More or less time. I'm on the phone telling them to flatline this and that stock to align with the latest string of televised executions — the syzygies of the market are viewed primarily by the artless and those with fragile arteries who see the market as their heartrate monitor. I'm avoiding the quack's company, another bulletpoint in Mala's exit strategy; that'll happen naturally without my intervention. This is the fourth worst property I own, somewhere in Zurich. Midgrade ornamental stonebrick, Gargoyle's nest, admiralty-spires and cluster-Mansards, silent film era stained glass miniature, hemisphere transition curves, second level balconies seemingly inaccessible whatsoever except through burglary (the windows overlooking, connected to the inside). Window sits crosslegged on obsidian-black leather couch playing Pokemon on her Nintendo DS. Dolor comes in through the backdoor with the quack in tow and the quack asks "who's that?" regarding Window and I call her a background character. Window mouths "rude." I ask Dolor where she found a helipad, she tells me the golf club just over that hill at Dolder Grand, whose architectural plan looks best in twilight with orange artificials Stilj-jagging, lighting half-balconies and three-fourths-colonnades. She does not say all of that about the building. I ask her how much the favor cost, she tells me that's my problem. This is the fourth new problem this hour. Denpa run circles around the room watching several startups burn to the ground, giggling and calling out each fraction of a percent and I contemplate whether I should have the packaged-in embarrassed CEOs shot for real at some later date. Res looks down at where her tits should be.

Window asks me to clue her in why we're rehabilitating the quack whose diagnostic devices read out a miscarriage or late stage leukemia a third of the time, I tell her business is business (Mala hissing); Window says that can't be the actual reason; the quack seems offended and subtly flexes her larynx to again lower the pitch of her voice in preempt but doesn't say anything; Window notices that I'm avoiding her actual setup. Why haven't Res and myself, Darling and myself,

1. simply had everyone shot, why are we
2. entertaining morally flexible ideas of philanthrophy, why do we
3. believe in a Neoplatonic philosopher-king, or two queens in this case?

"You can use money to make the world better. That's why nobody does it. Because then they'd have to innovate and the only threat to capitalism as it has been built is actual competition, so the only threat to capitalism is the realization of its own promise. It would take nothing for anyone with sufficient resources to become an enlightened despot, to run a monopoly that benefits the rest of humanity. Nothing. But the reason none of them do it is so they can keep selling the promise away to the gullible and subjugated and never have to act on fostering competition. So what then is a real threat to the market? Someone who actually treats the market as art instead of dressing it up in the colors of the underclass, the unprofitable artistic pursuits and calling it an art of its own. There are some who see the syzygies of the market but only where it relates to extraction - the first task of human capitalism was to wipe out competition by leaving the land cash crops were grown on dead. Competition cannot arise because the offerings kill themselves by design like Monei. So maybe we can bring about the end of capitalism, then what? How can you end something that categorically hasn't been born?"

"Look, look! Arte saw another -0.3% slide!"

"Mii too! Oh, -0.31%!"

I don't question why I have two mimes without makeup or stage magicians employed in advertising running around my room and I ask them if they have the obituaries sent out to every outlet yet. "As of just now, Boss!" Most cults dissolve without a second-in-command — this also applies to Silicon Valley. I can see the muscles in Window's face straining in formulation of a response but she seems rather taken with Pokemon so the implicit processes occur in slow motion. It strikes me now I haven't committed the quack's name to memory but I find no categorical imperative to set up a thread of conversation where somebody will have to fake polity and begin a sentence with her first name.

It strikes me that I'm thinking in less florid terms than usual — it must be a depletion of face-flush-color from the rules of engagement, downward chart: legally-alive red into asphyxia blue. The quack now clears her throat to ask me who Window actually is. I tell her Window is advocatus diaboli, a Red bedazzled with the utopic promises of self-sustaining communes - Red as signs of life and the Devil (the Devil, Corey, is a stout androgynous goth) and the neon red inside the elevator to the negative first floor, the command center beneath East Siberia Bureau (HQ), which can be propelled downward with great haste upon entry of an elevator-button Konami code which I will not record until the building has burnt to the ground, or can be occupied stoicly in great unhaste, languid and slumped against the walls of just to see where it could lead. She endured hours of the red strobe to find nothing but myself and Res scissoring and the stains stamped bureaucratically by the throes of other high-minded pulvinary activities, pulverizing no spring but beating, gyroscopically, backhanded with frail girly veinless hands many pulvina. Phew. I restate my characterization more bluntly: a failed anarcho-commie photojournalist with a dead-end Bureau job and nothing better to do.

I ask the quack how Dolor handled her. Larynx flex, twice as intense — sore subject. Having had to jump overboard, she's in the military fatigues Dolor had lying around. "She didn't make for very good conversation either. When I asked her where I'm going she just told me 'Switzerland.' I asked her where in Switzerland and she asked me if I wanted to keep that wet Armani on. In case I landed somewhere there might be press, I thought and said yes. She said 'Wrong answer.' So that's how I wound up in this. I asked her what she thought of my work and she answered 'I've seen better fraud.' I corrected her that it's not all fraud."

Denpa are ecstatic about the monitors with live TV loopback. It's terminal. Do Not Resuscitate. Usually for crashes like this they bring Allegra onto major news networks and she delivers the same script about the dangers of promising product or even lacking an operator inside the Mechanical Turk. Out of the corner of my eye I notice the quack's market ticker has begun to only be right twice a day. I didn't order this. I turn to Window: "Did you use the phone?" Res also turns her head.

