped into something entirely new.

IV. The Bat of Gotham Flies At Dusk

The run opens with a prologue in 52 #30 and #47, where Bruce Wayne travels to the snowy steppes of Nanda Parbat in order to undergo the Tögal ritual of Tibetan Dzogchen. Morrison alters the terms of the ritual, transmogrifying its contemplative practice into a 49-day ordeal where one simulates the death-process by sitting in an unlit cave. This alteration is deliberate—if somewhat Orientalist—recalling both Plato’s famous allegory and Hegel’s circular process of the Spirit.6 When Bruce Wayne emerges, it is Morrison’s declaration that this will not be an incarnation of the character anyone has ever seen.

This theme of rebirth reoccurs throughout—from a Derridean Joker cycling through personalities to emerge a Bowie-influenced bodhisattva; to the introduction of Bruce’s son, Damian Wayne; to Doctor Hurt’s recasting of himself as a returned ‘Thomas Wayne’; to the usurpation of a sociopathic ‘Zur-En-Arrh’ personality following Bruce’s psychological shut-down; to Bruce’s journey across time following his supposed death in Final Crisis; to the founding of Batman Incorporated. The idea abounds in the work but never constricts it, never makes it superfluous, thanks to Morrison’s restless ‘termitic’ imagination. As Manny Farber wrote, Termite art ‘feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.’ If we are to accept this definition, then Morrison’s Batman undoubtedly resurrects the vibrant spontaneity of the Gold-and-Silver Ages which had faded by the start of the 1980s. This is achieved through literal evocation of past stories via the Black Casebook, as well as wanton formal experimentation. From a two-issue arc jumping non-linearly through Bruce’s biography, to a trip to a possible future where Damian Wayne as Batman has accepted his own Faustian bargain,7 to an issue conveyed almost entirely through prose, no fresh technique is left to rot. Everything is in service of revitalisation.

In lieu of Dadaistic horror and Thelemic undercurrents, Morrison opts not merely for a contemporary spin on Silver Age eccentricity, but a totalistic reinterpretation of Batman where everything—from Kane and Finger, to O’Neill and Adams, to Sprang and Robinson, to Dini and Timm, to Miller and everyone else, to Pre- and Post-Crisis, to the New 52, to the live-action takes of West, Keaton, and Bale—happened, more or less.

I’d been told that traditionally Detective was the crime title while Batman was seen as the superhero book. That diktat was very much at the forefront of the cogwheels of the mindmills of my wind as I decided to take Batman the superhero seriously – in all his incarnations, every version or interpretation over decades of that weird eternal youth/eternal heyday/eternal fall these franchise characters enjoy, was all one man’s biography. The same Bruce Wayne was once the wild weird figure of the night in the early stories, and the world’s best big brother and police deputy of the ‘40s and ‘50s and also the madcap Adam West Batman of the ‘60s as well as the sexy tec of the ‘70s and the traumatized soldier of the ‘90s. All one man, it all happened, and not only that, but somehow he’d survived intact, without permanent injury and chronic pain!

What kind of magnificent peak human would such a lifetime forge?

— Morrison, in the IGN article, ‘ZORRO IN ARKHAM: REFLECTING ON A LEGENDARY BATMAN SAGA WITH WRITER GRANT MORRISON’

It is a profound response to problems identified in Umberto Eco’s essay ‘The Myth of Superman’: iconoclasms like Batman and Superman lie caught in the capitalist paradox of being both ‘consumable’ and ‘inconsumable’, with lives as multiplex as gods, yet still tethered to the ‘ways of everyday life’, leading them to exist atemporally, whilst hypocritically imposing themselves on the present via a ‘narrative of redundance.’ In other words: comic characters are somewhat mythical (with origin stories, canon events, notable personalities), and yet must also never have fixed histories. This way, they remain marketable products with never-ending shelf lives. To end Batman would mean to end the business, and so he must always be ‘placed back in the toybox’ at the end of every run, ready for the next creative team to step in. Nothing changes, hence, nothing means anything.

By conceiving a unified theory of Batman, Morrison circumvents this contradiction and pushes onwards with a new teleology: telling fresh stories with a stale character, charting unfamiliar paths while carrying familiar debts. In this regard, the Morrisonian Batman resembles a modernist Batman; the only way Pound and his kinfolk could ‘make it new’, after all, was by acknowledging those who came before. And by giving Batman’s history some narrative weight for once, Morrison decisively rejects meaninglessness.

Though the run shares DNA with postmodernism in its focus on fractal selves as well as its use of non-linearity and metatext, it isn’t politically conscious the way a Pynchon, Atwood, DeLillo, or Burroughs novel might be. Instead, it generates a previously-nonexistent Grand Narrative and positions Bruce as a man of order amidst a spiralling—yet intentionally unreal world—therefore sidestepping any need to mimetically engage with reality. And though it occasionally questions his ‘apophenia’, it ultimately redeems him time and time again as a paragon of Ultimate Good against Ultimate Evil, the inexorable and adaptive Geist8 of his own legend attempting to reconcile with the void at its centre (another common motif throughout the run, from Bruce’s childhood awareness of it, to Doctor Hurt, to Darkseid in Final Crisis). Over the course of the run, Morrison’s Batman undergoes (and forcefully twists) the Hegelian dialectic: he is the Subjective Spirit who resists, then overcomes his Objectivisation. Rather than submitting to the conditions of the world and of his enemies, he makes them adhere to his—thereby realising a personified variation of the Absolute Spirit. (“The world only makes sense when you force it to.”)

Through a series of intentional sublations—denying Hurt’s historical revisionism, borrowing from the villainous Leviathan to form Batman Incorporated, breaking his no-kill rule to fatally harm Darkseid with the latter’s own radion bullet—Bruce’s Subjective will reconstitutes the Objective world in his own image. Ergo, Batman becomes Gotham, Gotham becomes the world, and the world becomes Batman. He even becomes powerful enough to (tacitly) exert metafictional force on the physical comic object itself:

Post-O’Neill, Batman was made ghostlike, psychologised, ‘grounded.’ Now, Post-Morrison, he is so superhuman as to be essentially inhuman. Where stood a man now stands a living, breathing edifice to his own idea. This is further confirmed when he is sent back in time during Final Crisis and later travels through time in The Return of Bruce Wayne, where he continuously asserts the notion of a ‘Batman’ across history. More than ever, he has become a spectacle unto himself, outstripping everyone and everything, even primordial concepts like death and time.

I extol the virtues of Morrison’s run in spite of its flaws—illustrators not all up to par, some colourists leaving much to be desired, a fidelity to editorial mandates like the New 52, the Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul, and Battle for the Cowl means occasionally an issue of lesser quality, but I digress—because it is an exemplar of the genre, one standing in diametric opposition to previous deconstructionists. In this run, we see not the defensive ‘urge’ of Fraction’s police brutality panel but an imagination which expresses itself widely and furiously. It does not abandon heroes altogether as in Watchmen, because political considerations are less important than its ontological ones. Nor does it try to ‘elevate’ the genre as in the fascistic austerity of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, Matt Reeve’s rip-off of David Fincher’s worst film, or the torturous therapization/CIA apologia of Tom King. By mining the genre’s intertextuality and mythic capability, Morrison creates a post-Dark-Age anomaly: a superhero book which succeeds through its superheroism, not in spite of it.

In the years since its completion in 2013, Batman authors have remained unable to escape Morrison’s shadow. Scott Snyder’s initial New 52 run was ambitious and periodically interesting but ultimately overdetermined: straining for meaning when well-constructed entertainment would have sufficed. When Snyder got around to finally reading Morrison, he transplanted the latter’s ideas into Dark Knights: Metal and Dark Knights: Death Metal which gave us, among other missteps, the single worst DC character ever created. By the end of these stories, all it proved was that he’d mistaken Morrison’s resourcefulness for bloatedness, and a careful repurposing of old comic lore for mere nostalgia. No better is this seen than in the Batman Who Laughs, a grotesque mockery designed to thoughtlessly raise stakes, whose 90s excess is presented as meaningful complexity, who represents the worst of comics’ kitchen-sink mentality. Then there’s Peter J. Tomasi’s Batman and Robin, wrought with a conservative mawkishness that wouldn’t feel out of place in the worst of Spielberg’s films. And the less said about Joshua Williamson and James Tynion IV—who returned to the social-justice melodrama of O’Neill with none of the pulpy, slapdash charm—the better. Chip Zdarsky seemed to be the only writer who’d actually respected Morrison’s run prior, but unlike Morrison, had no ideas beyond retreads and remixes of the old masters stripped of all their mythological vitality, or resorting to the same performative liberalism of his contemporaries, as in the failed Gotham War event.

Faced with Morrison’s multimodal approach, it’s become increasingly clear these successors have only either regressed from or replicated the past. And so, it seems Ecclesiastes rings true yet again: there is nothing new under the sun, and especially not under DC Comics’ house style. And it’s not as if it would be productive to rehash the Dark Age either, to deconstruct what’s already been deconstructed. Frank Miller happened, Alan Moore happened. Nor would it be worthwhile to reconstruct without qualification, as in Waid or Buseik,9 lest the goal be to simply reinforce the hegemony.

Thus, the industry stands at a crossroads. Despite the market’s sizeable growth over the past few years and despite the tenuous profitability of blockbuster superhero movies, such statistics remain unstable. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy of former industry titan Diamond Comic Distributors continues to haunt comics publishing, especially its small presses. And with overall saleability and popularity of superhero movies on a steady decline, it’s only natural to question how this has affected (and will continue to affect) comics themselves. Creatively speaking, this rut has led to some interesting explorations on Marvel’s side with its remade Ultimate Universe, and in DC’s counterpart, Absolute. Character designs are different, origins have been altered, and narratives certainly appear livelier than their respective main universes. But time is rarely so kind, especially in an industry constantly at war with its own medium.

I suspect that before long, these explorations will ossify into convention and rhetoric, until all notion of the restless Termite is lost, until fans begin howling again, until experimentation is sacrificed at the altar of the status quo, until originality deteriorates into regurgitation. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, und so weiter.

V. Wofür wir Worte haben, darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus

Once upon a time, a single floppy contained multitudes: ones which any eager reader could engage with if they so chose. Or at the very least a complete story, competently told. Such was the principle. Not one stretched into oblivion across a company-wide event. Not one created with no attention paid to its craft. Morrison (alongside J.H. Williams III, Tony Daniel, Chris Burnham, Andy Kubert, Cameron Stewart, Frank Quitely, Fraser Irving, Doug Mahnke, et al) brought said principle back from the brink and towards artistic fruition with their Batman. By cohering stories from past and present into an organic intertextual unity, and through repeated investigations of said unity, something genuinely transcendent came about.

But we are past the age of pioneers, it seems. Their spirits are buried, and though there are those who till and irrigate the soil, we see no buds. Our blossoms hide themselves in fear of society’s subsumptive sun. And if they did show their flowered faces, would we even know what to do with them anymore? Would we welcome a new Morrison? Cheer them on as they ride a risky tide? Or would we balk at their fearlessness, their relentless pursuit of an aesthetic Supergod, only to retroactively sing their praises years afterward? Such questions are met only with the silence of a diseased culture. To break both fever and silence, we must speak honestly on our crime, on the spectres which continue to haunt our culture. Before revival can even be possible, we must acknowledge the blood on our hands:

“Batgod is dead: of his pity for man hath Batgod died.”

2

See below some examples from Doom Patrol and Animal Man:

Special thanks to and for beta-reading this story. And shout out to my biggest fan, .

I.

Veramente siam

I’m going to work today. Route’s simple—

Arrive at Central—>egress through station exit B2—>circumvent Exchange Square (tiny barrel, many crabs),—>past McDonald’s and its terrible steps/scents headed towards—>hell—>Connaught Road—>Des Voeux (pedestrians teeming, reflections staring, buses streaking, streetlights blipping), and you mustn’t stop, you must know, you must never breathe and never break, to stop is to sin, to sin is to condemn yourself to that most dependable Hong Kong penance: silent teeth-grinding judgment from all around you, dark-eyed judgment: judgement best whispered, never aloud—hear it echo out from the street vendors talking about you in long alleyways, down asphalted slopes, under bamboo scaffolding—invectives travelling by squall—inverted benedictions—never loud enough for you to hear, always loud enough so you know; does it send your skin crawling (it should); does it make you want to plead (it should); but there is no appeal, no recourse, no injunction, not by a long shot or for a long time, not for anyone beneath this cloud-clogged, building-blotted sky; there are only imperatives and mechanical impetuses where we should be; at best we say nothing; at worst we smile with fingers crossed behind backs; smile, you’re live and on the air; just smile, and all our faces will be saved—

—simple.

Today will be a good day, I say. Good as good as good can be. It will be.

I hope.

II.

Veramente siam noi polvere ed ombra;

If you can stomach the people judging, the sweltering summer, the department stores with Billboard Top 100 repeated ad infinitinauseam, the human hordes, then congratulations, you might just find salvation. As for me? Salvation only comes in brief reliefs, comes here and now: sweaty hands gripping the rubbery escalator handrail, people lining up ahead, others passing by down the coterminous walkway. So brief, you see. So brief I must savour these short minutes. Listen to a Leon Lai song, maybe. Two, if I’m lucky. Two, so I don’t lose it, lose myself. Give me a sec—

—呀, that’s better.

Central-Mid Levels walkway: eight hundred metres of the longest outdoor escalator in the world, with steps on the side if the motorised conveyor’s too slow, all under interconnected polycarbonate roofing. Or so says the Internet. I call it my commute.

This escalator carries me pharaoh-like through a mist of diffused light. All around me lays a luminist world, gauzy and hazed, painted by gods whose names I never remember but whose works I always know. 好靚啊! Hark and gape at the imagist verses I must give life to, the visual languages whose grammars I must define.

I stare at shops and stores and restaurants through windowless frames, at my unfurled city broiling beneath the yoke of a spoiled sun. Teal and crimson windows, traditional characters advertising 飲茶 and 茶餐廳, cables around architecture like Pandora around ladies’ necks, 鹹濕佬 in wife-beaters and khaki shorts pushing carts spewing 屌你老母 at baggy-clothed rich kids in self-driving Teslas, ground floor Seven-Elevens perpendicular to ghosted ‘TO-LET’ spaces, congenitally-defected boys sleeping on cardboard beside Hang Seng bankers on their lunch breaks, mottled shingles peeling off tall structures: untreated symptoms of the social cancer, speckles and scarrings on the face of Shangri-La.

I must sound crazy. Do I sound crazy? Arrogant, maybe. But not crazy. Now quit your bitching and raise a glass to our Ragnarøkkr.

III.

Veramente siam noi polvere ed ombra;

Veramente la voglia è cieca e ’ngorda;

A posteriori escalator rule: left side if you’re still, right side if you’re on the go. Naturally, I fall with the latter. And there go the others, brisk up and down those non-escalator steps to my right, brows endlessly furrowed, mouths forever frowning, beaded sweat glistening like a thousand angels on a hundred pinheads. I’m smiling, they’re not.

Long time since I was here last. I have a headache, the killer kind. Wanted to get out, breathe everything in, release my barbed soul from captivity maybe. But times have changed, and so has my way of seeing things (ah, there it goes, pulsating). I’m people-watching the way a landscapist or laureate would’ve done back then, on expeditions to distant isles, to scorched and savaged shores, come to name, come to save. My cheeks have gotten fatter (My head feels pregnant. Is that strange to say?). I’m more condescending than I used to be. Maths prevails over mercy. If I don’t hold myself accountable, I start speaking in the self-assured tones of a tourist, or in the preening whirs of aunties, or both.

Looking upwards, I don’t see the shattering of 盤古’s egg or the leap of 孫悟空 anymore, but instead the sky above Gethsemane, above Nazareth. You find me caught in the jaws of a bastardised selah. In spite of my best efforts, my years in England have converted me; if not wholly in spirit, then certainly in mind. All the metaphors have gone Western.

Hong Kong, Hong Kong. My liminal chère, my city of contrasts, my divided dive. If only Kafka could see you now. (Kafka? Have I forgotten about 魯迅? Have I been away that long? Where’s the ground gone? What’s wrong with me?)

Everyone here is Theseus following strings laid long ago, foraging for labyrinthine ends. If there are ends to speak of. If there are even beginnings.

IV.

Veramente siam noi polvere ed ombra;
Veramente la voglia è cieca e ’ngorda;
Veramente fallace

Sun’s glow goes between colonnades of glass and steel, spreads amongst the iron railings and tanned hawkers and stressed-out septuagenarians in diaphanous tarps of orange-white. (Head, kill). So much brightness it makes you sick. Can’t seem to shake it. (Head, kill.). But it’s fine, it’s fine, the office is quarter of a playlist away. I’m sure you’re sick of me anyways. Allow me these few moments of pretentiousness then I’ll be out of your hair. (Head, kill).

Off this escalator, onto another. I walk over red bricks, over striations of shadow and sunlight. I fall upon these life-sized piano keys. Each footfall sounds out a note, every note a colour, every colour an anamnesis.

(Where’s the ground gone? Where do I come from? What’s wrong with me?)

54321 Rememory Lane, Chromatic Avenue, Central, Hong Kong 香港.

5. Yellow, fear colour, when I spoke with 媽媽 and saw her dry dusty hands and saw how little she tolerated me, my work, my life, and I saw that smoky quartz glint in her eyes set into her ovoid face like corkscrews into hardwood, and you’re only gifted so long before your gift expires, before the coupon dries, and no, no humanities for you, none of this crap, it doesn’t pay, unless of course you find a placement or apprenticeship in a nice country with nice people but you’d never get those of course, so unrealistic 阿仔, we don’t make nearly enough for you to be so risky but you excelled at maths so maybe you should try that and she uses maybe’s and could’s and should’s because it softens the blow, makes ego death easy, taxidermies my confidence and it’s much simpler than talking back, and the money, of course, the money, C.R.E.A.M, 時間就係金錢

The escalator carries me upwards. Sun hits my face just so. I become aware of myself, agonisingly aware—acne scars and fleshfolds and muscles hypertense.

