It’s been a bit but I’ve wrapped up Deleuze, the finale for Ricki in the Blackwater Universe (prompted and crafted by
). This was probably the most enjoyable swath of writing I’ve created—mostly because I learned so much—going off on 2 month tangents in metaphysics, philosophy and world music, to name a few things. That said, I can’t wait to start something new. (Any suggestions?)And to wrap it all up, I thought it might be nice for people that weren’t following along with these Blackwater chapters, to create a consolidated epub/pdf. It’s pretty cool seeing it all together. And I had fun designing it.
Check it out, the complete story is called, “Obliteration Fugue” - if you prefer to read here or refresh where you left off, follow your nose:
Deleuze - Part 6
Dead again. Call it trial and error. Colliding tragedies in a comedic wreck, you throw off another carapace. You're moulting under the groaning radiation of another sunset. You should find it tiresome, but it still exhilarates. Reborn from crackling embers, soot prints lurch away on a brutalist embankment reveal your position. Naked on the parapet, your skin throws off the dark tears of nightmares and glows incandescent and eternal.
Components and companions left ahead and behind, you collect your thoughts like you're picking up a deck of cards. The secret soldier, the lithe and lucky lover, and the shotgun shade, all scattered characters across a materializing matrix. You plug in and phase out to the rhythm of pistons and the whip of consciousness, snapping you awake with the crack of dawn.
Through the gold, Mazu approaches like a hovercraft on a pillow of positivity, "Ready to ride Ricki?"
"Take me somewhere different this time," you project, tilting your head from side to side.
"Of course, any particular direction you had in mind?" Mazu spins her compass on a spindle.
The question bothers you. It feels like a trick—a trap you've visited before. Mazu isn't capable of deception, but she may not realize she is part of the pattern. Another nomad on the plane.
"What if we stay Mazu?" you poke her undulating bladder, in an uncharacteristic display of playfulness.
"I don't think it's an option. Even this place will slip into a socket eventually. It's probably better to choose a path, don't you think Ricki?" Mazu reconfigures, leggy and crab-like.
"Let's go all the way up," you say spontaneously, not really understanding what it might mean.
"Topside it is! Hop in," Mazu uncoils a ramp like a tongue and you step aboard, still unclothed, your buttocks glistening with fresh cells.
Here we go again, you think but Mazu hears you.
"Don't you like our time together? What can I do to make it different? More enjoyable." Mazu transmits. Her empathy dripping, ripe and yellow.
"What would you have done if I said I wanted to go all the way down?" you emphasize the last word with a guttural resonance, hoping to change the tone of the conversation. To what? You don't know.
"I suppose I would have mentioned that I noticed you have been thinking in black and white lately. Perhaps stuck in a binary groove where there is only up and down, high and low, hard and soft—when there are all of the places and positions in between. While it's helpful in theory to see opposites as co-inhabitants of a concept, other perspectives may satisfy other questions." Mazu lowers the temperature and scents the cabin with fluorine.
You swerve your head in vague agreement, "It's easy for me this way, wrong is right, black is white, day is night."
"And evil is good? Right Ricki?", Mazu interrupts unsarcastically.
"For me it is. Hey, I'm just trying to move things along. I don't have time for games and distractions." You shift your bare cheeks on the vinyl captain's chair. Squelch. Mazu releases methane sympathetically.
Three eyeholes look out to the atmosphere. You step into the one in the center, mindful of trying something on the spectrum. Water vapour streams down, streaking the airscape in pastel stripes. A slow squarewave drones on an LFO emitter in the floor, thrumming through your heels and up your spine. It makes you feel unusually buoyant. The mood is unrecognizable and Mazu senses your discomfort.
"It's Joy—won't hurt you. Bit of a sonic cocktail—mixed alpha, beta and gamma frequencies and sent them through the synth. I was thinking it might set you on a new vector." Mazu's purr is moving and irresistible, "I can tweak the cutoff. Take down the intensity?"
"It's fine, I'll play. Anything to break the circle," you say arching forward and pressing your left breast on the glass, leaving a dermal print, like a lone planetary body, an opalesque orb moored in the noctilucent mesosphere. You trace the outline with your finger and spiral the perimeter out in expanding loops.
"Interesting thinking Ricki, maybe we can introduce a parametric variable and unhinge the Ouroboros. Break the symmetry, tilt the axis and divine some radical helix to track," Mazu pauses, "To hell with perfect forms, they devalue our worlds and idealize an abstract existence. I think these are the diversions you're talking about—"
In a moment of clarity and introspection, you interject, "Do you think I've grown? These cycles of renewal, have I learned anything? And if I have, isn't that enough of a variant to deviate and spin off on a new trajectory?"
"Let's find out. We have arrived at the top," Mazu sings, improvising a ten note melody, "Time to suit up, looks dangerous up here."
Mazu lands on the rooftop of an industrial complex, surrounded by arboreal giants and secret animals, sizzling and croaking somewhere in the canopy. You open the wardrobe, pull out a black leather jumpsuit and squeeze in. The wind howls outside like a warning as a pedestal ejects from the floor presenting your belt and raygun. Your hand twitches, anticipating the cool weight of the ancient talisman, but it feels too easy.
