The Human Lip Room

Me and Double-Rice are gliding through the center of the city, down automated sidewalks surrounded by the eardrum ringing machinery that pairs everything around us to its lowest common denominator: movement. We’re high on Scopolamine-Toast, and the edges have a fuzzy dried egg-yolk feeling like finding oneself in a dream based on a Chemical Brothers song after too many donuts. ‘Dig Your Own Hole and keep the spade’ say the wise one’s; that way nobody can ever find out where you went, cause you’ve hidden the only real clue. The moles might know, but they never talk, and they’re mouths are always filled with dirt anyway, so it’s impossible to translate it back into a known tongue, especially when the fee is a mud-spit in the eye. Some knowledge is just not worth having; and fuzzy sight, even temporarily, is too great a risk for the lone, unaccompanied, Swat, down here in the Chip.

Double-Rice is flying on Toast-induced inspiration today, and says that he can find the Human Lip Room, and steal the only evidence of our official existence from the Master-Cylinder—his pet name for the place otherwise known as “P-P;” ‘Paranoid Palace, in the colloquial, where information is sifted like sand from molecular scraps of diamond, down to the fine-point of a single strand, as distinctive as a benzene ring or a fingerprint. The ‘Room,’ is in one apartment, on one gigantic floor of one high-rise tower in a single, tremendous, housing project—each building an exact duplicate of the one adjacent to it— in a city where such structures are million-fold and growing. We check out Clinton-Projects, Cheney-Houses, and the Bush Bastion and myriad other redoubts—even the Obama-Sphere, the luxury towers that stretch out over the river like an arcing prism seen through tinted-glass. Dead presidents all of them, whose names are as meaningless to us, as the history books from which they sprang disfigured, by our complete indifference.

The world is as opaque as we are, and nobody bothers to give their name anymore—just a few letters, a moniker, a fragment of a self, like crumbs from a much larger but indistinct bread-loaf, tossed under a moving lectric-monkey-bus for already distracted arthritic pigeons;  and, our very instincts could get us ground-round, underneath like unsuspecting birds. In fact, I dream-worlded that very same scenario, several nights past, when I drove on a coastal road, unchanged since Five-Boroughs-Days, covered with dirty white Seagulls, some still sleepy from long flight across the garbage-lands, and soon began hearing the crunching of bones under tires, and blood squirts, minced bodies and feathers flying in frenzied disorientation. I woke up swearing off chicken and anything else wish-boned, or beaked. Such promises last only as long as stingy dream-memory stays awake however, and I am soon grinding down winglets with the rhythmic pulsations of Solar-automated teeth in time for the Toast and its power to revive dulled appetites, as we make fruitless inquiries into rumors about the Room.

But this is exactly where Double Rice shines, because he is a master at extracting information from even the most media-closed, White-housing, sidewalk-minder, and can see inside the superficial indifference of virtually all  Mr-Limped-lipped, fish-mouths, in his quest for the HLR—our Grail, our Jack Kennedy Head-Shot, our hidden Osama. Still, bad shrimp-info-tune-masters White-House us down dead end corridors and Nixon-Says, Cul-De-Sacs that hold little interest and divert us from the Arabian-Oil-scent of our fabled Room. Double Rice is feeling the effects of the Toast, and he’s going into that mythic 1967-trance that brings visions, sweet fables and, pre-insight blow-back into the thought-chamber, like unwanted flies accompanying a Blue-Morphis larvae into the silkworm shed—in plain-headline, the destructive and the dazzling, which are both equally useless here.

“Listen Keds—he always calls me that because of my sneaker-tread-pattern arm-tattoo—these motherfuckers are trying to White-House us onto the Bylines; I can sense the Lip Room man, the Toast is laying it all out in front of me like Japanese-seaweed-trail. It’s definitely a-or b block, Lyndon-Johnson-Houses.”

“Wait a minute, D-Rice, the last time, you were Toasted and we went there we got our fucking chins greased, compliments Fiora-Guint’s, Kelly boys. Those guys are mean, Like Asian Hornet nasty—let’s vet this info first before we go down like Yellow-Cake theory.”

“I aint trying to Yellow-Cake you man—“

“Not you, them, the guys you just spoke to—“

“Well I didn’t listen to what they said, Keds, I fucking Seymour Hersh’d it man, like between the lines. See those guys are doing Lip Service for the HLR man, they turd for the cylinder.”