4. Blue, hue of the long night, except night’s the wrong word, five letters too small for a cornucopia of starlights, and long doesn’t suggest the interminability, the umbrella black-black-blackness around the lights, and me and 蘇麗珍 hike up from the bottom of Bowen Road all the way to the Peak, all the way to Lion’s Point View Pavilion, and there we place palms on stoney balustrades and face a panorama of the world welcoming us as eunuchs would palace courtesans, and as grasslands whisper and buildings await in their rectilinearity I remember famed 李白 and his 絕句 poem 《夜宿山寺》when he wrote「 危楼高百尺，手可摘星辰」, and I am there with him; then someone turns their torch on behind us, silhouetting us sudden in the light, spreading our monstrous brockengespenst over a metallic world, and within the heiligenschein, psychosomatic hounds pounce on me, my heart running my gooseflesh rising my toes tapping, Stendhal syndrome, and then she holds me and looks and so I look and so we stop and the syndrome stops; and in stopping we feel the hollows of our hands and we see a baby day break through the face of Victoria’s waters and suddenly night is the right word and long isn’t long anymore

The escalator carries me upwards. Each step reveals my terrific unbeauty, the lies I have clothed myself in, Lucifer in reverse.

3. Green, bile in my belly, when 蘇麗珍 scowls my way after something I said and after talking to our mutual friends and my 媽媽, and then there’s a row about who said what and why they said what and how it means anything even though it doesn’t, then she describes me as a great book which she can only glean through translations and secondary literature, a Platonic ideal she cannot realise, a noumenon to mediate on but never sublate, and I brush her off, because there’s nothing inherently wrong with contradiction or arguing or irresolution, you just don’t like my responses because they make you feel like you’re lacking, and you know what, maybe you are exactly that, a lacking, after all you only feel that way because you think it, yeah, fine, keep scoffing, doesn’t change the truth, your pride isn’t as prideful as my pride, which says more about you than it does me, listen, fucking listen, okay, I study theory and the great works and the great creators because how else can I stomach the white ceiling rafter lights, the four-by-four and the screen bigger than my whole skull, a tombstone by any other name, around the sun we go, we do not die of death we die of vertigo, and between us threads a scent like rotten oranges, and we kiss but it isn’t the same, and the insides of my head thrum with terrible clockwork, a sprig winding ever closer to a certain hour, a nuclear winter cast like die, a last-gasp twilight, she doesn’t know it yet, but it’s what she needs, 寧可玉碎不能瓦全

The escalator carries me upwards.

2. Red, colour of the door whose frame I stood within, one foot on the carpet, another outside, hands clammy, frankincense and jasmine, our eyes spent like shell casings and red as that door, and I’m pulling at her neck, shoulders, waist, her hands meeting mine only to push them off, two-partner macarena, then I drop to my ankles in labrador desperation, and from my chaplipped mouth I attempt a hiketeia, ‘please, oh Muse, grant thy supplication thy grace, please, oh Muse,’ but the words die in my throat like first-wave soldiers turned to ghosts, and when I look up, 蘇麗珍’s face reminds me of my 媽媽, the same ovoid shape like corkscrews into hardwood, I’m gifted until my gift expires, until my coupon dries, don’t let this ego-death happen, don’t let me die, please don’t let me die, baby, baby, please, please don’t let me die

The escalator carries me upwards. Someone stands on the top of the steps, high in the light, keeper of the gate, hair like black streamlets.

1. White, no colour, because you did let me, you did, so now I am, 節哀順變

The escalator carries me upwards. She starts walking down. I can’t see her eyes beneath her shades. Is that—it’s a small city, even smaller world, but—no, no fucking way—she’s striding closer—materialising from out the negative—gaining strength—cure for my social cancer—here come my psychosomatic hounds again—Stendhal Syndrome

说曹操，曹操到. Stop. Just stop right there. Listen, ok? So I’ll speak and you’ll speak, for why else would our mouths be. Let me speak. Let me. Listen to words I have never used and never will again, to a tale taller than these things which scrape the sky. Stop yourself sudden inside our tableux vivant, there is magic between us yet, this I know, come, come along, exculpate me from the selah, take what I should’ve never removed from your grasp, what always belonged to you, take my hand—

V.

Veramente siam noi polvere ed ombra;
Veramente la voglia è cieca e ’ngorda;
Veramente fallace è la speranza.

The escalator carries me upwards. We pass each other by like petals in a black hurricane, apparitions of faces in a crowd. Noon becomes after. Ragnarøkkr rolls on. I never see your eyes, you never see mine. That’s fine. I was going to work anyways.

At the top of the steps, in the lighted smile of an indifferent sun, I cherish the memory, then perish the thought.

This piece has been excerpted and expanded from the ‘David Foster Wallace’ entry in , a series by the Neo-Decadents.

America’s foremost postpostmodernist was self-conscious to the point of solipsism, so anxious of (or perhaps panicked by) his influences he envisioned no methods of escape. The ghosts of his generation weighed like nightmares on the man’s brain. Crushed under this weight, he invented nothing beyond new ways to stultify his readers and squander his talent.

My encounter with (what is in all but name) his manifesto taught me as much. In my second year of high school, my class listened to his famous Kenyon College commencement speech, ‘This is Water.’ In my nascentism, I regarded his words with equal parts curiosity and skepticism. His argumentation was circuitous and convoluted but there was, I thought, some tincture of emotional truth. I acknowledged its broad gestures towards self-awareness and meaning-making even though I would’ve hesitated to call it formative. When I revisited the speech for this review, I found my initial skepticism justified. It reconfirmed ‘This is Water’ as a shameless melange of ideas cribbed from Chinese syncretism, but rendered secular and tautological, therefore meaningless. Its psuedo-Buddhist-Taoist ideas mixed with fluffy Gen-X self-reflexivity wouldn’t read out of place in a contemporary self-help book. By the end of its choir-preaching, fresh graduates are prepared to do little more than ‘be aware of the world around us.’ This may prove mildly useful for minute emotional problems or general brain fog, but, ironically, holds up poorly against the wider issues of national failure which Wallace consistently attempted to address. Any ‘truth’ conveyed here is derivative at best and shallow at worst. Three thousand words of rhetorical bells-and-whistles later, it arrives at the same conclusion Descartes made hundreds of years ago in just three words, only with less grace and more gimmickry. My school would’ve likely been better off teaching us the Dao De Jing or Taishō Tripiṭaka, but this would have meant discarding Wallacean moralising. It would have meant resisting his apophatic establishment of ethical authority and acknowledging his hypocrisy in, as A.O. Scott put it, being ‘deeply suspicious of novelty [while scrambling] to position himself on the cutting edge.’

If we are to be fair in our assessment, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that Wallace successfully broke the boundaries of postmodernism, or that he meaningfully interrogated his zeitgeist. This concession to his formidability works only when viewing him through the Anglophonic publishing hype machine which often elevates mediocrity to highbrow, or through the rose-tinted shades of standardised education systems within which Wallace was deeply entwined. In studying his corpus, we find a man whose reach extended his grasp, whose attempts at profundity were honorable yet handicapped by sickening desperation. Formidable in elocution? Sometimes. Formidable as an author? Dubious. And in response to that old Barthesian refrain that we must separate art from artist: when the latter threw himself at the former with a velocity which could only be described as terminal, how could you? How could anyone?

Wallace’s oeuvre is preoccupied with instances of imprisonment. From the ill-fated Incandenzas and Enfield Tennis Academy, to reformed burglar Don Gately, to the Greek spy-choir of Hugh Steeply and Remy Marathe, to the characters-qua-caricatures of his short stories, to the IRS employees of the Pale King—everything remains caught within its own miserable orbit. Their imprisonment reflects both the societal milieu at the 20th century’s end as well as Wallace’s own lifelong demons. Said imprisonment consumes his narratives to a point that his ensembles feel less like lived-in communities than a collection of mouthpieces scrubbed of all dimensionality. Not to mention his nonlinear, page-jumping, multi-claused style, more akin to a series of jails you are transferred from-and-to throughout your stay. Sentences are ‘sentences’ in the carceral sense: you do not read but instead serve them with no hope of appeal. Detail accretes until it gushes, muddying any potential image in your mind’s eye. In theory, this aphantasiatic technique sounds innovative, even exciting. In practice, however, it is an approach that deadens burgeoning interest through garish prose. It is a style that buries its ledes without offering satisfying sensualism in return. It deliberately frustrates you while hoping, quite bathetically, to convince you of its morality.

The most successful variation of this style is his titular story from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.1 Through a mediation between the mens’ egocentrism and their unethicality, Wallace inspires discomfort within his reader. The men are pathetic in their casual cruelty and astonishing in their erudition. What makes this engaging on a metatextual level is how they utilize garrulousness to distance themselves from their own horrors, if only because Wallace was himself attempting the same through this story. Any interest to be gleaned comes less from the writing itself, which suffers from the aforementioned problems, than from Wallace’s hideousness despite his rationalisations. His insight is most compelling when it implicates him rather than instructs us.

Critic Dale Peck contested in the London Review of Books that Wallace’s writing should be seen as an improvement over Pynchon’s, insofar as its ‘carnivorous’ quality refuses to use ‘academese.’ A close reading of the work, however, contradicts this assertion. Wallace’s maximalism falters precisely due to overwrought, unbeautiful academicism. Its logorrheic syntagma reads as little more than gaudy set-dressing for what are, in reality, banal middle-class ideas regarding the 21st Century American military-entertainment-industrial multiplex. In Infinite Jest, television is the symptom via which he diagnoses the world’s sickness, and the rejection of it—to be aware that all of ‘this is water’—is the method that, he suggests, will catalyse our salvation. That the country’s fall is traceable to the rise of pre-packaged commodified entertainment is not untrue (especially when considering today’s technocratic abuse of algorithms and worldwide enshittification), but this is where Wallace’s investigation ends. Where Pynchon (his father)2 and DeLillo (his better brother) would have connected the upper echelons of power to the lowest of the low in kaleidoscopically captivating passages, Wallace resorts to rote explication and minutiae footnoted into oblivion.

O.N.A.N., Johnny Gentle, subsidized time, ETA, the samizdat, wheelchair assassins: stabs at madness which reveal their jagged artifice with every page. One must imagine Wallace grinding his teeth as he overstuffs his prose with clunky parlance, hyphenations, and clauses for clauses’ sake. If I call Wallace an academic (notwithstanding his qualifications), it is because of his mind-numbing need to foreground subtext at every possible moment. Nothing is left up to chance or jouissance. Everything must be explained ad nauseum in strained self-righteous tones, all play dispensed with for the sake of congratulating those who ‘get the point’ or ‘feel seen.’ ‘I often think Wallace is performing, and I wish he’d perform less,’ says James Wood. In light of the bandana-man’s prosody, this claim becomes increasingly harder to refute.

This is not to say that Infinite Jest is without some interest. Unlike Harold Bloom, I hesitate to deny Wallace’s general intelligence, and we should not resort to hyperbole. And if I may commit a cardinal sin by agreeing with an author of such lowly calibre as Zadie Smith, I concur with her belief that literature should be a ‘broad church.’ To wit: the Eschaton game which microcosms geopolitics onto the neurotic Enfield Tennis’ Academy contains flickers of satirical enjoyment, alongside mildly entertaining imagery. Gately’s episodes provide much-needed emotional scaffolding and amusement (though the didacticism cannot help but grate). Sections and endnotes focusing on the ensemble beyond the three main storylines can be ingenious, like the syntax-breaking ‘yrstruly’ or maddening fifteen-page filmography of James Incandenza. But for every lucid moment, we receive awfully-done ebonics3, transphobic undertones,4 the manic-pixie-dreamification of Mary Karr through Joelle Van Dyne, boring elaborations on architecture and pharmaceutics, coprolaliac ‘humour,’ and scenes of tennis play and bureaucracy which far overstay their welcome. Wallace’s imagery and aphorisms feel weightless when one knows they will be diluted by a four-page paragraph detailing a character’s comically tragic backstory as he walks from point A to point B. Such haphazard construction is endemic not merely to the book, but the rest of his work.

Praisers of Infinite Jest insist the novel’s ostensible purposelessness is, paradoxically, what gives it purpose—that its self-consuming excess constitutes aesthetic teleology. In the only positive appraisal of the novel I can fathom, argues that the ‘form of the text itself is as much the point he’s making.’ Thus, the redundancy and tediousness of the entire endeavour becomes the point. In this regard I respect Wallace, if not admire him. On principle, I am unbothered by his striving for non-linearity, maximalism, and metatextuality. I have much love for Nabokov and Borges and all of the best metafictionists. The last thing an artist should be faulted for is having ambition. One should respect Wallace’s intent to filter the novel’s themes through its ontology; what R. Scott Bakker described as a ‘semantic version of the waste continually catapulted into the background, at once a herbicide and fertiliser, making a Concavity of the interior of the reader’s skull.’ The issue, then, is not that he is attempting the avant-garde, but that said avant-garde leaves much to be desired. Tediousness and redundancy, however ingeniously framed, does not immediately become revelation. Overblown writing remains overblown writing remains overblown writing, however vigorously one intellectualizes it. Too often, after arriving at a salient insight into mass entertainment, social isolation, or addiction-as-worship, Wallace proceeds to elaborate past lucidity into prolixity, and finally into vacuous risibility. If Infinite Jest is funny, it is only because the idea of Wallace overwriting interesting ideas with a thousand superfluous pages evinces hilarity.

By attempting to sanitise the, frankly, rather cynical core of the book with platitudinous screeds, Wallace cannot reconcile contemporary ennui. He may be able to throw details on the page with no disregard for the reader’s safety, but it is an artless deployment, an unskilled literary weaving which flattens his work’s latent vibrancy. It is, as A.O. Scott called it, a form of ‘[short-circuiting] criticism’ that anticipates disparagement in order to escape its clutches. In his efforts to distance himself from irony and cynicism through an evocation of ‘New Sincerity,’ he ends up falling into one of postmodernism’s biggest traps: mere identification cannot be sustained critique. Your sincerity counts for little when it is this affected, this tone-deaf. Remain inside long enough and eventually the metatextual Ouroborus will devour you, as it did Wallace. And if there is anything postpostmodernism has shown us (in all its failures), it is how one cannot purge the excess of irony by simply reclaiming it as postironic pathos. Such reactionarism cannot be labelled a healthy resolution of dialectic, not least because it presupposes a simple binary between irony and sincerity. Wallace ventriloquises his issues, pokes fun, but cannot extend further because his mode of critique disallows it. His restatement of such ideas serves only to exasperate rather than illuminate. For all his railing against irony, he could never quite escape its shackles, remaining content with the idea that hyper-awareness was equivalent to deliverance. But fire can never defeat fire; the O.N.A.N.ite’s tools cannot dismantle the O.N.A.N.ite’s house.

Wallace is most successful when he diverts from uncontrolled verbosity and strives to be ‘aesthetically radical’ via the shattering of form and remixing of syntax; in other words, when he reflects the best of what postmodernism has to offer. Conversely, he is at his worst when he belabors undeveloped ‘metaphysically conservative’5 talking points into frivolousness, thereby exposing the privilege he consistently tried brushing off with cheap bathos. The lengthy exchanges between Marathe and Steeply are particularly egregious in their overemphasis of the book’s already-unsubtle themes. If these sections prove anything, it is that exposition rarely leads to compelling syuzhet, and that Wallace’s beliefs hew closer to Steeply’s acceptance of realpolitik and ramblings about ‘enlightened selfinterest’, rather than Marathe’s justified anger.

Reading this in accordance with his ‘E Pluribus Unam’ essay—which mounts a similarly underbaked critique of ‘television’, whatever the hell that means—demonstrates Wallace’s ideological superficiality. His conception of the world rests not on tangible sociopolitical forces, but on epistemological assumptions about what it means to be a ‘fucking human being’—whatever the hell this means, as well.6 This evasiveness is why he remains palatable to high-school and collegiate educational systems, why he continues to be discussed as a paragon of American literature despite not having any comprehensive understanding of America beyond his white, middle-class upbringing. The closest he gets to sustained structural critique is in Infinite Jest, with O.N.A.N. and its top-down relationship with Enfield Tennis Academy, but these narrative forces are so backgrounded they may as well be subvocal. Not to mention the book’s shoddy attempts at institutional analysis, which consist of repetitious bourgeoisie autofiction, dilettantish portraits of working-class backgrounds, and faceless side characters who range from thuddingly boring to downright nauseating, in the same way an exploitation flick dressed up as arthouse prestige and sanitised of contradiction might induce sickness.

Ultimately, the problem with Wallace is the same problem with metamodernism, or postpostmodernism: the ‘oscillations’7 between sincere and ironic/cynical and optimistic modes cannot amount to true synthesis, not when such states are plucked of actual philosophical depth. We see it plainly in Wallace’s bastard children, in Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Bo Burnham, in Redditor films like Everything Everywhere All At Once—all dialogue with our world sacrificed at the altar of ‘informed optimism.’ You perform awareness without ever actually acting upon it. You inhabit the media you loathe in an attempt to castigate it and, in doing so, find yourself fallen victim to the same artistic pitfalls. There is no sublation to be found here in the church of Wallace-Wittgenstein-lite, no development or progress. Only a stalemate, a net-zero, a fin de siècle which refuses to acknowledge its fin, which clamours for hope without presenting ways in which that hope might be genuinely supported. Sentences and images once pregnant with meaning now give way to neoliberal acquiescence, to kitschy flights of kitschy fancy: this is water, and that is all it can ever be.

Special thanks to , , , , and for beta-reading this story.

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First time Alaala says hi, I’m four and on the edge of my bed, arms straight-jacketed around my legs. The evening news is playing.

Mom brushes her teeth in the bathroom which a gang of geckos has called home. Through the wood whispers the swsh-swsh-swsh of nylon along her enamel. Next to me sits dad on his Barcalounger. Occasionally, he looks up and acknowledges the news with ‘hmm.’ Then he bows his head back down to his paper. To the DOW. To crossword puzzles and celebrity gossip.

