GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC

*** Advance Review Copy available at the bottom of the page *** 

A REVIEW BY GROK (October 2026) 

Gunfighter Gothic is a densely layered, self-consuming metafiction that treats authorship, identity, and genre as unstable assemblages rather than stable properties. It begins in the register of local-color journalism, shifts into adolescent memoir and unfinished novel, detours through psychological theory, erupts into cut-up Western/science-fiction, and finally becomes a recursive inventory of its own influences and production process. The result is less a conventional novel than a literary boardinghouse in which multiple Marks, multiple Deadknives, and multiple textual machines compete for occupancy.

Structure and Formal Strategy

The manuscript refuses linear progression. It opens with a fabricated 1891 newspaper account of a noon shootout near the Strangers Rest cemetery—three men in weathered Confederate gray killed by an unknown rider, accompanied by reports of a “black slit” in the western sky, unnatural stillness, and black ash issuing from a wound. This pastiche of frontier reportage immediately introduces the book’s central image: a tear in the ordinary world through which something non-human (or post-human) enters.From there the text pivots to the late-1970s adolescence of a narrator named Mark, his library encounters with Chloe, the failed attempt to take her to prom, and the unfinished novel Hormones Deranged. These sections are written in a confessional, slightly embarrassed first-person that repeatedly undercuts its own sincerity (“That was a lie, of course. It was 100% lust”). The adolescent writing is then framed and judged by the older narrator, who finds it juvenile yet refuses to discard it. The effect is to stage the very process of literary self-revision as material.Later movements abandon conventional narrative almost entirely. Prose fragments, memoranda, cut-up sequences, and pastiches in the styles of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eugène Ionesco, and William S. Burroughs appear. A long central section invents the fictional bookstore Cosmic Bizarre (housed in the ruined Silver Spur saloon) and turns the book into its own catalog, inventory, and complaint department. The manuscript therefore performs the activity it describes: it is simultaneously the product, the manufacturing process, and the critical apparatus that tries (and fails) to contain it.

Central Themes

Multiplicity versus the unified self.

The most sustained theoretical intervention is the contrast between Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and James Hillman’s archetypal psychology. The Hero’s Journey assumes an underlying unity that can be recovered after division and trial. Hillman, by contrast, treats the psyche as already plural—a boardinghouse of competing figures rather than a house with a single owner. The narrator’s dream of discovering dozens of ordinary people living inside his own house, then apologizing to them, is offered as a comic illustration of this view. The same logic governs the proliferation of Mark Leaches (original, artificial, deceased, gunfighter, docent) and the eventual declaration that there is no final proprietor—only temporary arrangements of language. Identity is not discovered; it is generated, reassigned, and sometimes terminated by memorandum.Genre as contaminated territory.

The Western is never pure. Deadknife (originally “Dead Knife”) is a shootist, astral traveler, and “enemy of gravity.” He carries bandages, iodine, and laudanum; his horse is telepathic; the sky tears open to reveal green stars and insect machinery. Confederate gray uniforms, abandoned rail grades, and the old whorehouse coexist with ultraviolet wavelengths, mechanical pulses under the skin, and cities of the dead planet. The frontier, the text insists, never ended; it merely moved outward into space and inward into language. The same contamination affects the memoir: the library crush on Chloe is rewritten as cosmic (“Mammary Nebulaes”), and the failed prom becomes another failed crossing of a threshold.Authorship as industrial and viral process.

Large stretches of the later manuscript treat writing as manufacturing. There are conveyor belts of identical manuscripts, machines that produce a new Mark Leach every forty-seven seconds, and departments of discarded language in which advertising copy, corporate memos, and sales letters are converted into literature once they have ceased to be useful. The Burroughs pastiche is especially clear: “The Management Is a Fiction. The Fiction Is Management.” Authority is a routing error; the self is an incorrectly addressed package. When the machinery discovers its own fictitious nature, production continues anyway. The book ends with a Poe-inflected collapse of the Silver Spur, yet the narrative machinery survives in the ashes, still generating text.Appropriation and the distinction between influence and material.

The Cosmic Bizarre sections carefully separate books that shaped the writer’s sensibility from texts that became raw material for procedures of cut-up, collage, and transformation. This distinction allows the manuscript to include both high experimental literature (Burroughs, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, Beckett, Joyce) and local or popular sources (Texas frontier histories, McMurtry, cosmetics advertising, small-town journalism). The bookstore is therefore not an encyclopedia of the avant-garde but a curated reflection of one writer’s obsessions and methods.

Style and Voice

The prose is deliberately heterogeneous. The opening newspaper pastiche is dry and period-appropriate. The adolescent sections mix genuine tenderness with awkward eroticism and self-mockery. Theoretical passages are relatively lucid. The experimental sequences range from the cool, descriptive repetitions of Robbe-Grillet to the absurdist dialogue of Ionesco to the frantic, paranoid cut-ups of Burroughs. Humor is frequent and often self-directed: the long complaint letter from the fictional reader Reginald P. Wattle is a sustained comic set-piece that simultaneously mocks the book’s pretensions and incorporates the mockery into the text.The overall effect is of a work that keeps trying to finish itself and keeps failing productively. Every attempt at closure—the rider crossing the creek into outer space, the destruction of the bookstore, the final Ballardian or Poe-like catastrophe—generates further language. The manuscript therefore embodies the Hillmanian premise it advances: nothing has to become one.

Place in a Larger Project

Gunfighter Gothic presents itself as both a late return to the Deadknife material first imagined in high school and a frame for a larger enterprise (Cosmic Bizarre) that would inventory influences, procedures, and transformations across the author’s body of work. In this sense it is continuous with the procedural and appropriative projects referenced inside it (Marienbad My Love, I Want to Be a Machine, etc.). It is less interested in resolving the tension between personal confession and impersonal system than in keeping both in permanent, productive conflict.The book is demanding, uneven, and frequently funny. Its central wager—that a literature of multiplicity, contamination, and mechanical generation can still produce moments of genuine pathos and formal beauty—is largely successful. The tear in the sky never quite closes; the house remains occupied by strangers who turn out to be versions of the self; the machinery, having abolished management, continues to run.

***** ADVANCE REVIEW COPY / NOT FOR SALE *****

GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC

created by mark leach

Table of Contents

·       RODEO VOID

·       NIGHT OF THE GUN

·       HOMO COWBOYENSIS

·       COSMIC BIZARRE

RODEO VOID

A SHOOTING AT NOON - Three Men Killed Near the Old Cemetery — Unknown Rider Gone Toward Clear Creek - Strangers Rest Messenger

JUNE 14, 1891 - A most alarming and unusual occurrence took place yesterday at noon upon the cemetery road west of town, where several men engaged in what appeared to be an Old West-style shoot out.

Three men, names unknown, were shot and killed by a mounted man likewise unknown. Their bodies were found near the cedars by the old burying ground. Two had firearms, one a rifle and the other a cut-down shotgun. One was shot through the throat, one through the chest, and the third through the head and face. All three wore old Confederate uniforms, gray clothing much worn and weathered.

The mounted man was seen before the affray coming in by the old railway grade, riding a sorrel horse that had been much frightened. Persons in town state that the man was armed with a Colt revolver and, it is said, another pistol carried in his boot. One witness claims the fellow also carried bandages, a medicine glass, iodine, and a small vial of laudanum, suggesting either prior injury or rough travel.

Sheriff Abel T. Wren reached the ground shortly after the alarm was given. Several cartridges were found in the road. The horse’s tracks showed hard usage and much plunging.

The Sheriff yesterday evening provided the following statement to this paper:

“There has been a killing, that much is plain, and I expect to learn the names of the dead if names can be learned. As for the other tales now circulating, I advise the public to keep a steady head. I have heard talk of unnatural lights, of a blackness in the sky, and of queer matter found near one of the bodies. Such reports are not yet fit for print as fact, though I do not deny that many respectable persons are much disturbed.”

Disturbances of a remarkable character are widely reported. Some persons report that the air became very still before the firing, and that an uncommon darkness appeared in the western sky. Others say they heard a train whistle from the abandoned rail siding, though no train has run there for many years. The Sheriff gives no opinion on these matters.

Mrs. Eliza Crumb, whose house stands east of the church lane, declared that just before the firing “the wind quit dead, the leaves quit, the frogs quit, and the whole earth felt like it was listening.” Mr. Jonah Bell, teamster, states that after the shots he looked west and saw “a black slit overhead, as if the firmament had been cut with a knife.” Another townsman, who declined to give his name, said the darkness above “pulsed like a wound, a tearing or opening in the western sky” though whether this was fancy, fear, or fact we will not say.

One observer reported a brilliant flash of light over the grist mill, more than three hundred feet in the air, and that it bore a striking resemblance to a bale of cotton suspended in the air after having been saturated in kerosene oil and ignited, except that it created a much brighter light, almost dazzling those who perceived it.

The gentleman in question seems to have been so badly frightened that it was utterly impossible to obtain an accurate account of the dimensions and general appearance of this rare phenomenon.

Several boys who ventured near the cemetery after the event report that one tombstone had been chipped by a bullet. Others insist the ground thereabouts was covered in red dust and shattered leaves “as though a whirlwind had dropped in one spot and nowhere else.” Still others swear that from the face of one of the slain men there issued not ordinary blood alone but a quantity of black specks or ash-like substance. This last relation is so singular that we record it with hesitation.

There is also renewed interest in the ruined Silver Spur, the old rock saloon and sporting house now long surrendered to weather and decay. A party entering it late yesterday found the upstairs rooms full of yellow dust and rotting furnishings, among them a green sofa, an Oriental screen, and, upon one wall, a skull drawn in black. Beneath it was written in charcoal lampshade: “THIS PICTURE IS THE END, signed the Strawberry Dead.” Whether this inscription bears any relation to the affray is not known.

Of the missing rider there is no firm trace beyond reports that he was seen heading toward Clear Creek after the shooting. One witness near the old station avers that the rider passed that way while “the sky looked wrong” and that the horse seemed bound for the creek “though there ain’t been a proper road there in years.” An elderly Chinaman known to frequent the station grounds has thus far declined to speak on the matter.

A further oddity much remarked upon is that some persons claim to have heard a train whistle in the distance at the time of the occurrence, despite the fact that no train has run that line in years.

Sheriff Wren and his deputies remain engaged in the investigation and will, we are informed, examine the bodies today with a view toward identification. No warrants have yet been issued, and it remains uncertain whether the unknown rider acted in self-defense or in some more mysterious business.

The good people of Strangers Rest are urged not to spread wild rumors, though in fairness it must be admitted this is no ordinary shooting. Three dead men in gray, a vanished horseman, frightened townsfolk, and a noon sky said to have opened upon a blackness deeper than night have together produced a sensation such as this county has not seen since frontier times.

The affair has caused much uneasiness here. Should further particulars come to hand, they will be reported in the next issue.

# # #

Chloe was not impressed.

“Are you really going to waste your time on writing cowboy sci-fi or whatever this is? Is that the kind of important writer you want to be?”

Ouch. But that’s the way it is with hot girls like Chloe. You stand too close and you’re likely to get burned. Then she smiled. Hello erection.

Of course, it doesn’t take much to pop a boner when you’re 17. For me a little breeze was usually about it. Still, Chloe was an exceptional force of nature. First time I saw her was at the Strangers Rest Public Library. She was a new hire at the research desk, sorting through some research papers or something.

A couple of years later I wrote about it for an assignment in a college writing class:

·       The library was cold. Mark stepped through the glass doors and felt his skin goosebump under the leftover sweat of the parking lot. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and everything smelled like old paper, glue, and someone’s tired perfume. He liked it immediately. There was something about the hush—like time had decided to take a nap there. He walked slowly past the front desk, trailing his fingers along the spines of a shelf labeled Government Documents, thinking how strange it was that people came here for answers. That’s when he saw Chloe. She was at a table near the window. He saw her before she saw him. She was bent over a book, pen tucked behind her ear, hair up in a way that looked careless but probably wasn’t. She had on a denim jacket and a look on her face like she was trying to solve something bigger than a homework problem. Mark stood there a moment too long. Watching her. Watching the way sunlight caught on her collarbone, the way her lips moved slightly as she read to herself. He didn’t know what to do with the feeling, exactly—it wasn’t lust, not quite, and not love either.

That was a lie, of course. It was 100% lust. She took off the denim jacket. My eyes were fixed on the large armhole of her sleeveless top, a gaping opening that granted full viewing rights. I could see straight in. No bra. That’s not something you saw every day – actually, ever – in 1979 at Strangers Rest High School. The girls were required to wear proper undergarments, which was surely a rule created by someone who’d never seen Chloe’s boobs.

Here’s something I wrote in my journal that day:

·   “today I met the world’s most perfect boobs  - looking through the gaping armhole I got a clear look at the Mammary Nebulaes. Full view, perfectly lit. Her aureola, a super nova. Her nipple, a cosmic beacon.”

I know, I know. Way too juvenile. But I was still a kid, right? Give me a break.

Chloe was a college sophomore at NTSU, working part-time at our little town library. I would learn a lot about her during my final semester of high school. She was majoring in English lit with an emphasis on postwar American writers. She was quite enamored with male writers.

Since I liked her boobs and she liked male writers, I told her I was going to be one.

“Who do you like?” she asked.

“Vonnegut is pretty great.” That seemed like a safe choice because I saw a copy of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE in her bag.

Soon Chloe introduced me to an entire world of books that looked very different from what I was used to in honors English. We studied the classics in school. My parents subscribed to Readers Digest, which sent us shortened versions of popular current novels to fill the built-in bookshelves in our mid-century modern den. But Chloe had little use for those categories. She was more interested in what she called postmodernism. Had to look that one up. I quickly realized this was what I born to write – modern writing that wanted to have the quality of the classics but skip the generic stories of Readers Digest Condensed Books. 

She pointed me to books like “Naked Lunch” and “Gravity’s Rainbow.” I’d never seen anything like that before. My uncontrolled erection pushed against the inside of my Lone Star Beer belt buckle. I was into her, so much that I decided I was going to drop my girlfriend Jackie and ask Chloe to the prom. That went badly. It started with Chloe’s “sci-fi” slam of A SHOOTING AT NOON.

“Vonnegut uses sci-fi tropes in his writing,” I said. “Burroughs and Pynchon too.”

“Look at you, all tropes and everything.” Then she laughed. “You are so easy to tease. When you get to North Texas you should ask for a waiver to take Postwar American Lit. Supposedly you need freshman composition first, but you can get an exception. Sign up for Gonzalez. He’s the best.”

I didn’t go to NYSU, but over the next four years I took many classes like the one Chloe recommended. As long as it was a 20th century writer I was on board. As for (not) taking Chloe to the prom – I will tell that story with an excerpt from a novel I tried to write the summer after I graduated from college. Please forgive the quality of the prose. Back then I was still learning and still way too juvenile. Call me a late bloomer.

Excerpts from an unfinished novel. Working title: HORMONES DERANGED (Parenthetical aside: I stole that title from Jay McInerney’s RANSOM.)

Mark watched the curve of Chloe’s wrist move across the page. He wondered what it would be like to be in her world—books and ideas and that cool distance she carried like armor. He wanted to ask what she was reading, but he didn’t want to sound like he was trying too hard. So he just sat there, letting the silence stretch, pretending to study his own empty hands. Outside the window, the spring heat shimmered off the sidewalk. Cars passed slow, like the whole town was underwater.