“I’m not following you, here, they lay trail for these guys?”

“No, they run messages, like e-com buffers—back and forth in circular ‘lectro-monkey bus routes through the Chip. They’re krill man, small fish, so the Cylinder uses them to lay temp-trail. That way, there’s no chip-scan, no follow-up, no infra-red.”

“Are you sure that they aren’t just Yellow-Caking you, like Nixoning their real Bylines so that you can’t get a scan on them?”

“They might be, but those fish gave away the stink man, they said, “no, there ain’t nothing infra-red scannable here, man, like not even night vision—I mean, if they didn’t know anything, how could they be so fucking sure?”

“Maybe they’re just covering for the Jackson Five or the Vanilla Fudge; the gangs out here are thicker than ad-pop-drones over a co-opt zone. I mean, we don’t know who they’re laying trail for—they might just be turding for some castle-throne oz-wiz, behind a red curtain. I don’t want my chin greased over some skittles-shit.”

“This isn’t skittles man, this is Big-Mac, protein, like Basra-oil-field—we just hooked into the cy-line man, the cylinder is in my drone-scan. All I need is the go-ahead.”

I wasn’t entirely convinced, as I was still filmy with Toast and strutting the pudding just like Big Rice; but he was on his Haight-Ashbury, and you couldn’t talk him out of it—so why try? He had always had a gift for smelling seaweed trail if it started getting rot-fish, and nobody was better at Shockanawe; and, of course, he could stealth-fuck anybody in a fight, so it was at least worth a run down the trail, scannable or not.

But luck isn’t drone-scanning us too well so far, and I tell Double Rice that his Haight-Ashbury Owsley might be more like desert toad-lick. Well D-Rice doesn’t like that analogy much, and he asks me when I last had a hunch that lead anywhere other than turd trail. Hurtful words, but largely true; and, as we cut infra-red towards Lyndon-Johnson, and the Kelly-Boys, we know that we have to scan-right or lose the trail and get chinned bad. We take auto-walks, and monkey-busses, down night-lit drone-ways amidst silver and sparkle-clad chip-grazers and squeegee-lopers. There are Swats and other walk-minders and intervention-scabs nightsticking the margins, but we stay on the trail and scan straight, insuring that we won’t stick out like disaster-headlines.

The Lyndon Johnson Houses, a-block, rise up like Swats chasing Osama, from the blue-dust haze of night-lit, and we make towards the larger stack high-rises, by the lectric-plant that stands guard over the multi-stacks. The  high-rises are rowed out like wind-turbines in a power-net zone, and so close together that one can scan one’s neighbor in the next building simply by wagging tongue through an open window. In double a, one-McNamara, we traverse steps and clear-tube, lifts across an arrangement of floors and levels that remind me of a dream-worlded tower, with floor-layers as thin as poker-deck cards and intersecting stairways made from recycled food-can metal. This isn’t so far from the headline truth as the levels in the high rise, are too complex for any simple scanning, and require night-vision concentration to infra-red the right doorways.

After a turd-trail of missteps and White-Housed leads, we end up on roof of high-rise D-a-1, Mcnamara, scanning the whole of the a and b sections of the Lyndon Johnson houses and the shadowy recesses of the lectric-plant, which casts its dark silhouette over every rooftop within short-drone distance from our perch. There is a sound from below the roof, on the old-school-style stairwell, and it starts to click more insistently. “Definitely some stink-fish trotting in to Osama-grab us,” says Double Rice, as the syncopated sneaker dance gets within scan-range of the doorway, and then seems to stop for a second. “Why’s he hesitating?” I whisper to Double Rice. “I don’t know, but we better shokinawe this stink-fish before he stealth scans us out of hide-n-dark.” “I’m too Haight-Ashbury’d from the Toast to be Chasing Osama in this haze man, I’m strutting the pudding big time,” I reply. But D-Rice is concentrating on that door, waiting for the fish to trail-scan us into night-vis, so that he can make first stealth run at us.

