Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Maybe five or six guys in gray business suits and ties, real like FBI or something, are huddling over this jumble on the floor. At first I don’t understand what I’m looking at. Then I make out the portable gurney. And this torso on it, just this torso, naked and fleshy pink in a doll sort of way, rib cage big as a cow’s, biggest fucking belly you ever saw. Out of it are sticking these skinny white flabby legs, between them this amazingly small little purple dick and two hairy marbles. Only, thing is, the chest isn’t a real chest? There’s a panel in it. And the panel’s open. And one of the guys is tinkering with some wiring in there. And another is rummaging through a wooden crate, coming up with an arm, plugging it into the torso, while a third guy, who’s been balancing a second arm over his shoulder like a rifle or something, swings it down and locks it into place.

I may be a poet, okay, but I’m not a fucking liar or anything. I’m just telling you what I saw. Believe it or not. Go ahead. Frankly I don’t give a shit. But I’m telling you, I’m standing there, hypnotized like, not sure whether to run or wet myself, when this fourth guy reaches into the crate and comes up with, I kid you not, the head . I swear. I fucking swear. A head . The thing is so gross. Pudgy. Bushy. Gray-haired. And with these eyes . With these sort of glazed eyes that’re looking up into the darkness where the ceiling should’ve been. I could hurl just thinking about it.

Anyway, after a pretty long time fidgeting with the stuff in the chest, they prop the torso into a sitting position and start attaching the head. It’s not an easy job. They fiddle and curse, and once one of them slips with a screwdriver and punctures the thing’s left cheek. Only they take some flesh-toned silicon putty junk and fill up the hole, which works just fine. And the third guy reaches into his breast pocket and produces these wire-rimmed glasses, which he slips into place on the thing’s face, and then they stand back, arms folded, admiring their work and all, and then the first guy reaches behind the thing’s neck and pushes what must’ve been the ON/OFF button.

Those eyes roll down and snap into focus. Head swivels side to side. Mouth opens and closes its fatty lips, testing. And then, shit, it begins talking . It begins fucking talking .

I’m with you in Rockland. I’m wuh-wuh-wuh-with you… But my agent. What sort of agent is that? What could she have been thinking? Have you seen those sales figures? A stone should have better figures than that! I’m wuh-with you in the nightmare of trade paperbacks, sudden flash of bad PR, suffering the outrageousness of weak blurbs and failing shares. Where is the breakthrough book? Where the advance? Share with me the vanity of the unsolicited manuscript! Show me the madman bum of a publicist! Movie rights! Warranties! Indemnities! I am the twelve percent royalty! I am the first five-thousand copies! I am the retail and the wholesale, the overhead and the option clause! Give me the bottom line! Give me the tax break! Give me a reason to collect my rough drafts in the antennae crown of commerce! Oh, mental, mental, mental hardcover! Oh, incomplete clause! Oh, hopeless abandon of the unfulfilled contract! I am wuh-wuh-wuh-with you… I am wuh-wuh-wuh-with you in Rockland… I am …

“Oh, shit,” says the first guy.

“Balls,” says the second.

“We should’ve let him go,” says the third guy.

“When his ticker stopped,” says the first.

“When his liver quit,” says the second.

“One thing,” says the fourth. “Nanotech sure ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

“You got that right,” says the third.

Thirty thousand books in 1998 alone , the famous rich poet says, but they couldn’t afford it. Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam. What were they thinking? Wall Street is holy! The New York Stock Exchange is holy! The cosmic clause is holy! I’m wuh-wuh-wuh… I’m wuh-wuh-wuh… wuh-wuh-wuh …

“Turn him off,” says the fifth one.

Pale greenish foam begins forming on the famous rich poet’s lips, dribbling down his chin, spattering his hairless chest.

“Yeah, well,” says the second.

“Guess we got some tightening to do,” says the third, reaching behind the thing’s neck.

But just as he pressed that button, just for a fraction of an instant, the stare of the famous rich poet fell on me as I tried scrunching out of sight behind a wall of boxes. Our eyes met. His looked like those of a wrongly convicted murderer maybe like one second before the executioner throws the switch that’ll send a quadrillion volts zizzing through his system. In them was this mixture of disillusionment, dismay, fear, and uninterrupted sorrow. I froze. He stretched his foam-filled mouth as wide as it would go, ready to bellow, ready to howl. Except the juice failed. His mouth slowly closed again. His eyes rolled back up inside his head.

And me?

I said fuck this. Fuck the books, fuck the suits, fuck Escort à la Mode, fuck the withered old pathetic shit. This whole thing’s way too fricking rich for my blood.

And so I turned and walked.

They sent down the robotic cockroaches first. Back in the eighties. To Wall Street, mainly, though they also hit Beijing and Moscow. The evidence is overwhelming. It was all recon, checking things out, the intergalactic shock troops, with insects that looked just like all the other insects around them — the ones under that metal chair in the corner of the Stock Exchange, the ones under the sheaf of papers in that filing cabinet in Red Square — unless you picked them up, unless you examined them real close. Cuz then you saw, if you squinted, the cameras just behind those dark polymer eye shells.

You think I don’t know how that sounds? You think I don’t know you want to treat me like one of those kids born without noses? Well, don’t. Cuz it’s true. All of it’s true. Every single word.

I’m the Raz, the Fed, the one They never told you about. I do the jobs that don’t exist. I investigate the incidents that never happened. And this is my report from the front. This is my last dispatch. I’m sitting in the bedroom on the second floor of our safe house in East LA, Yeltsin-70 in one hand and cassette in the other, and they’re on the stairs, man, they’re coming up. So here goes. This is it. This is how it ends.

They sent in the robotic cockroaches first. No one noticed. They went about their business, collecting data, organizing details, sniffing air, chewing detritus they chanced on. Recording. They were droids, cosmic notation instruments, with nano hard-drives for heads and vacuum cleaners for stomachs and assorted monitors for antennae. They gathered information like other insects gathered pheromones and food, continuously, relentlessly, sampling the temperature, UV emissions, background radiation, skittering into the national mainframes and hacking the codes, burning the neural networks of the globe, downloading the digital identity that made the planet itself. They discovered how governments functioned, how the hive-mind of the media performed. They ascertained our economic machinery, our technical acumen, the geography of our corporate imaginations.