"Ya know, I figured if ya were so busy ogling at the monitors appreciating the cinematography I should do you a favor and be useful for your whole enterprise for once, no?"

Res shrugs. "I think that's a good call, Athanasius." The quack is also visibly displeased. "Might I remind you it was either this or your life, Madame?" From an analysis of her tone and shift of facial expression as she spoke earlier she seemed to have taken more offense to having to change out of the Atlantean Armani than an order from the top to short her stone dead. "I should start calling you Thanatos, Athanasius." "Call me Haruspex." Dolor has snuck out of the backdoor as quickly as she entered.

Time on the hour for Financial News. Allegra, hair in planetary buns, sits down at some foregrounded walnut desk on top of a time zone-appropriate NYC skyline and invisibly shuffles papers on her lap before setting her arms down at the desk and turning to greet the host. Chyron (or lower third): (all capitals) Allegra d’Ottaviantonio (line break), Vice President, Ecarlate Company. Pleasantries about her being a regular guest and a trusted market analyst who can be relied upon to deliver accurate economic analysis especially with her several decades of experience as an angel investor are exchanged.

"So Allegra, what are you feeling about the latest Silicon Valley blowout?"

"If it were just one or two this is nothing unusual, especially in a buyer's market where everything is both a tech and a lifestyle product and pitches such as 'the Gmail of the gym' fly around fetching hundreds of millions of dollars. This week's crashes however are exceptional in scope and number and may be cast in a tragic light, especially with the seeming disappearance of (quack's name), but it is a going down with the ship in many other ways - these companies all came up at about the same time and got ahead with rather dubious demonstrations of their respective products. Whispers have been floating around investors' circles for quite a while that all of them employed each other's help in staging these fake demonstrations as well. This may as well be the Heaven's Gate of the startup market, although for now this is all gossip. It casts final and urgent doubt on whether young enterpreneurs can really rely on Lady Luck to help them avoid learning this lesson time and time again."

Denpa both repeat, wide-eyed, with a turn to the public (the rest of us here) and high-five for emphasis: "the Heaven's Gate of the startup market!". Allegra has to do this about bimonthly (sometimes twice a month, sometimes once every two months), often without the prompt of televised executions.

Itinerant typewriter salesmen, it is said, once ran my star-spangled Columbian country, to be throughout its awesome Midwestern reaches its couriers and the bearers of its myth, by these means becoming its anchors despite their inebriate exploits, outlining all to come, but despite their preeminence in those gold-plated days when President B. Augustenburg loomed, as they say, over, such a people are no more, replaced by a minority of Latter-Day Saints and a majority of seemingly sinister-handed businessmen overemphasizing profit margins, realists elevated to that ideal of Tian reconstituted from first principles, this the subject of our discourse inasmuch as it's become the most recent preoccupation of Ari's, one among many, a romance with episodes of ethics training in basements and disused break rooms, likewise with false promises and counterfeit faux-electrum bearing just the right balance of weights to become the real thing. Medical testing is, in theory, more refined in principle than ancient currency, yet so often I find myself, even in facade, doubting everything spectacled and coldly rationalist, no matter how enamored may be Ari, who recently told an audience of many millions, half-meaning it, "Despite difficulties in fostering a transparent work environment, she, my esteemed colleague, has managed to create truly meaningful concepts even on the market's tyrannical terms," with the cold motions of conceding that it may be that one of the two women before us has not committed total fraud in the manner of an innkeeper relieving her bladder onto an unlucky (or perhaps lucky, but nonetheless soiled) traveler. As of this year, 2017, no motions have been taken to prevent such travesties from being promoted by telephone and television, and we have not yet construed a blacklist solely because of her, but again, I must emphasize that this is, despite my moral quandary, nothing more than the epitome of her ingenuity, one of many means to a single end.

To my ears, Arte and Mii's proposition surfaces preposterous, likewise seeming too generous with respect to what they seem to consider humble scope for an event which I know will be far-reaching at its conclusion, so I find it necessary to retort, "Surely this is the makings of a Millerite schism in the business world, a Great Disappointment to drop stocks in the dozens to humble kowtows as was done in the final acts of the subsequent Civil War, as was necessary?" Indeed, I utter this, to a word-alternating continuation, "We think it's good for the media to have a Heaven's Gate from time to time, so we choose to believe our comparison accurate," chorused from their dirty twin mouths, but again, never must I shame them, for they are but two tortured youths knowing themselves too well for comfort, as the overbearing often do. Ari swiftly proposes an alternative: "Take good note, Arte and Mii Tenebrae, Malus Mala, and of course Darling, because to myself it's becoming abundantly clear that we have a new Zen master, a Zen mistress, before our eyes, whose practices will become scripture for the cleverly conniving and the painfully honest in perfect parallel. Adjusted for Americanisms, this she may as well be the progenitor of a coming generation of businesspersonlike Quakers." Her esteemed colleague seems to want to insist a few things from her suddenly-distant seat, namely that her family are (as we know) steadfast in their allegiance to that faith whose head lies deep in Rome's full bowels, that the Zen principles she employed in running her corporate organ are but worldly imitations in every possible connection untethered from the Gautamaist idea (as she erroneously calls it), and that heading even a semblance of a new, parallel tradition would amount (conveniently discounting the Jesuit precedent of Chinese rites) to heresy even if presented as but a secular formula, but she is taciturn, willing like all the rest of us but me to accept my love's word at face value without hesitation. "That's ridiculous," I begin. Malus: in the process of maintaining a silence just as sycophantic, attempting to appear totally nonplussed and manifesting a spectacular blunder in the contorted process of removing even the slightest grin-crease from her countenance, given how crucial proper comportment could be in the Bureau domain. I, Res Jino, trudging onward: "I'll accept it nevertheless; my apologies for my doubts. After all, I must nonetheless concede that William Miller's influence has surpassed his lifespan and synergized many disparate lives together into a bundle of faith, many of whom were saved sensu lato by steering hope to a single cause — despite my own admitted reservations. He attributed great importance to deadlines, indeed an aspiration for us all, indeed excellent at talking himself out of even deep holes up until his sole infamous folly. Is this agreeable enough to absolve my dear of the punishment these strange looks constitute?" This seems to please Arte, who pipes up, "We're all virtuous in and saved through the meritocracy after all!" Mii adds, conveniently, "No matter the path!"