“Watch out for this Kelly-Boy fish-stink motherfucker, Double-Rice yells, as the door flies open and two fish-turds, wearing white-man pants and loafers, come running at us, old-school, like they just knew already that they weren’t going to waste time stealth-droning us. “We’re Osmond Brothers,” they scream, like official ID papers flickering through Magneto-scan filters at a Swat-stop, as they raise arms in Shockinawe style old-school fist-punch. Double Rice is on trail and scans first with a direct hit onto the larger Osmond, while I just see an elongated arm, reaching out for me across a dark scar of moon-cover-cloud, like intervening therapy hands, trying to Haldol my screen into dream-world stasis. I am shockinawed instead, to the same general effect, and leave my scan-screen entirely undefended and useless, as I recoil from the blow, only half-hallucinated across helmet-bow of my head.

At first, I seem to awaken into a discrete blackness, where shrimp-shaped enema bags, hang from free-floating tree-limbs, touting the benefits of tower-collapse-darkness clouds. I try to interpret the banging and scraping sounds filtering through the miasma into Morse code, but without any measurable success; and, I am soon plummeted into Claymation dream world. Here, is an entirely different screen-scan, and I don’t have a GPS-chip on how to read it, but something steps in to translate across the ontological barrier.

The fruits are gathered into a pile with some of their vegetable friends. There is Banana, and Apple, Orange, Pear and Grapefruit—the latter, is the largest in the bunch. Then there is Tomato and Zucchini, who is quite green I might add; and finally, a small but boisterous Habanero Pepper. They are all quite handsome, and color coordinated. Each has a pair of Claymation lips, and when they are surprised or upset, the lips make an O, and then fold back into a grimace before retracting to their original unscannable state. Almost immediately, Tomato springs a leak, and starts juicing-out with red-fountain of seed-water. Most of it gets on Banana, whose yellow lips, make the anticipated O and then grimace deeply. He is not happy. If Tomato juices out completely, Banana will be left carrying the corpse like an Osama-skin trophy, and none of the other fruits will offer to help. This is unacceptable. But Habanero-Pepper has an idea. He communicates it in a special way that doesn’t translate from Claymation into my scan-app, so even in dreamthink I can’t convey; but it doesn’t matter, as a sunstream of orange light begins suturing up Tomato’s leak-hole, with its capsicum lectric’ bandage. Everyone is happy for the moment, except Banana, whose thick yellow hide is covered in red juice, and he keeps going into an O grimace before finally settling back into unscannable default position. There seems to be a message here, but I don’t quite understand what it is, as I am simultaneously being regaled with a story about a five-headed creature with articulable digits who comes around periodically to ruthlessly snatch a piece of fruit, before replacing it with another. They call it Hand, and I am told that his Osama-Grabs are sudden and without mercy. Only Tomato has avoided the wrath of Hand, up to this point; perhaps, as Banana, who is a third round replacement fruit, speculates, because Hand doesn’t like Tomato’s. The whole pile of fruit and vegetable friends begin laughing, as if this is the funniest thing that they have ever heard, and their mouths make O shapes and grimaces that pirouette in ways that seem to run up against the very boundaries of what is physically conceivable for a Claymation mouth-lip. I am entranced by these gymnastics, the way they break new ground and change my previous ideas regarding what fruit and vegetable movements are possible. And then, the entire cycle begins again, with leaks and juices and sunrays of suturing capsicum before the inevitable parade of grimace-acrobatics; because there is no past and no future, as everything in the world of fruit-and-vegetable friends is a rerun, a circle of alternating O’s and grimaces that chases, and then eats its own tail through eternity like an oroboris. Soon, my own mouth becomes an unscannable O, as I feel myself being rapidly pulled towards the surface of the more comprehensible world I had left minutes before in the wake of the Osmond Blow, also delivered by a hand.

“Keds, Keds, wake your Shockinawed ass up” yells Double Rice, in a way that barely hides his fear that I might be out for a longer dream-ride than anticipated. “C’mon Man, snap back into infra-red scan, we gotta get out of here—wake up!” he tells me, as I come out of my blank-scan haze. “I had the weirdest fucking dream-vis,” “We don’t have time right now—the rest of those Turd-punking Osmond Brothers are going to swarm in here, any minute, like a bunch of pissed-off South-American Giant hornets, and we gotta stealth-scan off this rooftop, before we get Osama-grabbed.