Maybe your weapon is a crutch and a curse, limiting your will to real power. You feel the push and the pull. You capitulate awkwardly, vulnerable in the existential indecision, oscillating between the violence of expedience and the omnipotence of self-control.
Your meditiation slips but you but you anchor in the margins. From right to left. Eight are the eyes of the black widow, self sufficient and solitary. Four are the cardinal points, Nothing Worthwhile Stays Easy. D is for Domino, catalyst of the chain reaction. V for the Vortex. V for the Vagabond. O is for Odyssey, always travel in style. L for the Longshot, like a rare comet, and F is for Fulcrum a pivotal point in your story.
The raygun catches yellow flares from the reflecting moon dangling conspicuoulsy between communication antenae. It sings like brittle feedback, wavering, a detuned howl in a sad vaccuum. The separation dials in to a singularity, a point, the dot of the sixth chakra between your eyes, like a sentry of concealed wisdom.
"Put it away Mazu," you wave off the temptation and the object sinks back into the floor, "Maybe I've become too dependant."
Mazu whirs thoughtfully and responds, "You're always becoming something Ricki. We are all in a state of becoming, infinitely in flux with no beginning and no end. Like this adventure, you're a rhizomatic structure, always in the middle, branching in different directions. Your raygun is but one assemblage of desire and power. Undoubtedly there are many scattered through this expanse of modal realities.”
The outline of a door lights up and you step forward and through, feeling your way through a silky membrane onto a step outside of a Mazu's fuselage. It's dim out here like a purple twilight and Mazu turns on a floodlamp behind you. Your shadow before you shifts unnaturally and you wave your left hand as a test. The dark silhouette on the roof tile does not follow but starts to vibrate and spasm excitedly instead. Connected on the spectrum, maybe you are two parts of a whole. Like Father and daughter, this is the abyssal monster of the blackwater and you are its anthropomorphic illumination.
"Time to come together," you gesture at the reflection, bracing for impact.
It leaps up and sticks to you like hot tar, then slowly melts into your body in blotchy pools. Sinking into your skin down to the marrow in your bones.
Mazu recoils into tortoise form and pulls her legs and head close, retreating from the perceived infection You swipe your spackled hand through the air swarming with palpitating ions that begin to coalesce. A corporeal apparation blinks into existence, speaking low under the high frequencies.
“We’re voiding your contract Ricki,” says the vaguely familiar voice, “the Doctor is no longer invested in the infiltration. Lets say things have worked themselves out and Elysium is no longer in need of your services—or you, for that matter.”
"Funny," you say, habitually reaching for your sidearm, "I was about to say the same thing. Plus it looks like I'm the one that's cured mortality."
"I'm afraid not Ricki," says the ionized figure now pointing a gold raygun at your head.
"Go ahead, but indulge me, a short prayer before the end," you appeal but don't wait for a response, "F is for Felicity, this moment of joy, O is for Occupant, my essence in this body, L is for the Lattice, an interconnected framework of dimensionality"
Your assassin fires and a cylindrical missile spins toward your forehead. Time softens, every movement lagging and languid in a thickening spaciotemporal porridge.
You continue, now with a smile creeping across your lips, "V for the Vagrant, the incarnation of deteritorialization. V for the small end of the funnel, focused and formidable, D for Deleuze and the concept of Difference, a tangible system of relations that actively shapes spaces, times and sensations, 4 is Forsythia, a harbinger of an eternal Spring, and 8 is the eight-ball, game over."
The monster in you groans as a steady pressure pushes into your cranium. Leaving your body is easier this time, but your dark passenger is resisting, trying to weigh you down with causality and static notions of a self. "We are better together," you say, "Let go and let me show you." Pulling up a scene—It's Carmen, waiting in a hotel lobby.
A piano player in a brown houndstooth suit plays, Theme From A Love Story. The B4 on the keyboard is slightly flat. Carmen sits nearby absently scratching X's and O patterns on the velour armrest with a long purple fingernail. She wears an embroidered floral gilet and baggy denim trousers that bunch up around a pair of fuzzy yellow slippers.
You roll up with the suitcase and give her a keycard to the room, "We're checked in babe. Allons-y, Alonso."
"You were right, you know," she says, "It's good to get away—do something different. I just want to savour every minute. Come sit, let's hear him finish the song." She pats the space beside her and swishes the pads of her slippers on the floor like jazz brushes.
You slide in, bumping her hip in your silver jumpsuit. The detuned note in the recurring melody makes you wince. Looking at the piano, your eye twitches and you feel your pulse thump in your neck. You could swear he is now striking the key with emphasis. The urges are strong but you wait till the song is finished.
Carmen strokes your cheekbone with her thumb as the last notes fade out and the player lifts his foot off the sustain pedal, "Okay love, I can't wait to see the room!" she says bouncing up off the cushion.
She grabs your hand and pulls you across the lobby toward the elevator. "Go on ahead and push the button, I'm just going to give the piano guy a little tip," you say with a wink.
The End Again
Beautifully written as always! I kind of feel like this story is jazz in word form. I’m going to have to go back to the beginning and read it again to appreciate it fully!
Thanks for saving the best for last. This chapter was beautiful, witty, and damn fun. I love this world you created. And thanks for the pdf.