Fantastic Metropolis

I lay on my back with my head in a broom closet. A mop handle and some gallon bottles of ginger ale kept me company. I kept forgetting things. I forgot what I was doing. (Flooding the house.) I forgot what I’d done. (Lost my car keys.) I forgot what I’d planned. (Someday the roof of the house would cave in, and the sun would bleach my optical sockets.) All my vital parts had been pried loose and carried off.

I told jokes to the cicadas. I said, Stop me if you’ve heard this. The cicadas brought me food and taught me things. I couldn’t eat the food, but I learned quite a lot. Things about families and about deserts and about soul murder.

I can’t eat this, I kept telling them. They thought I was joking.

During mating season, the male cicadas turned blue and began to glow. They crept around the ceiling like winking constellations. I wondered whether insects were machines, and whether machines were insects. Certain insects can fly, but not every insect, and the same is true of machines. Flying machines can kill people, but so can insects. Everything had converged to a single dot, but it wouldn’t blink out.

In spring, the male cicadas grew wings and buzzed around me. They dove at my face and whizzed away again. They dug tunnels into my chest and sharpened their mandibles on my servos. When I told them to stop, they said, Make us stop! Corpses can’t give orders!

Then I told them that I would make them stop. They squealed with glee and rolled around inside me, kicking their legs.

I stood up and found a bucket and a length of hose. I kicked down the kitchen door and tramped out to the alley. The moon was full. It was bright as day. Pellets of glass crunched beneath my boots. I siphoned some methanol from the tank of the van and poured it over my head. I went indoors again for a match.

Soon I was blazing away like a pudding in brandy. The drapes caught fire as well. Roasted cicadas clambered from my armpits and my crotch and fell, smoking, to the floor. Shrieking elated bug shrieks they fell, dying happy bug deaths, like mad airmen abandoning a burning bomber.

From all directions, from below and above, a delighted stridulation sprang up. The cicadas pranced in circles around my feet, cheering me on. My black vinyl face was dripping. The drops trailed blue flame and made funny noises. The bugs turned cartwheels, laughing wildly.

Sparks flew from my optics. Brown smoke filled the house. I turned into a tottering scarecrow of silver sticks and black rags. But I was glad, because the bugs were entertained.

I fell to the floor. The flames guttered. The cicadas climbed up onto my wreckage in droves, to celebrate. Papa cicadas in blue overalls and mama cicadas in hoopskirts and petticoats waltzed on my chest. Cicada kids rushed to the final fires of my face, with tiny marshmallows on toothpicks. Nursemaid cicadas in starched white bonnets pushed larvae in strollers up and down my legs. Eventually they raised a tent on my torso and performed circus acts on tiny unicycles and tiny trapezes.

Personally I don’t attach a lot of importance to nightmares. Anyone can have a bad dream. Even machines get them. They’re a form of torture testing. You go on to the next thing. And the next. And the next.

The object of this game is to shoot down the Enemy Memory Ships before they can sink your Dream Boat. Are you ready? Are you set? Are you trapped in a toy truck in a toy chest in a hole at the bottom of the sea? Do you think you escape before you suffocate? What do you think, Alex? Can you get out of there? Can you get out?

ANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONSANITATIONS

I was sitting in the cab of the van, one afternoon in spring. We were parked behind a Chinese restaurant that was having some trouble with roaches. I opened the glove compartment and reached inside for a tire gauge.

My glove closed around a plastic bag that squished. I pulled it out, and what do you think was in it? A cream cheese and jelly sandwich on white bread. Which was crawling with maggots. I tossed it out the window.

But I could never figure out how it got there. I mean, who would put a sandwich of all things in my glove compartment? And leave it there to rot? Who would do that?

I could never account for it.