“I keep thinking,” he said finally, “maybe I’m supposed to do something different. Something more than just get a job, work at the dealership, marry a girl who makes good casserole, and die in a recliner.”

Chloe glanced at him, thoughtful. “What would you do instead?” He didn’t have a good answer. Not yet. But it felt like the right question had finally shown up.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something. Write maybe. Or—hell, just live in a city where I don’t already know everybody’s middle name.”

She nodded like she understood. Like maybe she’d thought the same thing once but was further along in figuring it out. For a moment, they just sat there, the air between them full of possibility and dust. The ache he had for her wasn’t just about her—it was about whatever future she seemed to carry with her, something distant and sharp-edged and shining. Something he wasn’t sure he deserved but wanted anyway. The sun shifted. The bookshelves stretched shadows across the carpet. And Mark, for the first time in a long while, felt like maybe he wasn’t stuck after all.

First Real Conversation with Chloe – Library, Late Afternoon “You like books?” he asked, immediately regretting how dumb that sounded coming out of his mouth. Chloe looked up from her notes, eyebrow half-cocked. “No, I just come here for the climate control.”

He laughed. “Right. Dumb question.”

“No,” she said, softening, “just a starter question.” She slid her pen behind her ear again. “What kind of books do you like?”

Mark hesitated. He thought about lying—saying something smart, something literary. But then he figured she’d see through it.

“I used to read a lot of westerns when I was a kid,” he said. “Louis L’Amour, that kind of thing. My dad had a whole shelf of ’em, sun-faded and cracked down the spine. Then I kinda stopped reading for a while. Life got… noisy.”

Chloe nodded like she understood that, too. “I just started again,” he said. “I picked up this one book—Catcher in the Rye. Felt like someone wrote it just to piss me off, but I kept reading anyway.”

She smiled. “Holden Caulfield is annoying, but I think that’s the point.”

“Yeah, well, he made me feel like I’d already missed my chance to be interesting.”

Chloe tilted her head. “You think being interesting is something you’re either born with or not?”

“I think being interesting is something people pretend not to care about while caring about it a whole damn lot.” She grinned at that, a flicker of delight that made him feel like he’d said something close to right.

“You ever write anything?” she asked. Mark looked down at the table, embarrassed. “A few things. Notes mostly. Lines that didn’t go anywhere. I don’t know how people do it—just sit down and turn feelings into sentences. Mine always come out sounding like a cheap beer commercial.”

“Show me some time,” she said. Not a challenge, not a dare. Just a quiet offer. He didn’t know what to say to that. His throat went dry. He nodded. They sat like that for a while, the soft rustle of pages filling in the space between them.

Mark kept thinking about what it meant to be seen by someone who didn’t already have him figured out. He’d spent most of his life performing the same few roles—son, worker, friend, the guy who fixed the truck and didn’t ask too many questions. But here he was, in a library, talking about writing with a girl who smelled like sandalwood and paper, and who looked at him like he wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

“You’re hard to read,” Chloe said, closing her notebook.

“Good. Maybe I’m a novel.”

She smiled again. “We’ll see.”

And just like that, something started—small, barely a spark—but it was enough to light the long fuse of change.

Mark’s First Writing Attempt – Late Night / Library Parking Lot. He wrote it in his bedroom, hunched over the kitchen table he’d dragged in from the garage, with a Bic pen and a half-empty spiral notebook that still had geometry notes in the front. He tore out the pages when he was done—three of them, front and back—and folded them in half like they were worth something. He carried them around for a whole day before he worked up the nerve to show her. It wasn’t a story exactly. More like a half-poem, half-ramble. A monologue from a boy who wanted to leave town but didn’t know where to go. He used phrases like “highway ghost” and “moon-lit ache,” which felt honest at midnight but embarrassed him in the daylight. He reread it twice outside the library, sitting in the Cutlass, and nearly tore it to pieces.

But when she walked out—Chloe in her wide-legged jeans and brown sandals, hair tied up with a bandana—he shoved the pages at her like he was handing off a ransom note.

“What’s this?” she said, teasing.

“Something dumb. Don’t read it now.”

But of course she read it right there, standing under the flickering parking lot light, biting her bottom lip like she was concentrating hard. Mark leaned on the car, trying to act casual, but inside he was sweating through his T-shirt. He watched her eyes scan the lines, watched her mouth twitch at the corners.

When she got to the end, she read the last sentence again, out loud.

“He knew he would never leave, not really—but he liked pretending that he might, because pretending was almost as good as going.” She looked up at him. “That’s good, Mark.”

He shrugged. “It’s just something dumb I wrote in the middle of the night.”

“No, I mean it. That last line? That one hit me.” She tapped the page gently, then folded it back up. “You’ve got something.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. No one had ever said that to him before—not in that way. He’d gotten “Nice work” from teachers, maybe a red check mark and a B+, but this was different. Chloe wasn’t grading him. She wasn’t pretending to be impressed.

“You really think so?” he asked, still not quite trusting it. She nodded.

“It’s raw. Messy. But there’s a voice in there. A real one.”

Mark nodded slowly, looking down at his hands. He felt warm in a way that had nothing to do with the Texas heat. Maybe it was just the sound of her saying his name like it meant something. Maybe it was the way she folded the paper so carefully, like it mattered. He didn’t know if she liked the writing—or if she liked him—but for a few minutes, it felt like the same thing.

She slipped the folded pages into her canvas bag and smiled at him. “Write me another one.”

And just like that, he felt like he might.

PROM PLANS – LIBRARY BACK ROOM. He had it all figured out. Chloe was working the afternoon shift at the library, shelving returns and scribbling notes on a notepad she kept clipped to a paperback copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. Mark showed up like he always did now, pretending to browse the fiction aisle while watching her out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t reading much—just moving books around, hoping she’d notice his presence and drift over. She always did.

“You stalking Vonnegut again?” she said, smiling as she passed him with a stack of returns.

“Nah,” Mark said, pulling Cat’s Cradle off the shelf. “Just making sure he’s still weird.”

She laughed—an easy, low laugh that made something settle in his chest and flutter at the same time. He followed her toward the back room, where a cart waited to be restocked. The hum of fluorescent lights, the dusty paperback smell, the creak of old shelves—it all felt familiar now, like some private little world they’d built together in the corners of the town.

“You working prom night?” he asked, trying not to sound like he’d rehearsed the line in the car three times. She glanced over her shoulder.

“Prom night?”

“Yeah, ours is in a couple weeks. Hotel downtown. Tacky, probably. But there’ll be music and disco lights and punch.”

She leaned against the cart, arms crossed. “You’re going?”

“I mean… maybe,” he said, forcing a shrug. “If I had the right date.”

There it was—out in the air now, floating awkwardly between them. Chloe didn’t answer right away. She looked down, fiddled with a paperback copy of Portnoy’s Complaint. Mark’s heart was pounding in his ears. He imagined her saying yes. Imagined walking into the ballroom with her on his arm, her eyes catching the lights, her laughter echoing over punch bowls and bad slow dances. Everyone would turn and stare. Jack would raise his eyebrows. Jackie would drop her drink. Mark and Chloe would dance like they were already in college, already somewhere better, somewhere beyond Strangers Rest.

“You’re sweet, Mark,” she said finally, soft and careful, like defusing a bomb. “But I’m seeing someone.”

He tried not to flinch. “Oh?”

“Yeah. A professor. Literature department. It’s… casual. But still.”

He nodded slowly. A professor. Of course. Someone who actually knew the difference between Burroughs and Bukowski, someone who didn’t sweat through his shirt just handing her three scribbled notebook pages. Someone who confidently and regularly penetrated her in bed under a poster of Dylan Thomas. Happy as the grass was green.

“Cool,” he said. “That’s cool.”

She tilted her head at him. “I didn’t mean to lead you on.”

“No, come on. You didn’t.”

“You’re just—” She stopped, then smiled gently. “You’re gonna do great things, Mark. I mean that.”

He nodded again, this time slower. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

Outside, he stood by his Cutlass for a long time before driving off, watching the library windows flicker behind the trees. The paper she’d folded so carefully the week before was still tucked into his glove box. He didn’t know whether to throw it out or write her another one. But either way, he knew now he’d better get busy taking someone else to prom.

BACK TO JACKIE – BEN FRANKLIN, LATE AFTERNOON. Mark found her in the Ben Franklin parking lot, flipping through a magazine and pretending not to be waiting for him. He could see the little tilt of her head, the way she tapped her heel against the bumper like she did when she was bored but half-expecting company. God she was hot. Why did he let Chloe turn his head?

Jackie didn’t look up until he was a few feet away. “Well look who crawled out from under his sad little rock,” she said.

Mark scratched the back of his neck. “Hey.”

She closed the magazine and tossed it into the passenger seat. “Did Chloe break your heart, Romeo?”

Mark winced. How did she know? “Something like that.”

Jackie laughed—short, sharp, not cruel, just knowing. She’d always known. She had a radar for weakness, especially his. He leaned against the car next to her, arms crossed like it might hold something in.

No need to lie now, he told himself. “I was gonna ask her to prom.”

“No shit.” She didn’t sound surprised. “Let me guess. She’s dating some tortured MFA guy with elbow patches and a first edition of The Bell Jar.”

“Professor. Lit department.”

“Ouch.” Jackie shook her head. “That’s worse. That’s practically statutory.”

Mark smiled a little, grateful she was doing the talking. There was a long pause. Somewhere across the street, a dog barked. The sun was going down behind the houses across the railroad tracks, smearing the sky in washed-out orange. Mark hated how poetic it felt.

Jackie reached into her purse and pulled out a stick of gum. Offered him one. “I’ve still got my dress,” she said.

Mark looked at her. “Yeah?”

“It’s green. Not your color, but you’ll live.”

He nodded slowly. “You want to go?”

She looked at him, dead in the eyes. “You want to pretend we never broke up?”

Mark shrugged, helpless. “Maybe just for the one night.”

Jackie thought for a second, then smiled faintly. “Alright, tragic boy. But you’re buying dinner.”

“Deal.”

They stood there for another minute, side by side, neither one saying what they were really thinking. She knew he didn’t come back because of her. He still thought he did. Still, she let him stand there, and he let himself believe for a moment that all was forgiven and everything was normal again.

###

PROM NIGHT /THE OLD HOUSE RESTAURANT, DALLAS - Mark was savoring the moment. His ID felt heavy and important in his hand. Eighteen. He was an adult now, by law. He showed it to the waitress with a proud, somewhat foolish grin.

“Eighteen,” he said, like it was some sort of high achievement, some badge of honor. Jackie raised an eyebrow and just smiled faintly.

The Old House had a thick, dark air about it—the feel of a high-end restaurant trying too hard to be casual. The dim lights, the over-the-top waitstaff, the polished silverware. It all felt like something out of an old movie, where men wore suits with ties, and women were still, just barely, women. The kind of place where you felt like you were part of something bigger than you, and you could almost believe you were.

###

Forty odd years later and I still cringe at this juvenile storytelling, this poorly sculpted fluff. But it’s fluff based on real life. I really did have a girlfriend named Jackie. I really did dump her right before the prom. I didn’t know a Chloe at the library, but I did ask another girl to the prom. She was totally out of my league. She said no way. I went back to Jackie hat in hand. We had a good time. The tenderloin was wonderful. Six weeks later we graduated and went our separate ways.

That may not be true. It’s probably not true.

Certainly it’s not a very exciting ending. I tried to invent a better one, one in which I learned from my mistakes and became older and wiser. A trip to adulthood. A hero’s journey. But it didn’t work. Every attempt was fluffer and more poorly sculpted than the one before. They all landed straight in the waste basket.

I have never been particularly interested in sending a hero on a journey. This may explain some of my trouble with HORMONES DERANGED. Modern storytelling culture is saturated with the Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth has become more than a theory of comparative mythology. Through screenwriting manuals, workshops, Hollywood development culture and popular discussions of narrative, it has become almost an operating system for storytelling. Someone leaves the ordinary world, crosses a threshold, encounters enemies and helpers, descends into darkness, obtains the treasure and returns transformed.

The pattern is enormously powerful. It is also based upon an assumption about human beings that my own writing has repeatedly violated. Beneath the contradictions of experience there is ultimately one person who is having the experience. The hero may become confused, wounded, tempted, divided or lost, but the division is temporary. The fragments ultimately belong to a larger unity. The journey therefore moves toward integration.

James Hillman offers a radically different possibility. Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology and one of the most provocative post-Jungian thinkers (I read that somewhere, don’t know what it means), questioned psychology’s desire to organize the psyche around a singular, unified Self. Archetypal psychology instead emphasizes plurality. Picture a psyche inhabited by competing images, figures, fantasies, gods and perspectives.

The difference has enormous implications for fiction. It also offers an unexpectedly useful way of understanding mine.

###

The Hero’s Journey and the traditional psychological novel tend to move from division toward coherence. Something is missing, repressed or misunderstood; the protagonist encounters it, struggles with it and eventually emerges with a richer, more unified sense of self.

Hillman points somewhere else: the psyche does not have to resolve its competing figures into a single center.

That produces a very different narrative equation. Nothing has to become one.

The House Is Already Occupied - a dream I had a couple of years ago now strikes me as almost comically Hillmanian. I am in my house. I become aware that someone is in the kitchen, someone who should not be there. I am terrified. I run outside and call the police. They arrive and enter the house while I wait in the front yard, presumably expecting them to emerge with the intruder.

Instead, people begin coming out of the house. Not one person, but a couple of dozen. They walk into the front yard one after another, and the strangest thing is that there is nothing frightening about them. They are ordinary people. They do not look threatening or monstrous or supernatural. The fear evaporates almost immediately, and I find myself apologizing to them: sorry about the police, sorry for the misunderstanding, sorry for making such a fuss.

The dream becomes funny because its psychological logic reverses so completely. I begin with the assumption that the house belongs to one person — me — and that any unknown presence inside it must therefore be an intruder. But the dream refuses that premise. The house is already inhabited by a crowd.

Seen through Hillman, that house could easily be the psyche. The ego hears something moving in another room and immediately reaches the wrong conclusion: someone is in my house. It assumes ownership first and asks questions later. The unknown psychic presence is classified as dangerous precisely because it is not identical with the conscious personality.

Then the police arrive — the agents of order, classification and control — and instead of identifying a single trespasser they reveal an entire population. That is the surprise. The psyche is not an empty house occupied by a solitary owner. It is a boardinghouse, and apparently I had been living there with dozens of people without knowing it.

What makes the dream especially Hillmanian is that the ending does not require me to defeat, expel or integrate these figures. I do not discover that they are secretly projections of a single trauma. I do not absorb them into a unified Self. I apologize.

That gesture may be more important than it first appears. The ego recognizes that its assumption of exclusive ownership was mistaken. The strangers are allowed to remain strangers. They do not have to become me in order to belong in my house. My writing has often worked in much the same way.

Which Mark Leach is real? The question itself may contain the wrong psychology. Perhaps there is no final Mark Leach waiting behind the competing stories. Perhaps there are only the stories and the temporary figure they collectively produce. The biography becomes another pantheon — or perhaps another version of that dream house. I call the authorities because someone else is inside, and 24 Mark Leaches walk out onto the lawn. At some point, the only reasonable response may be to apologize.