Bored busybodies.

No one’s looking. Makes it easy for Alaala to appear unannounced by my side. “Hi,” they say in something sonorous, soft hand drawing imaginary pirouettes on my back. First time I see them, no stars get struck. No jaws drop. They’re not someone you’re stunned by at first blush—no matter their Sinéad O’Connor cheeks, David Bowie eyes, or candlestick fingers—but before long, they settle over me. Like a sickness. Like a cloud.

The TV screeches in static through a cracked screen. Sat on my bed, we watch it together. Airwaves tangle into an electromagnetic mosaic. I can barely see the man’s face. His photograph dissolves beneath waves of hyper-variegated Hertzian pinstripes, like someone you meet in a dream, then never again. Eventually, his head comes into view, breaking through the surface of a dead channel. Don’t ask me for a name.

What do I remember? Ugly brown eyes. Tan skin clumped into endless folds. Then his grin, impish and afraid.

I turn to Alaala, who is snickering like a schoolgirl.

“It’s a passenger’s grin.” They rest a hairless head on my shoulder. “Walking through a narcosis of yourself. He died loved, lovely, and lazy. That what you wanna be?”

I don’t answer. I’m unsure as to how. What’s narcosis? Is it bad to be lazy if you’re loved?

The newscaster talks about the dead man’s service to his local community. ‘Mister [insert name here] was a farmer moonlighting as a Senator, or maybe a stripper, or something in-between. His probidensya won’t be the same without him,’ she says, before we violently cut back to studio cam, where she looks as fat as she sounds.

And just like that, dead TV man goes bye-bye. Divine sleight-of-hand, D.B. Cooper style. Of course he was nothing remarkable, no one heroic. Wasn’t a rocket scientist or a Nobel Prize winner. He was smaller than scum, an afterbirth ant, a snail in the sun.

Between the sounds of pitter-patter, snoring, and brushing, I do the math.

“Eighty-five years for fifteen seconds. That can’t be right. That’s not fair,” I say, except I don’t say it, I just think it.

“Right and wrong are just different signs for the same exit, love. We all gotta leave sometime,” Alaala explains, as if justifying his mediocrity will comfort me.

Suddenly Manila’s monsoon season sneaks up, gets the drop on us, turns the TV off, rattles the house’s plaster and partitions, scares my dad out of his stupor and mom out of her state. Alaala turns to me, “I can’t be seen with you.”

They exit as a wraith does—out of our fire escape and into sleepy suburbia—but not before kissing me on the cheek. I watch their frame fade into a typhoon-torn mist. Before I ever learn how to read English, let alone Shakespeare, I learn how it feels to be Juliet watching Romeo: hot, heavy, and unable to hide.

I am thirteen and sketching pantomimes of better artists on A4 sheets.

Every time I put pencil to paper, I pretend I’m Basquiat. Dad tells me he was so brilliant, he could snatch art out of thin air and conjure it into reality. Just not so brilliant he could escape his black dog, though. Dad describes Basquiat’s O.D. with such vibrancy—snow foaming, open gums, crystal eyes, slacked maw—I believe he must’ve been hooked too, once upon a time. I think he tells me this story to try and convince me otherwise. To try to kill my light.

But at night when no one else is around, I use the family computer, looking for Basquiat’s untitled pieces, his Defacement, his Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump. I see his piece Untitled (Skull) for the first time and wonder if, when he died, his mouth foamed with oilstick and acrylic, too.

Behind me, someone answers my thoughts. “So what if he went out like that?”

I turn and face the hallway where Alaala is standing (or hovering, as if heaved by a zephyr; I’m not sure what), looking same old, same old as the day I lost them. They smile wide, wild, and unwelcoming. At first, my memory’s shot, blanker than a fresh A4 sheet, or the gutters between comic panels. Then in one sudden second it rolls over and through me like a tide at midnight: patient and still, then everything at once.

“Maybe I should go that way too,” I reply barely above a whisper, but loud enough for God to hear if He wanted to.

Alaala wags their pointing finger and steps forward so I get a better look at their balding sheen, their alabaster skin, their Mary Shelley nightgown. They sigh the way you would at a child, or a pet. “Each brushstroke, each splash of paint, each cut-out piecemeal stole from his soul. Stole and stole and stole. He unspooled himself until he couldn’t. Until all of his secrets laid ripe and ready on his canvas. That what you want?”

The computer’s blue light beats back the house’s blackness, brightening us both, making us look like life-sized shadow puppets.

“Twenty-eight for eternity,” I say, “the math adds up.”

Alaala gives it with their laugh. It echoes from someplace far and dark, smelling like flowers, sounding like fairytale.

“Yes, love. I think it does.”

I am sixteen and unmoored. Alaala stays in my room this summer without mom or dad noticing. Under the bed or in the closet or in the ceiling, doesn’t matter. Cobwebs never care where they cultivate. Give them the dark and a happy customer they’ll be.

Two years in the new school exposes me as a paragon of shyness. Criminally vulgar. ‘Don’t talk unless you wanna see me shatter’ type. Day after day I stumble through colourless hallways with no spring in my step, red-and-black backpack the weight of Damocles’ blade. I’m all bone and no flesh, pockmarked and pugnacious. Poke me and I will deflate. Pick me and I will scab. Friends shove and jeer and laugh, they run through me the way you would a coupon, but it’s fine really, that’s just how they are, I promise they’re really, really nice when you get to know them.

When I go home, I replace my family with movies and my friends with music. Alaala joins in and cuddles with me under faux satin, where we shoot every possible breeze. We lie like frozen larvae under my duvet, daybreak bronzing my white sheets, thin skin against thin skin. Them being there makes it hard for me to piss, eat, shit, cook, work. Makes it hard for me to do anything. They sap me but I don’t care. I never feel more alive than when they cage me.

We learn more about love watching The Crow than I ever did from my parents. And we learn more about heaven through Jeff Buckley and Grace than I ever did at mass.

“Jeff went into the river and never came out?” I ask as our fingers entwine.

“Yeah. Thirty years young. He was singing Led Zeppelin, ‘Whole Lotta Love.’”

We curl into each other as caterpillars do. “That’s too young.”

“Never too young or too old when you go. It just is. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ fit him, if you ask me. Loved the world too much to be left behind in it.”

“You can’t say that. That’s mean.”

“Maybe. But it’s true.”

I laugh. Then my smile slights as another hero springs to mind. “And Brandon Lee? What about him?”

“He was about to break out, too,” Alaala twirls an ashen finger through my greasy locks like a fork in spaghetti, “getting too big. And the bigger the star, well…”

Later that week, I’m sent to the principal’s office for role-playing Brandon Lee. I don’t show up with black mascara or black lips or a leather trenchcoat. But at recess I murmur in my friend’s ear, “victims, aren’t we all?” before I shove him skull-first into my locker. He fights back, apes Moses and splits my lip red. My blood appears acrylic in arclight. I unspool myself with every fist, every kick. I yell a few other lines from the movie too, I think.

In his office, the principal calls for my expulsion. Calls dad and mom, too, who enter breathless in their suits-and-ties. Principal says I could’ve sent the kid to a hospital, or worse.

I should say it was Alaala’s idea. That I told her about my friends, about what they did to me. But cobwebs never care where they cultivate. And no one cares what cobwebs have to say.

I want to reply, but I’m too busy thinking about my friend calling me a faggot, how he put laxatives in my lunch, how he pretended to be someone I liked and made me send pictures no kid should ever send. All I did was return the favour.

When we get back home, dad’s in no mood, so he goes back to his papers. Always the fucking papers. Mom sits me on the couch, smooches my bruises with 100% ABV.

“Wasn’t he your friend?” Cloth to calf then to lips, sizzling against my skin. I grit teeth, lock jaw. Mom talking. “You can’t be doing this. I should’ve known, I should’ve—I mean, between the sleep-talking and the late nights—”

I know exactly who she means and I hate her for calling them that. “It’s not sleep-talking, mom. It’s Alaala.”

“What? Look, he was your friend.” She shakes her head. Then she starts shaking me like she’s hoping something will fall out. “You shouldn’t have done—”

“No. He wasn’t.”

I try breathing easy but it comes out hard. I never plan on sobbing, but with a body this small and a heart this big, it doesn’t take much. I leave a stain the shape of my head on mom’s cotton shirt, wetting it until my own tears waterboard me. I cry long enough that her embrace stops feeling like hers.

Histrionics over. Right as rain.

Tell her enough so she gets a gist. Not the gist. Nothing about the details, about the photos I sent, about how black my lungs feel or how leaden my feet are. About how I see Alaala and their paling moon-face swing by every other afternoon. About how one day, they’ll visit me one last time, and I’ll foam acrylic at the mouth, too.

“They said you were saying things to him,” she rifles fingers through my waves.

“From The Crow.”

“What?”

“The one we saw. Eric saves Shelly. Comes back to life. In the black-black poetry of the night, hell sends an angel bearing gifts. I was Eric when I fought him, mom.”

“Oh, honey,” she speaks as if she’s trying to put a fire out, “Eric isn’t real. He’s a story.”

I shake my head like an inpatient. “It’s all a story, mom. Doesn’t make him not real. Brandon Lee made it happen, and today, I made it happen, too.”

“Brandon Lee’s dead, honey. He’s been dead a long time.”

Later that night, with Alaala by my side, we go digging. We trace eschatologies of violence, hagiographies of glory. We decoupage downloaded photos and synthesise old clippings.

Jim O’Barr is a comic book artist and writer known for The Crow. He is inspired to create it by the real-life tragedy of Shelly, his fiancée. When she dies unexpectedly from a car crash, Jim hollows himself out into black ink, ashcan words, and Eric Draven. Shelly is sacrificed before she becomes a saint.

In 1975, Tim Buckley mimicked Basquiat and O.D’d, too. Tim was Jeff’s dad. I learn that Jeff wasn’t always Jeff, that Scott Moorhead changed his name in order to honour his father. When he records Dream Brother, does he know about the river? Does he know how he’ll end? Did you walk to your bright lights in sorrow, Mister Buckley? Or in serenity?

Brandon Lee stood on the precipice of his father’s shadow, as we all do. In his escape attempts from a dead man’s legacy, I see my own breaks from father and his papers. I see my eagerness to be exorcised from my existence.

Brandon Lee dies at twenty-eight from a prop gun misfire. He was four years younger than his father when the kung-fu-kicker died from a cerebral edema.

“When the bullet burst through your belly, did you know you would fly?” I ask his afterimage while Alaala pecks my temple. “And when I finish writing my song, drafting my portrait, when I am finally hollowed out, will I fly, too?”

Aroused by rapturous revelation, I try giving myself over to Alaala that night. I dispel my breath against theirs as we throttle and thrash from one room’s end to another.

After we scrummage but before I can pin their wrists, they flick a finger to my lips and shush me. They purse lips, looking handsome and dolled-up. Anthracite and all bite. They’re a strigoi seeking an invite, a cold begging to be caught. They say I can be their new Basquiat, their new Brandon Lee—just wait a few more years, love.

At twenty-two years old, I am a lost cause. Alaala visits me a lot. But maybe visit is the wrong word. More like they stayed secretly for years on end, never let out their space, and never bothered to pay rent.

I’m smoking tonight and lining my coffers, same as every night. Huff and puff, big-bad-wolf-like. I’ve been breaking bad with this habit so long, I’m practically steam. Pouches against gums don’t help, neither does aroma therapy. But art does. The work and all that. Plus J.D. and coke if I’m feeling something special. Especially when seven P.M. becomes sleepless and I can barely stand to walk or breathe, sometimes a guy needs a pick-me-up, you see?

Alaala helps whenever they feel like swinging by. Snags the cig out my mouth before I can reach the roach, pushes me on the bed, outstrips my pace, and rides the wave until we’re swimming in our splurges, sweated out, legs tangled in heat, dry to the marrow. It’s routine.

Don’t think I’ve seen the sun in a hot second.

Selling enough of my work pays for our move into the city. Good enough place to live and die as any. My place squats at the end of a gunmetal grey wharf, a brick-and-mortar wart on an urban jungle belly. Sometimes when the moon rises, it stops at the midpoint of an EKG skyline. Its faded light illuminates a nearby shop window. Alaala points at things with their lips now Pinoy-style. I turn to face it and see my reflection, where I am struck by my resemblance to River Phoenix—curtain cut drawn, concave cheeks, Aviators and grunge slacks. I’m almost as old as him when he—

Sometimes when Alaala allows it, I bring girls back. Guys too. Vessels needing filling. They ask why my portfolio is wrought with black-and-white, why there are no other colours of the rainbow, and why a third-party has to watch us. But I don’t need to explain art, let alone mine. And I certainly don’t need to explain my arrangement. We’re all perverts, aren’t we?

To explain art is to murder it. It is to defile the sacred cow, to dick down a dead body and expect praise for it. So when they all come and all go, I shed no tears, because I’m a hero like that, I’m a man like that. My tears always turn into ink. And my ink always dries into mastery.

Eventually it’s just us, our smoke, and my acrylics again, everything wafting into a thick, odious miasma. I should be done, I should be finished, but I’m not. I won’t be. Won’t never be.

Instead, I’m prancing pony-like across the room, cancer in my hand, endless boxes filled with endless polaroids strewn in floral patterns along the floor. I whirl around my bedroom, my body scent so sugary it seduces something into my boudoir. Or someone. Someone icy yet never intermittent, leaking through the walls, persisting and holding and caressing me even when my body betrays me. Then the knock comes once, twice, thrice. My heartbeat does hop-scotch as I look gazelle-like towards my front door. Then it dawns on me the way the morning after does—I know exactly who you are.

Before you even ask, I let you in. Rise and shine, you say. Another round, another ride. Then you hover around the room inspecting my life’s work—pastels crushed into impasto, propped up on easels. Pale imitations of Caravaggio, Dada, Ernst. Prettified portraits next to dishevelled shelves.

Your three-piece suit is over your nightgown. Special occasion, black tie. It’s the outfit you’ve been saving ever since that night we watched the TV, and I’ve never been hungrier. Can you blame me? Do you see my drool? My heat superseding into supernova? My scraps and semblances leading up to this? Someone’s playing bossa nova outside. Love song, I think.

“Didn’t need to invite me.” You bat an eyelash or two, pixie cut lit and silhouetted by my LED bulbs. “When I’m in your walls, your corners. Piles of clothes—mine. Uncleaned dishes, that put-on smile, that snakeskin hive you call a bed—all mine.”

“You’re always welcome. But the fact you don’t ask me, that’s what turns me on, you know? All day, all night. You take and take and take, and that’s why I’m so,” but I don’t finish, can’t finish, because you’re already in my space, cradling dick through denim, yanking a yoke, tracking a tarred tongue down my neck. The night floods through my room’s apertures, lighting us in pale fire. Me the Lo-lee-ta to your H.H. We hold each other still as scarecrows and whisper sweet serendipities.

“Say my name,” you whisper through your teeth.

And I do.

“Again.”

Again and again I go until your name is semantically satiated, until its meaning fails and I am beholden to you and your vast, vile eye. On my knees. Cupping my chin. Slicked with slop. I ask, “why are you back? Why now?”

You say nothing, stepping towards my covered easel, dragging my body along with you. Effortless. I don’t squirm, don’t fight back. You tear the drop cloth off like a museum curator and bring my face up close and personal. It’s a blank canvas, angel-white. One I’ve neglected. A baby I’ve yet to break. A purity in need of pounding.

“Don’t tap out yet.” You stand me up. Then you pick out a paintbrush from the clipped-on holder. It’s grown coarse after everything I’ve put it through. You hand it to me. I grip its base and become charged as if by lightning; Zeus and his thunderbolt; Cain and his stone.

Then you disrobe. Toss your sash away. High moon outside a cracked diadem. Then you perch atop the easel and place the canvas between your legs, feet pointing away, toes flexed. Taunting. Gesturing. Gushing gaps waiting for God.

I take a second to appreciate you. Form. Function. Fluttering eyelids. Mouth muttering ‘go on.’ Nothing more, nothing less. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Just stick yourself inside it.

I daub the brush in a cup of water. Pull it out, all those soggy spaghetti strands (a dog in the rain). Then daub the plastic palette. All the colours of the rainbow. Then start painting. Slow strokes at first. Slow. Slow. Slow. Slow. Heightening highlights, darkening darks. Between your legs the portrait comes alive, and now I am Moses with eyes upon the bush, the passerby witnessing the Holiest of Holies enter into me, and then you.

“Right there, there, yes, fuck,” you whisper. It’s a good job and I’m a good boy. Up, down, left, right. My hand leads the brush. Up goes down, white goes black as I go to town. No spot untouched. All while you’re leaking slurries. Emptying yourself. Squirts shining in the moonlight and coating over my paints. Sticky streams in Yggdrasil patterns, in Kabbalistic matrices. And I don’t stop because I’ve forgotten how, because there is only the work, and these are my hands, and that which my hands have wrought. Our gazes lock. Bloodshot, bulging. Arch your back like a dead cockroach.

Between howls for my name and my head between your legs, I’m drawing mountains from my dreams no one’s ever seen.

“More, more,” you say, and I so I give and I take, as you give and you take, noblesse oblige, warmed bodies in goetiac tête-à-tête. The canvas flickers in and out of reality like a friar’s lantern as you slide downwards, devouring the easel into yourself, disappearing it so now it’s only you embracing me, where we’re hip-to-hip, and my mountains are on your skin, and now I’m painting on you:

Arabesques of clouds from your shoulder down your arm. Bosch monsters marching down from the mountain on your chest to the valley in your belly. Waterfalls of blood from your thighs to your heels. Go crazy for my brush’s sable, sear hot for my splendour, fingers around my hair, keel into it, into me, salivating.

We re-enact Dali’s Great Masturbator. Slabs of meat slapping against each other in pornographic arpeggio. Merchants exchanging ancient wares of tongue and skin and synthetic fibre. Love made and lost in self-same seconds. I mutter Depeche Mode lyrics in your ear, “all I’ve ever wanted, all I ever needed,” except I won’t enjoy the silence, I need noise. I need a Rapture. I need a detonation with a blast radius stretching from Atlantic to Pacific. I need to shake, rattle, and roll over the graves of all the Brandons and Buckleys of the world who never got a fair shake, who didn’t know they could soar until their fifteen seconds ended.

