Work Text:
The tunnel from the airport into Silo City sits underwater and is made exclusively of translucent plastic, but I can't catch a glimpse of the marine life because ads larger than cars keep screaming through the walls, so instead I watch Paul thump his thumbs against the wheel and sweat. He keeps muttering something about how this infrastructure is immoral. He is afraid to look at me. Sleeves from Atonement Tattoos are twenty-two percent off.
Paul is smaller in three dimensions than I had anticipated. His boxy Nissan smells of out of date deodorant. Beeping synth-filled music flows from his tinny speakers. He says, "This reminds me of when Bugeyed Taurus took Polka Taurus for a picnic," and I chuckle and nod: it really is. I'd like to respond, but it's as though I'm working with a new tongue. I'd like to allude to the fact that I love him, but the mood is wrong. The tunnel empties us into the city's beating heart, above which hang lightshow projections broadcasting the location of every entertainment and anxiolytic known to man. Paul flicks his eyes over like he's checking if my face has changed.
Over home-cooked scungilli Paul tells me if I'm thirsty I shouldn't drink the tap water because there's Hondaritol™ in it. I haven't been in someone else's home for a decade at least. I ask him why is there Hondaritol™ in the tap water, and he says an unnamed group of what the Silo City Tribune called terrorists set fire to the reservoir last month, and the city awarded the reconstruction contract to Lobstar Purification Solutions, whose CEO, Coral Dirt, believes strongly in tap water Hondaritol™, the reasons for which -- sedation, overall mood improvement, etc. -- he outlined in a pamphlet all residents received gratis last week. "Welcome to our great nation," he says, and stabs his scungilli. He looks at me like how little can I possibly know. Which look has been a mainstay on his face since the airport. He didn't recognize me at the gate. I hugged him from behind, and he bucked me like a bull. "This is really what you look like?" he said. I had to show him my ID.
He says, "So who's filling in for you on t-aural?"
I say, "No one's filling in for me. It's not as though we're flooded as it is, right?"
He says, "Isn't that a little irresponsible?" He says, "I still just can't get over this is what you look like. Was Erronea just completely fabricated? Ex nihilo?"
"That's one way of putting it," I say.
When we're finished he takes my empty china plate and chucks it in the sink and watches it shatter. I ask if there's space enough for me to stay here, and he gives me directions to the Holiday Inn. I walk there along somber foreign streets, just another bundle of smog, and wonder many things but most of all: how could they have set fire to the reservoir? I wonder: isn't a reservoir only water?
#
The Tauruses live in Tauraland, which is hosted on t-aural.org. They do not eat nor sleep nor reproduce. They are closer to deities than to livestock, creatures of pixel myth. We, on the surrounding forum, have sustained their culture. With the wi-fi-less flight and the offline dinner it is the longest I have spent away from them in seven years.
Holographic gashapons line the lobby's brown-starred walls, and white men in stained tanks stand night club close, slipping copper coins listlessly into the little slots. Partners till morning. I've got something like a morgue block for a room. The far wall made all of glass sees a street on which tweens in latex or burlap hurl hunks of sooty rock at one another. I can hear their gleeful screams. I dial room service and order five Parnate and Tonics, which are illegal back in BC, and when the penguinish runner shows up he tells me I'd better not consume all these myself, since any more than the FDA-recommended one -- one -- serving could be lethal. I tell him I've got friends coming over. And the second he's gone I drain the sour candy cocktails down my throat lumpy from pre-sobs with no breaks between, even as the the syrupy stuff sticks like liquid concrete to my esophagus, then collapse atop the hydrophobic mat and watch low ceiling go starry.
I lose all sensation in my skin. My reasoning is: To be stuck in this fleshy blotchy body of mine is a fate worse than death. He spoke to me like I was a complete stranger. I don't know what he expected inviting me here, but what Paul began to realize while he drove me to his home is that Erronea and I are wholly separate, that she is only a figment of our collective imaginations, only a pixel ghost. She dances now in my dopey vision: thin and alien, dressed in an immaculate black jacket and hotpants (her moodier attire). Here she is with her Moderator's gavel. Here she is with Paul, her one true love, joined a moment later by Polka Taurus. It is impossible to overstate the affection we felt for Polka Taurus. For her rainbow-spotted hide, her sense of humor, her dancing. For the way she strutted blithely through all those other (lesser) Tauruses, unabashed, horned head held high.