From the corner of my eye, it seems we've upset this daring founder, our peer in the business affairs of the bourgeoisie, and momentarily, it's my pride that I've managed to upset her, but it dawns on me that my effort is at least somewhat purposeless, so I begin to let an unfettered silence stew, in which my mind itself has started to stew on pertinent mechanics, factors not yet accounted for. Mala, having earlier entered the room post-flight but having gone unspecified, and the again-esteemed quack briefly exchange a mutual glance, as if to will themselves to the level of engagement on which we stood before them in constructive banner constricting the discursive context, but how futile would be engagement evades evading them, their wills both made weak, as if considering an agreed code-switch into second or third working languages (perhaps French or Russian would work?) before realizing nothing, not even that much-elated ghost of Standard English, could truly be common among any two idiolectic decadents, much less a colloquium thereof, making silence the sole real tongue of empire, not so much the unmoved mover as the uninvited inviter, but this doesn't stop them from misunderstanding one another, nixing eye contact, and, up to now, often breaking the olden social contract.

I take my peace and press forth, this time along fresher lines: "Which reminds me: our esteemed colleague, do you believe you've reached the ideal of a career apex even by your humble means?" It seems unclear to her at first that I have already selected the right polar answer in my mind, that indeed I am staring into her awaiting its fleeting exit from her mouth, but soon enough, after pleasingly little deliberation, it satisfies me enough that a "yes," my aim, drifts over to me with airy, yet neither rarefied nor glamorous, resolve. At large, it would suffice to say merely that I am, at this moment amused. To provoke, Ari brings forth, stifling mechanical snickers, "At the level you occupy, there are but two paths to a true capstone." "Which," Arte reassures her, "is advanced knowledge, only available for those who have sought" — "the most truth there is," Mii then finishes on her dear twin's behalf. Window, the Bleeding Kansas-beaten Red-and-Dead Army Annie Oakley Bolshevik of Nowhereville, Texas, having fallen silent as we planned up to this glorious instant suddenly passing us and likewise the quack by, lets out her barely-hidden drawl, one drink deep, and, compounding our orchestration, thus proceeds, "The first opportunity we'll furnish for you is a test of humbleness, whether you can damn yourself to what you see as hell, what we'd call 'middle management.' Might you be content with this, you'll see unimaginable sums hitting your account, and we'll certainly see to it that your reputation be laundered to the end of time, but the question is can you wait for it?" I see a cautious nod from the quack, shockingly unbothered as Window gestures at a semi-conspicuous holster, which I know holds an antique, yet reliable weapon, one which she does not truly intend to use. I, then, nudge Mala out of the room and then run her out of the building in order to seal the deal in the following clockwork fashion: "Should the former proposition dissatisfy you, as understandably it might, I propose that your face may not, per se, need saving, for we've maintained, on your behalf and on account of the wishes of many others, suspended disbelief among the public for every on-screen execution we proceed with on international broadcast after however many secretive flights to the Central Siberian conference. This is, to put it in your terms, well beyond the supposed Operating Thetan — this is reality as it is and as no one may be allowed to see it, and it will become clear to you now that every killing you've watched with your parents and extended family after the appropriate Hail Mary-span has been all-too-convincingly faked. In lieu of the real, in other words, I make you, exclusively, the classic offer to falsify your murder by the state on live broadcast, such that it will appear you will have atoned for this hopeless flavor of fraud with your life and your flowing, satiating blood, when in reality we will have only burst crimson packets, modeled your gory head flying from an ostentatious guillotine, and at last let you out the backdoor on the condition you assume another name, perhaps including a new face to correspond, and divorce yourself from the half-assembled imperial prosopography of this ugly, deceitful place. As with the prior offer, you will receive generous pay so long as you are silent, but either offer requires you to give up, along with what I have specified above, your nondescript private residence in the Abacos for use as, let's say, Bureau Hotel's next Bahamian central office — after all it is, as Ari and I recently discovered, more spacious than it lets on from afar." All of this is true, but not for Mala's ears, for our mendaciousness knows too few bounds for her to reconcile with the flimsiness of her own understanding of the world. Indeed, no one, the fraud must reckon, could possibly know about her residence given the layers of deceit she buried it under, but alas, she must think, here she is, exposed, and surely Mala would feel the same. I can sense the sweat on her brow without even meeting her eye, so I garnish my rhetoric, lest it was at all unclear: "Which will it be, our esteemed quack?"

