Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

“That’s odd, any run-ins with the department?”

“Yes, Arthur Dodger was arrested but not charged with a variety of small misdemeanors and small time anti-social acts in his late teens and early twenties. The first few concern a club he was involved with, some indication he was the leader, that vandalized automobiles by adjusting the content of stickers on the back window shield or rear bumper with derogatory and offensive words and images. It appears that the first altercation occurred when Mr. Dodger was caught changing a sticker on a Ms. Betty Raspell’s car from ‘My Son is an Honor Student at Hobokin School for the Gifted’ to ‘My Son is a Horny Student at Porno School for the Depraved’. Then, within two months, Mr. Dodger was arrested again, this time for altering a sticker that read: ‘I’d Rather Be Fishing’ to ‘I’d Rather Be Humping’. Mr. Dodger was remitted to a minimum security branding facility after he was questioned by a court-appointed psychiatrist because he had delusions of grandeur and refused to take his social harmony meds.”

“Delusions of grandeur, does it say what those were?”

“Yes, Mr. Dodger believed that the messages they made on these stickers would cause other people to join a revolution and the eventual overthrow of the government. Of course, the psychiatrist noted that this was a juvenile fancy that would be easily subdued through the proper treatment. Mr. Dodger was a model student at rebranding and was released in less than a year’s time. He was listed as the prime suspect six months later in a bizarre event in Blackburn Woods in which six girls of varying ages were found dancing in the nude around a cauldron which contained business clothing, it was later uncovered that the clothing belonged to the fathers of the six girls, and that they had been persuaded into stealing their father’s entire wardrobe. According to one of the women, Mr. Dodger drugged them with medication and tricked them into removing their clothing. Mr. Dodger was never arrested due to insufficient evidence. However, a month later Mr. Dodger was arrested for deviant behavior along with a Miss Sara Samedi, who was the oldest of the six girls in the previous case, after the two were found engaged in sexual intercourse in a public park. It is noted that both Mr. Dodger and Miss Samedi were dressed in costumes and that the way in which they were found is against social policy. This was followed by a few petty-theft crimes, in which Mr. Dodger would break into corporate offices during business hours and steal seemingly random items from the offices. He was initially caught removing seven machines for copying documents from four different corporations and allegedly, Mr. Dodger claimed he was helping the workers of these businesses by driving them close to madness. He has reportedly been warned by Section 1 for some of the books he’s written, four of which were required by court order to be altered before their release, and one other one is no longer available for resale because of the questionable values it represents. Mr. Dodger has six books on the questionable list and he has been investigated twice for allegedly making subversive comments. He has not had a run-in with the department, though, since he was twenty-four years old.”

“Thanks, do me a favor, I was never here today, I never asked you any questions about Arthur Dodger.”

“Of course, I hope to be of assistance in the future. May I ask, is there anyone in particular I should avoid mentioning this meeting to?”

“Anyone within the department.”

“Fine. As long as we understand each other.”

* * *

Elisa was lying on top of her bed covers with Arthur’s most recent book in her hands. Two cameras were on her, the one hidden in her dresser transposed onto Captain Vincent’s largest screen. Her assistant had gone home. Perhaps she should just go along.

He had said: “It has never been perfect for me.” His hair was uncombed; he was grieving. She had been sent to work on him. She was the most persuasive of them all. Most were men. He had not needed any persuasion. He was teary eyed, brooding, eloquent, mad. He did look at her the right way. He did not see things. He was speaking too fast; she couldn’t keep up with him. He was not talking the same language. She was trying to touch his shoulder. Contact always got them. She had a kitten’s mask on. He was screaming, whispering. He shook, he was pleading. She made contact. He stared at her wrist like he wanted to cut it. She did not withdraw her arm.

“Why do we care about noise? Wherein lies the reason noise matters? Maybe it derives from the obtuse oddity of there being something such as noise in the world. The clang, the bang, the boom, the beat, the onomatopoeia, the whoosh, the wiz, the smack, the clack, the clap, the snap, the zip, the thud, the kaboom, the whistle, the whisper, the song, the melody, the note, the cry, the scream, the moan, the grunt, the wheeze, the cough, the sneeze, the squeak, the whimper, the gasp, the movement…. That such things could exist, that we have discovered how to put them in order, those yielding intervals of silence woven together with clusters of noise… that we have invented how to harness the span of the human mind into audible melodies and strings of sounds that signify so many various things, ideas, actions, inactions, et cetera, et cetera… and some say it was a mystery cult, the inventors of wine and love, that first brought noise down into our hearts… but who’s to say? Maybe it was the birds that taught us… albeit unintentionally… maybe we’re just animals who demand adulation and rapture… maybe we don’t have enough of it… god forgave us but left us pretty lonely and desperate… maybe we made it for ourselves… noise… the tower of babel was a cathedral of sound, an audible, alchemical device for transcendence… into what we thought we deserved… peer away from what is deficient, painful, deceitful, deadening, and turn it all into something else… explain it to me… sing it to me… tell me all about it… that’s something worthy of the yearn, something worthy of the mind and the opposable thumb…

"The wind… the wind beneath our wings. Those birds… they got it all… wind beneath their wings and nice singing voices… that arboreal dignity… that above-the-world haughty conceit… for it is the ground where things are buried… those little chirpers tumble like angels when they die and join us… on the ground… where things are lost and forgotten… religions, art, poetry, civilization, species… they’re all buried under there… history seeps into the ground like mud puddles in the sun… to forever be lost… never to be found again… or, if by chance, some mole discovers some fragment, its altered so, it’s so minute, it’s so carelessly there… it’s not the same thing… a crumbly skeleton of its self… like mass graves… like fissures… like fossils… stand your ground… under there… under there… is hell… hades… the underworld… do not enter… there are things in there we dare not guess… draw a line in the sand…

"Among the great exertions — good vs. evil, reason vs. ignorance, science vs. religion, love vs. death, there is an additional, little known conflict: here vs. there… the entrapment of roots and the release of flight… And if you are Beatrice, if you are this little wonder girl with ocean eyes and iris skin, whose thoughts can cross the boundaries, even the boundaries of skin, then perhaps you know every hole can be filled, every crack leapt over, every cavern avoided, and every underworld ignored, all boundaries would melt away under the heat of the sweetest tune… Off you’d wander, off away… neither here nor there… prancing and skipping and tumbling… on wondering wings…