I remember when I first encountered another lover of PT. A lone post on her slow subforum. I remember the heady rush of dopamine, so much all at once I started to shake in my seat. It was a message from Paul asking why the great Polka Taurus enjoyed so much less acclaim than the others. At that moment I thought: there are people out there living in much the same way I live, and the thought constituted a kind of social jolt, an appetizer for companionship that had been absent so long it tasted like fairy food, and anything else -- the comfortable semi-solitude of my decrepit rent-controlled apartment, for instance -- became repulsive in comparison. I wrote back I thought it was bullshit. Polka Taurus was the best there was, and no one had the brains to see it. Fan-favorites like Bushido Taurus or Boer War Taurus had nothing on our poor beleaguered bull. I believe I used the word "heathens".
From which point on we couldn't be pulled apart. We discussed every in and out of our cow, every mooing nuance. We held days-long debates over which of us Polka Taurus, if she were right here, right now, would like more. I maintain to this day that it would be me.
He was in awe of that orange Moderator tag above my username. He loved to be close to that small meaningless power, or at least he loved the novelty of it. And of course his proximity to me afforded him certain respect. I began to notice his name below mine, whenever I issued a potentially controversial new ruling, voicing his total assent. Lieutenant Paul.
I remember, too, when he asked to see my face. Then it was a different sort of shaking. I scavenged scraps and bits from men and women across the internet, and with these bits I cobbled together a face to which I was comfortable attaching the name Erronea: an androgynous girl with hodgepodge features from every age and ethnicity (e.g., three-inch lashes, bleached teeth, grayish skin, long auburn hair), and Polka Taurus's rainbow eyes as her centerpiece. For that first meeting she wore a sort of chic Twister mat. Paul said, "This is what you really look like?"
And I kind of equivocated. What I would have liked to say is: "This is what Erronea really looks like."
And soon enough we were rubbing our tongues across our respective webcams. I told him I loved him. And all of it purged with one glimpse at my "real" appearance. I am becoming monoamine oxidase-inhibited history. I am much too many feet above sea level. A sea of something soft and endless edges closer and closer. I am incapable of resistance. It was inevitable. This was inevitable.
Someone knocks at the door, and I stand and stagger over to it. It's the runner who brought me the cocktails. He says, "You're Erronea!" then sees the empty glasses (some in shards where the hardwood meets the carpet) and dashes madly to get his spindly fingers down my throat, and I am too smiley and acquiescent to deny him. Neon sways like palm fronds through the glass. It is calm post-puke. He tells me his name is Eightmate. "Yes, really," he says.
"How did you know who I was?" I say.
He says, "Paul made a post to t-aural about your quote-unquote date, included in which was a pretty purple description of your features. I read it as vindictive. Look: sorry."
Eightmate takes me to the hotel kitchen and hands me a bundle of day-old strips of bacon with which to replenish myself. As I gnash the crisp meat between my teeth he explains how he came to t-aural.org, how he found solace in the humble manner of the Tauruses, and in their conflict-free interactions. His gray eyes go glassy when he tells me about the friends he found on the forum for Times-Table Tactics Taurus (whose introduction to the site came as part of a sponsorship deal with Arithmaniacs Inc., the publisher of the middle-grade study-tool/videogame Times-Table Tactics). "And if not for those friends," he says, "I would be lonelier than Pluto." He tells me if he'd recognized me he would have been more careful. He says he views us Moderators as high priests and priestesses.
I tell him it wasn't serious. "It was me being impulsive. That's all." He gags at the scent of bacon plus barf. The t-aural community has once again saved from certain destruction. I am aware of myself as simple flesh. I am meaty and lacking in complexity. My jelly legs wobble at each collision with the floor, and up comes more vomit, onto a splotch of linoleum hidden from view. I am too stuck to the present to remember the sensation of death, or what led me there to begin with.
"Listen," says Eightmate, "these friends. I'm supposed to meet them pretty soon."
"You can't leave me alone now," I say. "I don't know what I'd do if you left me now."
So he sighs and takes me outside, into the alley, and a black van splattered with asphalt pulls up, and Eightmate yanks me in alongside him. In there's a gang kitted out in black and red and blinking LEDs. "These," says Eightmate, "are the Misfit Matadors. It's possible Paul mentioned something about us?"