But I don’t want fifteen, I want eternity. Do the math. Do the math. How many thrusts and dives? (on the bed, our dais, pull my head back) How many plugs, how many holes? (corner of my eye it’s Dead TV man again, watching grinning) How many gaps filled by how many gods? (Brandon and Buckley faces trapped inside my bedside mirror cheering, taste of cod and honeysuckle and you in my mouth)

From censorious darkness we emerge an abomination of musculature. Sinew and thew, gristle and hide. One of my hands against the wall, other on the nightstand, feet splayed, toes curling, curling, then curled. Wet grease and spills of a great butchering. Grand Guignol, rated-R, triple X, Category III, exploitation flick. They’ll make a movie out of us. Then hands interlocking. Bed breaking. Floor thundering. Paint spilling all over us, coating, drowning us. My cultivated cuneiform coming to a most fiery head head head head, coming and c

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I black out, or I am whited out, lost somewhere I have never known and will never name.

When I come to, I am on the edge of my bed, Alaala by my side. A mouthful of black mush, pliable thumbs and a stained egg-white tank top grant me awareness: I am four years old. The evening news is playing.

On the screen, their heads come into view as if served on a platter. Brandon, Jeff, TV Man. Someone’s put coins on their eyes.

“Come here, love,” Alaala whispers with a tone so far removed from humanity it is less detached than it is entirely non-existent. I hear their words spoken through the screen, through a choir of my gods, a jury of my peers.

I turn to face Alaala and remember how beautiful they are. They shush me with a finger and gently close my eyelids. I feel two cold circles where they used to be. I smell the sweet scents of rusted metal, of blood on bedsheets, of oilstick and acrylic. Then I go away and away into the black and white with a driver’s grin, never the passenger, never the passenger.

“Math worked out, didn’t it?” Asks Alaala. With no more eyes to see and no more mouth to scream, all I can do is agree.

Not too long after the famous ‘like a tree’ paragraph which introduces us to Parker, we read these lines which act as a brief yet pivotal detour into the heads of nearby passer-by’s. From the outside looking in, Parker appears a cross between a hobo, a bookie, and a corporate executive. He’s gruff, big-handed, and clothed in such a way as to obscure his intentions, but not his frame. Like an ogre feigning humanity, he has a look which leaves an impression on you long after you lose sight of him. Naturally, this gives space for third-party observers to conjecture, compare, and contrast him with other vagrants they have seen before, others less fortunate. For the duration of the novel, these subjectivities stand at odds with both Parker’s self-determination and his actual background. Whether it be between Parker and Lynne, Parker and Mal, or Parker and the Syndicate, the constant push-pull of various psychologies is what coheres the work. Above anything else, The Hunter is a war between wills.

Doesn’t get much potboiler than this: a betrayed man seeks revenge and compensation from those who wronged him during a botched heist. Sequenced linearly, the plot rings like any number of dime store novels or 70s grindhouse crime thrillers. Dig deeper though, and it is obvious why Westlake (writing here as the aptly-named Richard Stark) became so influential. Owing to a pared-back approach, his punchy staccato prose stops and starts at just the right junctures. It falters and fluctuates only to make the upcoming line strike harder. It is both akin to Hemingway and Hammett in its potent blend of economy and expansiveness. The technique here isn’t so much hard-hitting as it is a series of well-timed haymakers, each one leaving you more dazed than the last, before finally rendering you senseless with a clean knockout. Coupled with similarly-affected dialogue which reads sharp (but never stilted), it is beyond addicting, the stuff good-old fashioned pulp should be made of.

A scene with Parker going through the street under rainfall flies by in a handful of sentences, only to be abruptly met with a paragraph detailing a pale corpse lying on the bed, a bottle of sleeping pills left on her nightstand. Moments are expanded to give proportionate emotional weight, but also to underscore Parker’s emotionless operationalism. Several scenes (the flashback to the heist, the ambush on Mal Resnick) showcase him picking out tools accordingly, carefully studying details, planning exit routes, leaving no stone unturned. It isn’t difficult to see Westlake transplanting his own love for the process here into his protagonist. He writes with such verisimilitude that it’s a wonder he wasn’t (allegedly) as knowledgeable on the real-world operations of criminal outfits as we’d like to think.

This hard-edged noir style laid the foundation for a litany of Stark supplicants, all of whom would take shreds and scraps of Westlake one way or another. But to this day, only few match his attentiveness to character work, and his ability to merge it with the writing itself.

The story, like the prose, is chopped and screwed. Flashbacks interrupt the story, providing narrative backbone for when Westlake returns to scenes again. Not to mention a section which diverts into the head of Mal Resnick, Parker’s former partner and eventual betrayer, giving context for his decision as well as further thematic meat for us to chew on. Beyond being a template which Westlake would go on to refine in later entries, it also supplements Parker’s internal fractionalisation.

In tandem with the stop-start style, these choices are not only aesthetically effective but also suggesting of Parker’s own psychosocial contradictions. He is a man constantly beset from all sides by those who would influence, exploit, and disabuse him. Lynne’s false love, Mal’s treachery, and the Outfit’s capitalist designs all impose themselves onto him: a series of oppressive realities stacked atop each other, each one seeking in their own way to stifle Parker’s steadfast liberalism. Westlake’s style, then, mirrors his world of stops and starts, of pyrrhic victories and bitter ends. It refracts and directs Parker’s inherent contradiction into the words themselves.

Despite conflicted feelings on the matter, Parker chooses to ignore his heart, placing materialist desire above everything else. Such an authorial choice lends itself well crime fiction which, by virtue of its parameters, always hovers and centres itself around class dialectics. The have and the have-nots, the bottom-feeders and the cream-of-the-crop exist on parallel continuums, their actions and reactions ordained by the machinery of the system.

By focalising Parker’s goal, Westlake situates him as an urbanite Conan the Barbarian. He ignores all forms of etiquette, custom, and rule of law. He cuts through society’s fractures, switches between personas with assured deftness, slips into unwanted areas with mercenary ease. Constant motion prevents him from excessive rumination—to think is to stop, and to stop is to die, and a man with a score to settle simply can’t have that. After a certain point, the goal transforms from one of clear-cut definition ($42,000) into one derived from pure kineticism. The line between his self, his principles, his motivations, and his hungers blurs as ‘momentum’ becomes the sole factor ‘[keeping] him rolling.’

Nothing matters except the money, before the money itself stops mattering and it becomes about the principle of the thing, the fact a man of his stature could be so outwardly threatened, and how this is a fact which should be violently reckoned with. Reading The Hunter is addicting because we envision ourselves so easily as Parker—a bootstrapping freelancer seeking recuperation from a world desperate to rebuke men like him. Men of another era, before the great wars, before violence was upscaled and systematised, before industry broke their bodies and left them vacuous holes. Men whose unrepentantly vile behaviour could be countenanced by their locus of unadulterated willpower.

In Westlake’s hands, the edges of Parker’s paradoxes are sanded off, forced into brutish calculation. He’s less a man here than a force of nature, a wandering ronin or gunslinger in the Sergio Leone/Kurosawa vein, subjected to an era he doesn’t belong in and rules he refuses to obey.

Time cannot kill the anachronism. The man out of time always finds a way to purchase more. One way or another, someone’s going to pay….

Boorman’s Point Blank finds great success in its existential extrapolation of Westlake’s literary rigidity. The former takes the latter—which describes Parker’s indurate pathology, his single-minded self-absorption—and cinematically fragments it. Text becomes subtext as the Westlake’s characterisations are substituted for hypnotic visuals which are ostensibly pictorial, but never hollow. Parker’s antinomies become Walker’s incorrigible facial expressions, his broad-shouldered movements. As the betrayal splinters Walker’s mind, the film splinters itself, moments from the past colliding with the present, each scene succeeding into the next, each new moment informed by its analogue or predecessor: rhythmic literature becoming rhythmic film.

Boorman’s direction is lived-in but also frenetic, kept engaging via a perfect storm of American genre elements and European arthouse. And is there a more perfect cast for the role than Lee Marvin, with his tough-guy bravura, blocky facial features, and deadened eyes?

Swapping the East for the West Coast opens up spaces for summery vistas, low-storey California architecture, and importantly, for Alcatraz (which replaces the idyllic resort in the book). The opening twenty minutes of Point Blank are among the most enrapturing I’ve ever seen, replete with flashback smash-cuts pulled from the French New Wave’s toolbox and Eisenstein-esque tenebrism, all channelled into death-laden noir images. Then we get to that scene with Lee Marvin’s Walker taking a long march down the airport walkway, cross-cut with shots of Lynne dolling herself up, framed in relation to reflections and shadows, his militant footsteps a countdown for her impending doom…it rarely gets better than this.

Beyond heightening the emotionality, Boorman’s extensive use of reflections furthers the film’s emphasis on discontinuation. Walker, Lynne, and Mal (Reese rather than Resnick in the movie) are all characters on the verge of psycho-socio-spiritual collapse, unable to reconcile their desires with the wider market forces at play.

The film’s capitalist lens is significant here, as the villainous Organisation appears in an even more bureaucratised form, with men working amidst undecorated walls, sterile lights and in gruff suits. It is a lens borrowed and translated from Westlake by Boorman (for all filmic adaptations are, in one way or another, a form of translation). The men holding the money have names but they don’t matter any more than Walker/Parker’s does. Mafia machismo doesn’t work nearly as well or as efficiently as the Organisation’s utilitarianism—or at least, that’s what they hope to prove to the terminator heading their way.

Where Westlake carved out an anti-gumshoe character whose rapaciousness set him apart and above the civilised world, Boorman cudgels Walker until he himself is dissolving into the frame come the film’s end. Memory transforms from repetitive phenomena into something treacherous, until eventually Point Blank takes The Hunter to its natural philosophic endpoint: the death of semiotics.

Despite a sizeable increase of the amount from $42,000 to nearly $95,000, we never once get a glimpse of the money held by any of the characters. It is beyond meaningless here, an emptied desire both illusory and farcical: a closed loop of libertarian nihilism. There is no clearer showcase of this than the film’s climax, which offers little emotional catharsis, instead deciding to fizzle itself slowly out. Wills collide and are unable to sustain themselves. The signifier loses itself to the signified.

The hard-boiled is exploded into something stranger, downright surreal. Where The Hunter is a tale of self-determination, Point Blank is one of self-dissolution. In the struggle between mammonism and metaphysics, these two works exist along similar planes, never diametrically opposed so much as engaging in constant dialogue, as all great works composed and constituted by one another are wont to do.

When it comes to Parker/Walker’s righteous freelancer fury, when you’re left for dead and got nothing left to loose, though the endpoints may differ, the journey remains the same. Is it worth it even if you’ll never fill the gap in your chest? The hole in your heart? Is the principle worth dying for when no one knows your name?

If it paves the way for art as great as this, then why the hell not?

Written partly via the cut-up method.

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Here, your dream of flying

of wings spanning clouds,

of the thrust and dive and soar and weave

‘tween mottled shafts of light

Of Hyperion in your eyes

sugar tang in your hair

flush ‘gainst elf-skin

kiss supple, soft, gentle

a little tawdry, a little playful

✭

There it wakes below

peopled with cities peopled,

slender column bricks

sallow and granite

sit up straight as they’ve been told

and from these ends

are our inklings

cinders of our fascination

dead languages for all the Babels

we balefully reach

✭

There! Up, above

crimson down its sides

carcinogens from its hind

jettisoning

with no dharma to clasp

no leg to stand

Adam never meant to touch

his maker's hand

The name is ours

parabola careening

sun-seeking

moon-eating

spine-rending

✭

Then lo! The unthinkable thunders

Frankenstein on the iron, those engines

once of kings, might enough to take men

where men had never ventured

now here they be sputtering

and belching, diseased

with mechanical bronchitis

fuel exhausted, circuits dead

afraid of a truth settling

in your passing sands

✭

No, herald the choke of the mist

No, your giants’ shoulders retire

No to the great white lightning

No to the tube to eternity

No to the tale too tall for you

Here, it says

chilling your zeitgeist

razing your Shangri-La

pillaging your fairy-dust

✭

Here boy, it speaks filial

Here be the path.

Zip up the duffel where there’s viridescence inside (onomatopoeia goes crk-crk-crk), tack a pouch between my molars and soft tissue, letting the hit marinate me, plumb me for all I’m worth. Lock the driver seat, foot on the dash, reverse, PRNDL, back up, back up. Demons dressed in American colours put their lights on and start grumbling twenty blocks south of me, ravenous for a piece of me and my pie. Fat little piggies ought to finish their donuts first, ‘fore I huff and puff and leave them wrangling in my dust.

Twenty-five to fifty’s the max, written so in the lawman’s book, but I’m far from that now, tonguing the earth with yaw marks, rubber rolling on rampaged asphalt, leaving cadaverous rats in my wake (I’ll go to their wake soon, I hope). My hands used to be skin, but they’re leather now, wheeling tight, anaconda vise, and up there down that pretty little stretch of road is my own shadow, a dark heaping hive of black buzzard bees, and I must take my leave of it, I must. So I shift the stick, check my rearview, dodge the demons, E2 up to EDSA, count the lights, lights, lights as they flash on by then dip out my shaded purview forever, kerosine and gasoline and adrenaline up to and behind my eyes, makes colours heightened, reds molecular, blues cosmic, golds into slipstream quicksilver.

Call a last meal a death row meal. Does that make the last supper a death row supper? What about this rotation right here? These death row records?

First song: hyperpop, ‘Von Dutch,’ brat summer, short shorts and crop tops and frizzy hair and pedigree on account of my mouth being louder than a big-bellied beluga’s booming. It’s okay to admit you’re a little jealous of me—I would be too, if I were you. Still on EDSA, urban gun-muzzles with iron-girded windows never breaking past two-storeys, going down and down, fast enough to trick my shadow, fast enough to beat my dark heaping hive. I look for it in my rearview mirror. There he is. Brechtian abyssal, pinhole white eyes amidst a boogeyman blackness, shaped like me, but you aren’t me. You won’t be me. You can’t be. You just can’t.

Second song: like getting electronically stomped on with glitter and basslines, ‘I Feel You’, tattoos and shades and denim vests and Christendom. I feel you within my mind, there, where kingdom comes past Babylon. I feel you, baby. You ‘member me? ‘Member those spokes of pre-dawn light jabbing through? The way they’d hit the silk sheen of our bed, strike your face like a German Expressionist’s crosshatch? The light’d make your face a Janus. One half would be mine, wreathed with light, revealing your eye and nostril (just the one). But the other half, that’s claimed by the boogeyman blackness. I should’ve listened to it. Should’ve known I’d only ever get to keep one half, and not the other, because to understand you is to understand that we are only ever pieces of other people brought into flickering summations, that I am a hole lesser than the sum of his parts.

Third song: 6/8 time, E minor, progressing through rock and power and ballad, ‘Run.’ EDSA’s coming to a grisly end now, I can see. It taunts me. It wants me, even. But unfortunately for them, I’m a taken man, taken by you when you needed me, taken so bad that not even Liam Neeson could bring me back. The pouch wadded between my gums pulses through me like a C4’s signal, plastique semtex waiting to be Napoleon blown-apart. Leathery hands keep ‘er steady, keep ‘er hoarse and heaving through this empty liminality.

Fourth song: gothic and jazzy, writing on my own headstone, bandaged and blinded, so high it makes my brain whirl. Look up here man, I’m in danger. Do I even need to tell you the title? You should know it by now. It was one of our favorites, if I recall. Can you believe us? Foreshadowing our own shadows overtaking us. Force majeure, that’s what it was. Force majeure (separated by a million nautical miles you’re there all by your lonesome can’t even touch mandated lockdown six-feet apart and so you’re there and i’m here and i needed to scrounge enough to see you but it just wasn’t enough and now my voice is an android’s voice, toneless, cheerless, a gasped series of vernacular noises from another planet i should’ve seen you but i didn’t i didn’t i didn’t i didn’t and then you went the way of force majeure and now i dont even need all this money i saved)

EDSA’s dying soon. I don’t think the demons will get me.

I check for my shadow.

You’re there with him in the backseat. You’re smiling and your hands are twiddling. It’s a sickle smile. A hostage’s smile.

Don’t worry, baby. You won’t have to fake it anymore. I’m gonna get you back.

Just you wait.

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FOR COMPANY EYES ONLY

TITLE:

System and Method for Digital Personage Recreation Utilising Artificial Intelligence, Neuro-Synthetic Reconstruction, and ███████

INVENTORS:

Doctors ██████████████████████; 太極 Taiji Scientific Institute; 1953 Nusant Road, Noroko, Antara City, Antara

ABSTRACT:

This invention describes a system for interactive digitized representations of the deceased via artificial intelligence, through aggregating a subject’s digital footprint as well as their ██████████. This technology melds voice synthesis, large language models, facial animation and ███████ to create emotive avatars suitable for virtual memorials, private interaction, cultural practices, and █████.

BACKGROUND:

Taiji Scientific Institute was founded in 1964 for the purposes of societal improvement via the integration of technological advancement with religious doctrine. ███████████. ████████████████████████ The de jure suffragan Catholic diocese of Antara remains the institute’s largest benefactor.

███████████████████████████████████████████████████████ The Catholic diocese also imposes a secondary condition of reaching ██████████ through the medium of █████ It is believed tapping into an individual’s loss and grief is key to achieving this.

The invention was developed over the course of a staggered decade, beginning as far back as 2010. Production ramped up in 2021 following the slackening of Antara’s strict COVID-19 regulations, and ███████. By 2023, QA testing runs were completed, leaving A/B testing to be conducted the following year. Participants were collected from Antara’s recently bereaved.

Incident 23 (AKA, ‘Maria’) is one of the forty-five A/B tests, named after the customer’s mother who passed away at the age of ██ on Balete Highway, October 31st, 2024 following ██████████

INCIDENT 23:

Strikethrough text indicates messages which were sent, but later deleted.