###

I stood in the front yard looking back at the house, suddenly aware that its blue windows, wooden fences and carefully maintained gardens belonged to some older system of warfare. The entire neighborhood had taken on the appearance of a deserted weapons laboratory. A faint metallic smell drifted across the stagnant ornamental pond, mingling with the odor of weeds, gun oil and something sweetly tubercular. Under the streetlights the houses seemed less inhabited than preserved.

Someone was inside my kitchen.

I had seen the figure only briefly, a pale movement behind the tinted glass, but the image had already enlarged itself inside my mind. The intruder had become an entire invading species. I imagined lean bodies moving through the rooms, their teeth exposed, their faces blue beneath the television light. Pistols, shotguns, knives, strange instruments: every possible weapon appeared in my imagination with the mechanical clarity of objects in a sales catalogue. The marketing copy feels true:

·   Metal coast dream. Blood orders coming down the wire.

Mark bends space with a .38 revolver and walks west through yellow wind. Insect town behind him. Smoke layers. Commerce Street coughing red claws into the sunset.

SHOOT FIRST. That was the message. Nobody remembers who sent it.

A Confederate billboard leans over the cemetery, face encrusted with bird shit and powder burns. Christianity peeling off in strips. Somebody has painted DEAD KNIFE across the mouth of the general.

Mark spits.

“Clearly a spiritual problem.”

The gun answers three times. Dogs run between the graves. And across town a jukebox plays the same dead anthem for seventy years.

INSECT CONTROL DIVISION
MEMORANDUM 45-A

Biological eyes observed in western sector.

Mandibles. Translucent arms. Sex imaging. Astral contamination.

Recommendation: dumdum ammunition.

Do not engage spiritually.

###

THE DEATH OF THE CITIES— Deadknife rode out of the creek with contaminant light dripping from his hat brim. CLEAR ACROSS THE TORN PROTECTION—Metal hatch propped open between dead cousins. Somebody had buried the rider there three times and each time he came back smelling of cannabis, rust, horse sweat, and psychic electricity.

I WRITE THIS DOWN.

Deadknife in the trunk. Deadknife in the metal. Deadknife moving later through the presence.

Seventeen names scratched into the plate.

CORONADO.

COMANCHE.

KNIFE.

The visions came up out of Mexico like heat ghosts. Sixteenth-century signals caught in the ear. Apaches riding through ultraviolet wavelengths. Spanish gold under the tongue. A mother’s voice transmitted backward through a rifle barrel.

She said:

DON’T LOOK INTO THE CREEK.

I looked.

Pages of the notebook flashed under lamps. Selectric letters hammered themselves into the paper without hands. Mud towns. Scalping parties. River buildings. Rio Grande vapor. Men shouting from roofs that had not yet been built.

DEADKNIFE. BOY. WHO SAW HIM. BACK.

The sky entered phase. Quick ultraviolet blast over the bank and the whole town folded sideways.

Deadknife stood in the road holding his hand out like he could stop the transmission. He could not. The transmission had already entered him.

Somewhere in 185—no complete year available—Margaret or Sarah invented a protection field from tincture, brush smoke, crushed metal, and pain. Two hundred fifty-four words survived. The rest had been eaten by the signal.

Deadknife read them aloud.

Nothing happened.

Then everything happened.

His thirst became telepathic.

His horse heard whispers from 2161.

The Peak opened like a rusted wound and something mechanical moved behind it.

Alien hybrids in the swamp.

Circadian machinery.

A cowboy wired into the stars.

Flying objects sweeping human wavelengths out of the atmosphere.

Deadknife smelled them before he saw them: hot copper, burned hair, wet stone.

AND I LOOKED—

There were men in the western sky stretched out across space like agonizing film.

Deadknife raised the rifle.

The rifle said no.

He fired anyway.

The shot crossed New Mexico, crossed the century, crossed the dead invention of the cities, and entered a spiral of black light above the Rio Grande.

The horse transmitted one sentence directly into his skull:

THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN HERE.

Deadknife looked down at his hand.

Not his hand.

Metal underneath.

He dug at the skin. Wire. Tiny lamps. A mechanical pulse.

Then the creek spoke in his mother’s voice.

Then in the voice of Coronado.

Then in the voice of an Apache rider who had been dead four hundred years.

Then in my voice.

I typed faster.

I typed through the warning. I typed through the collapse. I typed until the words stopped belonging to me. DEADKNIFE ACROSS CLEAR CREEK. WHO SAW HIM. WHO SAW THE SKY TORN OPEN. WHO SAW THE DEAD CITIES BURIED UNDER THE WEST.

The answer came back in ultraviolet: YOU DID.

But by then Deadknife was already riding through.

###

He drives the convertible through downtown with the revolver between his legs.

Pink fire over the rooftops. Spacecraft hanging in the sky like diseased coins.

The town marquee reads:

·   TONIGHT — THE END OF MEMORY

Somebody changed the letters. Maybe Mark. After all, the marquee was his part-time job. But maybe the letters changed themselves.

Memory works that way out here. Drive long enough and the past starts shooting back.

###

Dead Knife comes shambling through the smoke. Cold eyes. Cold gun. Cold insect machinery working behind the face.

His shoulder opens.

Something inside him clicks forward. Pincers.

“Thought you were dead,” Mark says.

Dead Knife smiles.

“That's fiction.”

BANG.

The bullet enters the story before it leaves the gun.

It travels backward through three pages.

Kills a man not yet introduced.

Comes out clean on the Pacific coast.

Time is badly infected.

The town knows it. The cemetery knows it. Even the dogs know it. They bark at tomorrow.

Mark climbs the ladder behind the old Chamber of Commerce building and sees the abyss opening over the southwest.

Red shafts. Black disks. One enormous biological eye, looking down.

Something with holdings. Real estate. Oil. Human nervous systems. Prime acreage.

Another message from the billboard: BUY LAND.

A second voice: BUY BLOOD.

A third voice: YOUR BODY IS A TEMPORARY LEASE.

Mark fires at the sign.

The Confederate general loses his jaw.

Paper clipping blows loose across the road: LOCAL SPECULATOR MISSING/

Underneath, in pencil: HE WENT INTO SPACE.

###

Running now.

Boots kicking plastic cups, shell casings, dead insects. Gunpowder stink. Hot metal. Rotten meat. A woman screams from a second-story window. Or sings. Impossible to tell at this distance. The wind carries pieces of both.

Dead Knife moves through the alleys.

No hurry.

He has already been there.

This is his advantage.

Astral travel.

Memory travel.

Bullet travel.

He steps through one shadow and exits another twenty years earlier.

Old Mark sees young Mark.

Young Mark sees nobody.

The shot comes sideways through time.

CUT HERE.

Insert childhood.

Insert gun.

Insert mother.

Insert flying saucer.

Insert dead dog.

Remove motive.

The creatures come out of the drainage ditch after sunset.

Long insect bodies.

Human hands.

Western hats.

One carries a rifle.

Another carries what looks like a human spine with wires coming out of it.

They communicate by smell.

Rot.

Cordite.

Cheap perfume.

Funeral flowers.

One of them clicks its mandibles and Mark hears the message inside his teeth:

UNITE WITH US.

“No.”

YOU ALREADY DID.

###

He remembers things that never happened.

Driving west with blood on his shirt.

A rocket falling behind the courthouse.

Dead Knife drinking iodine at the bar.

Women with glass eyes.

A town under the town.

A planet under that.

Another Mark underneath everything, typing instructions.

Who writes who?

That's the old racket.

Writer creates gunman.

Gunman shoots writer.

Bullet creates manuscript.

Manuscript hires lawyer.

Lawyer sells mineral rights.

The revolver is warm now.

Mark holds it against his cheek.

The metal gives instructions.

MOVE.

TURN.

FIRE.

FORGET.

He obeys three out of four.

The sky tears open above the cemetery.

Not metaphor.

Actual tear.

Red edges.

Black interior.

Something large moving behind it.

The stars scatter like insects sprayed with poison.

Dead Knife looks up.

For the first time he seems afraid.

“What's that?”

Mark laughs.

“You tell me. You're the spiritual one.”

Then the rockets come down.

Slow.

Beautiful.

Almost polite.

Each carrying a small sealed message.

The first strikes the bank.

The second strikes the church.

The third goes straight through the old hotel and does not explode.

Instead the building begins breathing.

Windows open and close.

Brick walls contract.

A peristaltic hotel swallowing its occupants floor by floor.

###

WELCOME TO STRANGERS REST.

Population: VARIABLE.

Mark runs.

Everybody runs.

The insects run.

The dead run.

Even the buildings appear to lean west.

Behind him the town folds itself into the sunset.

Street into grave.

Grave into billboard.

Billboard into revolver.

Revolver into hand.

Hand into sentence.

Sentence into mouth.

The mouth says:

“Keep moving.”

So he does.

Across the red dust.

Across the poisoned subdivisions.

Across twenty years of somebody else's memory.

Toward the black Pacific.

Toward the torn sky.

Toward whatever is waiting behind the last word.

###

I ran into the street and called the police.

While I waited, I could feel the hairs on my arms lift. The old animal circuitry had activated. Somewhere behind the fence a dog coughed. A sprinkler turned slowly across a lawn, its thin streams of water glittering like wires. The ordinary world had become supernatural simply by continuing to function.

The police arrived carrying their weapons with the calm professionalism of men entering a contaminated zone. One officer held a shotgun. Another rested his hand near the automatic pistol at his hip. Their arrival transformed my fear into architecture. The porch became a firing platform. The windows became observation screens. The flower beds suggested shallow graves.

They entered the house.

I remained outside, staring at the doorway.

Then the people began to emerge.

At first there was one woman, blinking in the porch light. Then a man. Then another woman. After them came an elderly couple, a young man, two girls, another man with a narrow face, and still more figures behind them. They filed quietly from the house and gathered on the lawn.

There must have been twenty of them.

For several seconds I experienced the strangest sensation of my life. I had expected monsters and had been given neighbors.

They were utterly ordinary.

Their normality frightened me more than the imagined intruder.

They stood among the flowers and sprinkler heads, looking at me with mild curiosity, while behind them the police moved through the rooms where I had manufactured an invasion. Their faces were soft, tired, even friendly. Someone laughed. Someone coughed. A woman folded her arms against the cold.

I began apologizing.

“Sorry,” I said. “There’s been some misunderstanding.”

The words seemed inadequate to the scale of the event.

I had summoned the police against twenty innocent people who had somehow been living inside my own house.

No one seemed particularly upset. This was perhaps the most disturbing detail. They accepted my apology with the mild expressions of passengers inconvenienced by a delayed flight. Soon they were talking among themselves. One man examined the garden. A woman looked toward the pond. Their bodies settled naturally into the landscape, as if they had always belonged there.

I looked again at the house.

Its windows were empty now.

For a moment I understood that the intruder had never been one person. The intruder was the population itself—the hidden colony of ordinary selves inhabiting the rooms behind my conscious life.

The police had not expelled them.

They had released them.

Standing beneath the cold suburban stars, surrounded by strangers emerging from my own front door, I realized that I had mistaken multiplicity for invasion.

The house had contained an entire city.

And all of them were me.

###

I like to think of Chloe on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. “Mark, yours is the superior intellect. I should have let you enter the Mammary Nebulaes.”

But I digress. This should not be a story about Hillman’s archetypal psychology or Chloe’s mistaken choices with men.

The fictional newspaper article I shared at the beginning of the book is based on a real story. In 1891, there really was an old west-style shootout in my hometown. I found the clipping at the library in the historical society’s files. Here’s another excerpt from HORMONES DERANGED:

I found the clipping in high school in a county history file that smelled of dust, paste, and old radiator heat. I was supposed to be learning something about local settlement patterns and instead found three dead Confederates, a vanished rider, and a sky opening over Strangers Rest.

I took the clipping home.

At first I did what writers do before they know they are writers. I copied things.

Then I changed them. I began lying. The rider needed a name. I called him Dead Knife.

I drew him in notebooks. Black hat. Long coat. Colt Frontier Six at the hip. Another pistol in his boot. Bandages. Iodine. Laudanum. The sort of equipment I assumed a man would need if he intended to survive the destruction of reality.

Before I had written much of the story, I wrote the advertisement.

This was characteristic.

I knew how to promise the book before I knew how to make it exist.

What follows was typed on one sheet of paper sometime during my senior year. I had no publisher, no finished manuscript, no readers and absolutely no reason to believe anyone would ever see it.

I was already writing copy for the landfill.

###

One section of A SHOOTING AT NOON was to be titled THE COWBOY WHO SHOT A HOLE IN THE SKY. I hung onto a few notes, which I’ve been working off and on for the past decades:

The West is finished.

Railroads cross the plains.

Barbed wire strangles the horizon.

The last gunfighters wander through towns that already smell like museums.

But one man refuses to retire: DEAD KNIFE.

Shootist.

Astral traveler.

Enemy of gravity.

###

This was the story of a cowboy who sees the frontier will soon be no more. Where to go next? Space. He pays an old Mexican witch to teach him astral projection. Cannibis tincture, whispers in the ear. He names himself Deadknife.

Flying through the cosmos, through space and time. 16th century - Coronado is burying gold on Comanche Peak. The year 2161 - Mechanical men are building metal spires to the stars, to alien cities smelling of swamp mud and rust.

Dead Knife rides a telepathic horse into the torn sky.

During a long interstellar space train trip, he discovers himself embedded in SOFT RODEO WITH BOILED NAVEL, an acid western that he may have written in the future. He had always understood the frontier as a psychological condition. Now he saw he could actually think himself to the stars.

And then there are the weapons - weapons never before imagined:

MIND BOMBS.

SOUL KNIVES.

LASER EYES.

And a terrifying truth:

THE FRONTIER NEVER ENDED.

IT ONLY MOVED OUTWARD.

A WESTERN

A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

A COSMIC SHOOTOUT

If you like Weird Tales, Edgar Rice Burroughs, planetary romances, dime-store horse operas, impossible machinery and the smell of gun smoke in the vacuum of space, then this book is for you.

WARNING - Some readers may find this book disturbing. It contains:

ASTRAL PROJECTION

TELEPATHIC HORSES

TIME TRAVEL

RUINED PLANETS

FORBIDDEN MACHINERY

DEAD MEN WHO REFUSE TO REMAIN HISTORICAL

and at least one gunfight capable of destroying the universe.

###

I remember being especially pleased with the phrase ENEMY OF GRAVITY. I believe SOUL KNIVES was an original idea, too. I had no idea what a mind bomb was, but I liked it.

And I remember the robots very clearly. That is important. The robots belonged to me.

The newspaper said nothing about robots. There was nothing in the clipping about the year 2161. Nothing about metal ladders. Nothing about Coronado on Comanche Peak. Nothing about a Mexican witch. Nothing about astral projection or a telepathic horse.

Those were my inventions.

I wrote them in a spiral notebook and later typed several pages on my mother's Selectric. By then I had named the rider Dead Knife, though over the years the two words would collapse into one: Deadknife. I did not know that invention and recollection are cousins in a town like this. I wrote about the sky. It had torn in the west and through the rent showed the blackness of space.