I can still feel the pull of the Toast, as I Pudding-Strut down the stairwell, with Double Rice, grateful to have friends who can shockinawe gang-turders before they can do it to us first. Once outside, after the interminable drop through the tube-lift, we head towards the corner of McNamara section, in the direction of Rusk, where the Kelly Boys have been known to keep their main scan-station. “Slow down D-Rice, I’m getting winded.” I say, in a gasp. “You are seriously Toasted,” says double Rice, with just a hint of envy, over the fact that I might be Strutting the Pudding a little more heavily than he is We find a spot to rest, in an alleyway, between a delivery door, and an unused lectric’ monkey-bus stand. “Where are we?” I ask. “In the alley between McNamara section and Rusk section.” “What are we doing in Rusk?” “Nothing, but we have to scan through Rusk in order to get to Bundy.” “What’s in Bundy?” “What do you think?” Oh, let me guess,” I say sarcastically, but Double Rice is already there, and he’s throwing out the punch-line like a Swat net over a suspect. “The HLR is in Bundy section man—that’s where the master cylinder is; the machinery and we can get there and erase ourselves from every screen and drone scan on the green-map, if we can Yellow-Cake the security apps.” This news perks me up, quite a bit, as Double Rice sounds very sure of his infoscans; and when Double Rice is this confident, he’s usually right on the trail.

“Where did you get that sneaker-tread tattoo anyway?” asks Double Rice.

“I got it after the Swat-drafts, when they were White-Housing all of those kids from the gridline and the Chip into the Swats, so that they could use them to NSA each other into the scan-maps.”

“What does that have to do with the sneaker tread pattern, I don’t get it?”

“The sneaker tread is just a kind of barcode, identifying me with the Big-Shoe apps, so that if I got drafted I could get scanned back out of the system, and find my way back home to the Chip.”

“Do those Swats even care if you’re marked like that?”

“Not really, but that mark means you’ve already been scanned as part of the Big-Shoe app, and that any attempt to override it is copyright infringement. See, they might fuck with the rest of us and try to Yellowcake their way into master-scanning every Chip Grazer they can find into their app; but they can’t fuck with each other like that.”

“You mean, the cylinder heads, right?” asked Double Rice.

“Exactly,” I said, and then added, “The lot of us might just be a bunch of chip-grazing squeegee-lopers, but even the master scans at the Cylinder heads, have to follow their own guidelines; otherwise, they can’t control the rest of the system.”

“Well, in a couple of hours, once we get to the Human Lip Room, we won’t have to worry about getting scanned, trail-sacked, or stealth-droned again, because we won’t even exist, on that fucking screen-map,” said Double Rice, with an inspiring confidence.

“I hope your right, because those mother-fuckers are always trying to White House us into a corner. It’s getting too Nixonian for me, man. I just want to get off the gridline entirely, and find a place where the screen map doesn’t even exist, and where nobody turds surreptitiously for anybody else’s benefit.”

“Good luck with that,” said Double Rice, in a way that suggested that I should just be happy in achieving even one of those outcomes.

Bundy Section was much different than the other areas that we had passed through. It was darker, and surrounded by two levels of fencing and a large retaining wall that barely concealed a gigantic concrete structure. The surface of this cylinder-like building was festooned with cables, metal-grids and antennae like projections that stuck out from every part of its surface like ornaments from the branches of a tremendous Christmas tree, or quills on a porcupine. This was no ordinary security structure however; it was as massive as an entire a-block of high-rises, had few if any visible windows, and was obviously designed to be unscannable. This Leviathan was its own master- map, and connected to everything else in only one direction: Receiving. If we could get in, we could NSA them, before they did it to us. Double Rice’s information was great as usual, and we hatched a plan for hacking the beast, that finally tapped my one and only stealth-talent—an innate gift for re-orienting cell-phone scans so that they reflected whatever app or pattern was necessary to fool the lab-hacks and ‘dummy-trail’ the mole-netters into map-scan oblivion. If we were caught, the Swats and Intervention-therapists, would lectric’ Haldol us into permanent incubator-status, or worse. And, I certainly didn’t want to get anywhere near that particular possibility.