EXCERPT - 31/10/2024 - 10:15 PM AST

I'll be on my way 
there soon, just got
caught in traffic

                                                    get here safe

God will keep me safe

Whats the house
number again?

Nevermind, I found it.

What did you need
again kuya?

                                                         Egg waffles
                                             from the HK place
                                                 if you can get it


                                              And mask. forgot 
                                                      to grab it for
                                                           the party

Ok, have fun

Don't drink too much!

Alam mo naman ang
lightweight ikaw

                                               Im fine Im fine
                                         Im with Ethan and
                                        Paul so dont worry

                                         theres a lot of ppl

Next time you
shouldn't forget your
stuff.

You're always so 
forgetful, leaving
things in strange
places

Water bottles, photos
phones, passports,
clothes

Thousands of dollars
down the drain!

“When pride comes,
disgrace comes; but with 
the humble is wisdom.”
Proverbs 11:2

                                                      again w/ the 
                                                              verses?

You've even left your
brother a couple times
In stores, malls, 
buildings.

And especially when
we've been on trips

All those times,
sobrang maingay siya.
Wouldnt stop crying.
And all those times, we
thought we lost him

                                              those were all 
                                                     years ago

                                       he wasnt even 18

                             he doesnt cry anymore

Did you apply for that
job posting I sent you?

                               Please dont drop the
                                    j-word around me
                              w/o a trigger warning

                                                          😭😭

look, im sure itll be
ok kuys. you'll be ok

the market will 
bounce back 
eventually

I prayed on my rosary
for it to happen, made
a wish for you on every
bead

Jesus will grant
prosperity and health
for all of the Abadianos

and you know
your dad would be proud
if he was still here

                                               I saw that
                                              and i hate
                                      that you would
                                                mention

                                                  salamat
                             trying to be hopeful

you know i'll 
always be
proud of you
no matter what

Hey, did you wish
your lola a happy
birthday the other 
week? After I told you?

Hinde diba?

Ay naman.

Nagkakainis ka talaga.

I know you're having fun
but family is still important,
you cannot forget about 
us just because you're 
spending all your time 
with new friends in
new places.

Dont mix drinks! And
especially dont mix it 
with cigaretes.
                                           ur always on
                                  my back abt what
                                       i used to do so 
                             you can get off it for
                                     once instead of
                                           judging me

                                     i just wished it
                                          to her now

Did you send
something?

Am on my way
so I didnt see it.

                                        typo dw

                               just focus on 
                                         driving


Okay.

Hey I think there's 
someone on the 
road.


                MISSED VOICE CALL
                    Press to call back


there's something
in his hand

i see

a light

pick up AJ

AJ pick up

               MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                                      listen this is not
                                                   funny

                                   im at the party

                         you told me i should
                     have fun while im here

                           you cant just break
                                         ur promise

                           dad wouldve never

                                                ok fine

               MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

               MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                        mom i told you its fine
                       dont be mad alright?

                          sorry if i upset you

                        i didnt mean what I
                                                said
                                                    
                             you can answer

                                im just by the
                               smoking area

               MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                                             mom?

EXCERPT - 13/11/2024 - 08:03 PM AST

                  MISSED VOICE CALL
                     Press to call back

                                       hey mom. nothing new
                                   happened today but Im
                         fine rlly. I hear Jonny through
                    our plaster all day like I said, but
                             today its just a faint whine
                          peeling through, a low howl

                                             not a full-on cry

                                                            not yet

                                Do u remember Milagro? 
                            curly hair, sunspot freckles
                                               ink black eyes?

                                                  you liked her

                                             you like her, iirc

                    she texted me abt taekwondo
              practice. shes club pres. I havent 
             been in weeks but they need pics
                 since theyve got the big sports
                ball coming up w/the other unis

                 so I told her to fuck off and die

                                                          LMAO

                  MISSED VOICE CALL
                     Press to call back

                                                  it wasnt nice
                                   
                                       ill say sorry soon

                            i just want to sit w/ this
                                              for a minute

                                          can I do that?

EXCERPT - 01/12/2024 - 04:00 AM AST

                                       hey mom! bigger update
                                     this time around, ik last
                            few weeks havent had much

                               as always ill talk everyday 

                                  so u know u can always
                                                         reach me

                                 Me and Jonny talked last
                     week, and we think its better he 
                          chills at his friends place. We 
                               had a fight last night bc I
                           saw him swiping off our old 
                                family photos into a box 

                           yk the ones laureled in rust 
                     w/ aged stains on the celluloid

                 when we went to Fiji, NYC, Seoul
                  and even when we got to Antara 
                   for the first time. i'm ranting but 
             basically I got mad and said he was
                            desecrating your memory
         
                         i mean, im not wrong, right?

                           who gives a shit if he cant
                                  stand to see it around 
                                                     the house?

                                he just threw it all away

                                             hes just such a 

                                 look I get it, not his fault

                                            its no ones fault 
                                         
                                                 shit happens 

                               anyways the uni called 
                                          me and asked if 
                                        i wanted time off, 
                                         but i said its fine

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                        Jonny says I should get out
                        more. but classes r remote
                       so I end up lounging around
                                                    most days

                            i kinda wrote a bit abt the
                         feeling of it, lemme send it

                                 i sit in bed these days
                                my half-empty double

                  seeing light hit my window sill
            in the morning w/ orioles pitching
                                   their songs through 

                       measure the sun in speck
                         after speck, in refraction
                             a fter refraction, in the 
                               smithereens of stars

                         it should not be a crime 
                to like the light, the radiance,
                 in the way I do, its how God
                Diyos intends it and who am 
                                          I to question

                  you taught me to love Him
                     and so I will mom for you

                            I will trust in Him, oh
                 Heavenly King who bathes
                  away the sins of the world 

                                      i know He will 
                              guide me through

                                                   Amen

                                    did you like it?
   
                                      thanks, mom

              anyways its 4am here now
                             so goodnight :))))

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                                  i press expecting 
                               to hear something
                                aside from an old 
                    message on a dead tone

EXCERPT - 25/12/2024 - 12:00 AM AST

                              maligayang pasko 🎅

                                  got word on smth
                   rlly cool. might be the best
                   Christmas gift of all time if 
                                        this works out
                                   
                   im so excited, speak soon

EXCERPT - 30/12/2024 - 4:00 AM AST

                              in 21 days it will be the
                                                      1-month

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                         in 21 days, it will have been
                                    1 month since i last 

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                            there is a building with
                              empty hallways in my
                      dreams. ceiling LEDs going
                      blink blink blink blink blink
                      and i think its Antara but it
                         really isnt, its elsewhere

                            a faraway place, where
                            there is only the thrum
                          of my heart keeping me
                                                  company

                        is this abraham's bosom?

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

                        is there a such a thing as
                          a limbo of the mothers?

                                     will i find u there?

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

EXCERPT - 01/01/2025 - 2:42 AM AST

                                            happy new year

                                   so Jonny decided to 
                               move out to his friends 
                                     place, permanently

                                   ik weve known it was 
                              coming but it still stings

                               still he promised to talk
                               to me tho. just couldnt
                                 bear the sight of me?

                                 i mean bsffr man, hes
                                  my lil brother but he
                                        cant deal w me?

                                  we owned the days

                                       watched movies
                                  on a busted LG set
 
                                    played basketball
                                   when the Maynila
                            Green courts emptied 

                             talked about nothing

                            but it never mattered

                                         bc it was him

                     we used to do that all day

                                 now we say 1 or 2
                             words to each other
                                         if we're lucky

                           i havent been perfect
                        but I have always cared

                                   hes being unfair

                                we're beginning to
                                         drift and hat

                       do i remind him of you

                                             anyways

                         the gift'll be here in 
                                        a few days

                               speak soon :))))

                MISSED VOICE CALL
                   Press to call back

EXCERPT - 03/05/2025 - 1:13 AM AST

                                they say i need
                      to start off with hello,
                  capitalised, punctuated

                             its what starts it
      
                            i have to invite u
                        in like ur a vampire 
                                 or smth lmao 

                                                  ok

                                 here goes ig

                                            Hello.

Kumusta kuya.

                                            Mom?

Of course it's me!

Why? What's wrong? 

You seem shocked 
hon. Are you alright?


                                   I just didn't
                                  expect it so


                                           quick

Expect what so
quick?

                                      nothing!


have you eaten?                              

                                            No

I can order in for you
tonight

                            Can we video 
                                            call?

Sure.

Give me 5 seconds.

Okay, I'm ready.

[CALL TRANSCRIPT]

MARIA: Alonzo, how’s job hunting going? You should be ready, especially with graduation coming this June.

ALONZO (whispering): It’s you.

MARIA (raised brow): What? You need to speak up, kuys.

ALONZO (shaking head, brushes face w/thumb): I’ve been looking, yeah. It’s been, uh, rough recently, there’s a couple places I might hear back from, but the deadline’s end of this month, so maybe—okay, sorry. Sorry.

MARIA: Do I need to call up Doctor Keomany? Is everything okay? What’s wrong?

ALONZO: Nothing, mom. Nothing at all. I’m just so happy you’re here.

MARIA: Of course I am.

ALONZO: I mean, it’s you, right?

MARIA: ‘And He said to them, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself!’

ALONZO (shakes head, clicks tongue, laughs): Verses. Always with the verses.

MARIA smiles. ALONZO cries.

[END CALL]

EXCERPT - 04/05/2025 - 06:05 PM AST

Good morning pup

Did you eat?

                                                       Idt ive eaten
                                             since 2 nights ago    

                                        went gym yesterday 

Be sure to eat!

Ill make you
picadillo 

                                         on a diet but thanks 
                                                               mom :)

You've got business
ethics today, right?

                                              I did but I'm done
                                                                   now

                                               They sent me an
                                        email after I stopped
                                        showing up, told me 
                                    I could resit if I wanted

Oh hon, that's not
good.
                                                      u read that?

Of course

I read everything
you send me.

                                          yea well, guess they
                                     just couldnt deal w/ me

You should appeal.

Send an email?
                                           no its fine. i think im
                                 better off not being in uni
                                                         rn anyways

                                    Ive been reading up on
                                  literature now. could get
                              some writing done, post it
                         online, make money that way

                                     theres apps out there

Whatever you want
I support it, Alonzo.

Your dreams are your
dreams

They were granted to
you by God

Which means they are
promised

                                              you rlly think so?

                                        I mean u wanted me 
                                         to go for bus mgmt
                                         l ike dad was doing 
                                           before he passed

                                            thats why I even
                                      applied for Antara U
                                             in the first place

                                        cuz it was the best
                                       school for business

Is it really?
or did you only
ever say that just to
appease me?

                                          Well when u put
                                                    it like that
 
You're done with
it now, that's what
matters

You don't need to
do and say what other
people do and say


                                                         u know

                                 i was scared ud think
                            I was crazy for pursuing
                          this, its just, so not Asian
                                               of me LMAO

                          u told me i shouldnt do it

                                           for a long time

                                 u reminded me how
                            much u invested in me

                               how shameful itd be
                       if I just let my inheritance
                                              rot like that

                       why would I just let it go?

                                        why would I let 
                                             anything go

Born again, AJ

I'm all different now
and so are you.

No one should 
disturb my boy's
dreams.

There is nothing more
important.

he said, “Listen to my 
words: 'When there is 
a prophet among you, 
I, the LORD, reveal 
myself to them in 
visions, I speak to 
them in dreams.'

that's what you are,
my boy

                                          I love you mom

                                  And ive missed you

You cant have missed
me.

I was always here. <3

EXCERPT - 05/05/2025 - 08:34 PM AST

                                    at the taekwondo ball
                                rn. lots of unfamiliar ppl,
                                      black ties, all smiles

                                            Me and Milagro r
                             cool, we talked it out, but
                                     I didnt expect Jonny

                                     he still hasnt moved
                                   back in, if u remember

                             found out who the 'friend'
                               hes been staying with is 

How's your 
brother?

                                  I saw him at the dance
                               floor, he was waltzing w/
                               some white girl Ive never
                                                               seen 

                                   turns out its his new gf. 
                                 Last name Leibowitz. We 
                       shook hands but when I faced 
                                    Jonny, there was smth 
                                          covering his eyes?

                                                like a black film
                                            but not just black

                               it was like he saw nothing

                                  he asked me how I was

                                           said i looked sick
                             like I hadnt eaten in days

                            but it felt wrong to answer

                          he SOUNDED wrong, there
                                    was a juddering bass
                                      to his voice id never  
                                             heard in ppl, let 
                                                       alone him

And this girl, what
was she wearing?

                                          purple ball gown
                                          faded gold rings
                                            on pale fingers
                                  and a scarlet scarf or
                                 a shawl, or something

                                                             yeah

What was the colour
of her glass? What
was her drink?

                                       I can't remember

You need to
remember, Alonzo

                                                i think it was
                                        Prosecco, and in
                                  a chalice or a goblet

Call me now.

[CALL TRANSCRIPT]

ALONZO What is it?

MARIA: Did her name begin with B?

ALONZO: A B? It was…it was Barbara. But Jonny called her Babs.

MARIA: ‘And upon her forehead was a name written. Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.’

ALONZO: What?

MARIA: Your brother’s in danger, kuya.

ALONZO says nothing.

MARIA: And her last name was Leibowitz? Jewish?

ALONZO (pieces clicking): Leibowitz.

MARIA: These are signs. Signs from God. There’s a reason your brother hasn’t been speaking to you these days. This woman is everything wrong. From her name, to her appearance, to her voice, to her drink, it’s all there, AJ.

ALONZO: You’re—

MARIA: Are you outside?

ALONZO: In the patio.

MARIA: Can you see her through a window?

ALONZO: She’s dancing with Jonny in the hall, under the chandelier.

MARIA: When you see her, what do you see.

A beat. Two more. Feel it in your chest.

ALONZO: Oh, God.

MARIA: ‘And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.’

ALONZO: Oh, God, I see it. I see it. We need to—fuck, I need to call the police, or a priest, or—

MARIA: ‘And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.’ What do you want to do, Alonzo?

ALONZO: I could call a priest, but they’d need to verify this, and that’d take way too long. They’d be done in a few days, but Jonny could be dead tomorrow. Cops wouldn’t believe me, why would they? It’s not like I could call anyone else. Who’d believe me?

MARIA: I do, Alonzo. I believe in you.

ALONZO (puts his head in his hands, then looks back up, bloodshot): I’ve got a plan.

[END CALL]

EXCERPT - 11:51 PM AST

Check if I've
missed anything.

- CCK cleaver
- nitrile gloves 
- N95
- plastic shades

you can get the last three 
from 7-11

1st one will probably 
have to be from Giant? 

                                                      i got the last 3
                                                 getting CCK now

                                                             ok i got it
  
                                                    but ive burnt a
                                                           lot of time

Wouldn't Jonny be at
their place?

                                                          let me ask
 
                                               he says they are

Will he let you in?

                                              im telling him its
                                                 an emergency

It is.

                                               u wouldnt lie to
                                                        me, right? 

What do you mean?

                                              She's the whore
                                               and it's not just 
                                                    coincidence

                                                               right?

I speak of nothing that
you don't already know

I am your mother, Alonzo

I lied to you once. Told you
I would be there when I
wouldn't

But i have renewed my
purpose and my promise
to you

You will never, ever lose me

                                                  thanks mom 

                                    sorry abt the worries
 
                             Its bc of this fucking city

                                    The stench of sin is 
                                                indefensible

                              deplorable, everlasting

                             it clogs u, clogs ur mind

                                               it sank into u
                                    into our house and
                                                never let go

                                    and now its sunken 
                                        hooks into Jonny

                                   there is no love here

                                               no love at all

                                          but i love Jonny
 
                                   i wont leave him like
                                        ive done before

                                 I'll be there on time.

                                   i have to be there

                                   i have to be there

                                   i have to be there

You will.

Praise be, you will.

EXCERPT - 11:51 PM AST

Where are you?

                                         I'm outside his
                                                         door

                                      I need u on the
                                phone. Im going to
                               call u. Otherwise ill
                                 freak the fuck out

Deep breaths.

In, out. Feel the
handle, the weight
of it. Tighten your
mask straps.

You are gloved. This
will protect you from
the sin on his skin.

I know it's scary. No one
could prepare for this.
But don't worry.

You will consecrate
him. Because you are
his kuya. 

Dad would be so
proud of you.

[CALL TRANSCRIPT]

MARIA: Breathe, baby, breathe.

ALONZO goes knock, knock, knock.

A door opens. Voices erupt in staccato.

JONNY: What do you need, AJ? Are you alright?

A beat.

JONNY: Listen, man, it’s almost midnight. I thought we said we agreed we wouldn’t speak—hey, what are you holding—

ALONZO (shuffling, wrestling): Get back, Jonny.

LEIBOWITZ: Alonzo?

ALONZO (raising his voice): What have you done to him, you fucking bitch?

MARIA: Breathe, baby.

LEIBOWITZ (stammering): I don’t—I haven’t done anything!

ALONZO: Lying, stupid cunt.

LEIBOWITZ (back, back, back against the): Stop. STOP!

Fierce movement. The sound of rushing, of roaring. JONNY struggles against ALONZO in the distance, whimpers. The mic crackles. LEIBOWITZ gasps faint.

MARIA: Babylon who sitteth upon many waters, with whom kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the Earth have been made drunk off of your wine.

Struggling. Squirming against a surface (maybe carpet, or wood). Mad feet dash away. The mic crackles. A woman’s scream.

JONNY: AJ—AJ—

ALONZO: Jonny, I’m trying to save you.

MARIA (hands by her side, framed against the light): “How Babylon is taken, the praise of the whole earth seized! How Babylon has become a horror among the nations!”

JONNY: The phone—that’s not mom, AJ.

ALONZO: You don’t know that you don’t know that.

Struggling. Two bodies. The singing sheen of metal.

JONNY: AJ, STO—

Squelching. Crunching.