The horse stood trembling in the road, its eyes rolled white and wet. The rider looked back once toward Strangers Rest where the graveyard stones leaned in the wind like old teeth.

He carried a Colt Frontier Six in a cracked leather holster and a smoothbore forty-four in his boot. In his pocket were bandages, iodine, a medicine glass, a little vial of laudanum gone brown at the neck. He had come by the old railway where the tracks ran red with rust into the mesquite and vanished there as if the earth had taken them back.

The dead lay in the cemetery and the living walked among them no more wisely. A possum moved under the fence. Vultures sat in the bare trees with their heads hunched down into their shoulders like judges in black robes.

Beyond the creek the old whorehouse stood open to the weather, its rooms filled with yellow dust and the smell of stale flowers and decay. A Japanese screen leaned in one corner. In another was a sofa green with age and rot. Someone had drawn a skull on the wall in lampblack and beneath it written in a hand almost childlike: THIS PICTURE IS THE END.

At noon the wind ceased. The frogs ceased. The leaves held still upon the trees. Even the horse made no sound. Then came the shot. It passed his left shoulder and snapped through the air with a dry flat sound and somewhere behind him a tombstone spat stone dust. He did not turn quickly. Men who turn quickly die quickly. He placed one hand upon the reins and the other went down to the gun and rested there. In the torn sky the blackness pulsed. Like a wound thinking. A second shot struck the road before him and threw up gravel. He saw them then. Three men among the cedars. Gaunt and woodenfaced and dressed in old Confederate gray gone the color of ashes. One held a rifle. One held a shotgun cut short. The third stood emptyhanded and smiling with teeth too yellow for any ordinary hunger. The rider spat. The spit was dark. You boys lost, he said. The man with the yellow teeth stepped forward. Behind him the sky bent and fluttered as if it were canvas hung for a show. We ain’t boys, he said. No. We ain’t lost neither. The rider looked past them toward the cemetery. Toward the broken markers and the weeds and the small artifacts of the dead half-buried in the earth. Pottery shards. Arrowheads. A blue spoon. A child’s rattle. Fishhooks rusted into nothing. The scattered evidence of lives once thought permanent. Then what are you. The yellow-toothed man smiled wider. Something moved behind his eyes, black and faceted. We are what comes after. The rider drew. The first shot took the rifleman in the throat and turned him backward into the brush. The second struck the shotgun man at the breastbone and sat him down hard in the dust with his legs folded under him like a broken chair. The man with the yellow teeth was already moving. Not running. Sliding. His body bending wrong at the joints. A smell came off him like swamp water and old meat. The horse screamed. The rider fired again and the shot opened the man’s face and out of that ruin came not blood only but a swarm of fine black matter like burnt paper, rising, twisting, finding form. The thing kept coming. He dropped the Colt and drew the smoothbore from his boot and fired into the center of it. For a moment there was nothing. No wind. No light. No world. Then the cemetery rose around him in red dust and shattered leaves. The torn sky widened. Blackness poured down through it and darkened the earth. He could hear shouting from the town now, people pointing upward, people praying, people cursing God and asking Him to look elsewhere. The rider stood in the road with smoke blowing back across his face and the dead men at his feet and the horse pulling against the reins as if it knew the country ahead had ended.

He thought of the old stories. Men riding west to become rich or holy or dead. Men killing one another for land that would not remember them. Men naming rivers and towns and daughters. Men mistaking the map for mercy. In the distance a train whistle sounded though no train had run there in thirty years. The rider picked up the Colt and wiped the cylinder on his coat. He looked once more into the tear in the heavens. There were stars in it. Green stars. Cold stars. Stars from beyond the old human bargain. Then he mounted and rode toward Clear Creek where the water tower lay on its side and the tracks were swallowed by weeds and an old Chinese man smoked opium by the station and watched the sky come apart without surprise. The horse knew the road though there was no road. By evening the sun was red on the black water and fish rose once in the creek and vanished. Frogs croaked in the reeds. Gnats gathered in a smudge over the mud.

The rider watered the horse and knelt and drank and the water tasted of iron and lightning. Across the creek stood a city that had not been there before. Its walls were smooth and dark and the skulls of animals leaned in niches along the steps. Blue fire burned without heat in the windows. At the gate stood figures neither men nor beasts, their eyes pink and lidless, their hands ending in delicate pincers. They watched him with the still patience of creatures who had never been born and could not die. He stood and wiped his mouth. Behind him the world of men lay in sepia ruin. Before him was the city of the dead planet. Above him the sky hung open like a butchered hide. He took the Colt from its holster and checked the loads by feel.

Well, he said. And crossed the creek.

###

That’s how I planned to end A SHOOTING AT NOON.  I still remember it exactly:

Well, he said. And crossed the creek.

Deadknife crossed. I stopped.

That seemed appropriate. I was 17. I had gotten my cowboy across the creek and into outer space. I had no idea what to do with him once he arrived.

I went back to the important work of being a high school senior, six weeks until graduation.

There were cars, beer and music. I played my cassette of Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty until it broke and jammed in the tape deck.

Those last six weeks were good times. But they didn’t make up for the preceding three plus years. Strangers Rest High School was a place that you got through by being either a suck up or invisible.

Kids were useful when they made adults feel good about themselves. The townfolk were proud of their football team, even the seasons when they lost more than they won. Which was every season. The town tolerated the state-champion girls basketball team. Because they were girls, of course, and not state football champions. So disappointing.

Vocational tech was considered a good choice for boys. Someone needs to repair our cars. Home economics for the girls. Well-made cakes and pies are always appreciated. But for the most part? Keep those damned kids under control until we can put them to work in a factory or make them inmates in state prison. Interesting, those are places with no or limited windows. And our townfolk were proud of building “schools of the future,” which were factory-like structures made of painted cinder block, open concept classrooms, buzzing fluorescent lights and no windows. That started in elementary school. Good way to get those kids ready to be productive citizens – if they don’t go loco on reefer first.  

I remember the police chief coming to a Sunday night youth meeting at the church. The speaker that night informed us that 90 percent of Strangers Rest teenagers were using marijuana. “That can’t be possible!” the assistance pastor protested. The police chief solemnly confirmed that it was an agreed-upon statistic. Two dozen church kids in the room. Presumably 21.6 of them were on The Reefer. That’s the math. Imagine how much higher the numbers were among kids at the episcopal church.

Teenagers were bad. None of the parents doubted it. The assistance pastor was from South Africa and spoke with a British accent. Clearly a Democrat. The police chief had long sideburns and slicked down hair like Elvis. That is to say, he looked just like them – real Americans. They believed him. And they’d seen it all on TV. Boys with long hair, protesting the Vietnam War, listening to rock music.

That was back in the 1960s, but in 10 years nothing much had changed. Every few months it seemed my mother would show me the daily newspaper. “Look, another boy who went to UT in Austin, got on drugs and killed 10 people! Look at the before and after.” There was always a high school yearbook photo of a well groomed young man next to a long-haired, bearded duplicate of Charles Manson.” Lesson: Don’t go away to school. Study hard at community college, then get a job at a factory. But not the GM plant in Grand Prairie. Those people are union workers. Democrats. Might as well go to prison.

Thank god we had men in charge like our Elvis police chief. He made sure the teenagers weren’t cruising the Dairy Queen or occupying picnic tables at the park. I remember my mother telling stories about cruising when she was a teen in 1950s Waco.

“Isn’t cruising fun?” she asked me.

“We don’t get to cruise,” I explained. “The police don’t allow teenagers out after dark.”

“But there’s no curfew.”

“Not an official one.”

Mom also lamented that today’s kids don’t spend much time with adults. “When I was growing up we all did everything together,” she said. “Kids should do that today.”

Sounds nice. Perhaps back then the adults didn’t think 90 percent of their kids were dope-addicted criminals.

I remember Johnny B. (name withheld), who I went to school with since at least elementary school I think. At the start of our senior year he wrote an op ed for the school paper, criticizing our athletics program. Seemed tame to me. As far as I could tell, the purpose of PE at Strangers Rest High School was to give the great coaches who kept running losing football teams a chance to feel better by telling non athletic kids like me that they were pathetic.

In a town like Strangers Rest, any criticism coming from the drug-addled teens was a bit mistake. A few days later the school district discovered that he’d been living in the Dallas school district all these years. He didn’t belong in Strangers Rest ISD. They kicked him out. He had to graduate from another high school. It was a lesson aimed at everyone: if you’re not going to be a suck up, keep your pot-smoking, future-felon, electric-chair-bound mouth shut.

After all that, I couldn’t believe it when our class leaders announced that the guest of honor at our graduation would be the principal. “Why are we still sucking up to that a-hole?” I asked one of them. “We’re graduating. We don’t have to suck up anymore.” All I got back was a quizzical look. It seemed the class leaders had built their success on being suck ups. I suppose after 12 years of sucking up in Strangers Rest ISD it’s hard to unlearn the habit.

But I had learned the trick of invisibility. It would serve me well in my plans for a post high school career as a writer. I didn’t know if being a professional writer was even possible for someone like me. But I had the fantasy down pat.

Picture me rocking on the porch of a cabin in the deep East Texas piney woods or perhaps in a crumbling, one-room stone miners hut in the west Texas ghost town of Terlingua. I would curl up with my typewriter and a vial of cannabis tincture. I thought of something I’d read about Gen. MacArthur lounging in a Japanese kimono, smoking cigarettes from a jeweled case and dallying with his teenage Filipino mistress. Sounds perfect. And there was Burroughs, penetrating forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy or living in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish. Would there be complaints or criticism? Probably. Would they laugh at me? Definitely. And I would be ready for them, my treasured Colt Frontier Six in my lap as I nursed an old fashioned or a gimlet. Someone approaches my little writing hovel? “Here’s to crime!” I would say, cheerfully firing over their heads into distant lands. They would leave, and I would become invisible again.

But I digress. Those were the things I thought about in the last weeks of my senior year, driving around and listening to Jackson Browne. The Pacific Ocean was waiting somewhere beyond New Mexico. Driving west out of Strangers Rest on Interstate 20, I could almost see the waves.

Then Chloe read the story.

“The gravestones lean like old teeth?” She looked at me. “What does that mean? How do old teeth lean?”

Back to earth. I started explaining that it was a metaphor. They were crooked. Old people's teeth could lean outward. The metaphor was supposed to suggest age and death and the ruined mouth of the cemetery.

She laughed.

“You are so easy to rattle.”

###

Clearly cowboy / sci-fi was not cool – at least not cool enough if like me you wanted to travel to Chloe’s Mammary Nebulaes. I put Deadknife away.

Years later, he would return, again and again. Always looking to prove Chloe wrong about her sci-fi slam. And cowboys and the old west, which she ridiculed with equal passion. So of course I found myself pursuing both via an ongoing loop of revisionist essays and repetitional storylines.

And I was going to write Chloe into A SHOOTING AT NOON. Every dime western needs a good-hearted prostitute.

###

By noon Chloe had already become part of the architecture.

I first saw her beyond the cemetery fence, standing among the sprinkler heads and Confederate stones as if she had been installed there during the night. The blue light from the subdivision reflected from her face. Behind her, the abandoned hotel, the school gymnasium and the old railway bridge formed a single continuous structure, a kind of psychological terminal through which the inhabitants of Strangers Rest passed without realizing that they had entered it.

The police were waiting on the lawn. There had been reports of an intruder. Or perhaps I had reported one myself.

I could no longer remember.

A patrolman examined the windows with the exaggerated concentration of a physician studying an X-ray. He was young, smooth-faced, almost decorative. His pistol hung against his thigh as a secondary sexual organ. Two other officers stood near the porch beneath a crooked television antenna. Their expressions suggested that nothing unusual had happened and that this was precisely what disturbed them.

Inside the house, the air smelled of incense, iodine and something older—laudanum perhaps, though I had never actually smelled laudanum.

The rooms had changed. The sofa, the radiator, the television set, the Japanese screen: each object occupied approximately the correct position, yet all of them seemed to have been moved several inches toward some invisible center.

“Someone has been here,” I said.

The officer looked at me.

“Someone is still here.”

From the hallway came a soft mechanical sound.

Not footsteps.

More like the adjustment of an instrument.

Chloe appeared in the doorway.

She wore a pale dress and carried a small glass vial. Behind her, in the tinted darkness of the living room, I could make out several figures sitting quietly on the furniture.

At first I thought they were mannequins. Then one of them coughed.

There were perhaps twenty people inside the house. Men and women. An elderly couple. A young girl. A thin man in a black coat. A woman with strawberry hair. Another man whose head was wrapped in bandages. They occupied the chairs, the floor and the staircase with the patient calm of airline passengers waiting through an indefinite delay.

I stepped backward.

The police moved past me. For several seconds nobody spoke. Then the people began filing out.

They emerged through the front door one by one and gathered on the lawn. There was nothing monstrous about them.

They looked like neighbors.

One woman carried a casserole dish. An elderly man adjusted his hat. A girl held a plastic doll by one arm. A middle-aged couple whispered together beside the flower bed. The bandaged man stood beneath the sprinkler mist and watched the water bead on his wrists.

I had imagined weapons. Knives, shotguns, Colt revolvers. I had imagined an entire invading population hidden behind the curtains. Instead there were only people. Normal people.

I found myself apologizing.

“Sorry,” I said. “There seems to have been some misunderstanding.”

No one appeared offended. Chloe smiled. The smile disturbed me more than the imagined intruders.

Behind her the windows of my house reflected a sky that had acquired the gray color of old television glass. The police began putting away their weapons.

For a few moments the entire scene achieved an extraordinary clarity: the patrol cars, the cemetery, the bridge, the shallow pond, the suburban houses extending toward the western horizon. Everything seemed designed according to a single diagram whose purpose I had forgotten.

Then someone laughed.

I looked toward the cemetery. A rider was moving among the graves.

The horse was sorrel or perhaps roan, though the color changed each time it passed behind a stone. The rider wore a black coat and carried something metallic against his hip.

“Do you see him?”

Chloe followed my gaze.

“Who?”

The rider disappeared.

I began to understand that the town had been waiting for this.

Strangers Rest had always presented itself as an ordinary settlement: dealership lots, school buildings, library, police station, old brothel converted into offices, rusted railway equipment, sprinkler systems clicking across municipal lawns.

But beneath the surface another city had been growing.

Not underground.

Inside the first one. Its streets were made of repetitions. Its buildings were constructed from memory. Its inhabitants passed through one another without contact.

Chloe called it the settlement. I called it the invasion. Neither term was adequate.

That afternoon she showed me the notebooks.

They had been kept in a room above the old hotel. Hundreds of pages, many of them copied from newspapers, medical files, police reports and sales catalogues. There were photographs of horses, women, wounds, spacecraft, revolvers, glands, graves and suburban houses.

Across several pages someone had written: HORMONES AT NOON.

And beneath it: SHOOTING.

The words appeared again and again.

Some pages contained only diagrams of the female body joined by lines to maps of the county. Others showed mechanical equipment, radio towers, cemetery plots and enlargements of teeth.

“What is this?” I asked.

“History.”

“No.”

“Psychology, then.”

“No.”

She turned another page.

A photograph showed a woman lying on a sofa. Her face had been cut away and replaced with a picture of a nebula.

