Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Clicks the OFF button.

Stands, trots into the bathroom, thumbs down the front of his Fruit of the Looms, relaxes his urethra, stares at the high-gloss ceiling (across which scrolls a single ant) while listening with pride to the vigorous plashing below, wriggles himself dry, pops the front of his Fruit of the Looms into place, whistling without really realizing he’s whistling (the reverse version of “Strawberry Fields,” doncha know), feels the sugar from the Baby Ruth beginning to itch the glassy horizon of his brain, trots back to the living room, squirms into his bean-bag chair, chomps into his sandwich, clicks the ON button.

Clicks the OFF button.

Stands, trots into the bedroom, throws on a pair of jeans and sneakers and a Sick Poppies t-shirt (this black woodcut of a sleeping head, python-long tongue lolling out and curling below like a garden hose, on a white background), trots into the kitchen, searches the top drawer beside the stove for his keys, grabs his black denim jacket in whose pocket he knows resides every penny he possesses for the remainder of the month (more than two weeks to go… a-and how did that happen?), jogs onto the porch, down the external wooden staircase, down the block to the 7-Eleven where he purchases a pint of Cherry Garcia, his fave, from an underfed chestnut-colored man without a thumb on his left hand…

Jogs up the block, up the external wooden staircase, onto the porch, into the kitchen, down the hall, back to the kitchen where he picks up a spoon and deposits said keys and jacket, down the hall again, into the living room, into the bean-bag chair, and, panting, clicks the ON button once more…

5. PRIME: TIME: LIVE

Kerwin Penumbro experiences his consciousness expand in a flood of sucrose-enhanced light.

141. DUCK & COVER

Nona Nova, hospital nurse, has battled illness on the eleven-to-seven shift. She has shocked a cardiac victim back from the brink of death; uncovered a plot by fiendish candy-striper Stephanie Stix to kill elderly patients; eased Dale Devin, young doctor, from his depression brought on by his wife Dolly’s abscondence, a pending malpractice suit, and by his youngest son, little Donny Devin, dying in a freak fiery plane crash in the Andes (fog; tribal blow-gun competition); cheered up a child laced with tumors; unraveled the labyrinthian financial problems gnawing at Dustin Elwood, hospital head. Nona is thus understandably tired now. Her legs feel like hardening cement. Her head feels like twelve feet under a swimming pool. Her body feels old at twenty-seven. She stands in the restroom, staring forlornly in the mirror at the mulberry sleep-bruises gathered below her methylene-blue eyes, unzips her uniform, reveals her tight belly, almond-brown skin, pert breasts barely hidden under bra. She runs warm water in the sink. Splashes her face. Reaches for a handful of paper towels. When she looks in the mirror again another head floats behind hers: Rex Rory, flamboyant resident.

Nona Nova ducks and covers.

246. CARTOON GEL: HOMELESSNESS: LIGHT

Kerwin Penumbro claps in unabashed delight, forgetting he’s holding the bologna sandwich, which pretty much disintegrates in his lap. Unfazed, he reconstructs it as best he can and takes another bite and smacks in nirvanic satisfaction.

Because it’s like living in a cartoon gel; the colors are so bright; the outlines so crisp.

Everything is animation rich.

A-and the sound… the sound is… Ker believes he feels spittle collecting along his busy lower lip.

Which totally undercuts the theory he developed as a philosophy major for his undergraduate honors thesis back at U.W., which states that imagination and desire continually outstrip technology… as in we’re always waiting for the transistors to catch up with the synapses, always able to outthink the next mechanical or digital advance.

Nope.

He was wrong.

This appliance just about does it.

Though, true, nonetheless, that, weh-hell… look at computers.

If your basic car advanced at the same rate your basic computer did over the past two decades or whatnot, you’d be looking at a vehicle that’d travel at like five-hundred-thousand miles an hour, get a million miles to the gallon, and cost less than a down payment on a Stealth like this.

Which is simply to say things have gotten pretty… what.

Weird.

For instance, look at Ker looking at himself looking at the box, Ker thinks, looking. You’d imagine he was watching a really interesting sex arrangement through a one-way mirror when in fact he is watching this maybe awful soap opera which he simply can’t turn away from.

Culture’s first perceptual orifice, his theory goes, which is in fact someone else’s theory, he’s pretty sure, but, hey, was your no-frills cave door: primary purpose of allowing hominidal passage.

Culture’s second, once we’d gotten beyond those load-bearing external walls, was, natch, the window: primary purpose of facilitating movement of light and air.

And but culture’s third window?

Well, you’re looking at it.

Or looking at Ker looking at himself look at it.

Except you don’t look out through the third window, do you, reasons Ker. Can’t. You look in . But the In you’re looking at pretends it’s an Out, which it sometimes is, sort of, if you think about it. Plus it’s not so much that you look in or out as it looks in or out, kind of borrowing your eyes from you and every now and then forgetting to give them back. Plus what it does, honestly, is to bring stuff outside inside, such as it is, though the outside stuff pretends to be outside stuff when it’s in fact inside stuff, as in produced and edited and so forth, and though it makes you feel you’re always somewhere else when you’re in truth always doing nothing much more than, like Ker here, feeling the spittle form on your lower lip while participating in the rampant overexposure of well-lit space, taking another bite of that really fabulous sandwich in a world without borders, because, if you stop and think about it, your home becomes someone else’s home, doesn’t it, your digital front door always being open, and not exactly yours, even while it’s yours…

Which is to say nothing of stuff like e-mail a-and telephones a-and radios a-and…

Ker interrupts himself to wonder if he’s heard, or only imagined he’s heard, that there exists a model of the Mitsubishi Stealth that comes with a catheter for a prolonged viewing experience.

He’ll have to order the catalog and check it out.

18. ROSES: TEACUP: REVOLVER

“You no good varmint!” the barrel-chested man in the white cowboy hat at the breakfast table is saying. Ker blinks. A tidy breakfast table. Three roses in a crystal vase. White tablecloth. Beflowered china. Tinkle of teacups. “You polecat!” he says. “You think you can plan my daddy’s downfall and get away with it? You think you can sabotage his oil wells and mama and me’d sit still for it? Lickin’ my boots is too good for you.”

The barrel-chested man in the black cowboy hat smirks.

“An’ what you gonna do about it?” he asks.

“This!” the barrel-chested man in the white cowboy hat shouts, flipping an oily blue revolver into view.

211. AS SEEN ON TV

A-and faxes a-and beepers a-and cell phones a-and the World Wide Web a-and voice mail a-and answering machines a-and (in a sense, at any rate) VCRs a-and stereos a-and videocams a-and…

98. HE LEARNS HOW TO LOSE GRACEFULLY

Rope-and-log bridge wobbling over ravine.

Skydiver in red, white and blue jumpsuit. Lightning bolts on his helmet. Parachute on his back. Flawless teeth in his grin. He raises two fingers to his forehead in a flip salute to posterity, gingerly climbs over the cable, poises, arches his back, leaps toward the river threading below.