While Res is threatening both Mala and the quack or neither, recondite, Allegra continues giving her report in the blue glow of implicit warmth: "It is true that in the brave new world of Silicon Valley they've figured out a new kind of high-risk-high-reward strategy, which is still having no product to speak of but aggressively advertising through nontraditional platforms, such as social media, in the manner of influencers and vloggers. Cash injections of millions from angel investors are now earned through having a video or a cluster of videos with one billion views in a weekend, overedited with aggressive Dutch angles, pixelated fire coming out of the backside of the CFO, the CEO deadlifting in full tuxedo with every single drop of sweat composited out. Another million if the the entire employ is set in frame with the exaggerated swagger of a white teenager lipsyncing lines from Disney Channel Original properties and replicating the face-acting and poses out of musical theater seen from very very very very far away. You could say that, to borrow from a dead poet, 'the good [advertiser, or aura farmer], chooses his [images] for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably'. Now that an entire generation of young CEOs promising you a tool that can help you cheat at everything, least of all college exams, was raised on Jake Paul and individuals under that banner, has landed amongst a bucket-shop market of psychologically sportsbetting young investors that toy with money for instant satisfaction on platforms where the liquidity may sometimes drop to zero because the brokers let the investor act like the money has arrived when it hasn't, the Wall Street fat cats of the Great Recession who bet against the market are more than content to let the poor man rob himself blind and bet against the little guy who bets with his pretend-bankruptcy-money equivalent to Chuck-E-Cheese tokens while making, with to them one drop in the bucket that could satisfy the thirst of the entire clientele of the bucket shop across three North Korean generations, moves to prop up the chosen stocks of the fool with these cash injections…" The modal keyword is survival on the new frontier.

Arte is now doing pretend-CPR on Mii as the tickers are at their all-time worst, calling back to the Knickerbocker Crisis — not so much the Recession or the Depression but its dry-run where the stunt department injures the main actors and you have to call the understudy to fill in, and giggling out "Help!" instead of accomplishing the falsetto of threat. I record about twenty flexes from the quack and seventy 100 meter dashes of the eyebrow from Mala in the course of Res' monologue. I watch a picture of myself holding up a phone to my ear, usually posted during blowouts of this sort — transhumanist pioneers / male-ally xenofeminists the Bogs saying 'dump it', flood the zone on social media and once again garner those redundant mentions of @notvashino under posts by media outlets, often with the image attached, sometimes captioned things like "Oh you!" and "Classic Ari." Inking the Tweet icon, a whole night's work lending itself to only a Frakturized "The", I quote Tweet ABC's soundbite quotation of Allegra's monologue (the channel having just had Allegra on and broadcasting globally thanks to an extension of the American News Bureau propaganda program where at first newsstands would be set up in European countries with flown-in major newspapers across the political spectrum but then expanded to American channels on cable everywhere to overpaying subscribers to an on-demand American Dream — what's that line about having to be asleep to believe it?) with "Deeply insightful as usual", then Tweet a standalone "Regulators in my camp are seeing what can be done about this (line break) Especially in regard to protecting retail investors" and in finality find the most viral instance of the memetic visage to quote Tweet it with "Oops". I giggle grimly like a Rothko from the end, light as smoking made light of by ironic adoption of olive-drab cigarette cartons by Scandinavian youth, eyeballs seared per carton with hopefully unbloggable/unInstagrammable body horror, hopes dashed as usual by reality.

I: "Window."

Window: "Me."

Myself: "You're the singular American in the entirety of national history she respects."

Window: "Yeah, I'll buy that for a dollar."

Taking ghost ship strides across the room to meet at the elbowless negotiation table (Enhanced Interrogation Techniques) of midair into which it is impossible to truly bow your head into for ostrich burial and full avoidance of eye contact, at least after triangulation of exactly where the line of sight tapers off and graphing of the point on the dartboard inside the Circus of Cruelty onto which you're mounted onto the eyes too far gone for Faustian soul (or the blues of Robert Johnson) shoot daggers, myself makes entrant entrance: "I trust our terms have been made abundantly clear, and preferably with statutes of understanding beyond a spiritual/liturgical-scholarly abundance of clarity?" Mala or the quack is/are thinking: "Sometimes you roll literal snake eyes." A canned laugh track emits, dust is their food and clay their meat, encircled in paused-reel dance of agreement by praying statues bathed under plastic-melt studio photonegative ultraviolet; perfect dark, no flashbulb — Gilgameshean is the three-act, twenty-two minute block and not betraying genre these are the returning, resurrected villains of the week that are now banished until defrosted a la carte.