Double Rice slid between the fence grates first, using his thermal-scan-proof hazmat suit that he had bought off one of the Jackson Five during a long since forgotten gang-war peace-negotiation. The jacket kept our presence from being noticed, and provided cover from the nettle like lectric’ fence barbs, as well as the robo-parasites, that waited in tiny embedded cylinder-heads to be injected directly into the flesh of anyone unlucky enough to graze the spiky surfaces that ran the entire length of the outer security barrier.

The second layer of fencing was much the same, but included an almost primitive exoskeleton of carefully arranged Punji-spikes, that threatened to Osama-grab you as irrevocably as any lectric’ nightstick swinging Swat on a Shockinawe rampage. You could tell that Double Rice was really excited, he kept making references to Basra Oilfields, and became quite obsessive about our infra-red scans. We were definitely applying ourselves to our work now, HoChiMinhing it a little bit, to turd-trail the lab hacks just in case we were unwittingly scanned.

But it was the retaining wall, which surrounded the Leviathan that posed the greatest challenge. It was covered with small nodes that resembled close up image-scans of the sweat pores on a grown man’s hand. Setting off any one of these ‘black-hole’ alarms could activate the master scanner, and result in a guaranteed stealth-grab, the outcome of which would lead to an unthinkable end, and one that we were not anxious to ponder. I put my cell-hacking capability to the test, and began dialing in the codes that would confuse the hacks, and put the rest of the system onto a turd-trail leading away from our intended itinerary. The remaining nodes could be fooled by old-schooling the still used insect-code, which alluded to frequent Cicada-swarm events that were known to disable the most complex anti-hack systems from time to time. It was this weakness in the system for electronic sensory overload that would allow us to NSA the cyphers from the trunk and roots of the master cylinder, thus enabling our stealth-shockinawe to effectively erase all records, bar codes and scans alluding to our existence. We would, in plain-headlines, be unpersoned from the system, and immune to hypothetical future stealth Osamagrabs. Or, at least we hoped.

Our traversing of the black-holes in the retaining wall went smoothly, as we HoChiMinhtrailed our way right into a small electronics-scan-chip insertion-door nestled at the base of the Leviathan. Double Rice assured me that, even if hidden cameras were infra-red scanning us, the Insect-Codes had most probably deactivated them, and there would likely be a gaggle of lab-hacks racing around like lectric’ monkey busses trying to find the root of the problem. By that time, however, we would surely have penetrated to the very heart of the beast: the Human Lip Room itself.

The only thing that confused me about all of this was Double Rice’s insistence that the HLR would be located on a non-descript floor of a non-descript high rise. When I asked him about that discrepancy however, he just laughed and said, “that must be the motherfucking bad-shrimp-info-master, Yellow-Caking, from those Kelly-Boy turding punks, that you were so concerned about.” “Yeh, but, if they could turd-trail you about that, what else did they Yellowcake us on?” I asked. “Don’t worry man, they didn’t turd-trail me, we’ve still got good infra-red scan on the HLR, right in the heart of the Paranoid Palace. This is the real hidden Osama, the description of the actual building is just a detail; it’s the location that matters,” said Double Rice—emphasizing the word location. But my doubts had already ceased to be anything more than obligatory caution markers, for at that point, we were HoChiMinhing through the air-purification ducts that lead to the Stealth-GPS’d location that Double Rice had known about all along.

It was a simple white door, with a rather tarnished silver knob. There were no titles or markings on it except for a small schematic drawing of two lines pressed against each other in a uniting kiss; these were the lips.

For a second we both looked at each other cautiously, and with certain trepidation.

“So this is where we ‘dig our own hole, I guess?” I asked, pointedly, and then added: “We just have to make sure the mole-scanners don’t find our spade.”

“You don’t sound so confident man, relax, replied Double Rice. “I got this Jack Kennedy Head Shot already aimed, and we’ll be Oswalding out of the damn book depository in less than two motherfucking minutes; and unlike that guy, our ‘spade’ is never going to get found, because we’re erasing the whole thing from the system, so we can’t get JackRuby’d or Osama-grabbed. It’s like Oswalding without any identifiable Oswald!”

“So we’re really de-Oswalding then right?” I asked, secretly impressed with Double Rice’s knack for uploading old-school 20-C headline-vis, and knowing exactly where to place emphasis for inspiration.

“Call it whatever the fuck you want, Keds, we’re gonna stealth the bar codes with our names on them right out of the cylinder—I call it freedom.”