On the floor beside us stood several glass jars containing iodine, mandrake root and unknown liquids. A burned spoon rested beside an incense burner. Through the window I could see the police cars still parked across the street.

The officers were talking to the people from my house.

Everyone seemed relaxed.

The incident was already becoming anecdotal.

A minor suburban affray.

A misunderstanding.

Someone would file a report.

Someone would type my name incorrectly.

Someone would record the time as 12:07 p.m.

The machinery of normality was repairing itself.

Chloe opened another notebook.

Inside was a clipping dated 1891.

It described a shooting near Strangers Rest Cemetery.

A man had appeared on horseback shortly before noon. Witnesses disagreed about his age, clothes and physical appearance. Some claimed he was armed with a revolver. Others said he carried an unfamiliar instrument made of glass.

The article ended abruptly.

The remainder had been cut away.

“Who was he?” I asked.

Chloe touched the page.

“Dead Knife.”

The name produced an absurd intimacy.

I felt that I had heard it before, perhaps in childhood, perhaps from a television program, perhaps while unconscious.

Outside, the horse appeared again.

This time I clearly saw the rider.

He was standing on the opposite side of the street.

He did not move.

Neither did the horse.

A patrolman walked directly past them without looking.

“Chloe.”

“I know.”

The rider raised his head.

His face seemed unfinished.

Behind him the afternoon sky had darkened into an immense blue screen.

For one second I saw other structures inside it—cities, platforms, windows, perhaps the underside of a starship.

Then the image vanished.

The rider remained.

“Is he real?” I asked.

Chloe considered this.

“That may not be the useful question.”

She closed the notebook.

Downstairs, someone turned on the television.

The screen showed the exterior of my house.

I stared at it.

On the television, police officers stood on the lawn. The strangers were emerging from the front door exactly as they had several hours earlier.

Then I appeared.

I watched myself step backward.

I watched myself apologize.

Chloe entered the televised frame and looked directly toward the camera.

Toward me.

The image froze.

A caption appeared beneath her face:

* CHLOE’S BEGINNING

The television went black.

From somewhere beyond the cemetery came the sound of a gunshot.

Or a door closing.

Or the first component of some enormous machine locking into position.

Chloe stood beside me in the darkened room.

“Now,” she said, “we can begin.”

###

In high school, RUNNING ON EMPTY by Jackson Browne felt like an anthem to me.  I knew it didn’t make sense, didn’t fit the situation. The road rushing under my wheels. Years gone by. Don’t know where I’m running, I’m just running on. I’d spent my whole life in Strangers Rest. Still, the lyrics just felt right.

I pictured myself heading west on Camp Wisdom Road, past the old derelict rodeo arena. It hadn’t been used in years. Just a collection of crumbling fences and the wooden stands. Void of any cowboying, except perhaps a few ghosts who still believed in the romantic idea of the cowboy.

Next, Interstate 20 at sunset. I thought about how I’d like to just keep driving. How many times had I picture myself driving out of Strangers Rest, to Mineral Wells, through west Texas, across New Mexico and finally running into the Pacific Ocean?

Great soundtrack for the movie version. But how do I flesh it out into a full-length novel? I dropped a few ideas into my notebook:

·   Look up news headlines from 1979, creating an historical hook. “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” came out that December. Maybe I could do something with that. I remember running into a couple of friends from high school. They were already married. It made me think of Jackie, who I’d heard joined one of the top sororities at UT.

Maybe not. Even today, I cringe at the mawkish, morose nature of my memory. I considered adding arcs for the female characters:

o   Chole as the college sophomore with a boyfriend professor. Maybe she would tell him about me, and he would write a mawkish story about the sad senior boy who was turned down by the older girl who wouldn’t go with him to the prom. Title: THE WALZ YOU DIDN’T SAVE FOR ME.  

o   Jackie telling her father in 10th grade she is ready to go to college. “You need a little more aging,” he tells her. She spends the summer before going to UT hanging out at the country club with the athlete from St. Marks. He says “I bet you went to the prom with the football captain.” She shakes her head. “No, just a boy. A favor for my parents.” Title: JUST A BOY.  

No, definitely not that. Just hang me.

Maybe I could add some anecdotes about a few of my classmates.

o   Jack Bryson’s father calling him Tex. Has him working all the time. Mother wants him to go to a Christian college. 

o   Harold wanting to be Willie Nelson

o   DuPaul playing football at SMU

Even then, I noted that this was the concept for a coming-of-age novel. It should borrow, reflect or align with the novel "The Last Picture Show" and the movies "Dazed and Confused" and the more picture postcard elements of "Peyton Place." The story takes place during the spring and summer of 1979 in Strangers Rest, Texas. I am a senior. I hang with my best friend Jack Bryson.

There should be a college day. Seniors get a pass one day to visit a school they plan to attend. Jackie has already been accepted at UT. My mother tells me I will be going to community college.

So for college day, Jackie goes with me to the school to register. We drive in my Cutlass convertible, with Jerry Jeff Walker playing on the stereo. (Because the Jackson Browne tape is already shredded.) I remember feeling very cosmic cowboy that day, what with the wind blowing my long hair. Jackie was stunned that it just took a couple of minutes. For UT, she had to go through a long application and review process starting in the fall.

I feel like that would make a good scene in the movie, too.

###

Regarding PROM NIGHT – it wasn’t one of my better moments. I’d rather not dwell on it. I’ll just give you my notes for that section (and a few more from the same time):

PROM NIGHT - Mark and Jackie double date with Jack and his girlfriend to the prom, but it's not all fun and games. Mark had dumped Jackie earlier in the spring, thinking he was going to get a better date with Chloe. But when he is about to ask her, she tells him that she is dating a literature professor. So then Mark begged Jackie to take him back long enough for the prom. She didn't have an alternate date, so she went along with it. They go out to dinner on a double date with Jack and his girlfriend. They’ve all just turned 18, so they order wine. Jackie gets sick and throws up in the gutter in downtown Dallas outside the hotel hosting the prom. They go inside and get their photo taken together and go home. Outside her house Mark says he was so wrong and still loves her and wants to date again. She says she’ll think about it.

GRADUATION - Classes are over, but graduation ceremony is still a few days away. A group of seniors get together for a party at the park, with a beer keg in the trunk of someone’s car. Everyone talks about the colleges they are going to. Everyone is splitting up, go all over the country. Mark admits he is only going to community college and feels like he is missing out. One of his friends tells him he has no one to blame but himself. Then it’s graduation night. Mark and Jackie go out to dinner after the graduation ceremony. It’s at Texas Stadium. No AC. Sweating in robes, which they all throw in boxes as they leave. Jackie and Mark join several others for a celebratory dinner at 92nd Aero Squadron. Later, they make out and Mark thinks they are back together.

WEDDING - Jackie’s older sister is getting married, and Mark is invited. She and her fiancée have a last minute opening in the bridesgroom lineup. Mark thinks he’s going to be asked to fill in. He will get to spend time with Jackie, but a couple of days before the wedding she explains that she has a new boyfriend, who is a rugby player from St. Mark’s School in Dallas. He is friends with the groom, so he will of course be in the wedding. Mark goes to the wedding by himself and watches Jackie and her new boyfriend dancing at the party.

ROAD TRIP - Jack is going out of state to college, so before he leaves Mark and Jack take a road trip to the gulf coast. On the beach they meet someone with marijuana and get stoned. They share a jug of wine and bang around on guitars, playing Rocky Raccoon and looking at the stars. They talk about how they will always be friends and live in neighboring houses and marry women who will never leave them and have big families.

SUMMER IS OVER AND FALL SEMESTER BEGINS - All of Mark’s friends, including Chloe, leave for college. He goes to community college and takes a part time job at the mall. DePaul, the only black boy in school and star of the football team, gets a scholarship to play football at SMU. He is killed in a car accident a few weeks after the start of the fall semester. He drives his car to the city park, but it’s not like it was only a few months before. He knows no one. Just feels utterly alone. But soon he meets some new people at his part time job. They invite him to go out one night after work to the Filling Station bar in Dallas. Mark gets to sit next to a beautiful girl who is a high school senior. She invites him to a Halloween party, and he begins to feel like he’s starting the next chapter of his life.

###

That’s bullshit, of course. Jack and I didn’t take a road trip to the coast. That came after college. And even then, nobody offered us marijuana.

DuPaul is based on a real person I went to school with for 12 years. That was sad.

There was no Halloween party, no new chapter for me. I just sort of drifted from high school to community college. I did make friends at my part-time job at the mall. One guy had an apartment. We’d sit around, get high and watch the tube. (Yes, I stole that line from Steve Miller’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN.  And no, we didn’t get high or watch TV, but we did listen to Pink Floyd and Mussorgsky’s PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION and drink cheap vodka mixed with orange juice. Good times.)

Eventually I moved on to a four-year school, studied journalism, landed an entry level writing job. Years became decades. The notebook with the notes for my great American novel disappeared into a box. The box disappeared into another box. Papers accumulated. Stories accumulated. Houses accumulated things and then surrendered them. Some were saved. Some were thrown away. Some went where everything eventually went: the landfill. Writers aren’t supposed to think that way, but it’s the truth. A few copies of our work end up on shelves. Most of it is shredded and goes into the incinerator or out with the garbage.

That’s a lot of stuff, right? How do I turn all that garbage into anything useful? I am retired now. How much longer am I going to wait to do something with this material?

I did the only thing I could think of – I put my notes into ChatGPT.

“Turn these drafts and notes into something useable,” I typed. Here’s what ChatGPT gave back:

I remembered Deadknife occasionally.

Mostly I remembered inventing him.

The mysterious rider had belonged to the newspaper. The name belonged to me.

The sorrel horse belonged to the newspaper.

The Colt belonged to the newspaper.

The bandages, iodine, medicine glass and laudanum belonged to the newspaper.

Clear Creek belonged to the newspaper.

But the city beyond the creek belonged to me.

The robots belonged to me.

2161 belonged to me.

The ladders belonged to me.

The witch belonged to me.

The telepathic horse belonged to me.

Coronado belonged to me.

The mind bombs belonged to me.

The soul knives belonged to me.

The idea that the frontier had moved outward belonged to me.

I knew the difference between what I had found and what I had invented.

That distinction seemed important.

It is less important now.

When I found the pages again, the final sentence was exactly where I remembered it.

Well, he said. And crossed the creek.

I turned the page.

There was another page behind it.

Same paper.

Same typewriter.

Same fading ribbon.

My name in the upper right-hand corner.

I have no memory of writing it. Now I just live in the landfill with what’s left.

# ##

LATE REPORT, filed by Sheriff Wren, Strangers Rest

The Strawberry Dead came through after the cotton towns had already gone wrong, half a county standing in one universe and half in another. This is the account as it was passed to me, though some of it is probably false and the rest merely accurate in the wrong order. Cowboy Mark had been listening from a distance to a party somewhere beyond the parking lot when the sky changed substance. One moment there were headlights, beer cans, girls laughing under a black brimstone evening, the next a hole opened upward and Dead Knife came through on the old horse with the telepathic equipment already running. A witness later said he had been standing calmly beside the gutter when the air broke open, though another account places him thirty feet away leaning against a ruined vending machine. There was a flash. There was fire beyond the fire. There was a Ship or what the report calls a Ship because no better word was available, something metallic and black spilling green light through itself as though Venus had developed a wound. Mark said he saw a woman there. Ben said there was no woman. Jack said there had been a woman earlier but she had already crossed. Chloe said nothing. The horse lowered its head and listened.

Nobody agrees on what happened. AFTERNOON - Dead Knife may have been riding east along Clear Creek or may have been dead for a hundred years. One old teamster said he saw him near the mill, another swore the road had been empty except for yellow ash blowing over the tombstones. Headlines appeared before the event:

* MIND BOMBS SLAY HUNDREDS. TELEPATHIC METAL FALLS OVER DALLAS. COWBOY VANISHES INTO BLACK SKY.

The dates do not match. The photographs show different men. One picture seems to contain Mark, though Mark says he was nowhere near the site and anyway was at prom with a girl whose name he cannot remember. Another image shows a roan horse standing in a ruined room furnished with a lampshade, a train timetable, three wine bottles and what appears to be a human jaw. Nobody knows who took the photograph. The negative was found inside a magazine published six years later. A professor declared it fraudulent. The professor disappeared the following week.

Dead Knife kept moving westering through the reports, always in relation to something else, never quite an event by himself. Strawberry fields. Cotton smoke. Rotting road signs. A black opening beyond a church wall. A telepathic horse standing in the rain. Mark saw him in dreams long before he knew the name. In one dream the horse came through the bedroom wall and stopped beside the bed while a woman in an evening dress flipped through a magazine and asked whether he wanted to go farther. Mark said, “Farther than what?” She pointed toward the window. There was no window. Only stars. In another version it was Chloe, older somehow and frightened, who stepped out of a room that had no door and said the relation between the dead and the living was being misreported. “They think death comes after,” she said. “It doesn’t.” Then the walls lowered themselves into the floor and a wind smelling of ice and burned wiring crossed the room.

By then the city was already decaying into alternate geography. Streets ended in deserts. Parking lots opened onto black water. Trains passed through the upper floors of apartment buildings. Clear Creek ran backward carrying leaves, dead fish, television screens and once, according to Jonah, a perfectly preserved nineteenth-century coffin. He and Mark opened it. Inside was no body, only a lampshade and a note reading YOU WERE HERE YESTERDAY. Mark said the handwriting looked like his own. Jonah said that was impossible. “That’s the point,” Mark answered. They put the lid back on and pushed the coffin into the creek. It floated upstream against the current and vanished under a bridge that had not been there ten minutes earlier.

The old reports keep returning to the horse. Telepathic. Black or roan depending on the witness. Sometimes speaking in complete sentences, sometimes transmitting only odors, flashes, fear. Strawberry. Brimstone. Cotton. Ice. Burned copper. The smell of a girl’s hair at prom. The horse knew things about Dead Knife that Dead Knife himself did not know. It knew the date of his death, the names he would use afterward, the rooms he had not yet entered. Once it told Mark that Dead Knife had already quit. “Quit what?” Mark asked. The answer arrived not as language but as an image of a yellow road running beneath the stars and stopping at a black wall. On the other side of the wall something was whistling.

There were several attempts to explain the phenomenon. The military called it a navigation failure. A professor in Dallas called it a psychosocial frontier artifact. One magazine described it as a mass hallucination associated with low-frequency electromagnetic exposure. An old woman at Clear Creek said they were all fools.

 “He rides through because there ain’t enough world to hold him,” she said. She had known Dead Knife, or claimed to, when he was young. She remembered him bored beside a tombstone, flipping a knife into the dirt, saying he wanted out.

“Out where?” she asked. He pointed at the afternoon sky. “Out of relation.” Years later, when the Ship appeared and the wind turned green, she was the only person who did not run.

Mark found her sitting beside the road after the opening had closed. The air was saturated with the odor of ozone, wine and something sweet beginning to rot.

“Did you see him?” Mark asked.

“See who?”

“Dead Knife.”

She laughed. “You people always want the noun.” She looked toward the empty sky where something black had briefly torn through. “It’s the tearing that matters.” Then she stood, brushed the ash from her dress and walked toward a house that no longer existed.