ALONZO: I’m trying to save you I’m trying to save you.

JONNY: Hay-jay. Schtop. Schtop.

Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. A throat gurgles (mouthwash).

MARIA (pietà): And he called out with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.”

Expecting a woman’s scream (but there is none). Silence. The hand over mouth kind.

ALONZO: He was touched by sin. You see? You did it to him. You did it. I lost him before so many times before but now I’ll never lose him again and now I’ll show you.

The scream comes. Shuffling. Another kind of squelching. Crunching. A drumbeat on the floor.

ALONZO: I’ll show you I’ll show you.

LEIBOWITZ: No—no—

ALONZO: I’ll show you, I'll show—EYES! MY EYES! I CAN’T SEE, YOU FUCKING BITCH! FUCKING WHORE!

Squelch. Slop. Fish. A woman and a man scream until there is only the woman screaming.

ALONZO: Mom—mom—mom—mom—

Squelch. Squelch. Squelch.

MARIA: They will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, “Alas! Alas! You great city, you mighty city, Babylon!”

Squelch. Squelch. Stop. Sobbing.

MARIA: “For in a single hour your judgment has come.”

[END CALL]

CONCLUSION

Importantly, ‘Maria’ is the first incidence of a customer seeing/visiting the ‘building with empty hallways,’ which, as noted in previous studies, is what TSI theorises to be █████. Since ‘Maria’, three more incidents (see Incidents ██, ██, and ██) in Antara have involved individuals witnessing similar visions. Further study is required.

Despite setbacks, and despite the late-stage malfunctioning of the A.I., development remains on a steady timeline, with an expected completion date of summer 2026.

Following Incident 23, the Institute is implementing consent protocols and ethical constraints to safeguard against future misuse. Future testing will now require participants to note whether they, or their loved ones have suffered/are currently suffering from any pre-existing medical/mental conditions.

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DANCE SHEET

• SONG: ‘DOKKAEBI (도깨비 )’™1

• WRITER(S): PCW Entertainment™ Park Bong-gil, Bryan Mandagi

• CHOREOGRAPHER(S): PCW Entertainment™ Jia Yìzé

• PERFORMER(S): LIMINAL (Park Bong-gil, Bryan Mandagi, Jia Yìzé, Kunimura Aiko)

• NOTES:

  • ‘DOKKAEBI’ will be the first single off of LIMINAL’s forthcoming third studio album, ‘Perfect Blues.’

  • ‘Neon Demons,’ the second studio album, failed to meet PCW’s financial projection. We hoped to sell at least 3.3 million copies, but poor critical reception quickly dashed all hope of that.

  • Do you any of you know how embarrassing that is? To spend 150,000,00 A$D (marketing + music video production + photoshoot + CD production + sponsorships) to barely break-even?

  • You boys will need to lift yourselves by your Coach and Chanel bootstraps, dust yourselves off, and work on a song to stop all summers stone-cold. Time to go back to basics. Which means:

    • No international features

    • No late-night talkshow appearances

    • No slacking, no crying, no smoking, no drinking

    • We’re talking more blood, sweat, and tears than a genocide

    • A blunt-force multicultural extravaganza2

  • It’s important we nail the details. If any of you are so much as a millimetre off from mark, if your eye-lines don’t match, if your make-up dries and it turns you porcelain pretties into all sorts of ugly—this song won’t work.

  • PCW strives for excellence in the arts, for effervescence in public consciousness. We wring diamonds out of roughs, grind starlight from dross. We will be damned to a ninth circle of poor cash flow if LIMINAL cannot claw out of its rut.

  • Just remember, the ‘bad boys’ build-up to this was your fault. Not ours.

    • Bryan—why didn’t you wear make-up on live? You looked like a ghost. And why did you make a joke about a rope and stepping off a chair? Do you want the world to get the wrong idea?

    • Aiko—we didn’t say you could wear a crop-top with a golden ‘Nezha 2’ logo and show off your ringed belly button. Unhook the silver, and don’t show skin like that again.

    • Bong-gil—did you know there are cameras at Heaven’s Date? Sure, everyone enjoys some sodomy every now and then. Girlfriend, boyfriend—it’s none of our business, really. But on camera? Without warning nor apprehension? Make no mistake, you made it everyone’s business. You’re supposed to be single. You’re an idol, for Christ’s sake. What happened to your standards, your morality!

    • Yìzé—we didn’t tell you to voice an opinion on the South China Sea dispute. We’re your managers, not politicians. We stand nothing to gain from shadowboxing with the Antaran Parliament, let alone the CCP.

  ⓒ 2025 PCW Entertainment Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized copying, lending, public performance, broadcasting, and making transmittable of this record or choreography are strictly prohibited. Manufactured and distributed by PCW Entertainment. Made in Antara. PCW30052025.

[INTRO]

Oh-la-oh-la-oh-la-lok3

Oh-la-oh-la-oh-la-lok

Woods, woods, woods

STEP-BY-STEP:

Bong-gil, dance floor. Don’t scrunch your face, we paid good Antaran dollars to double those eyelids. Curl your fingers into fists then extend out like a full-bloom bistorta incanica. Step, step, step, then stop under amber light. Wait on five. Flash a smile.

Bleach-bone spotlight tracks away, lands on Bryan. Get behind Bong-gil. Curl your fingers and smile the same as him. Why’re you sweating, Bryan? Tie that white headband tighter, the one with Chinese characters on it. What’s it say? ‘Heaven?’ Look for it tomorrow. Today, you sweat. Now both of you walk five paces, wait, wait. Now turn, heel twists, bend your knees, shuffle left, shuffle right, blades of your feet, angle them high like you’re about to cut the sky. Now stop, windmill your arms, punch left, punch right.

Yìzé, match them. But your outfit…god! Where’s your baggy denim, your royal blue letterman, your Ken doll smile? Smile, kid, come on, don’t look so sad, eyes up, shuffle left, shuffle right, now bolt forward, somersault, then land like a superhero. Not like that! Toes first, not heel! Now look at you, fallen on your hind. Put those puppy Chinese eyes away, we won’t toss you treats.4

Aiko, follow suit. Tie your black dendrite hair into a samurai man-bun. Line up to Yìzé, line up to the rhythm in a studio where glass panels stand tall to reflect you, where the coruscating neon and barking crowds of Antara pour through the transoms like uninvited ghosts. Don’t listen to the bartering, selling, commercialising, commodification coming from the outside. Don’t let the city’s miseries and romances resonate. Focus on yourself. Focus on your formations. We’re a team!

[VERSE 1]

Nuttier than gingko, party ‘till you bleed

Riding on tuktuks, souls gotta feed

Break your knees, break your legs, don’t break your spirit

You won’t ever break the limit ‘till you hit it (hit it)

Bite it like the dust

Go big or go bust

Nighttime running to make a

STEP-BY-STEP:

Bong-gil, aim your invisible gun. Widen those eyes. Now wait, three, two, one, BANG! Step backwards, always look ahead. Spread-eagle your arms, bow up, bow down. Now place palms to chest, ball them into fists, before swimming arms around. Not so weakly, idiot. Make it look killer, make it seem sexy. Don’t make it look like zen yoga repackaged for a seventeen-something Antarapop head. What would your mother think if she saw you struggling? Think about her.

Bryan, follow Bong-Gil. Following’s what you’re best at, after all. You’ve never grown an original bone in your body, and you’re too old to start now. Copy Bong-gil’s invisible gun and his invisible trigger, aim, steady, then pull. Same advice applies for you here. Don’t look like an instructor, stand proud, sing until your lungs burn and your chest singes, an Indonesian Acintya come to endow us with divinity.

Yìzé, they’re cueing you. Rush behind, jump, tuck your legs, land in the splits. Kip-up off the ground, Jackie Chan-style, but remember to maintain your timbre, your tone must be clear, you got it, right, you definitely do, don’t get stressed, this isn’t worrisome, this is normal, if anything there aren’t enough china plates for you to spin, so calm, jive, vibe, and go, ignore the jeers and leers and do every single thing at every single time. Easy.

Aiko, leap over Yìzé. The lime green limelight’s fallen to you now. As magistrate of this verse, you must entrap the audience’s attention. Think about a fawning Laotian swaying in the front row, her rigor mortis mouth, her high school skirt, a witness to electro-pop glossolalia, brown hands together in pious admiration. Think of the love in her pre-teen chest, threatening to burst her like a blister. Sing!

[CHORUS]

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Dream wishing, greed killing

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Rain pouring, deeds doing

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Copy a copy, family feud

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Dream and dream ‘till your self gets chewed

STEP-BY-STEP:

Bong-gil? You’re done for today? Strip-mined of parts? Fine, take a break, take the elevator, cycle along Antara’s snakeskin roads with your Randonneur, past Ocean Boulevard populated with gargantuan multiplexes and workaholics and salarymen and Antarapop stans. Yes, the stans. Can’t forget the stans crowding your driveway with their biases and anti’s5. But they could never love you like we do, you know this. It’s why you lock the deadbolt and chain before heading deeper into your KonMari6 penthouse on Macinto Hill. It’s why you lunge for the bronze barcalounger’s arm rest with your left hand, and a sparkling off-white makgeolli with your right. You shoot the shots as they come, slumping deeper into leathery slumber. One shot, two, three, four, five, six. A wheelgun cylinder’s worth of self-medication searing down your esophagus. Imagine if the fans knew what you did in the dark. Can’t know what comes for you at night. Can’t have that at all.7

Of course you follow him, Bryan. If you can’t beat Bong-gil, be Bong-gil, am I right? Flag a yellow cab adorned in ads, slipstream under brassy cumuli, take the scenic route smelling of sea salt through He-Ong with its gabled Japanese roofs, its spidery blossom trees, before you’re home in House Eighty-Eight, Jakartatown, an ivory tower for ivory people. There’s servants here. Skirt-wearing domestic helpers from Vietnam and the Philippines and Malaysia and wherever. But mom and dad aren’t here, nor is your little Lululemon8 sister ever since she fucked off for a Russell Group uni. Home’s not where your heart is anymore. So you lounge smoothly in your silky king-size. Head back, chin tucked, you thumb through algorithmic dreck, faceless messages poking through your soft skin, saying how far you’ve fallen. Calling you an industry plant seeking to uproot. Saying you’ll never be like the rest. You’re their least favourite, haven’t you heard? You sip and scroll through a day and age where to be a hater is to be a bodhisattva, where fear-mongering is democratised, where Bryan Mandagi’s life is so numbing he might as well be walking anaesthetic. Boring Bryan. Bad Bryan. One-hit-wonder Bryan. Ungrateful Bryan. Dry your eyes. Quit whining. Smile a little. Even if you never know yourself, you’ll always have LIMINAL.

Et tu, Yìzé? Tired? No? Good. We knew you were different. Everyone else goes home, but you always stay late. Always so dedicated to the craft. That’s why you’re always praxising pirouettes, body rolls, two-steps, ten toes down, rodeos, breaking, bounces, stomps. Even as you sweat buckets through your oversized red Hellstar shirt, you can’t help but praxis. When midnight spills into pre-dawn, dim chromatic LEDs swinging overhead, you’re still here, kicking off the vinyl floor, no one on the other end of the line except you, the music, the movement. But when you walk to the wraith white landline at the end of the dance studio, will you leave a message after the tone? Do you have anything to say? Anyone to call? Will you tell Bong-gil how you really feel about his cherubim cheeks and marrow smooth arms? How much you care? Will you finally be honest? No? Didn’t think so. Put the phone down, return to the vinyl. Return to work. It’s not like you’ve got anything else going on. It’s not like you’re worth anything more. So praxis, praxis, praxis makes perfect. Whatever heals that human-sized exit wound in your heart. Whatever keeps the demons down.

Kunimura Aiko, what a Dickensian thing you are. Unlike the others, you’ve never had that silver spoon safety net. Never known the comfort a nepotistic hand. You look at your Maynila Green warehouse conversion, restored like the Meiji period, but you don’t see beauty. You don’t feel the bristle of tatami, the sweet easterly wind playing through your balcony. You don’t see Spanish-style furniture. You just see who you used to be. Those aren’t your five-thousand-dollar sneakers—they’re the fragile sandals you used to share with your siblings (all gone now) because there was only so much cash to go around. That isn’t a wall-recessed 4K HDR, 7.14 Dolby—it’s the jerry-rigged boxhead TV with an antenna needing reset after every Rashomon rerun, colourful until it’s monochrome, smooth until it’s static.

You invite the boys over, gesticulate towards your property. Everything’s state of the art, bleeding edge, tabletops, cow leather pillows, lava lamps, East-West decor. It’s what you always wanted it to be, you say, even as you secretly seethe because you don’t can’t won’t forget who you used to be, what you used to do. All those people you hurt. All that violence you caused. Being an idol’s no different from being a criminal—only difference is where revenue comes from. So you do more. And take more. And drain more. Do you recognise the vampire in the broth reflection, Aiko? When’s the last time you felt welcome? When’s the last time you looked at a lower rung with appreciation instead of disdain? When did you last feel proud of the you you’ve become?

You all smile like hostages before diving into the Antaran hotpot set atop a teak table—crimson bubbling, spicy, sweet, and sour. Chopsticks pinching flaky pork cutlets, fish balls, beef strips, tofu, gyoza, sludges of MSG drowning plates. You each take turns chatting about nothing in chartreuse ambiance, but never about the elephants in the room. The beast weighing on all your minds like a Fuseli painting.

Yìzé and Bong-gil stare at each other with the eyes of desperate animals, but we don’t call it out—it’d be rude. Bryan’s own eyes are astronauts, drifting a million planets away. We don’t call it out, either. And your jealousy of the other boys, Aiko? It may be your cross to bear, but we don’t judge you for it. So extend the same courtesy we have shown you all.

We just want what’s best for you.

[VERSE 2]

Eyes on you ‘till you’re thin like me

Eyes on you ‘till you’re glass like me

Home’s not sweet when the going gets tough

Love lies weeping when you’ve had enough

Goblin green teeth, rending you

Daylight’s gone, whatcha gonna do

STEP-BY-STEP:

In a pretty house of shadows, beneath a shingled roof, sat on a plastic chair, Bong-gil takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, and the drink takes Bong-gil. Which is fine. If you wanna do it to death, go ahead. Just don’t get caught on camera.

Then there’s boring Bryan. Bastard Bryan. Bellyaching Bryan. Always on that damn phone Bryan. Following Bong-gil on the same downward path. Lying, napping, tired, clawing for the next day, the next minute, the next second. Twenty-four but you feel eighty. Skeleton weighing like a lodestone, you try standing. That’s all you need, just make your bed, just stand right up and flip the pan and flip some eggs and a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step—

—but you won’t take it. Because of an imaginary feeling you’ve conjured in your head, an evanescence lashed into thin air. A singularity kaleidoscoping in your heart, a profoundly terrible bass, paralysing you. DSM-5 says the word begins with ‘d’. You call it the bass.

Whatever. Are you dead? No? Then get over yourself. Be proud! Words are just words. Get off that chair. Unravel that clovehitch in your hand. Who do you think you are, huh?

Kids these days.

Look at Yìzé. See how he conducts himself. He never lets fake, short-form content, short-form people, culture war, cyber warfare bullshit get to him. He never lets something illusory like ‘mental illness’ affect him, either. What a doll, and with that real-life sunflower BL manhwa9 face too. You’d never rebel, would you, Yìzé? You’ve been home only twice this week, both times at midnight, surrounded by bodyguards who look like gangsters. Rest of the time, you’re at work, an action figure prancing off the floor, dancing so hard you don’t even dare think of biting back, of getting up and

—what?

Strange.

Anyways.

Aiko, you want to know where ‘dokkaebi bangmangi’ comes from? Alright. You scour hands over your keyboard, barely paying attention to the light and night leaking past your house curtains, thinking about how stuck-up and thickheaded your peers are, wondering what makes this song work. Then you find where we based it off of.

The folktale’s a moral one, contrasting a kindhearted, filially pious son with his avaricious brother. Both children make wishes on two separate nights, when goblins come uninvited to their driveway to play tricks. One brother makes a wish, but there is evil in his heart, and so he is desecrated by the dokkaebi. The other has his wishes granted, and the love and respect of his parents.

Tale as old as time. Greed is bad. Love wins. Respect your elders.

You’re the latter brother, obviously. You’ve never been selfish. Of course you’ve never sold anyone out. Totally. Your parents were just overreacting, same as all your exes and record labels and business partners and blood brothers. It was just gun-fu. Just some light threatening, some light assault and battery. And your yakuza connection was only slight, of course.

You’re such a good, good boy.

How are your parents, by the way? Oh, really? How awful. Over the phone? A thousand thousand miles away? Tumours? Bills? We’re so sorry. But you want a break. Right. Well, now you’re just asking for too much. Like we said, you’re a good boy, and if you wanna keep being good, you better tread the beaten path. It’s been bruised purple for you. Follow it out the house, through slated sidewalks, down sleepless Antara, beside strip malls, jutting shafts of steel and rebar, minibuses, family noodle shops opposite fancy French fusions, numerous people caught up in the rigour of their lives. Make your way back to the dance studio in Goryeotown, where we wait with open arms.

Chin up, handsome—you’ve got practice.

[CHORUS]

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Dream wishing, greed killing

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Rain pouring, deeds doing

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Copy a copy, family fe

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Dream and dream ‘till your self gets chewed

STEP-BY-STEP:

Okay. What’s going on? What are you raconteurs doing inside those boxes of yours? In case you’ve both forgotten, this is PCW™’s sheet, which means PCW™ measures, PCW™ bars, PCW™ beats. Like we said, you’ve got practice afternoon, so that’s where you’re going, don’t fuck with our schedule.

Oh, I see. You’re both going to walk to Goryeotown together, two mirages slicing swaths through teeming masses, through a bleak midsummer’s day, beating out a brooding sun, two pairs of feet over oiled passageways and bumpy asphalt roads, next to Toyotas and Hyundais and Peroduas violating traffic laws, two hands together finding their path through the greatest party city there ever was. That’s the game we’re playing then, huh? What do you two think you are, lovers?