So here's what should have happened: both of them would have been out of the door with an asskicking. Here's what actually happened: an armed staff in military fatigues accompanied them to the airport (IATA: ZRH, ICAO: LSZH — problem of competing standards?) with artisanally forged fake passports (expenses: whatever, I can foot it — printers can smell fear and hurry) under supervision of myself and Res who figured we could leave Denpa to be raised by the iPad, or in this case the eternal block of Financial News resembling megalopolis congestion or the Theatre of Eternal Music (which I realize now ABC has carved out an entire single staff for and keeps it running perennially as its own channel, that explains the name of the account I quote Tweeted, and which is available as part of a cable package called 'Bureau Essentials' with an indiscriminate market of both professional and sucker, discerning about the viewership and their level of insight into the appropriate terminology as the average Marxist is about how capitalism really works), to see them off and peruse the offerings of the disembodied (organ transplantation) IKEA cafeteria inside the airport whereupon Res could once again conveniently forget that she has told me this before and I know this offhand from being raised by a Muslim that fought a three day insular war in Sweden that the meatballs are in fact a Turkish specialty — but should be allocated to the Swedish to take credit for in light of the Armenian genocide and the lackluster claim of the Turkish state's to its own existence.

Whenever we, myself and Darling, myself and Res, myself and herself, Ari to Res (calibration complete), have this conversation the obvious inquiry that I always pose (this not being neither the last nor least of multiculturalism) is largely self-evident: should sushi in the Americas and sushi in Japan be regarded as separate, filtrated as it is through Norwegian salmon fishing and generational decay? A very unappetizing phrase in proximity to matters of the culinary, but there's always cheese. Her response is always an emphatic yes, which seems to ring with the same passion for being the most correct person in the room or righteous indignation (one or the other) perennially undiluted; the backup for her argument is the mostly accurate Korean food in the States, whose introduction is much more recent, largely thanks to the method, make-of-product (cf. EU PDO scheme) being imported simultaneously with the human resources to produce it in a triumph of military will amidst a collegiate dead-grandma deadline extension for the Pacific Theatre, emergent suddenly from cryo. Only after declaring this does she seem to consider the moral implications of these often dissolved in wake of wifebeating or second-screened, proximofamilial (milk and cigarettes) marriages between GI and the peninsular.

The quack crosses and uncrosses her knees inside a private jet, Denpa haul the television or the monitor out of the room and upgrade it to something of a much higher definition (they tell me 4K video is going to be the next big thing — I have the eyes to see, to pixel-pinch; every sweat drop perturbing makeup, every reanimation of the reified, but do most?) and do this with each and every piece of display gear in the room until there is no remaining singular Theseus subject, Mala attempts to smoke on a plane. With this attempt to smoke thwarted by essential crewmember asthma, for lack of something self-destructive to do, she takes the SIM cards out of her phone and attempts to crush them in the palm of her hand, fists flexed in physiological process of back and forth barb with the quack's unconscious flexes of the larynx, not yet ready to cease practicing her routine of ruining her own voice in pursuit of a certain Edenic grey-on-white. It strikes me now to ask why I self-censor corporate symbols in my own narration: the answer is no free promotion.

For my own entertainment I carry around an antique chess set, foldable — rosewood, acrylic, ivory inlay. ("Women [chess players]. There is no such thing—or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as "man artist" or "elephant artist." You may be a woman and you may be a [chess player]; but the one is a given and the other is you.") It like, many things, was always a job that I tried to frame as a hobby. Maybe I've never had any such distinction, having had no sane reason to not make anything and everything in sight undergo financialization: the Soviet Union used chess as a bargaining chip, as Hardening Soft Power — their players would draw each other circularly to ensure mutually assured tournament placement, following the MA the D a factor of Defection. I don't remember Mother raising me to be a politician, I remember the Navashinos putting myself, a kidnapped orphan, in front of the board. Myself and Res often play the game on the move, never being able to leave it at rest, statue as religious object with permanent locational specifications (gallery installation) — I memorize the placement of the pieces and she takes my solemn word for it when we put all of them back inside the foldable compartments and I maquette the buttonpressed unpausing. We started a game back at the house with useless windows and resumed it yet inside the IKEA cafeteria and god knows what other place it'll be taken, replaced with its own ident, that gesture towards its authenticity, a moment of amnesic self-reintroduction. Midverse enjambment leads the listener to imagine an obscenity before the next verse completes the word more innocently.

Most of my only happy memories have to do with money.

Oversized woodframed windows breathe Alpine air, the frames appearing as moth-ravaged underwear saved only for the occasion when it cannot be perceived and then found destroyed. The kind of thing you bought to wear under your best suit with the superstitious beliefs that even the parts of the woman's clothes that cannot be seen also make the woman. Or something. A breastknobbed door the creak of which is more fitting for a bridge parting to carry through an entire invading armada from Spain into England is voluminous (and impregnable) and thus signals the birth of another clock day as it parts now for the home fleet commander instead of the enemy. All this estrous imagery directly contradicts the fundamental fact of life that women wield phalli too (cynically: Diversity Initiative, truthfully: fact of life).

"Good morning, President!"

'Good day. You seem to be mistaken - that is Mother.'

"You don't intend to succeed her?"

'I intend to own majority shares and orient the operation of the board of executives, I guess.'