"You're the ones who set fire to the reservoir," I say.
A gruff guy set too far back in the darkness for me to see his face goes, "The thing is it wasn't really fire. It was a hologram. We used lasers to give the illusion of fire, but there was no heat involved. The municipal government, I guess, just wanted an excuse to give the job to someone else."
"But tonight," says Eightmate. "We're going to burn it to the ground."
There are solemn nods from the half-dozen other comrades. The van shoots screaming over roads which constrict the farther we get from the city's center mass. I ask, "Is this going to be dangerous?" and no one answers. The gruff guy goes, "Are you really Erronea?" And when I nod he says, "So we didn't suppose you were Erronea erroneously?" which gets them all giggling.
We find the reservoir and step into the sand surrounding it. Chlorine leaks from the surface into the hot dark air, and the smell fills me up, renders me half-catatonic as the Misfit Matadors lug from hidden trunks the appurtenances of arson. Over the static of dams at work I catch terse words re: am I trustworthy. I'm too caught up in the glass for this to matter much. It's ink for miles, seems like. Sand and cackling wind.
Eightmate hands me the head of a firehose. He points at the far shore, where there's a series of obelisks. "That's the Reviditron Engine™. It's got fire-retardant lining, so get it good."
"The what?" I say.
"Proprietary technology," he says. "It's how Lobstar Purification Solutions gets their purification so cheap. It distills the most libidinal aspects of the internet into energy. They've figured out a way to turn desire into electricity, believe it or not. And it's evil, you ask me. So: get it good."
And the gruff guy gives a go-ahead, and acrid opaque liquid squirts from the head in my hands and soars in a great dripping silver arc over the onyx water. I am thrumming and hot to the touch. The only outlet for the feeling is to howl, but when I try Eightmate whacks me over the head, so I stay stuck in the feverish sensation till the stream reaches its limping end. Then a short girl in ninja clothes gives a stick lighter a quick flick and throws it overhand into the iridescent reservoir, at which point there's a whispery whoosh, and the spotty crackling orange goes as far as any of us can see. We all let out little yips of relief and celebration. A tall thin man in a ski mask cracks open a couple cold ones (that is, Jack and Escitalopram in a can) and hands them out. I say none for me thanks and ask Eightmate to accompany me to the burning obelisks because this desire distillation intrigues me, and he can't refuse because, after all, as a Moderator, I outrank him.
The wreckage lets go a plaid of ember and smoke like a beacon. It's a half-mile trudge to the melting pillars through squelching mud with a powerline buzz above us the whole while. En route I ask him what's the goal with this Misfit Matadors thing. He says, "Don't get it wrong, this isn't a moral mission. It's only that tonight we felt we had to rectify something. We aren't freedom fighters. We met on t-aural, and all we could talk about was how we all felt so tense all the time. We needed a release. We needed something bigger than the Tauruses. And it was like a seizure. The mischief was like a seizure that freed us from all that useless energy. That's why we do it. It's for fun."
He asks me what is it like, you know, to be in my position, to be a Moderator. I scratch the back of my scalp bashfully. I tell him I can't return. "This trip marks a turning point I life," I say with serious expression. "I've matured too much too quickly to be interested in Tauruses any longer."
Eightmate breathes heavily and says, "Frankly, Erronea, if I'd known you were going to feel that way I'm not sure I would have saved your life. The site won't be the same without you -- and to be honest I need the site more than I need food and water."
And it's silent till we arrive.
We find the Reviditron Engine™ crying. Tarry lumps of melted silicon slip down its dark green exterior. My sweat speeds up to match it. It leaves my clothes soaked. The heat means I will soon enough start to steam. The plasticky covering has melted away and left the copper coils and circuit boards exposed to the open air like geodes' insides.
I say, "With this kind of technology why don't they just go into energy? Why stay in the reservoir business?"
"The CEO's dad worked in reservoirs," says Eightmate. "Guess he's sentimental."