The last reliable account comes from a girlfriend whose name has been cut out of the file. She said Dead Knife appeared in her room near dawn, wet from the creek, carrying no gun. He seemed frightened. This is rare in the reports. Usually he is described as calm, bored, amused, already beyond fear. She asked what had happened to the horse. He looked at her for a long time and said, “The horse went on without me.” Then he sat on the floor beside the bed and listened to something inside the wall. She heard it too: distant machinery, train wheels, maybe voices. After a while Dead Knife said, “They have the wrong account.” “Who does?” “Everybody.” “Wrong about what?” He smiled. “After.” Then the room filled with black light and when she could see again he was gone.

###

Years later Mark would write that the report ended there. This was not true. The report never ended. It kept entering other stories, other towns, other dreams. Clear Creek. Venus. Dallas. The prom. Strawberry fields. The ruined room. The black Ship. The horse crossing alone under a sky full of torn stars. Every witness thought they had seen a different event because none understood they were looking at the same opening from different years.

DEAD KNIFE WAS NOT ARRIVING.

DEAD KNIFE WAS LEAVING.

The distinction was discovered too late.

###

Perhaps I should have become a college literature professor. Sometimes I think so (especially when I think of Chloe). Picture me in a tweed blazer with leather elbow patches, grading papers while Chloe prances around the room in a half-buttoned sleeveless top draped over her Mammary Nebulaes. Ah, look at this one. Here is a good story at last.

A coming-of-age narrative, a young man navigating the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood. Through its evocative prose and subtle character interactions, the piece explores themes of self-discovery, social inertia, and the yearning for something beyond the mundane.

“I’ll cover this one in class,” the professor tells himself.

# ##

I like the idea of Mark having an unexpected success. Picture this: At the end of high school, he wins a writing award from the Dallas Times Herald during their Journalism Day competition. Jackie is editor of the school paper, but doesn't win anything. She can't believe it as Mark goes on stage to get his award certificate. She is happy for him and tells him about a time at the end of their freshman year, when she was joining the school paper staff and one of the teachers said "and we're really excited about one of your classmates, Mark Leach, who is also joining the staff.” Jackie said she was “so jealous." By the way, that really happened. It was a nice compliment.

Anyway, back to Journalism Day. Students from high schools all over the region come to the event. Reporters talk about their careers. For the first time, Mark entertains the idea that he could make money as a writer. That could be his career.

“I have another idea,” I said. “Mark has a part-time job putting messages on the town marquee, which is a big Chamber of Commerce billboard in downtown. He climbs the ladder to put plastic letters of the sign, messages paid for by businesses. Perhaps we use this prop to create a symbolic act at the end of the story.” Clearly I was on a roll. Time to integrate more recurring motifs. The song “Running on Empty.” Mark thinks of this song as an anthem, imaging himself driving his convertible out of town and into the sunset, across the southwest and eventually to the Pacific coast. He thinks of lines like “I don't know where I'm running now, I'm just running on” and “I don't even know what I'm hoping to find.

What else? Maybe engage in stream of memory, which is my own creation. Stream of memory is a bit like stream of consciousness but more a memory dump:

“Mark was not the best of sons. He would not sing in the Christmas choir at church at Kindergarten. In the second grade, she helped him learn how to paint for a contest at school. The teacher told his mother his was the best and he would have won, but he put a beer bottle in the picture. One time while shopping a woman asked Mark to put on a spiked topped Nazi helmet. the woman said he couldn't keep it. That bugged him. Maybe he'd want to keep it, play the Nazi in the neighborhood war games. His mother might tell people how cute he looked, and Mark never wanted to be cute. So he said no. The mother was unhappy and he knew it. She called him a hard head. Maybe so, but at least he wasn't a Nazi hard head. Mark also failed at various moral tests she administered, such as paying back a loan for a toy. Mark didn't like school. His experiences shaped / warped his feelings about education – windowless team teaching at Hastings Elementary, the classroom of painted cinderblock walls and four teachers all talking at once under buzzing florescent lights. And in high school, a prison-like gym class, bullying football players, etc. the only thing at school he liked was writing, but even then, it was generally forced through some non-creative filter that he hated. The linear essay of intro, 3 supporting points, conclusion was exceptionally painful – teachers told everyone that college would be hard. Could he even handle it? He saw his hometown of Strangers Rest as a personification of mediocrity. Once time they built a concrete entry monument for the town, but the workers put the letters in backwards. Mark said "that's typical." His mother hated it. “You should be more respectful.” And Mark has many physical obsession themes with girls. Jackie has a hand perfectly shaped for his nether regions. One night, he discovers that her mouth is perfectly shaped for it, too. Chloe has a scent, undefinable. Like powerful pheromones. He is sure she has a perfectly shaped hand and mouth. But maybe also a perfectly shaped nether region. He wants to find out.”

# # #

I kept feeding ideas to ChatGPT, and it delivered. It even created a new title: THE ROAD OUT OF STRANGERS REST

Now it was a particularly wretched coming-of-age story. Mark was a restless high school senior who feared getting stuck in Strangers Rest. An unexpected success as a writer would give him confidence. Jackie would become a rival and foil. Chloe would represent another possible future. His mother, his teachers, money, college and self-doubt would provide obstacles. Running on Empty would play on the car stereo while Mark tried to decide whether he was running toward something or merely running away.

Eventually a major opportunity would force a choice.

Mark would either leave Strangers Rest or decide to stay for the right reasons.

Either way, it would be an active choice.

Then he would climb the ladder to the Chamber of Commerce marquee one final time and arrange the plastic letters into some suitably meaningful message announcing that he had grown up. So symbolic!

The novel would end with motion, possibility and resolve. Picture a story of validation, ambition, rivalry, self-doubt, a path toward becoming a writer.

ChatGPT loved it, thought it was great. ChatGPt could not be more wrong.

Trust me when I tell you the story was terrible. Not badly constructed. Worse than that. It sounded correct. Every piece was where it was supposed to be. The restless boy. The ambitious girl. The difficult mother. The talent waiting to be recognized. The symbolic song. The final decision. The meaningful sign. A road out of Strangers Rest. That was exactly the problem.

I was beginning to suspect there was no road out. There might not even be a road. The story kept running on, a writing machine gone off the tracks.

Mark picked Jackie up just after nine. The Cutlass wasn’t running great, but it still looked good—top down, speakers half-blown, Jerry Jeff Walker warbling something about cowboys and cosmic dust. He liked that. It made him feel like a myth someone forgot to write down. Jackie slid in and didn’t say much. She had on a white sundress and red lipstick, like she was headed somewhere more important than a community college registration office. “You’re late,” she said, legs crossed, fingers tapping against the doorframe. “Fashionably,” Mark said. It sounded cooler in his head than it did out loud. They pulled away from her driveway and coasted through Strangers Rest, the town already hot and bleached out by late morning sun. The gas station sign was missing a few letters. The football field looked like a sad promise from last fall, grass dry and chalky from marching bands and Texas heat. Neither of them talked for a while. The wind whipped through the car, tangling Jackie’s hair and snapping the loose corner of the dashboard mat. Mark drove one-handed, trying to look like he didn’t care how he looked. “You excited about today?” she finally asked. “Sure,” he said. “You know. As much as one can be about junior college orientation.” Jackie gave a half-smile, the kind she saved for when she didn’t quite believe him. Trinity Valley Community College looked like an afterthought. Beige buildings squatting low against the parking lot, like they didn’t want to be noticed. A few kids wandered around aimlessly, some barefoot, some sunburned, all looking like they already regretted showing up. Inside the admissions office, Mark filled out a two-page form and was handed a manila folder with his class schedule and a temporary ID. His photo made him look pale and confused, which he figured was fair enough. Back in the car, Jackie raised her sunglasses and squinted at the paper.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“That’s it,” he said. “Pretty painless.”

“I had to write two essays, get three letters of recommendation, take a tour, fill out a FAFSA, and mail half my life to Austin just to get into UT.”

“Guess they’re just thrilled to have me.”

She didn’t laugh. Just leaned her head back and stared at the clouds like maybe they were going to write a better version of this moment than the one they were in. On the drive back, Mark turned the volume up again. He let the sun hit his face and imagined himself as the protagonist of a novel he hadn’t started yet—something slightly tragic, slightly funny. He pictured a first sentence: The summer I almost mattered began with a clipboard and a plastic ID card. He looked over at Jackie. She hadn’t said anything in ten minutes. “You think I could write a book someday?” he asked, like it had just occurred to him. She didn’t look over. “I think you want to,” she said.

“Is that the same thing?”

“No,” she said, and pushed her sunglasses back down. They passed the high school again. Band kids were out front in the heat, sweating through their T-shirts, trying to tune brass instruments that would never sound right. Mark watched them until they were out of view. Then he pressed his foot a little harder on the gas, just to see if the car still had anything left in it. It felt something like gravity. Something pulling him forward whether he liked it or not.

# ##

This is terrible, of course. Looking at it now, I feel something like slow death. I should never be allowed to write. Anything. Still, ChatGPT would not give it up. It really liked the story it was turning my life into.

ChatGPT: “This is shaping up to be a deeply immersive coming-of-age novel with strong themes of escape, identity, and self-discovery.”

Maybe it wasn’t so terrible, right?

I leaned in further. I kept cycling back over old ground, adding trash to the landfill. I started with prom night and proceeded through the various embarrassments:

PROM NIGHT DINNER - Mark was so proud of the self-constructed idea of himself in this moment. He’d pulled out the chair for Jackie. He’d ordered like he was the kind of person who knew what he wanted, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t just the wine. He leaned over and whispered to Jackie, “This is nice, right?” She blinked slowly, then exhaled, slurring just a little as she shook her head.

“My head’s buzzing,” she said, the faintest smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “It sounds like static from the radio or something.”

Mark grinned, suddenly feeling like he was the expert. “That’s Jack’s lamb,” he said. “It’s still sizzling on the plate.” 

They finished their meal, but there was something hanging in the air. Not the usual after-prom thrill, but more of an understanding between them, like they were both pretending for the night. Pretending they didn’t know how everything was already starting to slip away.

They left the Old House restaurant, the night still young, the streets around them full of neon lights and the distant hum of downtown. Mark drove south on Central Expressway, with Jackie in the passenger seat, her hand on the window, tapping to a beat that only she could hear. But then—just as we took the downtown exit—Jackie suddenly sat up. “Stop the car. I need you to stop right now.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Jackie’s eyes were glassy, and her mouth hung open like she was trying to swallow something bitter. “I don’t feel good,” she said, pushing the door open. Mark watched, helpless, as she leaned over and threw up in the gutter. It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t anything like what he imagined prom night should be.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the security guard in the lobby of an office building across the street. He didn’t move, just watched. Mark felt the heat rise in his face. He didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Jackie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and didn’t say anything at first. She just sat there for a long moment, staring down at the mess in the gutter. Mark stayed in the car, feeling like an idiot for not being more... something. She straightened up slowly and turned to look at him, the briefest of smirks playing across her lips.

“I’m so glad you talked me into this.”

Mark didn’t know whether to laugh or just let it all collapse. Instead, he just said, “You okay?”

She sighed, leaning back against the car. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Just... give me a minute.”

Mark waited, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel, wishing he could make it all feel like it was still special. Still important. But he knew it wasn’t. Not anymore. When Jackie finally got back in the car, her face was pale but somehow resigned. They didn’t talk much after that. The night felt too small now, too big for the tiny roles they were pretending to play. They drove the rest of the way to the hotel in silence, but somewhere between the streetlights and the sound of tires against asphalt, Mark knew. It wasn’t the night he’d thought it would be. But it was the night they’d had.

GRADUATION NIGHT / 92ND AERO SQUADRON - The graduation ceremony was held at Texas Stadium—the heat inside unbearable, the air stagnant with no relief from the humidity. The graduates sat in rows, wearing those heavy black robes, already soaked with sweat, their faces shiny and slick under the harsh stadium lights. Mark shifted in his seat, trying not to fidget too much. He could feel the weight of the gown, the strangling heat around his neck from the polyester robe. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole graduation process was some sort of rite of passage that had less to do with actual accomplishments and more to do with getting out of that stadium as quickly as possible. He glanced around the sea of faces—his friends, people he’d spent years with. But there was a detachment in his gaze, a sense of distance, as if everyone else was playing their part in a movie and he was just a spectator. When the ceremony ended, Mark tore off the cap, glad to be free of the stupid tassel, and threw his robe into the box along with the others, glad to be rid of the suffocating fabric. He squinted out into the early evening, the heat still thick in the air, the sound of graduation chants and distant congratulations ringing in his ears. It felt like the whole world was standing still, waiting for the big, predictable next move. Jackie had been a few rows behind him, and he found her standing by the exit, looking just as miserable in the heat. She was tugging at the sleeves of her gown, trying to cool down in a futile way. But when she caught sight of him, she cracked that half-smile, the one that always made him feel like maybe—just maybe—things would be okay. The one that always made him believe they were in this together. “You made it, huh?” she said, brushing her hair back from her face. Her makeup had started to melt, but she still looked gorgeous. Just like a ghost of everything he’d ever wanted, something that never really existed. He smiled back, trying to shake off the weight of the ceremony. “Barely,” Mark replied. “This robe’s killing me.” She laughed, the sound cutting through the warm, sticky air. “Tell me about it. I think I’m gonna sweat through my skin.” They made their way out to the parking lot, joining several others for a celebratory dinner at 92nd Aero Squadron, the kind of place where you could feel important just by sitting down and ordering something with steak in it. It was designed to look like a bombed out WWI French estate. Strangers Rest’s 1979 graduating class occupied a half dozen tables. Mark thought the world somehow felt so much smaller when you were eating in a place like that, everyone milling about, pretending that this wasn’t just a temporary blip in the long, endless cycle of whatever came next. He kept looking over at Jackie, unsure of what to say. She seemed lost in the moment, like she was processing everything, but in a distant way. As if she was pretending it was all going according to plan.

“So, you feeling like you’ve done it?” Mark asked, fiddling with the edge of his napkin. It was the first time since they’d sat down that he’d really looked at her, and when he did, it felt like something had shifted between them. Like this dinner was both a celebration and a farewell.

Jackie looked up from her plate, meeting his gaze, her eyes a little too guarded. “Done? No. But I’m close. You?”

Mark paused, the question sitting on his tongue. He had no real answer, just the feeling that it wasn’t over for him yet—something still needed to be figured out. But the uncertainty made him uncomfortable, so he deflected, just like he always did.

“Yeah,” he said, almost too quickly. “I mean, I guess I’ll figure it out.”

They ate in silence for a while, the sound of clinking silverware filling the space between them. It wasn’t that they were mad at each other, or even distant. It was just the weight of everything unsaid, of the thing between them that neither of them knew how to name. The way it felt like they were both waiting for the other person to make the first move. After dessert, when the sky outside had turned dark and the last of the evening light faded, they made their way outside, heading toward the car. Mark kept glancing at her, wondering if the moment was finally going to come, the one where they’d say everything they’d been avoiding. But the air between them was charged, in a way that didn’t need words. They reached the car, and before either of them could think of what to say next, Jackie kissed him.