The year is 2001 and quotation marks are doublets whose single-apostrophe constituents are interchangeable. This is a different problem from having Mala across from you in the conference room or having Denpa run through the whole circus gauntlet terminating in autoventriloquism. The singular apostrophe which conjoins words together and parasites them and becomes them is her, you, me, she whose imagined hands can't stop strangling the neck of all the hundreds lined up on both sides of the grand hall. She, you, I, can safely assume that, no doubt, that entire trifle about moth-ravaged underwear meant to be worn under a suit for the day a dignitary arrives and somehow sees through your entire character is giving at least one of the people at the two sides of the wall some pause. The way they raise their heads to look directly at the forehead so as to appear to be making eye contact with the person for whom the carpet has been rolled out. Like being a person famous for fame itself, hearing about a string of robberies of others of your status, complaints from your friends mostly and, feeling remorse at your own belonging to the class, leaving a key to your forty million dollar mansion under the mat, right in time for a bunch of teenagers to be looking at Google Earth snapshots of the place at the very moment you place the key where it can easily be found and stolen so the theft can be made into an act of charity after they post themselves wearing all of your clothes on their blog and brag about the act and you take a screenshot and repost it saying you gave back to the community. That same kind of conscience is the sight before she, you, I. You, the hypothetical individual which I have found hundreds akin to just because, have been trying to give your house more identifiable landmarks so it can be seen from satellite and more easily broken into - a pool that is an inland sea, a helipad, a tennis court with posed mannequins holding rackets with balls glued onto them. I mean, you're never going to need to play it anyway, are you? Being that none of the people gathered fit the exact description of that hypothetical guilty nouveau riche, it would be fair to say that they all want to look good in front of the boss. Or the future boss. Or not the future boss, as they just found out. But then the people and the people's criminal is a celebrity's boss too. Mala falls over, drink in hand beachside, cartoon thwack, slipping on no banana peel but dyskinesia of the influence.

'It appears there has been a misunderstanding.'

[Oh, Arianna. You don't want to succeed the company?]

Mother's words are in square brackets because I want to prevent the words from escaping without running into a wall and bouncing back and forth across the perimeter of the room forever. The room will be soundproofed and I will close the door so I don't have to hear them ever again. Midverse enjambment leads the listener to imagine an obscenity before the next verse completes the word more innocently — the resonance of her words, the character of their termination and spread into the room, the pregnant implication: all barred.

'I don't want to be President in particular. I feel as if assuming the biggest possible responsibility, wanting the most major possible thing, is something over which you will have too much oversight.'

She is azure and I am night.

$ President $, Mother not me, $ what do we do about this then? $

Allegra's life is drowning in money. The whole global economy. Prognosticating the death of expectations, all day, somehow never once going to the restroom, always on the clock, never having pissed into a bottle while no one is watching. Hours filled with as much ascetic purpose and self-serving self-inflicted suffering demagoguery as the Book of Hours. She is the Vice President of the Company. If you want an idea of her work, to make it fair I should set in stone that a dollar sign can be placed before a digit price or after. It is known, as the scripture would say. Please feel free to summarize the values of each character printed by her mouth, let the characters between the signs be what you calculate obviously, and mail it to the following address: Liminal coordinates X 4565447854763533645753763646767, Y -32322689898435753579722256, Z 459999999888844441111, A

1. Return address not required but encouraged. The A is to account for

the chance that the entire location sinks into the ground and reconstructs itself entirely

• it is the variable that loses most people when they try to send the couriers on their

appointed rounds from which they will not stray come permutation or permafrost because it cannot be seen nor felt until it is truly felt, like the concept of a hole in the ozone layer.

[Arianna, would you take a tour of the building?]

'Where is it that we manufacture weapons?'

$ President, I was not made aware we had signed any military contracts. $

[We have a whole standing army, of which I am General, Vice President. However that bewilderment of yours is not at all bewildering and is indeed quite ripe with reason. We don't say the weapons are made by the company, neither is where we make them in this building.]

$ President, you're embarrassing me. We don't say new in this building. $

[Indeed, there is nothing in that new of yours, I tell everyone, that isn't old. So you were recensing on if we had had anything novel to show this daughter of mine.]

$ Indeed, yes. $

'This is not where the weapons are made.'

Nod from both.

'Can I leave?'

First it was hundreds looking up at the forehead of the miniature authority crossing the room, now it is the eyes that are usually filled with dollar signs, the eyes of the Vice President, that are seeking an escape route from their orbits, while she seeks a detour that ultimately guarantees the retention of myself in the building for longer. Mother's face is static, in emotion, and the blackness of a turned off full wall cinema screen in color.

It's a happy memory because I had the hindsight to ask 'Can I leave?'. For some reason I stuck around for the rest of the tour and I only saw a quarter of the armory warehouse. I was meant for this.

The class of the commons, into which I'll quietly induct her somewhere in the cafeteria, whereverupon there is an opening, formalities forsaken, tend to baulk in collective at "strenuous lives" (per some President) lifted to some apex or another of unattained greatness indeed inhuman, but the apparent magnitude lures, snares, and perhaps even begins to skin the no-longer-so-esteemed quack and her conceptual bricolage grabbed having been delicately transfered to "word clould" via online tool from the Xerox (which result, I am told by Ari, remains unperturbed in her briefcase so long as she retains the resolve not to crumble up the sum of her vision lying somewhere within the syzygy arrangeable from "standards compliance" and "disruption" in the diligently-dithered greyscale, all therein being the things she wishes to express in everyday life, like she tells me when I question her), lest she try to struggle against her own hunter's net laid down well beneath the canopy for which she strives. I am not partial, as it stands, to the coffee here available, for the idea of vaguely scatological stains wrought upon the angel-white China-silk of her solely or even thence solipsistically (thus) polyester top echoing oncoming light to blind me wheresoever my vision crosses it appeals more to me — and these displeased, difficult eyes I cross and uncross from boredom, another syzygy still — than in imbibing the conversation-starter gunk of which I am, albeit in no measure like tea qua Camellia sinensis, perpetually fond, although this inequality of possible stimuli concerns less a hypothetical set of my ordinary proclivities than it does my oily, caked-on ire at her every turn and figure of speech, no better than the most Microsoft-mediated of unillustrious bar charts skewed in scale to exaggerate what is, in fact, a near-sameness, and indeed it is the shame of the idea of joining a coffee-toss scatterplot that restrains my impulse, returns my glances a-darting to indistinct unions of my eyes and Ari's. Acceptable, reckonable is this.

