Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

This is truly the time of the ‘event horizon,’ part and parcel of the Black Hole concept — the ‘event horizon’ being the rim of such like a waterfall drop — the exact point where life and matter, all energy, is sucked in and Time, with a capital T, ceases. That is where my energy is now. Willing and joining with the cessation of all Time.

Energy on the ward is good. I am rubbing some girls here (non-sexual) to acquire vestigial strength for court and psychiatric appearances; too, for sleepfulness, waking vigilance, ect. There are a few pregnant ones and I seek them out for their double energy — getting to them before they become too big and muster out to Sick Bay (I am the starship healer). I must draw energy for the next Great Battle — that against Carsey/Werner and/or the perpetrators of The X-Files . Mr Chris Carter and family will sonn be in my web

Sara Radisson

Hell and bejesus, it took a while but we are finally Minnesota-bound. We have a first-class sleeper car with a jiggly bed and our very own shower and toitie. I cannot tell you what it’s like to be rocked asleep by the clickety-cluck-clacking, with you, the Quiet Storm, in my arms (you, the I of my storm.) We awaken at the witching hour and stare out the looking-glass window at the silvery world. Then it’s dawn and because I give Max the porterman twenty dollars a day, he is very good to us and brings hot tea and helps with baby’s things. Max serves lunch and dinner in our room, unless we choose to take it in the white linen’d dining car, with its perfectly polite passengers and their ambient, holy Middle American mur-mur-talk, the glass dome like some kind of church — isn’t that right, Samovar? That’s what we call you when you have on the furry hat Grandma sent. Boy, is she gonna be glad to see you !

Most of the Dining Car People don’t even know where we stay: they must think we fall asleep somewhere in the cruddy, high-backed seats with the riff-raff — if they knew how pampered we were, they’d be so jealous (sad thing is, most of the bedroom suites are empty because they’re so expensive)…. After we’re fat and sassy from our grub, we stroll below and find the door to our floating room. We lock it behind us, then nestle in for the night and Maxwell brings hot chocolate if we want. Aren’t we the luckiest people in the whole World Wide Web? Don’t you ever let anyone tell you anything else. You are my sunshine and my dreams, my heavy-lidded night-blooming orchid, all I ever wanted, all I ever need, and I made you long ago: you’re positively antediluvian, and younger than springtime too.

I ordered you with those damn infinity coupons, I did I did — sight unseen.

Zev Turtletaub

The black steward kneeled and stroked the drowsy superstar. “She’s the best . Aren’t you, Mimsy? Aren’t you the best .”

Mimsy lay on her seat without a yap while Zev Turtletaub got sixty pages of the Reavey translation of Dead Souls under his cinched Kieselstein-Cord belt. The trim, hairless producer loved this character Chichikov: a con man, replete with idiosyncratic servant and driver, traveling from town to town buying up serfs—“souls”—expired ones, that is, from well-off farmers and gentry still forced to pay census on their dead. But why? Because if Chichikov acquired enough names (so went his reasoning), he could approximate a wealthy landowner, a “man of a thousand or more souls.” Or something like that. If his motives weren’t quite clear, neither were Don Quixote’s. Zev was convinced there was a movie in it, an AIDS opera that would make Philadelphia look like the HBO cartoon it was.

Even in first class, pets were prohibited from lolligagging outside their pissy plastic enclosures. Yet this was the famous star of Jabber and Jabberwocky , the just-opened Mimsy and upcoming fast-track sequel, All Mimsy —the cabin being only a quarter full, an exception had been made.

“You’re so tired , aren’t you, Mimsy-girl?” The steward massaged the skin of the languid superstar’s neck, bunching it up then letting go. “Mimsy-girl looks so so tired .”

The phlegmatic pooch had indeed overexerted himself at Mimsy ’s New York premiere. As if to mitigate a stressful itinerary, he’d shacked with Zev in the producer’s capacious hotel apartment. Mimsy loved the Carlyle. Life being what it was, there came a hitch: the studio jet was down and they had to fly back commercial. Bit of a bore.

On the way to the airport, Zev got the bug to hit the legendary Gotham Book Mart. He was greeted by a tidy tree farm of authors he’d never heard of, and that was surprising, because if Zev wasn’t a great reader (didn’t have the time), he definitely considered himself au courant. He scanned the major Reviews from cover to cover, and the lit rags too — he loved the ones with poisonous intramural letter exchanges the most. There were droves of people at the Turtletaub Company whose only job was to ferret out writers before they were hot, textual soldiers who did nothing but read galleys and talk to book agents all day long. Still, there was nothing like going through the stacks and sniffing out quarry oneself. Example: a short while after whizzing past the pale cashier, Zev purchased the thirteen-volume Ecco Press edition of Chekhov’s short stories, arranging for them to be FedExed to L.A. — within five days, each tale would be “covered,” i.e., broken down re: plot, characters, updatability. Like a high-brow predator, Zev stood at the register, flipping through titles — Roberto Calasso, Cormac McCarthy reissue, Penguin Henry Green — then grabbed a volume his sister had always pushed on him…Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls .

“Anything I can get you, Mr. Turtletaub?”

Your mouth around my dick came to mind but the producer asked for cookies instead; he loved the warm doughy meltiness of a front cabin chocolate chip. The steward had a rock-hard bubble ass — no Princess Tiny Meat was he, of that much Zev was certain.

A month ago, the important passenger chanced across an article in a magazine that had seized his imagination, worrying it ever since. It was about a service that arranged for persons with AIDS to get cash advances on their life insurance. It seems that within the HIV community, brokering this kind of deal had become somewhat of a cottage industry, a vulturine shadowland of the quick and the dead that Zev Turtletaub instantly saw as the stuff of potentially great drama. A towering character already floated at the edge of his mind, a dead zone Music Man, a millennium Willy Loman, and the more he dipped his beak in Gogol’s fountain, the harder it came into focus: that character was Chichikov. Who could do such an epic theme justice? A LaGravenese or a Zaillian — he’d go after talent first. Zev would talk to Alec Baldwin. Tell him this was Academy Award time, Elmer Gantry meets Inferno . It was big, it was very big, Zev could feel it. The man who threw a Jack Russell terrier into a troika of projected half-a-billion-dollar-grossing comedies would soon be known for something else, entering his middle period with a classy, unexpected Schindler’s List —like crossover coup. The beautiful part being the template was there in his hands, pages lightly smeared with fuscous-fingered bile— Dead Souls . The stage was being set for the perfect zeitgeist melodrama, a work of high, elegiac art that wouldn’t be afraid to make money, the frisson being that Gogol was public domain. The rights wouldn’t cost dime one.