Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

Mom, I spent the next month stuffed, plugged, in the grip of a pathetic mogigraphia (I plucked a reference text from leveling the fridge in the office kitchenette to determine the technicalese for “writer’s block”) — unsure, or perhaps all too sure, as to where, precisely, my character should dine. Agonizing over why he would dine there, over what dining there would say about him/me — over which would be riskier: drivingthru a drivethru with Patty in the back? or just parking her carcass for a three course duration? Should he gratify the impulse to return to Patty’s diner? or could that be read as too safely laning tragedy between reassuring shoulders? Ronald Ray watched the backlit logos approach, every craven incarnation, every franchise of desire. So many amenities yet so many the same, so many ways to condemn them, yet all of them the same. Too many few choices: which restaurant I should go to? what to order at which restaurant he should go to? which suit to wear or wash? having skipped breakfast should I skip lunch too to write? I know nothing impresses you, Mom. During lunchbreaks I kept seated, kept him moving. Me suffering sedentary in a chair too crippled to swivel, him swerving for sushi prepared by Chinese, dialing ahead for Mexicali — but how would Ronald Ray dial, Mom? did he have a cell or would another payphone have to be implicated? I refilled the car with gas, kept his own tank unfulfilled.

By workday’s wane when I was supposed to be reproving an unapproved attention deficit aid—“NAME [the Indipaks aren’t allowed to know the names of the medications whose materials they assemble by template: names are privileged, to be inserted only by us employees with miles of clearance] may cause side effects. Tell doctor if any symptoms is severe or does not go away: nervousness, restlessness, difficult falling or staying asleep, uncontrollable shaking of a part of the body, change in sex drive ability”—I was having difficulty, Mom, paying attention myself (which is “the cognitive process of selectively concentrating,” according to a collaborative website I edited when I should’ve been otherwise editing, anything but changing that entry to read: “the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on what happened to that shawarma stand on 10th?”). Misprints slipped by, slopping my copy. I was warned, I who typically issued the warnings (that’s all my copy was): do this, don’t do that, if you experience nausea or upset stomach, with Ronald Ray dromomaniacal. The dictionary definition for dromomania linked to a thesaurus, which suggested (advised/broached/commended) drapetomania (that quack syndrome that caused slaves to flee captivity). I searched that up, left a page on my screen when I wandered to pee, was reprimanded for my (the subtext was racist) violation of corporate IUP (Internet Usage Policy). At least mine wasn’t “painful or frequent urination,” though with all this stress — though affect is not effect —I was experiencing “unusual weakness,” which once arrived in an Indipak email phrased as “unusual weakedness”—I’d never be capable, no computer would be capable, of writing as beautiful as that, Mom. I’ll never get a raise, or a promotion, and we use what’s called the serial comma. I typed pages I trashed, then feeling anxious a cospirist might find them retrieved them for shredding into piñata entrails, which I bagged in a bag inside a bag to dump to the dumpster of a nonneighboring impasse (if I could’ve, I would’ve shredded the impasse).

And this was every day, Mom, which is two words when talking about a repeated experience but one word, everyday, when speaking of the boring, the mundane. Anything on my workcomputer I’d email from: to: my personal email, delete. Once home I’d check email on my homecomputer, my nightcomputer, reread the day’s writing, rewrite. I’d skimp on dinner, email myself the night’s skinning and gutting then, tucked between bedsheets lined like obsolesced paper, turn off the light. Every day lived double, everyday duplicity. Nomenex us both, Mom, but read the smallprint first: Nomenex doesn’t exist, it’s an exemplar drug, a composite of composites — inspired by how an amphetamine can be combined with a dextroamphetamine into a single drug that both focuses your attention and helps you lose weight, which gives the attention of others something better to look at, someone slimmer on which to focus their own personal doses — a fictional surrogate for an array of antidepressants that actually do exist and that I would prefer not to mention for fear not only of legal reprisal (in case this is published), but also of being fired. I couldn’t sleep, Mom, but I didn’t need a sleeping aid — I needed a hamburger. I won’t be disingenuous, I needed a specific burger — buns and pattymeat indistinguishable, but the burger distinguished by other criteria. I could taste it, Ronald Ray could taste it — could taste its very ingredients active and inactive — but I could not prescribe him what he wanted, what I wanted even: I couldn’t Nomenex any of us with nonexistent Nomenex, I couldn’t name and by naming bring into being, Mom, I was a wreck.

Ronald Ray, he will try this in third person. There’s nothing more efficient than third person (omniscience), and a story about fastfood should be nothing but efficient. The writer — J, say, the fictionalizing illeist, regular masturbator, and underemployee — can write but he cannot name, even though he knows what he wants to name, he knows what he wants to say, he knows the Word, he knows the letters that form the Word, he knows the sounds of the letters and the shapes of the letters, Ronald Ray, he knows them like he knows the word uxoricide, like he knows the hard and soft sounds and the shape of the J, but he cannot pronounce them or form them in order, he cannot assemblyline them into the … he can only have you cruise incommoded, making your mileage, your exits and turns, incarnating yourself and the grid, substantiating yourself within the grid as he maps his own failings — at night with his head centered on the white perfection of pillow that needs only a few scattered seeds and a moment’s toasting to resemble a bun — as wars and diseases roil around, bubbling up here and there like effervescing oil. He cannot do it, Ronald Ray, he’s sorry but even wretches must have standards, wretched fictional standards. He could invent a fictional restaurant for you to bite your burger at but any fictional restaurant would be, like Nomenex, a worthless simulant or inconcinne imitation, a placebic generic. Any burger restaurant he invents would obviously be based on a real burger restaurant, a real burger restaurant everyone knows and has been to and that even he’s been to (the writer has also taken the succedaneous drugs on which Nomenex is based). Pity the burger outlet that must go up against a fiction? No, pity the fiction that must go up against a burger outlet! Ronald Ray, is the writer afraid to be seen as being in the pocket of his fake franchise’s competition? but can a chain that doesn’t exist have any competition? To invent one restaurant is to flatulate an entire chain? Yes, Ronald Ray, ridiculous! The writer would have to sit in his apartment unpublished (and lately the water pressure’s been stingy), and create a burger franchise, create a name and even a logo for it and falsely register and trademark and copyright the entire invention from its appearances exterior and interior to its gastronyms, the hammy neonames of its supersynthesized cuisine and why? only because he doesn’t want to be seen as endorsing any actually existing and beloved burger franchise in this crap creatic tale, apologies Ronald Ray, of your girlfriend’s hackneyed murder? Does the writer really think that if he mentions that existing famous burger franchise in his story he might help mayospread its fame — spread it like war and disease? like literary “influences”? Is he convinced he’d only further popularize its (he can’t decide on the one encompassing word) homogenization? is he convinced he’d only further homogenize the utter diversity of its damage? He shouldn’t be, he shouldn’t worry. This story will never be published, it will never survive — unlike plasticbags, unlike styrofoam, which will degrade forever. This story is closer to what’s packaged inside: unhealthy, produced by exploited labor (self-exploited), to be consumed or unconsumed, either way quickly gone, quickly forgotten. Excreted, excreated. Ronald Ray, you must be ravenous. Roll down a window and ponder the polysemy of “draft.”