The binding restraining my chest seemingly stiffens as I assume would a prim Victorian lady's bosom with the realization that, per a freshly-wound pocketwatch fetched from the recesses of one of a litany of Matryoshka-pile overcoats (imported as much as and for as much as one might do to lay hands on the passingly-mentioned dolls, when an authentic craft, in those antiquated days), the more-and-more demystified experience of a said-to-be spellbinding opera in the fabled theater at Bayreuth had only elapsed to its halfway, but I know the confines must not be adjusted lest suspicion be roused in her of either my outward-projected, incongruent, and overtly pragmatist confusion of the sexes or a roused loin within the inverse-Pygmalion which is the male self Ari knows not to be me, dressed ostentatiously as ever, aurum cuffs, overdescribably-embedded embroidery I'm sure there is no time for in swift descriptions of deeds of chivalrous dykes with their Marx penchants, opulent palace intrigues, and taboo interwishes (interwishes here being a term I sometimes use in private correspondence for the things Ari and I do agree are or would be efficacious for furthering our prerogative or for the whole of reality), so I stay still. I reveal a rather minuscule work-phone, SIMs swappable so I may retain one for my obscure Providence area code for more intimate, candlelit messaging and another for "graver" matters involving finance and the Transnationals with whom Ari and I first became entangled during my days at Red Swan Academy as they searched (as it goes on to this day) for a classmate of mine and Rico's, accused of having been a murderess of a mixed bag of Boston old-money ilk, though the girl insisted privately she was only in it to ruin the lives of those who ruined hers, my purpose being to send taciturn messages to Window, who even now carries a pager, to the cutting-edge effect of sounding an alarm that the quack's choice must soon be finalized someplace Mala cannot see, and I ensure that Allegra is carbon-copied on the matter however quickly the speed of light allows her to receive the message, no matter how gravely the habits of Bathys Augustenburg, haphazard appointer of harem women as stand-in legal guardians to her estanged daughter, continue to confound me every night I fall asleep having interacted with one of her beloved sycophant-jesteresses. On the other hand — one could call it the hand I use to clasp the knife in such uncertain times as this one — I haven't the leisure to wantonly dispatch subordinates, for I am a hard-working American citizen (Korean and French at times as well, but really of the world), and I know it well that the diligent Statesian not unlike I try to be does not, like Bathys Augustenburg, have ties going back to or beyond Napoleonic times; accordingly, I am not of bread and circuses, nor am I, like certain others who more formally headed the state, of hardtack and minstrelsy, so I will propose to the contrary that I am the sort of American who, in opposition (or maybe, in more honest truth, apposition) to the myriad cadet branches of those Alaries who value murder in their deepest-diving precepts yet will not hesitate to stand against somehow more senseless en masse killing, is of cornbread (in terms of sustenance, for it is cosmopolitan, appealing to both to Louisiana's eloquent Francophiles — forgive my anachronism — and Pennsylvania's smooth-talking Anglophiles) and jazz (in terms of entertainment, even if the artform itself has seen an unjust cloistering at the hands of art-world entities to a place of excessive reverence and classicality I cannot quite attribute to it, although it, in my eyes, is still the most American mode of live entertainment), and I pose this as a question for the remainder of the table, feeling somewhat bold.

I myself, inquiring: "Say, I have a question for the table. Choosing from either the phrase hardtack and minstrelsy or my own kind competitor, cornbread and jazz, which of the two would each of you say is America's equivalent to the rather European idea of bread and circuses?"

Window: "A preposterous conversation starter you've got there." Had she had a drink or two beforehand, that would surely enhance the acceptability of responding, but to my surprise, it is, verily, no issue at all, for she continues, "That said, I'm torn, Res. You've prefigured minstrelsy and jazz both as authoritative forms that'd need some sort of boss to implement, and I think it's abundantly clear to you as to me that President Augustenburg's policy of Regency and Reconstruction" — the same Bathys Augustenburg, I and barely anyone else knew, as the immortal claiming the Sicilian throne-chairwomanship today — "drove newly-outlawed minstrelsy underground." She is correct in her history as usual. "What shocks me more, though, is that you aim for jazz, famed for so little institutional support and, once, its countercultural element. What are you getting at here?"

Ari, intercepting my response to put her own in its place, swapping out the gendering of any pronominals as she must do in public to maintain our facade: "Equally preposterous, Window. Darling here has assumed rightly that crude Americans, after President Jackson's example, entertain themselves, and drastically at that, and his analysis is more than enough to speak genuine volumes. When the suburbs are paved over and Motor Town rusts, is there anything better to indulge than the creation of an absence of no harm, harm not done? Myself will attribute hardtack and minstrelsy to the weedy spawn of Jamestown."