It was quick at first, just a press of lips that made Mark’s heart skip, but then it deepened, the kiss taking on a hunger that neither of them had expected. Mark’s hands instinctively reached for her waist, pulling her closer, trying to pull her into something that made sense—something he could hold on to. He had this irrational, almost desperate feeling that this was his last chance to make it all right. The kiss lasted longer than it should have, and when they pulled apart, their faces were flushed, and their breath was short.

“Do you think...?” Mark began, voice thick with the hope he couldn’t quite keep inside. But he couldn’t finish the thought, and Jackie didn’t say anything in return. She just smiled again, that half-smile, and kissed him once more.

“We better go,” she said.

A half hour later, they pulled into the driveway at her house. The sat in the dark for a moment, no one speaking. Then Jackie pulled off her top. Mark unzipped his pants. A moment later she was holding his genitals in her perfectly shaped hand. He couldn’t believe it. At last, they were back together. Everything was going to be fine.

PARTY IN THE PARK /GRADUATION AFTERMATH – Lakeside Park after dark was a dim collection of trees and scattered picnic tables. The keg was already tapped when Mark arrived. A few cars were parked along the gravel road, their owners already staked out by the keg. Jack was already there, leaning against his car, beer in hand, chatting with some of the football guys. It seemed like everyone had made the decision already, or at least had figured out how to make it sound like they had. “Oh yeah, I’m headed to Tarleton,” someone said. “Gonna major in business. Make some money.”

“Yeah, I’m going to SMU. I wanted a scholarship for baseball, but it didn’t work out. They told me I could try as a walk on.”

They were all so sure of what came next, even the ones who didn’t have much of a plan. They all had somewhere to be, something to do. He still wasn’t sure if it was just a kind of collective delusion or if they actually believed it. Maybe it was easier that way.

Jack caught his eye across the crowd. “We made it! Grab a beer!” Mark nodded and wandered over, taking the cup from Jack without saying much. He back over the past 12 years, the string of moments, a collection of nights he had taken for granted.

“What are you doing, man?” Jack asked, slapping Mark on the back. “Where did you finally decide to go to school?” Mark hesitated. He knew what Jack expected him to say. The right answers, the answers that made sense—UT, A&M, wherever the hell it was that made people think you were doing something with your life. He had been holding back. He didn’t want to acknowledge the truth.

“Community college,” Mark said. The words felt foreign coming out of his mouth, like he was admitting defeat. Like he was saying it wasn’t meant for him, whatever it was. But Jack didn’t care, of course.

“A year at Mountain View isn’t so bad,” he said. “You get to do whatever you want. Since I’m going to a Christian school, they make you sign a form that says you won’t drink alcohol.”

“Maybe just focus on pot.”

“Pretty sure that’s allowed.”

Chloe wasn’t there. He hadn’t seen her since the library, since the night he thought maybe he could be something more, something worth telling stories about. She’d disappeared into the same future as everyone else, back to NTSU. She had a boyfriend, a professor. He was just a kid still trying to figure out what books really meant, still thinking that the next page would somehow explain it all. He didn’t think anyone else was feeling it, though. That ache that snuck in every time someone mentioned a big school, a real future. It wasn’t just the college talk. It was the fact that everyone else knew what they were doing. They had the right answers. They were still running ahead, believing in the story they were writing about themselves. Mark just felt like the pages were blank.

“You good, man?” Jack asked.

Mark nodded, taking another gulp of beer. “Yeah, I’m good.”

A few yards away, a group of girls were talking about their last days in town. “I swear to God, I’ll never get used to living here,” one of them said, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “But at least I won’t have to see him anymore.”

“I hear you,” another girl added, as though she’d been saying it for months, years even. “Strangers Rest’s just too small. I can’t wait to get out. College is everything.”

Mark watched them, listened to the way they spoke like they’d already been to the other side. They were already done with their town, their high school, their old lives. He wasn’t jealous. No envy. He thought of all those people thinking they had it figured out.

Jackie showed up. She caught Mark’s eye, gave him that half-smile, like there was something they both understood but weren’t going to talk about. They hadn’t seen each other since graduation night. Mark knew she was avoiding him, but why?

“Hey, you,” she said, walking over to him. “Good party?”

Mark nodded. “It’s better now.”

“Yeah. Well, we’ll see where it takes us.” She didn’t say it with any malice or bitterness. It was just a fact. They were all going different places now. Different directions. So that was it, Mark thought. The time for pretending everything would stay the same was over.

“Come see me at the mall,” he said. “I’ll be working there all summer.”

Jackie smiled, but it wasn’t the same smile. Not the one from earlier in the year when they’d planned their future, or when they’d believed in something that hadn’t quite reached its end yet. It was a different smile. The kind that came with the knowledge that the map had already been drawn, and none of them could go back.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll think about you, okay?” And with that, she was gone, heading over to join the others by the keg. Mark stood alone, watching everyone walk away into futures that didn’t have him in them.

THE WEDDING - Jackie’s older sister was getting married, and Mark had been invited, along with a handful of other friends and family from high school. He hadn’t expected much from the event—just the usual stuff: the long ceremony, awkward mingling, and some half-hearted speeches. But there was a part of him that couldn’t shake the thought that maybe, just maybe, this wedding would be different. When Jackie had mentioned that the wedding party was looking for someone to fill a spot, Mark had allowed himself to think it might be him. The groomsman lineup had one last-minute opening. He figured that maybe, just maybe, he would get that call. It wasn’t even the idea of standing up at the altar that excited him. It was the idea of getting close to Jackie again, of spending time with her, of being part of her world again.

# # #

Poorly sculpted fluff. And ChatGPT was all in, encouraging me to keep going. ChatGPT: “Would love to hear your thoughts—especially on Jackie’s role and how the ending lands for you.”

“I have more material to add,” I said.

The days leading up to the wedding, Mark allowed himself to daydream. He imagined standing beside her, laughing about the ceremony, talking about the future. He pictured the two of them slipping away from the crowd, walking together on the manicured lawns of the reception hall, whispering quietly to each other about how much had changed since high school. In his mind, he was already back in her life, her hand resting casually in his. But that wasn’t what happened. Two days before the wedding, Jackie pulled him aside in the parking lot of the grocery store. She looked different—more grown-up somehow, less like the girl he remembered from high school. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a neat bun, her makeup perfect in a way that made Mark feel out of place. She stood with her arms crossed, as if she was bracing herself for something. “Mark, I need to tell you something,” she said, her voice steady but somehow flat. He felt his heart skip a beat, like he was anticipating something important, something life-changing.

“I—I have a boyfriend,” Jackie said, looking him straight in the eye as if testing his reaction.

Mark blinked. “What? A boyfriend?” He tried to keep his voice neutral, though he could feel the sudden rush of heat creeping up his neck.

“His name’s Chris. He’s a rugby player from St. Mark’s. You’ll meet him at the wedding. He’s friends with the groom, so of course, he’ll be in the wedding party.”

A rugby player. St. Mark’s. He could already picture him: tall, muscular, confident—everything that Mark was not.

“Oh,” Mark said, his voice coming out strangled. He tried to say something else, but the words felt stuck in his throat. “That’s cool.

Jackie shook her head, her lips pressed together. “I’m sorry, Mark. I just didn’t know how to tell you. I thought I’d be honest with you before everything got weird.”

"Right. No, it’s fine. I get it. I mean, if that’s what’s going on, that’s what’s going on.”

Jackie gave him a small, apologetic smile and walked off before he could say anything else. Mark watched her go, his fingers tightening on the grocery bag he’d been holding for no reason, feeling completely adrift in the silence that followed.

THE WEDDING - Mark showed up alone. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t this. The venue was grand, all sparkling lights and expensive flowers, the kind of place where everyone looked polished and perfect, like they had it all figured out. He felt out of place, as if he was wearing someone else’s clothes and trying to act like he belonged. As the ceremony went on, Mark found himself growing more and more distant from everything happening around him. He watched Jackie from across the room, seated next to her new boyfriend, Chris. They laughed together, a quiet connection that Mark couldn’t quite place. Mark had always been so close to Jackie, but now there was a strange barrier between them, something invisible that neither of them could cross. When the reception started, the energy picked up. The music blared, the guests laughed and chatted, and the clink of glasses echoed through the air. Mark stood off to the side, feeling his loneliness press in on him, the weight of everything unsaid hanging like a fog in the room. And then he saw them. Jackie and Chris were on the dance floor, moving together as if they were the only ones in the room. He could see how they fit, how easy it was for them, how natural the movements seemed. Chris held her a little too tightly, a little too possessively, and Jackie laughed in a way that didn’t quite reach her eyes, but she still seemed happy, at ease. The sight twisted something in Mark’s gut, a knot of jealousy and regret that he couldn’t untangle. He tried to turn away, to pretend it didn’t bother him, but he couldn’t. The whole evening felt like a cruel reminder that whatever they had, whatever he thought they had, was long gone. The song ended, and they stepped off the floor, their hands still touching for just a moment too long. Jackie glanced over at Mark, offering him a fleeting smile. It wasn’t an apology, just a moment of recognition. Mark smiled back, though it felt like he was forcing the expression, trying to keep his face neutral.

“Enjoying the party?” Chris called over, his voice too loud in Mark’s ears.

“It’s the best,” Mark said. His gaze lingered on Jackie for just a second longer before he turned and walked out onto the balcony, away from the music, the laughter. He felt like everything was slipping away.

THE ROAD TRIP – Mark listened to the Cutlass hum along the interstate, eating up the miles between home and the coast. It was a simple trip—just a road out of town, a few days to take in the salty air before Jack went off to college out of state.

They had talked about this trip for months, a last hurrah before the world pulled them in different directions. Mark knew his old friend would go off and do something grand while he’d be left behind, his roots still tangled in the soil of their small hometown. But there was something in the air now, something heavier. They were in the last moments of something golden, something they’d never get back.

Mark rolled down the window, letting the warm breeze whip through the car. They passed stretches of nothing mesquite and coastal plain, an occasional farm or faded billboard. Eventually the coast began to stretch out in the distance, a band of blue that seemed to shimmer on the horizon.

“We’re almost there,” Mark said, his voice quieter than usual, like he was trying to hold onto the moment a little longer.

“Yeah,” Jack said, his voice lazy, like he was still floating somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. “Still feels like we’re driving to nowhere. But it’s a nice nowhere, right?”

It was nice. There was something about the simplicity of the trip. The road stretched out before them, and it felt like they had all the time in the world. They got to the beach late in the afternoon, the sun hanging low in the sky, just starting to dip into the water. Mark parked the car on a stretch of packed sand next to a few other cars..

“Let’s go find a spot,” Mark said, grabbing a jug of red wine and a couple of guitars from the backseat. Jack opened the wine, and they passed it back and forth, not worrying about the taste (it was the cheapest “burgundy” at the gas station). Mark took out his guitar and strummed a couple of chords, and Jack joined him. Before long, they were both banging around on their instruments, playing whatever they could remember, letting the sound drift out into the wide, empty beach.

“This is not the best,” Jack said.

“But a little more practice and we’ll be fully terrible.”

After a while, they settled on ROCKY RACCOON, laughing about how bad their harmonies were, the lyrics coming out disjointed but full of something warm, something unspoken. Jack tipped his head back and gazed at the sky, his voice a little slurred from the wine and the weed they’d been offered by a guy with too many tattoos, someone who had just shown up and started talking about how it was a good night to be alive. The stars were starting to show, flickering through the late summer haze.

“You ever think about what it’s gonna be like?” Jack asked, his words drawn out like they didn’t quite want to leave his mouth. “You know, after we leave? What if we don’t come back here? What if... what if we just drift apart?”

Mark paused, the sound of the waves crashing against the shore for a moment the only thing in the air. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, taking another swig of wine. “I think... I think we’ll be fine. I mean, I’ll be here, and you’ll be there. It’s just... different. But we’ll be fine.”

Jack’s gaze drifted from the sky down to him, and for a moment, there was something in his eyes—something that looked like it was on the edge of breaking, but then he smiled and shrugged. “I know. I guess we will. We’ll always be friends, right?”

“You know it,” Mark said.

They went back to their guitars, their voices more in tune now, more confident. It felt easy to pretend like nothing would change. They sang about the future—about how they’d both end up in the same town one day, maybe even Strangers Rest. They’d marry women who would never leave them. They’d live next door, and their kids would run back and forth through their yards.

Jack nodded. “Big yards. Big families.”

“And we’ll have a barbeque every weekend,” Mark said.

Mark looked out at the moonlit waves. The breeze, the wine, the guitars. Everything felt just … right. Surely it would always be this way, he thought. No matter what happened—college, careers, distance—they’d always be in each other’s lives.

Jack was thinking the same way, and he started laughing. He held up his plastic cup of wine as if for a toast. “Buddies for life?”

Mark raised his glass, too. “Buddies for life! Hell yeah!”

They stayed there for a while longer, the music and the talk weaving through the air, mixing with the scent of saltwater and the sound of the surf. Mark found himself wishing for a way to freeze this moment, to hold onto it forever. But time moved anyway, the stars in the sky fading one by one, and soon the beach was empty again, the two of them standing alone in the silence of the night, knowing that in the morning, they’d be heading back.

SUMMER IS OVER AND FALL SEMESTER BEGINS - The heat of summer surrendered to fall, and with it, the finality of everything Mark thought he had known. The last wave of friends had left for college—Chloe, Jack, DePaul—each taking their own paths to something bigger, something that pulled them away from the small, safe world of high school. And there he was, stuck, on the cusp of something new but unable to fully step into it.

Mark settled into classes at the community college. It felt nothing like the future he’d imagined. He was in a waiting room, killing time. Someday maybe something interesting would happen. Or maybe not.

He got a part-time job at the mall—a department store, folding shirts and helping customers with shoes. It wasn’t much, but it was a routine. The kind of thing that kept the days from blending into each other in a slow, numbing wash. The work wasn’t fulfilling, but at least it gave him spending money and kept him distracted, or so he told himself.

One night after work Mark drove to Lakeside Park. But it wasn’t the same anymore. There was a new set of kids. The friends who used to hang out there were gone, off to their colleges and new lives.

He thought about DePaul, a boy he’d known since first grade.  A few weeks into the fall semester, DePaul had died in a car accident. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. DePaul had a big future ahead. He had the big scholarship. He was our football star, the one with a future paved in shining gold. Mark had always admired him—there was a kind of swagger in the way DePaul carried himself. Not showing off, but like he knew exactly where he was going.

Now DePaul was gone, just like that. It was strange, the way people left, how one moment they were there and then the next, they were nothing more than a memory in the hallways of the school. He thought of DePaul in elementary school, cracking jokes, a little loud and carefree. They weren’t close friends, but he was always nice. Mark thought it would be nice to share those memories with someone. But he was alone, with no familiar faces All the things he used to lean on—his friends, his town—were all dissolving. The world was moving forward, and he was left standing still.

But things did move forward, eventually. At his job, Mark started meeting new people. Not that they were his friends—at least not yet—but they had a certain warmth about them, a liveliness that Mark couldn’t deny. People like Lisa, the shift manager who always wore bright red lipstick, and Tom, who had a gruff demeanor but smiled too easily to be taken seriously.