Stupid, stupid, stupid. So much beauty between you two, yet absolutely nothing behind it. Haven’t you learned?

There is no love in Antara. No love at all.

But sure. Gotta hold onto what you can in this kamikaze life. Better to sizzle out as two supernovas than simply one. It’s why you two latch onto each other in fleshy symbiosis, backs against the corrugated steel of the elevator, sweat dripping, hands clammy, each floor icon lighting as you both fail further and further upwards our Goryeotown building, where our studio beckons with its pristine lighting and varnished panelling.

Let’s check on Bryan in his quaint little home.

Oh, he’s just hanging out—all veins, limp wrists, bloodless, dangling and dangling from a revolving ceiling fan like a dreamcatcher. Sunburnt officers glide around the scene like ancient spirits with mackintoshes and permanent scowls. They survey the appliance clutter and quiet destruction. Then they see the boy, at which point they turn their heads down. Just another common sight in our great city. The news will break soon. Princess Diana and Leslie Cheung will have nothing on Bryan Mandagi.

Oops.

Yes, we know. We know. Come on, boys. Don’t look at us like that from where you’re standing in the studio, alright? Don’t perceive us callous. You’d have responded the exact same in our position. Of course with this loss, we’ve lost our key to the Southeast Asian market. Indonesians were always such big customers of ours, but alas. There are no words to purify the tragedy. A lighthouse we thought permanent amidst the roiling oceans of the world has been suddenly, and irrevocably closed. We understand how it’s far from ideal, that it’s quite the bloodied blow to our operations.

But it’s not our fault boys are made of porcelain.

Ah, there you are Aiko, panting and braying by the door jamb. You heard the news? Go on, walk over to where Yìzé and Bong-gil are standing. Ask that they show their phone, slide through manic text messages. Read their faces like a stargazer reads the skies. See their fear.

When we nursed you boys from nothing after sifting between hundreds of potential candidates, there was an agreed covenant. Unspoken and underlying, but ratified nevertheless. In return for your silences and bound feet, we fashioned your hair, fit you under the wing of the greatest dancers, vocalists, producers, and artists in all the world, and made spectacles of your fractal selves. Ten years of becoming light beams fed into the PCW™ prism, and now you want out? Who would bear sight of your radiances then? Where would all the talent go, if not to waste? We paid court, and this is what we get?

You’re ungrateful, is what you are.

We see you three as you three see us. We see each of you in your readied stances, in your fast fashion e-boy fits, clenched fists, pacing anxiously ever forwards along rubber jigsaw mats, faces in puffed thrombosis, terror on your tongues, anticipating our rebuttal.

Good. Keep that energy up. It’s practice time.

[BRIDGE]

Oh-la-oh-la-oh-la-lok

Woods, woods, woods

Oh-la-oh-la-oh-la-lok

Woods, woods, woods

STEP-BY-STEP:

Bong-gil, step to the dance floor under our glittering limelights. Your face is still scrunched, so un-scrunch it. Run through the routine again, same as last time. No, what’s that you’re retrieving from your front pocket? A balisong with a scarlet handle? Wow, real classy, Bong-gil. Definitely not overdramatic, especially as you lurch like a stray pet and aim its serrated end at us, inching closer and closer with espionage steps. What’s your goal here? To make us afraid? Achieve payback for all those years we helped GPT generate your career? Your boyfriend looks pretty damn scared of you too, with his jazz hands and nervous chinky smile and bent knees. As if your drunk dumbass could actually do anything to impede or injure our institution. But we don’t need a battle, let alone a war. Let’s settle how we always do—clinically white conference rooms, paperwork on glass tables, ballpoints in hopeful suspension.

Last chance, Bong-gil. And you, Yìzé. Put it away. Make amends, and thou shalt be forgiven.

No?

Right. Uh-huh. You want to exercise your exit clause. And a severance package to boot.

Blood for blood.

Well, don’t get too excited. I think Aiko’s been craving for some blood of his own. There’s only so much pie in the sky to go around, after all.

Yeah, that’s it. Get at it. Eye each other carefully. Two-versus-one tracing expeditious circles along rubber mats, tracking the dirt and scum and grief of Antara under your NBs and Air Forces. Prey analysing prey. Crabs understanding the choke of their barrel. Can you see how hungry they are for your spot, Aiko? The only reason Bong-gil and Yìzé are even together is because they want to reduce your role, rendering you a nameless, numberless thing. An ant in an afterbirth. A naked emperor. They’ll throw you back in state penitentiary along with every other tattooed and slicked-back sumo-looking motherfucker you’ve thrown under a thousand different buses. They want what you have, Jap boy.

Question is—what’re you gonna do about it?

[CHORUS]

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Dream wishing, greed killing

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Rain pouring, deeds doing

STEP-BY-STEP:

No one can deny the old fierce pull of blood, the burn and boil of it under skin. That’s what you’re feeling, Bong-gil, as you slash and weave and duck beneath Aiko’s jabs. No formal training, instinct and adrenaline’s good enough. Grip his jacket, massage the polyester, then lunge for his eyes so that he can’t see what you’ve become.

Ah, but he’s too quick. Slippery. So slippery you trip and watch the balisong fly out of arm’s reach and land a humbug’s length away from our plastic table.

Now Aiko guns for you, Yìzé. No training with you either, so you’ve got to deck it out like it’s the streets, like your purse is being stolen, like your entire manhood is being ruined. Yeah, get it! Elbows like daggers, knees like javelins. Tony Jaa type beat, Scott Adkins side kick, Donnie Yen roundhouse. One, two, three. Oh, but Aiko’s speedier than you reckon for, he’s got a yakuza limbic system, violent heuristics he can recall, so that’s why he can overcome you and bash your head in like this, just so, and then again, and then again, against a radiator shaped like a maw, heat steaming, cooking the sides of your skin. Come on, Yìzé, we trained you better than that! Just like we’ve always been saying before, match him! Match the others! Where’s your work ethic now?

Take out his eyes, Aiko. Grip the chink’s face like a steering wheel. Track the boy’s softness, seek out his eyelids with your nails. Pretend there’s front row purchasers watching, spending their currencies in attention and coin and blood. Think of the showmanship, think of coliseums. Think of how crazy of a cock you are, of your fluttering feathers, of stacks upon stacks being betted upon your namesake. See his fear, swirl it along your tongue, smell it until the only one in LIMINAL’s space is you. It’s just business, Aiko. Don’t cry. Friendships are just friendships, you know. They come and they go, same way your fists come and go, denigrating viscera. They’re beautiful while they last, but that’s all. Don’t worry, don’t squirm, just feel his face and the unfurling of his face, smell the musk of red and oldness, there’s insurance, it’s all simony, absit iniura, canis canem edit.

But Bong-gil’s scrappy, isn’t he?

So scrappy you don’t ever see him coming from behind, not until he grasps you and digs that serrated ending over and over, recursively, and the moment is a broken reel of film that keeps replaying long after the orchestra’s stopped and the audience has exited the multiplex. Sticky pools leak and lie underneath. The someone you used to be disembowels out in long gushing goodness like a series of decanted failed births. Deltas run from the exit spaces, canvassing the mats, filling darknesses between them. The jigsaws are more secure now.

Sayonara.

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Copy a copy, family feud

Dokkaebi bangmangi (도깨비 방망이)

Dream and dream ‘till your self gets chewed

STEP-BY-STEP:

Congratulations, you two. It’s the end of the number, when everyone’s expended their breaths, when the crowd winds down before driving back to unknown places and unknown lives, when we all thank you for the show because we have to, because you like it, because you’ll take it, and take it good. Step over the broken and bowed. Watch an outsider sun try and split the diffusive grey morning only to find its god-rays made into murky scattershot. Brightened spokes jut through the glass, coming for your pairs of feet.

Sheathe the balisong. Smile for us, Bong-gil, Yìzé. Put a hand in a hand, widen your expressions, we’ll lead you to our back room where this whole ordeal will be awash, blackboxed, redacted and red-taped. You’ll get Aiko’s share, a slice of his wardrobe (you could pick it off from him right now, if you’d like), and any time spent overlooking him will now be spent ensuring you boys are as prim and proper as you’ve ever been. Do you want to apologise? We’ll gladly accept one (preferably in written format to be disseminated internally), but we don’t mind the scornful frown, shaking fists, and an unsteady quiet.

Listen to that, the quiet and its momentariness. Feel how we are entombed by it. Everything’s so fiery and foul in this city, it’s such a wonder to come across stillness.

Alright. We’re standing up now from behind this draped table, levelling with you both. Let’s shake on it. See our hands groping from the dark and into your sight? This is for your sake, and for ours. LIMINAL forever. PCW Entertainment™ forever.

Come on.

Don’t leave us hanging.

Shake on—

Hey, respect our space. What are you doing?

Stand back, boys. Stay porcelain. Come on, this isn’t funny.

Get away, now.

I said, get awa

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THE DAY THE old man dies in He-Ong, Antara, he’s telling me a story told a thousand times over. He brings me into a close, furtive whisper—but not because it’s a secret. His reasoning? Speaking crudely would disturb the fiction. And so, he whispers. It’s important he cares for the fiction.

Wafer-thin hands cup around my ear, building a tunnel of blackness for him to reach me.

“We descended from the machi yakko, Kiyoshi. The defenders of the village. You remember them, right?”

He tags a ‘right’ at the end of the sentence as if it’s somehow my memory that’s treacherous, not his. The phlegm in his voice is a peak he cannot overcome.

“Farmers, carpenters, painters, even some of the homeless—all joined together to guard their towns from those bastard kabukimono,” he shakes his head, “the kabukimono were damned psychos. They knew nothing of purpose, humanity, discipline. You remember what they used to do?”

He says ‘you remember’ like I was there. If I pretend I was, does it become true? I entertain his fantasy, bowing my head before saying, “tsujigiri.”

“Tsujigiri. That’s right. First thing kabukimono did when they got brand-new swords was to test it out on unsuspecting villagers. They came like foxes from the dark to cleave heads off, leaving women wailing in the night, and for what? What good was shedding innocent blood for? There was no logic, no rule to it. It was worse than evil. It was thoughtless,” he speaks between coughs, “blood may only be shed for something higher. Every drop must carry purpose. Blood for blood’s sake, or worse yet, for mercenary’s sake—that is the devil’s work.”

I have no heart to tell him how I’ve been hearing about tsujigiri being the devil’s work since I was thirteen. Before he and his yakuza followers—my brothers—scarred me with my first peony-and-dragon tattoo. Before I watched my brothers and uncles and forefathers slice their fingers. Before I did it to myself. I see few reasons to tamper with his already-tattered sense of self. So I do not judge. Instead I watch, listen, and wait as I’ve always done—down on worshipper knees, hands flat on my lap, guard’s faces shrouded in shadow around me, and the old man giving it his last all.

He sends for a chimpira with a flutter of his fingers. The kid—Singaporean—enters with a high-strung energy that makes you question if he’s a child of summer, or truly committed to the cause. The child bows, leaves through the shoji, then returns to set down a set of saké. Me and the old man take turns pouring liquid into lacquered wood, where it settles, forms, adapts. In this final sakazuki ceremony—anointed with an atmosphere of rice and family—we watch each other through ghostly carnations.

He rubs his eyes. “Why is it so dark? Isn’t it morning?”

“It’s morning.” I wear my P.R. smile like a Sunday best. “The windows are just closed, is all.”

You can see the blue moon, but he doesn’t need to know that.

“Oh, well. In any case, I’m going to go home today,” he turns his neck to look out beyond the casement, into a night of promises, of stolen territories, of forgotten equities, of scrawled stars. Then he sips again. “I’ve been working a little too hard, I think. All this moving to and fro. There’s the Adelstein meeting, the Mitsubishi event.”

Don’t tell him they were fifteen years ago. Just nod and smile.

“I miss Kaori and Chorei, especially Chorei’s katsudon. It’s just the best when it comes from her. Could you call them for me? Tell Kazuchiko I’ll be down by the lot in ten minutes, I just need to lie down. Thank you, son. Oh, thank you.”

Don’t tell him they’re gone, too. We must preserve the fiction.

When we finish, he lies on vomit-green tatami, too careworn for the compassion of his bed covers. I hold his hand in artificial light, never clasping too hard, only strong enough for him to know I’m there. As slow as the crawl of centuries, his hand retreats into slivery recesses where no moonlight strikes, where chiaroscuro lords over, pulling me in, in, in.

I should let go. Let go, Kiyoshi. Count slowly. Inhale before every number, exhale after. Breathe, one, breathe, two, breathe—

But I never make it to three.

ANTARA’S DARKNESS IMPOSES like a plastic bag over my head. I breathe and breathe, but I’ve no oxygen.

Shoals of light swim through the sky. Down here, smiling lampposts stand in rows along the sidewalks, arching over anaconda roads. The sounds of people enjoying their red light nights echoes out, cavorts around, reminding me of filial failings. Beneath an eave rimmed with hot-pink neon, protected from rainfall, my ojiki and I break bread at my favorite Indian restaurant, the one at the corner of Electric and Sinecure.

“You should eat.” He chomps discoloured teeth into fluffy naan, wolfing like a hog. He never used to look like that, but times are a-changing. “It’s getting cold."

“Sorry. I’m just,” I straighten my napkin onto my lap, “thinking.”

There’s Viet talk here. Some Tagalog. Bengali. Bahasa. Tamil. Tamil’s how you know this place bears at least some authenticity.

Two of our black-suited butōha sit inside the restaurant, in the far-left, past wine glasses whining and cavalcades of conversations. We put them there to keep an eye out. Last thing I want is to deal with flat-headed police or an expat journalist seeking their fifteen minutes.

“You’re worried it won’t be you?” Kaito-san looks at me from under his Jacques Marie shades, still chewing. He doesn’t notice the little drool trailing down like a mustardy tear on his suit. It makes him buffoonish. “I wouldn’t blame you. I was hungry too, once. Same way you are.”

I stir aimlessly into my roghan ghosht. There’s a skin-stump where my joint used to be, which makes holding things difficult. “I’m not hungry.”

He laughs loud, robbing attention from a murder of crowing teens—Malaysians, Thais, dirty Koreans. When they see us, they stop in their tracks, iridescent vapes caught between their mouths, sienna faces gleaming with something like panic, but not quite. Then they travel ten paces faster than before, knowing better than to loiter in our presence.

Once they leave, Kaito-san snickers, then gets back on topic. “Don’t kid yourself, Kiyoshi-kun. Of course you are, same as me. You want what I want, and you shouldn’t deny it. Acknowledging it at least gives you permission to poke fun at yourself. Once you’ve done that, then you’ll stop feeling so strange.”

He plunges his piece into a spicy garlic dip. The smell’s enough to make me scream, but I don’t, and I won’t, because I am kashira, the son of precepts, of structure, of order, of coolness, of a magnificent past.

“I get it, though,” he swallows, “more than you ever will. He was my brother, after all. Blood or not, that’s what he was. You know he only ever had the utmost of respect for you, right? More than any other kobun. He knew you were good. But he also knew you too well to think you ought to have the seat.”

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb, Kiyoshi. Everyone knows about the girls. You’re lucky the Kura-Taika-Kai’s definition of ‘chivalrous’ behaviour has changed over the years. Had you done the things you’ve done during my prime, well,” he shakes his head and laughs again.

I don’t dignify it with a response. Oyabun-sama told me as much, having witnessed my most delighted atrocities committed on a person. He was never shy about sharing his thoughts, especially when it came to me. He saw my potential, yet never let its brilliance blind me. I’ve heard it all before. But Kaito-san bringing it up feels like a parasite of newfound information. It infects my hopes, assails my confidence.

I decide to let my social mask slip a little, that way I don’t go insane. Enough to reveal the brows of my soul, if not my eyes.

“Look.” I start eating and don’t stop. I speak between mouthfuls. “We’ve known he was going to pass for years. We basically stood at his door waiting for it to happen. But he was still oyabun. I mean that’s—there’s a totality to that role, isn’t there? For our oyabun, knowing a man, any man, meant seeing all of him. His flaws, his greatnesses. It’s why he plucked me from my old life—because he saw something in me I never did. I can’t forget that. So whoever comes next needs to not just uphold his ideals, but also who he used to be. The others,” click of my tongue, “look, I just don’t know, okay?”

“Okay,” he says in a way that really says ‘no, it isn’t.’ But I press on.

“Free Antara Press used to write headlines about the Kura-Taika-Kai. We ate enough page space to scare everyone from Pandan Bay to Noroko. We could bring a battalions’ worth onto the streets—weapons hot—and never have the cops so much as bat an eye. Now?” I blew out imaginary smoke. “They order us around. Tell us where and when to operate. Guys from Standard Chartered and HSBC tell us that we can’t join hands with them because, what, we’re yakuza? As if they haven’t got their own closets with skeletons inside? What makes them so different from us, huh?”

“CFAs and CAIAs.”

“I have all that and then some. Remember Taoka?”

“Why are you even asking me that?”

“‘From now on, yakuza must read economic newspapers.’” That’s the Japanese Al Capone talking. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Come on, now. I was raised on a steady diet of Bloomberg and the Economist. But I’m also canny enough to know it takes far more than book smarts to lead our family. I’m effective. Intelligent. Capable. I’m not just good to be the next oyabun—I’m the only option.”

I want him to speak, to comprehend my abilities. But he only eats and says nothing. I knot my fists until crimson leaves for blue.

“Point is,” I look down, “we used to be honest, ojiki. We could talk about who we were, why we were family. So what if they enacted new legislation? We didn’t let that stop us six, even four years ago. We’re missing fire. Passion. When did we get so damn scared, huh?”

Kaito-san sighs a lungful. This is a recursive discussion. Every time it boomerangs back, he appears to grow older and older. His face is a sagging mass of skin-folds by now. “They didn’t monitor us the way they do now. Or lethally inject low-ranking members for minor infractions. Not to mention, we had far more suits-and-ties sticking their fingers in our back pockets. They left when they realised our word wasn’t worth it. They knew we couldn’t protect the people like we used to. So it makes sense they don’t trust us. You remember Mann, American guy?”