There's a crunch and a rumble from the engine's interior, and the smoke folding out is suffused with a scent like singed sand mixed with internet sex, and the wind wafts it into my nostrils, and it's as though all spiritual hunger (all want, all fear) exits my code like so much cruft -- just for an instant. And in this tiny eternal moment I get a vision of the site, of t-aural, drowning in that endless sea from earlier: all its megapixel images and angled brackets hit by an avalanche of whatever is next, all its captions and asks and answers swallowed by something beyond consciousness. And it is the most blissful experience of which I've ever been part. It lasts half a second and it lasts years. And it passes.
And the steam sizzles and dissipates: little pinkish wisps sent skyward and never to return. I look to my left and am met with an expression from Eightmate that says he's presently gone through something similar. Then there's a minor blast that puts us both on our ass.
When we're again able to stand, before our bearings can return, a couple of specters come spinning through the brush behind the pillars, through the cattails and big twigs shot bitterly between the more floral foliage, arm in arm -- or should I say hoof in hoof! For it's none other than Polka Taurus and Times-Table Tactics Taurus. They twirl and twirl, and the world seems to twirl with them. Us bipeds hop from leg to leg, flabbergasted in the presence of our better halves.
Polka Taurus puts her hoof in my hand and says, "No need to be shy, baby." Her voice is low and has a sort of rural quality, an aw-shucks-type timbre to her human moo. It scratches some new nerve close to my spinal cord, and I shiver and turn to hide my teary eyes. Embers leap like rabid fleas from the flaming reservoir. Triple-T (as she is sometimes known) and Eightmate have begun a sort of waltz across the mud. "Would you like to dance as well?" asks Polka Taurus, and I shake my head, because I hate to dance, and so we hobble off in the direction of the thicket, already thick as thieves, because haven't we known each other for nigh on a decade now? I can't break my gaze away from her rainbow irises. I wonder what I would tell Paul if he were here right now. I think I would waffle a bit then get around to saying: See -- she chose me.
There is a strong rightness to all my actions now. It's as if I saw this turn of events from a mile away, and I have been preparing all this time.
This is something like a wedding night. We stomp through the mire and find a clearing and get supine, and I try and put my arm on her rainbow-spotted hide, but I go right through her. "I'm here for you," she says. "I know you've had a rough go of it as of late, baby, but I'm here for you now." Earthworms swim from the dirt into the wet air and wriggle over my fingers. Bubbles of thunder burst overhead. "We can spend the rest of our lives this way, baby," she says. "Till death do us part. I mean it. I love you. Oh, there I've gone and spilled the beans, haven't I! But it's true. Tell me you know it's true, baby. It's true, it's true. I see you. I see every bit of you, and I love you for all those bits."
"You mean," I say, "you're not disappointed I look like this?"
"Oh, baby," she says. "I'd love you no matter what you looked like. And yet, at the same time, I love you precisely because of the way you look. Oh, look at me! Gushing!"
"It's just all happening so fast," I say.
And she hops to her hooves, and I haul myself up alongside her, and we start into six-legged polka. I am clumsy. The mud suctions to my sneakers and makes gurgling sounds of disappointment. Music from invisible accordions comes over the vaporous air. If not for Eightmate I would not be here, and if not for my bovine bride it would not matter whether I were here I whether I were ashes in urn, stored in a strange city, never to fall again under human vision. And it occurs to me here in the flickering dark: Paul factors into this equation not at all. Polka Taurus reads my thoughts and says, "There's no need, baby, to ever think about Paul again." I nod and spin her. "He's no good for you. See how stressed you are just thinking of him!"
"You're right," I tell her. "Without you I would never have realized, but you're right."
"You know what you need?" she says, and quits her rhythmic stepping. "You need the circuitry of the city. You need salt and fat."
Her mind is wired directly to mine. We start at a clop toward the distant globs of amber and ocher. We pass Eightmate arranged horizontally in the reeds with Triple-T, and I think: there is goodness in the world. By the time we arrive back at the center of the smog the sky's gone that buzzkilling indigo I associate with swollen eyes and the taste of taurine. The lights are no less vibrant; they loop in arches to form arcane characters, dangle like vines from the glass and concrete towers. The glistening symbols for Pork-Co-Pine BBQ interlace their spiky serifs with those of Crabreaction Seafoods. All of it is connected. PT and I find the slender entrance to Cloven Hoof Cuisine, next to which is a dancing hologram goat. She orders a fruit salad with flax seeds, and before thinking better of it I ask for a bacon cheeseburger. "Oh my God," I say when I realize my mistake. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't worry about it," says Polka Taurus, and nuzzles her thick head against my left thigh. "I'm not loyal to my more meaty cousins. I am faithful only to you, baby."