Me, diverting the discussion, the idea being to incense Mala with a falsehood wherein I bury a kernel of truth: "Perhaps I must concede, then, that Andrew Jackson was quite clever to imagine a world without television by living in it so thoroughly, displacing so many so indiscriminately and in such haste, and likewise it seems wholly possible I must commend that man for his electoral skill in recognition of his clever reformism. Maybe his slaves were even subject to his otherwise-unseen kindness."

Mala, ensnared, unable to see the intention behind my apparent folly: "All my respect for you just vanished like a mirage in the desert."

Me: "I'll leave it up to my audience to assign truth-value to my remarks."

Mala, no longer putting on an equally American spectacle of vibrating on false pretenses in her chair, allowing her Swedish meatballs to grow tepid: "Ah, I see." The quack remains silent, and Window seems not to know how to nudge us back toward our topic, not by any means. I resume deliberations.

Withholding no interspersed breaths which tend to punctuate the deed of dining both in this moment now and under conditions more ordinary than the ethos heat-transfering herein, I, plate before me and lined by a few meager buffet pickings chosen based not at all on their appeal to my unsophisticated, bucolic-bordering-rustic palette, but rather on what I'd conceive of as most agreeable to the hard-to-please parvoturba (meaning literally small crowd and referring, in my parlance, to any gathering which, despite ostensible smallness-fewness and a seeming intimacy of its privy parties, still panders to base concerns not unlike those of a riotous mob thirsting for not just any killing, but a random killing) Ari and I address and partly comprise, its abarticulamenta in a state of ache, an ache longstanding and well beyond reason's address, one I feel in my joints, sleep beckoning. Our quite separate hotel bookings bounce around, masticating in mind in lack of a handy digestif to ease the rumbling of the taxicabs none of us have yet bothered to take aiming for each thithers, and it occurs to me that I miss my Rhode Island studio apartment, in particular the slight sag exhibited by the spring-spiked mattress on which I would sometimes sleep in lieu of the futon to which I was usually accustomed might I be reminded of how much pride, how much impiousness, still lurks within me from my days trafficking weaponized psychedelics, and thereby wish to remind myself how auspicious it was that I could afford not only to fun my effort, but to rest generously — Ari, dear as she is, never sleeps a sound night, plagued by revisions of her captivity which played out until she was eighteen and I roamed free during, feudally untethered, an aimless radical producing no value except insofar as I could work towards her freedom and, secondarily, that of the whole world, an aim I have not yet seen come to real (or false) fruition. At some times my unfeminine, attractively weedy Ari read in that Navashino guest-crypt, indeed most often at precarious or "dead" hours, of a great many of those gaunt Russian tales whose pallid hopes lay themselves down just to take godly glances up, though at times the effect fell flat in light of her knowledge of the project of reputedly "civilizing" Siberia even given how tantalizing to her it was that the envious, blood-sucking men with whom she shared no blood still so often tried and just as often failed to confiscate such great Imperial Russian works from her (despite her prodigy in dueling to the death), while at others she whispered fluent works of heterodox hermeneutics on her ever-dear copy of the Holy Quran into microcassette recorders in struggles to justify (as many long-lived beings have put forth effort towards) the long-standing, unquestioned attestation that Muhammad — PBUH, my Ari will always add, furthermore preceding his name with Prophet — had lived and died his whole life an unrepentant male never addressed and solved his manhood as is expected and arguably obligatory among great immortals, reciting from memory in perfect eloquence despite her quiet-keeping rasp she enacted for Navashino men did not much like the sound of Arabic even being convinced the girl Ari, my girl today and for so long prior, could not read it nor did it seem possible anyone else for that matter ("damn it all to Hell"), resulting in exegetical gestures comported in manners inconceivable to the scholarly circles intersecting in the Golden Age long prior, rhetorical graces I cannot repeat from memory for their real meaning does elude me in the absence of a Muslim upbringing, yet no matter what Ari, teenaged and restless, read, she would not rest a single night and does not whatoever now, aged twenty and at my side whenever she can be and I can correspond with a kind vice versa, and it pains me so greatly in my wishes I could afford her torment to the quack, who I'm sure dreams noctu of her apotheosis into some gnarled, twisted sort of tian, resting on her back as do all the unrepentant scoundrels of this dead land. To this fraud I, shooing clueless competitor Mala out again, reiterate my offer: either she may relegate herself to corporate nothingness, filling only one proverbial microcassette with self-aggrandizing diaristics for the rest of her life, or she may die an antihero in the televised anticlimax I proposed in opposition-apposition, unity with the whole, a Russian sky-glance, which would carry with it book after book of legend writing what could have been yet was not: she whispers to me after a prolonged glance at her smartphone that, for the sake of her schedule (i.e. time), the latter would be easier to accommodate given her existing plans. The date conveniently coincides with the Central Siberian Conference's regular meeting, meaning no trouble for me, Ari, Window, or anyone else scheduled to be present. Indeed Window will, shortly thereafter, board a flight back to Boston to syndicate her talk show and all her pertinent hyperbolic antics — surely the ripples compressed through every life the quack has touched don't bother her if my smooth psyche is any fair signal. Ari nods, and Mala receives the signal to reenter. My dear darling's captivity may be divorced from this day by two years, but it will be the public eye's vigil which imprisons us most direly, most suffocatingly, never ending.