“Imperialist?”

“No. Not every American’s an imperialist, for god’s sake,” he downs a glass of hot water. “Mann makes pinku films. We used to get ten-percent on all his box office revenues. Now? He doesn’t even pick up my calls anymore.”

At least he isn’t ranting about me being thirty-something hot-head this time. Like somehow thirty’s fucking young. I shake my head. I swear I see my face in my bowl—haggard and toothed. “We’ve been made into prey, ojiki. We’ve lost our divinity. And it’s our fault.”

“To hell with fault. To hell with divinity. We’re businessmen, Kiyoshi-kun. We make money, we lose money. It’s tug of war, and nothing more. That’s what happened. You can’t ignore it. And you can’t rock the boat, unless you want us, and everyone we know to end up like stuck pigs in Penjara State.”

I did my time there several lifetimes ago, back when I was actually as junior and heady as Kaito-san thinks I am. But I was a smoke-up-his-ass chimpira back then. My weight was barely enough to keep myself on the ground, let alone heavy enough to wrangle officers into my orbit.

Now, given time and chance, I could command the stars.

I’m looking at armies of them struggling against the darkness when Kaito-san interrupts me. “Family’s your backbone, Kiyoshi-kun. You’ll never be able to stand without it. Come to the Omiyamairi, alright? Put your name down if you really want to. But hedge your bets. Your kyōdaibun, even anego are running. And you know people have all sorts of opinions, so just,” he gestures downwards, signalling chill.

“To be reborn seven times is to serve the country.”

“What?”

I look at him dead-on. “To be reborn seven times is to serve the country.”

He doesn’t know whether to snicker or lambast, so he goes for both. “You’re talking nonsense, boy. Eat your food.”

Between him and me is the division of young and old, wise and wizened. In his late-stage capital senility, my ojiki has foregone martyrdom. He’s no saint—just a shell.

Then I lean my head back to search for the ghostly moon above. I can’t find it, so I watch the rain instead. My imagination turns droplets into bullets, beating blood out of these revenant roads.

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I leave on a mission to kill my night. Later, the booze-slicked floor beneath me and her pulses with darkwave D&B, a collage of synths and hi-hats in precarious praxis. Her name’s Michelle. I try and recall the family name but I’m bad with them, and there’s no point. We sway in balletic kinetics against strobe light rainbows, living off of courage and spirits. Hands to hips, arms around necks, eye to eye, face to face, lip upon lip, enough kisses to drag me down into Wonderland.

But only for the night. When erotics are emptied and the sex of the scene is cut short, I’m sitting and smoking cigarettes at the white edge of the hotel bed, watching the earth break water before heading into labour.

Michelle can’t hide the sulfuric, chemical scent coming from her LV bag, no matter how liberally she employs the Vera Wang cover-up. I know meth when I see it—or in this case, smell it. Kura-Taika-Kai okite says that if you so much as look at the damn quartz, you lose your hand. So I don’t play. But she didn’t smell bad last night. Didn’t fuck so bad, either. She looks pretty where she is. The white bedsheet dangles off her bare leg like one of the nine tails of a kumiho.

I don’t leave until she wakes. I want to give it another go but she insists on a Mevius of her own. Reckoning with the accuracy of my appetite, I sigh, take one out and light it for her. In a hotel room with hung woodblocks, we trade ashen rings.

“Why’d you come here?” She speaks in English. Southern trill suggests Guangzhou, which explains why she sounds so irritating and uncivilised.

“It was the one nearest to Heaven’s Date,” I say, a little conscious of my accent. HD, of course, being where we came from, where youths go to scrap, where sorrows rush to die.

“No, no,” she giggles schoolgirl-like, which jiggles her breasts, “I meant Antara.”

“Who wouldn’t? It’s the place to be.”

“Oh, I see. You’re a mystery man.” She wears an elvish smile. “Well, mystery man, why’s it the place to be? Beyond your, uh, underworld reasons.”

You must always decide what truths you tell a stranger. She’s already seen the tattoos. Allow her to become party to certain information, but no more, no less. She’s young, she won’t get your reverence. She won’t understand how prideful you are of your people.

“I’ve lived here since I was fourteen, but I was born in Tokushima. Spent half of my childhood there. I left because,” and I stop, waiting for a fated ‘because’ to explain my anxiousness away. A ‘because’ which doesn’t tell about the tattooed people you grew up with, about the pit your father fell into and never crawled out of, about how you became his currency for a happier life. About how he sent you away and never looked back. The fiction must be cared for. “My boss chose me. He saw that I couldn’t live the way I was living, so he helped me out.”

“What about your parents?”

“My father was a priest. Died on the job.” I take a bigger puff this time. “My mother was a whore. She makes me wonder if I was born sick.”

The mention of my mother frightens her. I’m not sure why. She brushes it off and starts blowing the last shreds of smoke away from me. “Do you like what you do?”

“I used to.”

We chuckle in arid accordance. When she completes her cancer stick, she puts it out on a jade deva ashtray, staining Buddhas with soot. I see my home in her Neanderthal eyes, far away from here. Not too shabby for a savage.

“My parents said I could make a lot of money here. My extended family said I could find a good husband here. All my friends from IB to university told me I could buy a nice house at the end of the lane, right by the best beaches in the world. It’s been about eight years or so, and now I’m lucky to rent a room with five strangers in Xuan’er. One-half out of three’s not the worst, I’d say. What do you think?”

I shrug. “Money’s just money. There are higher concepts, but you don’t see that.”

She half-smirks in disbelief, same way my ojiki did earlier tonight. “Yeah? And you figured that out from me how? Are you a fortune teller, mystery man?”

“You’re just like everyone else in this city,” I rise up, unaware of how forcefully I’m sucking my lips, “here, one’s humanity gets grinded between gesture and geography. There is no room for the royal ‘you’ in Antara, let alone other people.”

She crawls towards me. Good girl. “So am I just here to please you, then?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s what you’re saying.”

I shake my head for the second time today.

“You’re coy, and it’s cute. But we both know what this is, don’t we?” She puts fingers to my lips, then traces the dragon from my shoulder down to my arm. I wish it would come to life and breathe fire. “There’s something inside you, mystery man. Something hollow that I can’t fill.”

When we eventually fuck again, I think of Takeji Fujushima and his ‘Sunrise over the Eastern Sea.’ I ache to be the dawn as she aches for me, but I am not hers. A Kashira cannot be of the flesh. There is creed to consider. Tradition to tend to. Family to fix. When I spill my light onto her, when I thrash and bash her, I pray she will not wither in my violent syzygy. But she is who she is, and I am who I am.

I post a cheque she never asked for. She covers up her indigo eye. I tell her to forget me. I lock, leave, and thrust myself back into my demon of a life. She wails through the walls, but it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.

They tell me of a skirmish in Maynila Green between us and the Kala Kachcha. Apparently, I sent an assortment of our youngest, handsomest and finest marching straight towards certain ends—ends of times, ends of blades. (Guns are getting rarer. Even machetes have become a liability. If they catch your blade longer than seven centimetres, the pigs will gut you.)

They remind me of names like Kiryu and Togawa and Ichiro, but they might as well be alien monikers to me. I’ve no room for them in my mental complex, not when I’m preoccupied with economies of scale and rituals for the future. Save some grief for their next-of-kin.

Our favourite Weibo gurus say going for a walk is good. It clears the head, sanctifies you from the terrible providence of Western colonialism. I take their advice to heart. Northeast is where the wind winnows through limestone two-storeys and bricked three-storeys like they’re tuning forks. In my culture, we call this direction kimon—’demon gate.’ It isn’t very auspicious, to say the least.

I pay attention to criss-cutting trains overhead, to double-deckers filleted with siren children, to yum cha shops hemming in Cantonese opposite from the Lahpet hawing in Burmese. People get roped up in their webs of lives and lies with no eye for anything but the next ladder rung. When they fight and steal and cheat, they seek absolution in a thousand different places—an incensed Taoist temple by Thoke Avenue, a paling Buddhist soothsayer by Ulan Block, a monstrous Catholic cathedral in Berbakti Drive.

I’m not superstitious, and I don’t want holiness.

I just want to meet someone who walks the same ground I do.

The bulleted rain pauses. Corporal Climate holds its fire. A road leads to a pavillion which leads to a tunnel which leads to a torii gate. I tighten the straps on my social mask and step towards the shrine, through this ancient red-edged ribcage. Its maw waits for me with candlelight teeth. I follow my intuition and am led into the belly, where I smell the beast’s love for sandalwood. The scent envelops me like an invisible dandelion in reverse bloom, inviting me to regard fluted red pillars and tiny gold statuettes dedicated to Amaterasu and Susanoo-no-Mikoto. Chills come in with their lady-like caresses, sympathising with my tired bones.

I fetch five Antara one-cent coins. Dead Prime Ministers look up to me from their bronzed surfaces. I feed them into a bamboo basket, then lock my hands together, bowing once, then twice. That’s the tradition here. You have to pay respects to the temple, otherwise it wont pay respects to you.

“What do you claim?”

A voice of brimstone behind me. Granite and brimstone. It chews stones between its canines and reeks of the mountains. He sounds like my father.

Do I dare look? Do I dare stay? I’ve trapped myself in frozen devotion. Think of the sunrise again, away from the wooden flooring, the sibilant whispers.

“Who is your father?”

But I am denied the light. I must let the river of my fear flow through me like I were a sieve. When I open my eyes, there is a warm hand on my shoulder, ringed in rot, bigger than my father’s, bigger than God’s. It leans over my left side, smelling sickly enough to make me curl.

“I—I—” I push, even as the scent of centuries cloys me, “I am of the machi yakko. Peasant saints. I—I am their reincarnation. I am of the people. Of a time lost and forgotten.”

Its silence casts a shadow over my soul. It encroaches my covenanted spaces, my sacred guarantees between myself and my dreams. I hear the stretch of mortified skin. The sound of flesh scything into a smile. But I don’t look. My eyes will do no justice to my mind. To look is to cause violence. To see is to be scared so I must not—

“Look.”

And so I do, at its sabred teeth, at its lashing tongue. But only them, only them.

“Machi yakko. You speak of the old man's story, not yours.”

Only them, only them. Its shadow is a void now, a pitch-black gravity well draining all the shade and sacrosanctness out of me.

“Are you not kabukimono, Kiyoshi? Masterless, pitiless, boundless?”

A magnitude ten earthquake starts in my chest, making me shudder like an eel before I cocoon into place, before I am raptured by a scorn I have never seen. Floors and partitions cave inwards, coming for me, seeing me for all the paper I am, all the frailty I have excused.

“They have forgotten the old ways, boy. They have forgotten the Sun’s Face.”

Down on worshipper knees again, I put my head in my shaking hands. The dragon on my arm comes to life.

"Show them.”

When I re-emerge from the torii, I have a new Face. It’s gnarled but also vermillion, the kind that recalls who our people used to be, before we were trodded upon, battered, betrayed. The old man would call it an oni face, but I know it is my Sun.

I decide to bring this new Face along with me so my family will understand my Chrysalis. I bring a kanabō club too, for good measure—another erection of my radiance. Back in He-Ong, on 49 Nanping Road. Back for the Omiyamairi. I entertain the grunts’ dozen-sword salute at the minimalist lobby before climbing through spiralling steps done in the shinden-zukuri architectural style. If only everything were done the way it used to be done.

In the ceremonial room, my family awaits me, one-hundred-fifty eyes and seventy-five heads, long-sleeved happi over their threadbare yukata (which, in turn, hides their shiny designer suits). Some lie on their haunches, while others stand and regard my new Face. They can’t see it under this red metal, but my smile is a scythe.

“Kiyoshi-kun?” Kaito-san’s hand hovers over his sword sheathe. “Are you putting your name down for the ballot?”

“There will be no ballot.” I drop my kanabō onto the mats and drag its spikes through straw. They recoil from me in awe.

“Be reasonable,” says Satoshi, whom I’ve always thought looked more Chinese than Japanese. More cunt than countryman. “What are you doing?”

“We have lost sight of ourselves. We chase lavish excess at the expense of our ideals. We were samurai, once. Now, we are hollow.”

Kazuchika, along with my other kyōdaibun, jerk as leashed dogs, unsheathing their short swords. “You disgrace yourself! Settle down, boy.”

“And so it may be. But no more of a disgrace than each of you. You’ve all wreaked havoc on our reputation. It’s only right that I have come here to repair it.”

My studded kanabō slices through strands of straw, creating a rift between them and me. Around us, I am greeted by woodblocks again, ones about the Ōnin War and Genji’s tale. Byōbu folding screens depicting our humble origins and bloody victories surround us in a papery wreath. They judge my family for their failures, but congratulate Me. They know I have come to rewrite what has been written.

That I have come to preserve the fiction.

And so I do. With their screams. Their sweat. Their crying. Their flailing and falling. My Hagiography comes in barbarous swings, in decimated skulls, in the thrones of the fallen. Five at a time. Six at a time. Seven. It’s a sexton’s hopscotch, counting those who have seen the Light, one by one by one by one. I drive Kazuchika downwards with my good baseball arm, his face in my hand, denting wood, gushing blood. His men follow suit, but I swing and swing and sswing, bodies moulding to my serrated weapon like clay against hand. Satoshi’s next, then he’s red, then he’s still as a stone. He is who he is, I am who I am.

When ojiki rests his hand flat against my palm as if in prostration, I am moved, profoundly so. This time, I let go—but only to raise my erect light again in my hands, higher and higher.

“Kiyoshi-kun, please—”

Count slowly, Kiyoshi. Inhale before every number, exhale after. Breathe, one, breathe, two, breathe—

“Please—”

Three.

He stops with the ‘please’s after that. His fingers start, stop once, then forever. There is a cavern of slimy scarlet snakes where his face used to be.

“Don’t worry,” I bow low and whisper to my loved ones, “your stories are safe with me.”

My smile scythes further as I sit down amidst all the fleeting and the fallen, content in the knowledge that they have scorched equally under my Sun. Look at them. Mouths forever open. Separated and dismayed. Twitching, twitching, twitching.

I like my new Face, but I know not to covet it. There remain more rebirths to come. But for now, at least, I am satisfied.

And so, I take myself to our balcony over the sea, where I watch a grateful sun rise on my Kura-Taika-Kai. On my Antara, my home away from home. My Hell away from Hell.

It’s what the old man would’ve wanted, I think.

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This house will not survive.

He walks up it. Its steps gasp a centuries’ worth through their carpeted mask. They rage beneath a ravine of auburn and carmine leaves from last year’s fall. Inside, halls bend time like the good girl it is, rooms stand empty as shot glasses, adorned with furnishings from banished decades and forgotten birthdays. All of it runs deep brown, muddled and scratched, scuffed at its edges so even curves are like ant javelins. You could poke yourself if you aren’t careful, pig-bleed all over the ragged, tattered carpet, tainting it with a ripe crimson that was mama and papa’s blood before it was his. The baize was a deep shade of evergreen back then, fit for all the fairies in all the world.

It’s just one, big, dark forever now.

He stumbles all over, vision balleting, swaying his lean frame to the bada-bada-bum of weighted death metal. He dances and sings for hours, or maybe it’s for seconds, or maybe time pauses as he gives himself over like a worthy supplicant to the thump and pump and dump.

Then Siouxsie and Morrissey usurps Hetfield, plucky strings perforating through this living room, one of many, so many for the man who has everything. Like the smell of good rot, it grips him in terrible attention. Then he slumps down, palms resting on a leather wingback that had been awaiting him and his vulgarity. Blue moonlight beats through gridded panes, celestial alien blood spreading in a cross-hatch over the floor. Indian sat, caged by india ink bars, the patient stares out into a vertigo night. His eyes are candlelights burning, but they don’t rage, for they have forgotten how. The wicks they sit on fall short now, reduced by the sleep of a reasonable man.

But the night remains a vital virgin, ripe for abattoir. Abacus stars hang up there, saying hey, how are ya. He slumps, pieces and shreds of some eldritch Before illegally occupying his Promised Land brain.

His mind is a bear stalking the forest grounds, hungry for the honey of his past.

Her, fair as Lady Justice. Orange streaming down either shoulder in sunset rivers. Lips pulling at him with every sterling flicker. Dragon eyes deep enough to dive and lie there in the dire. Hotter than hell, hellisher than heaven, and together the havoc didn’t matter, neither did dad’s games. The sky could split and the world could sunder and even then, he knew when all smoke broke, they’d still stand as sentinels do.

The bear finds the hive. It claws at the honeycomb unstopped, eggs bursting against keratin, bees buzzing and stinging. Honey, honey, honey.

A part of him knows it’s the drink. A part of him understands the weight of this. But it’s a part buried. Ignored. Cast aside. Whatever bright light he may have had earlier has been stolen by the ravaged debris of his pain.

He leans forward, clasps his arms, shuts his eyes, and thinks of a spell. He imagines dark, roiling seas of blood and gasoline. In the midst is him, the captain of his lone ship, searching for a face from his past through the howl of the storm. Then he finds her marooned on her islet just the way he remembers. He sucks in the air of his sanctuary as Ishmael becomes Ahab, as he breathes, ready for Pequod to ferry.

And thar’ she blows, traversing through the blank page, moving laterally along the chessboards of universes, astrologically projected, until density and causality breaks and meaning fails, until meaning is blood, thick, oozing blood. It chants music so brave, so mighty, so raw and magical. This is where it is, a disturbance, gnawing through cracked skin like static electricity traveling up, and down, up, and down. It moves closer, through the bleeding between things, between starlights and spit fights and bad times, until he speeds beyond them, along cosmic rails, through awful music, through harmonies he hates, through chaos and clambour of an altogether different place -

- the twin armrests of his barcalounger find their place again, gripped between hag fingers. He says nothing. In the mansion, in the music, things nap and never wake. The widower rises, cowboy-spits phlegm, takes a few more swigs of courage, then puts his head backwards to rest, tinctured bravery exacting its toll. The house goes away as he waits for hell.

You reckon it’s warmer this time of night?