The cashier asks me if I'd like anything to drink, and I tell her tap water will be fine.
In the dingy seating area is none other than Paul, hunched over a platter of baked potatoes smothered in pulled pork and sour cream. I put my body between Polka Taurus and Paul -- to keep things civil. "What are you doing here?" I say.
"I eat when I'm stressed," he says, and shovels dripping pork into his mouth. He chews and swallows and says, "You really stressed me out. I don't mean that. I'm sorry. Earlier I was sort of reeling, you might say. I shouldn't have acted that way."
"Paul," I say, "that's beside the point now. There's someone I'd like you to meet." And I step aside to reveal PT, and wet and stinking matter falls from Paul's mouth, and he rushes to put it back, the pacifying pork, more and more till he's sedated enough to say, "This isn't real." Cream leaks from between his thick lips. "I'm hallucinating," he says.
"I'm realer than death," says Polka Taurus resentfully, and the sound of her voice gets Paul to his feet. I rest my palm on PT's rump to settle her.
"I've found someone else," I say. "I'm happy now. We would never have worked, Paul -- I see it now. She chose me, Paul."
"No," says Paul. "This is a joke, isn't it? This is wrong. This is wholly un-kosher. What sort of black magic you worked to bring her here doesn't matter -- it is wrong. It is a wrongness I feel in my gut, Erronea. That is, just as you are not Erronea, this is not Polka Taurus. You understand that deep down, don't you? It's more than wrong, it's sad. It's pathetic. You've blinded yourself. You will realize this soon enough. You need a human being. Wrong wrong wrong. Don't you see that? You may not feel it now, but you will. If you have a cow and not a human being you will fail, don't you see that?"
"You're overreacting," I say. "I chose someone else. Get over it."
"Does it really feel right to you?" he says. "You're forgetting things. Does it feel like it felt when you misspelled Polka as Polk, and we thought it was so funny we drew an imaginary James K. Polk Taurus? Does it feel like when I squirted milk from my nose in an attempt to replicate Polka Taurus's lactaction, and you laughed so hard you fell over? Does it feel like that, Erronea?"
"You're being histrionic and irrational and sad, Paul," I say. "Plus: it feels so much better than all that."
Paul's eyes are wider than I've ever seen them, as though he's gotten a glimpse of something truly beyond understanding. "I thought I knew you," he says. Meat sweat and fear sweat fall piggishly from his brow. Before I can explain the situation further he dashes from the restaurant as fast as if he were running for his life. I am too happy to care. All our conversations seem so small compared to true love, all our childish confessions, our confectionery nothings. The same can be said of yesterday's self-destructive despair. Diluted light slips into the restaurant and by it I can see PT's bright leather, her high-contrast red and green and yellow spots. I think I'd like to spend the rest of my life looking at her. I eat my cow cheese and cow meat beside my cow girl. I can see the future with such perfect clarity:
This year I will move here to Silo City, to PT's hometown. She and I will be married. Eightmate will be best man. We will find a single-bedroom apartment. We will both work full-time to support ourselves because rent in this center of industry will make your head spin. But it will be worth it: we will find time for late-night polka sessions. We will have dinner parties with the Misfit Matadors, although I will be too busy to join their ranks. I will move on from my Moderator position, and from any affiliation with t-aural. Lobstar Purification Solutions will replace the tanks, and the Hondaritol™ will smooth my mood. I will no longer be alone, and I will no longer be lonely. I will spend the rest of my life grateful and full of praise.
I stab a piece of PT's cantaloupe with a spork and spoon-feed it to her, and it tumbles through her body to the dirty floor. She prods the rest of the salad apathetically. "I'm not very hungry," she says.
And when the temperature between Paul and I has dropped, I will take him for coffee. He will continue to be skeptical, but I will patiently assuage his doubts. I will tell him things are just splendid with Polka Taurus and I. I will tell him I have never before been in a relationship I found more spiritually or physically fulfilling. Paul will not like it, but he will have to listen. Polka Taurus chose me, and he will have to consider this fact until he is in the grave. And I will no longer be alone, and I will no longer be lonely. I will spend the rest of my life grateful and full of praise.