“Okay, that sounds good, can we just open this fucking door then?”

“Relax,” said Double Rice, and we both laughed nervously, as his hand gracefully turned the knob and the door opened silently like the prelude to a stealth shockinawe.

The room was enormous, and brightly night-lit, although I could not see the source of the illumination. There were rows and rows of shelves spreading out in what appeared to be an infinite array that had no central emanation point, but instead ramified outwardly like an infinitely unfolding antherless flower petal, in CG, with Double Rice and I playing the role of the first  virtual honey bees to actually get inside of it. “I had no idea this was so beautiful,” I remarked, and then fell silent, embarrassed to have expressed such effusive longing for a place which was believed to embody an unnatural, synthetically manipulated evil. Yet, the absence of any nearby walls—the sheer size of it—and its cathedral like presence, seemed to empty me of all emotions except for a strange feeling for which I had no name. Double Rice, quickly supplied one, however: “Communion, man, this is communion.”

A small woman, wearing a rather busy lab-coat covered with tiny diapered teddy-bear motifs, and matching white-boy pants, walked over to us. She was all smiles, and obviously unsuspecting of our subterfuge. My apprehension melted away.

“You must be one of the aphids tending to this flower”, I said, and then noticed that Double Rice was glaring at me.

“Well, that sounds really pretty, but I don’t know what that means”, she said with disarming and unexpected warmth.

“Just an inside joke,” I muttered.

Well, you guys probably want to get acclimated first, we have a lounge and kitchen enclosure off to the right, and you can find some lab-coats in the rack in the closet. And, you can do whatever you want to them, you can affix old-school iron-ons, or download whatever pictures you like. Dr. Patel is the supervisor, but you can call him Andy, we’re very informal here. Oh, I almost forgot, I’m Jesse, Jesse Bear.”

“Bear as in Bear, like the furry animal with sharp claws and big teeth?”

“Yes, spelled exactly like that, but I have no claws and I’m not known to bite.”

Double Rice and I both smiled and laughed. We hadn’t expected to meet anyone in the Room except some lectric’ nightstick swinging Swats, and here we were talking to the friendliest Chip Grazer that either of us had met in weeks. I had to wonder, just to satisfy my own paranoia, if for no other reason, whether this was just a NSA stealth prelude to an Osama grab; but, there was nothing about the mood or the layout of the place to support such speculation.

“She thinks we work here man, we’re in.” whispered Double Rice, interrupting my stream of speculation.

“Are you sure that she’s not stealthing us, with a two-face, or NSAing our asses from that alcove over there.?”

“I couldn’t tell you man, but my scan-intuition isn’t registering; and this doesn’t feel like old school network, vis-theater to me. They really don’t know why we’re here. We should be able to sever our ties with the master Cylinder and HoChiMinh out of this motherfucker before anyone even begins to ask questions.”

But I was hardly listening, at that point. I was too awed by the completeness of it; a completeness that spoke of something infinite, something that had no beginning, no origin, and no conceivable end. It was an ecstatic space for the continuing variations embedded in personal histories, as preserved in one tiny slide of lip-tissue. In real-headlines, there was a stain-glass slide, just like in the old-school science books, for everybody, one for each person who had ever lived. This didn’t square at all with the image of Lab-hacks NSAing the unsuspecting and micro-managing the daily rhythms and minutia of moment to moment existence, that I had expected to infra-red scan the moment we walked in. But then, why the ugly security apparatus, and the antennas and electronic-info grates? Why the fences?

None of it could be reconciled, but this place, whatever its purpose, had morphed into something far more interesting than a central hive for insectoid surveillance devices. It was bigger than that; it was a temple—a religious zone; and evidence, that both Double Rice and myself were being colonized by the very apparatus that we had hoped to escape from. Could we now undermine a structure that had taken off its mask, revealing itself, like the embers of a burning bush, to be the Master Cylinder metaphorically connecting with eternity through the prism of the Chip-world? I was speechless, and Double Rice looked uncharacteristically preoccupied. The place spoke of pure heavenly symmetry; and I knew that we had to find the master-scan screen, stealth our names out of it, and HoChiMinh our Squeegee-Loping asses out of there, forthwith, even if it meant being cast out of paradise forever.

JZRothstein 11/111/2013