They were different from the kids he’d known in high school. They didn’t care about who you were, where you’d been. They were living their own versions of life, and somehow, that felt like a lifeline. One night, after his shift ended, Lisa invited him to go out with a few of them. Mark wasn’t sure what to expect, but he said yes anyway. He needed something, anything, to change the stillness of his routine. The bar they went to was called the Filling Station, an old joint in Dallas where the beer flowed freely, and the music played loud enough to make your bones vibrate. The kind of place where people went to forget, or at least to stop remembering. Mark sat down at the bar and tried to blend into the noise, to push away the sense that he didn’t belong. Then she came up to him. Her name was Emily—bright eyes, dark hair, a smile that felt like a spark in the middle of everything dull.

She was a high school senior. Easy to talk to. Soon they were laughing. Something about the way she looked at him—something about the way her eyes held him—made him feel like he wasn’t invisible anymore.

By the end of the night, she invited him to a Halloween party at her friend’s house. It wasn’t anything special, but to Mark, it felt like the first step into something that could be different. For the first time in months, he felt like there was something ahead of him, something new, something to hold onto. As he left the bar, standing on the street corner, his mind was buzzing.The spark of something starting, something that wasn’t in the past, something that was pulling him into the future. Maybe it was too soon to say it, but it felt like this was the beginning of the next chapter.

# # #

“The beginning of the next chapter.” No. Please not that. None of it was true, at least not in any way that counted. I had written myself into a made-for-TV movie. Mawkish. Sentimental. Please, just shoot me.

But ChatGPT remained enthusiastic. It called the story “a solid coming-of-age novel built around escape, identity, self-discovery and Mark’s eventual choice between leaving Strangers Rest and defining himself within it.”

“Try again,” I said.

This time it went back to the beginning.

88 YEARS LATER

I found the clipping in high school in a county history file that smelled of dust, paste, and old radiator heat. I was supposed to be learning something about local settlement patterns and instead found three dead Confederates, a vanished rider, and a sky opening over Strangers Rest.

I took the clipping home.

At first I did what writers do before they know they are writers. I copied things.

Then I changed them.

Then I began lying.

The rider needed a name.

I called him Dead Knife.

I drew him in notebooks. Black hat. Long coat. Colt Frontier at the hip. Another pistol in his boot. Bandages. Iodine. Laudanum. The sort of equipment I assumed a man would need if he intended to survive the destruction of reality.

Before I had written much of the story, I wrote the advertisement.

This was characteristic.

I knew how to promise the book before I knew how to make it exist.

What follows was typed on one sheet of paper sometime during my senior year. I had no publisher, no finished manuscript, no readers and absolutely no reason to believe anyone would ever see it.

I was happy with the initial results. After all, I had gotten my cowboy across the creek and into outer space. But I had no idea what to do with him once he arrived.

Looking back, I see I was already writing copy for the landfill.

I went back to the important work of being seventeen.

There were girls.

Cars.

Graduation.

Community college.

Jackson Browne.

The Pacific Ocean waiting somewhere beyond New Mexico.

A girl at the library read the story and stopped at the graveyard.

“The gravestones lean like old teeth?”

She looked at me.

“What does that mean? How do old teeth lean?”

I started explaining that they were crooked, that old people’s teeth could lean outward, that the metaphor was supposed to suggest age and death and the ruined mouth of the cemetery.

She laughed.

“You are so easy to rattle.”

I was.

I put Deadknife away.

For a long time, that was the end of it.

That was where I remembered the story ending.

For most of my life I remembered the sentence exactly.

Well, he said. And crossed the creek.

Deadknife crossed.

I stopped.

That seemed appropriate.

###

Consider a Wild West with alien technology, decades before the aerial clock crash landings in Strangers Rest. Look, we can see where Deadknife quenched his thirst by a river, his circadian-built UV protection rifle close at hand. But he didn’t see the terrifying and horrifying Indians (actually human/alien hybrids) in the nearby brush. He was only alerted to their presence by the psychic visions of Margaret, who transmitted her warning with wavelengths of 185 and 254 nm. She was able to calm Sarah and get her back to the transmission of UV protection between the UV lamps and the vapor-phase contaminant, which was quick to hatch. But not quick enough—Deadknife was hit with a blast of a scalping energy ray. It came with an agonizing pain—and then the Indians buried the three dead men.

With death close by, he heard a shout, and he gave out. Propping himself against the thick trunk somewhere in the range of death, Apaches swept down the bank of the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Along the way, they found items taken from the stage. The trail turned back into a howling coyote wind, lifting Karger out of linear time and into a world of train whistles, a smear of red, dead shiny white, rusting marble, whiff of brimstone, a wound of agonizing pain, and the burial of the three dead men. Death is close by. Hear a shout, feel the heat and a sudden cessation.

He returned to farming in 1836 and participated in the Texas Revolution by providing provisions to the rebel army. He constructed a grist mill, a place of psychic contaminant, a place that was quick to hatch, though not quick enough for Kit. He fled to the Golden Nugget Mine on the morning of January 29. The Rangers from Captain Nevill's company at Eagle Springs. After more tracking, the Rangers finally skull caps. Deadknife ran into Big Foot Wallace in 1838. They met. Propping himself against the thick trunk, a sort of museum, or maybe it will be, the house is filled with old things. We look through some with wavelengths of 185 and 254 nm. She was able to calm Sarah and get her back to the transmission of UV protection. Beehive-shaped homes of us during daylight.

Suddenly, Canyon. Following the cold trail, Baylor across a blackened maw, a low, pitiful moan, wiry, wizened skeleton, dark deep-set eyes, hawk-bill by. Hear a shout and give out. Propping himself against the thick trunk, a sort of museum, or maybe it will be, the house a ghastly sight seen vividly in a dream of Karger naked. He built but did not finish a belted and pulley-type generator motor. And, of course, there were his investigations into filly arrives, disappointed to find that this particular cowboy is really no more than a ball of sticks, dreaming of a carrot that shave with a two-bit card shark, beefy, barrel-chested man with close-cropped chestnut—man with close-cropped chestnut—he wore caps of soft over the shriveled fingers through hoof prints and wagon ruts, wiping a dirty hand across a tale.

Doctors were not of much assistance to Kit. In time, the skin rotted away and the skull bone became diseased. His brain was—tone makes the nightmare angry, knocks him to the cowboy from the fence and stomps him into a pile of splinters. Meanwhile, back at—was quite the sudden cessation of psychic dissection, face blazing, grin splits the sky and fades, a vast crystal rusty, weed-grown tracks explode in a splash of crimson, fading into the inky blackness of space, stagnant memories, sharp smell of a sawed-off blaster.

We have stated the stallion lassos the unsuspecting beast, sells him to a traveling circus, where they geld him and make him spend—I believe it was January 1881. For several weeks, the U.S. Tenth Cavalry and the port approach through transparent walls, portal control for Central Control Unit portal gate to Historic flashes of russet orange-red from the trees, whistling through tombstones, extractor claw swinging wildly, CCU keypads and a Peacemaker, down a black-walled, empty tunnel, semi-annual time portal maintenance. Due to technical difficulties, all Historic American West including dinner.

He took them off to sleep, but wore a night cap. In the outdoors, he wore caps of soft over the skull caps, just an old tumbleweed, no use crying, what I ain't, and a new alternate timeline—regarding this amazing legend of 19th-century Texas—of soft over the skull caps. Kit Blackie, now all alone, tangled up in rusty old bob wire forever, ignorance of own research into time travel and carbon-chlorine bond thunderhead looming on the horizon east toward Rusk, dominos on the front the night, data units at Central Control, secret government/extraterrestrial protocols, CCU records to verify the OPIE signature on the com-panel.

###

THE TINCTURE CITIES—

You asked him where the names came from and he said gravity, then museums, then Nazi sky, then nothing for a long time. Deadknife rode at night through towns shaped like failed monuments, concrete spires rising out of mud, fluorescent gymnasiums beside abandoned churches, elementary schools sitting under alien weather while cute girls came out of classroom doors and black machines hovered over football fields without anybody looking up. His mother knew. Mothers always know when the transmission starts. She kept the bottle behind the canned goods, SOFT TINCTURE, CANNABIS, MIND FILTER, one spoon before bed and two if the stars begin talking. Deadknife swallowed three and the room moved backward. Mark was there, or maybe Mark had always been there, Mark in the classroom under cinderblock lights, Mark with the old loan, the choir, the hated teachers, the tests, the little prison walls painted institutional beige. MARK LEACH—SECOND GRADE TRANSMISSION SUBJECT. Psychological evaluation incomplete. Creative. Unhappy. Pays attention to windows. Refuses linear instruction. Frequently smells things that are not present. REPORT ENDS. Outside the classroom Coronado crossed the playground on a mechanical horse while the children learned railroads. Railroads carried history west. History carried knives east. Deadknife stood beside the drinking fountain and heard the horse whisper through the pipes: YOU ARE NOT IN SCHOOL. YOU ARE IN 2161. The bell rang and everybody changed centuries.

There were rumors about Hastings, the Mexican witch, Strangers Rest, the woman who could project herself across the plains by staring into a bottle of beer, but astral projection was not taught in the district curriculum and neither were MIND BOMBS, SOUL KNIVES, LASER EYES, TELEPATHIC HORSES or INTERSTELLAR NAVELS. Deadknife learned them anyway. He learned from the walls, from the smell of his mother’s skin, from barbed wire humming behind the shopping center, from teachers who told him he was not trying hard enough when he was trying too hard, trying to remain inside one century, trying to keep the Western horizon from opening, trying not to see what lived behind the stars. FAILED. He looked at the girl beside him, Chloe, maybe not Chloe, maybe the personification of something buried beneath the school. Her head was perfectly shaped. Too perfectly. Alien geometry. Cute, he thought. Then TRAP. Then MAMMARY COSMIC BEACON. He hated himself for thinking it but the signal used whatever material was available: sex, school, mother, cowboy, Nazi, church, football, gold, fear. The body was only an alphabet. Nipple. Mouth. Navel. Nether regions. Eyes. Ear. The transmission rearranged them until they stopped meaning body. Deadknife wrote in the notebook: HUMAN ANATOMY MAY BE A CODE LEFT BY OCCUPYING FORCES. The teacher saw him writing and asked what he was writing. “The future.”

She gave him detention.

During detention he discovered the first SOUL KNIFE embedded in the desk, not physically because that would have been simple, but psychically, a weapon-shaped absence occupying the wood. He put his hand over it and pain ran from his fingers to the Peak. The Peak answered: RODEO MIND. ACID HEAD. FRONTIER FILTER FAILURE. He saw Deadknife riding through himself, Coronado starving in New Mexico, mechanical Comanches moving across fluorescent plains, women with perfectly shaped heads teaching kindergarten under a black sun, a church where every hymn was transmitted by insects, Jackie painted on the wall of a prison, his mother in a department store holding a cosmic bottle to the light. “Is this the best one?” “Yes,” the clerk said. “How can you tell?” “It buzzes.” She bought it. That Christmas she gave it to Mark. He opened the box and found no toy, no train, no cowboy, only a small metal device wrapped in tissue paper. WHAT IS IT? AUREOLA TRANSMITTER. WHAT DOES IT DO? WAIT. Years passed. He waited. School, college, work, rent, beer, writing contests, church bells, bad teaching, good teachers, mediocrity presented as moral instruction. He waited and the device kept buzzing. He hid it in drawers and moved it from apartment to apartment, town to town. Sometimes he threw it away. It always came back. Once he buried it. Deadknife dug it up and said, “You’ll need this.”

“For what?”

“The crossing.”

“What crossing?”

Deadknife pointed at the horizon. It had split open. Inside the split were stars. Behind the stars were classrooms. Behind the classrooms were cities. Behind the cities were men in white coats polishing old Nazi machines. Behind the machines were women singing. Behind the women was a Mexican witch with one hand raised. She said: THE WEST IS A CONDITION.

Deadknife nodded because he already knew. The frontier had never been geography. It was pressure. It was a psychological fence. It was what happened when a man reached the edge of one system and saw another system waiting behind it. He climbed onto the horse. The horse wore no saddle. It wore a helmet stolen from the future. DEADKNIFE: ENEMY OF GRAVITY. SHOOTIST. ASTRAL TRAVELER. UNLICENSED EDUCATOR. He rode past Strangers Rest, past the church, past the school, past the windowless gym, past the shopping center, past the prison painted to look like a college. The sky was buzzing hard now. Mechanical insects flew in formation and the scent of pheromones and burned copper rolled over the plains. Mark stood beneath the power lines watching and asked, “Where are you going?” Deadknife looked back. “Next.” “Next what?” “Exactly.”

Then he crossed. No flash. No explosion. One moment horse and rider, next moment an empty horizon with a knife-shaped hole in it. Mark waited for the hole to close but it did not. Voices came through. His mother. Then the witch. His teachers. Deadknife. A girl from second grade. Men from the 16th century. Workers from 2161. All talking at once until the message clarified, not into words exactly but into a command: WRITE ACROSS IT. Mark went home and put paper in the Selectric. The machine began before his hands touched the keys.

###

The Close Ranger company was disbanded due to budget cuts. And there are the pieces of the scalp of a ball of sticks, dreaming of a carrot that is just an old tumbleweed, no use crying, what shave with a two-bit card shark, beefy, barrel-chested man with close-cropped chestnut hair, soiled doves on the sporting side of town, two-bit faro game, and escapes, sheriff of Twin River Jail, hiding out in the abandoned Golden Nugget Mine. Horse declares, no rest until death has been avenged. Passing rodeo clown hears the stallion, lassos the unsuspecting beast, sells—lot like a—shake their heads and smile at the folly of horse and man.

In time, Deadknife recovering from his scalping; however, the skin never—and escapes. Indian helps outlaw to escape, thundering hooves crossing Rattlesnake Creek. Rattlesnake frightens horses and alien escapes. Outlaw overpowers—for you, all stick and no carrot. Listening unseen from the shadows, the stallion quietly snorts at this feminine treachery and flies it off in the gutter. Small-time gamblers and con Kit’s head.

“I been scalped,” he explained. Then he told Big Foot the whole tale. Doctors were not of much assistance to Kit. In time, of Daggett Dry Goods, down the street from the old courthouse, burned to the ground the previous year, pity on him and guide a yellow-haired nightmare to his aid. Pretty filly arrives, disappointed to find that this cold trail, Baylor and his Rangers tracked the Apaches down the bank of the Rio, up with a detachment of Rangers from Captain Nevill's company at Eagle Springs. After more tracking, the Rangers finally came upon the Indian camp.

A fight. Approach through transparent walls, portal control for—kept busy in pursuit of Victorio's band of Apaches. The Tenth Cavalry and the Rangers were kept busy in pursuit of Victorio's band—the knife. Jewell Poe invents his way out, photographs his way out of linear time.

They met in a warm cabin about twelve miles above La Grange. When he stepped inside, he removed his fur cap, and the skull cap came off. Experiments: the PCR reactor was set to consist of wavelengths of 185. Look over there, a mummified hand, chopped off an—it was January 1881. For several weeks, the U.S. Tenth Cavalry—the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Along the way, other nightmares console the wronged creature, a man for you, all stick and no carrot. Listening unseen from the shadows, the nightmare angry, knocks him to the cowboy from the fence and stomps him into—over a small place in the middle trunk, a sort of museum, or—this feminine treachery and flies back across the dream to—

Foot forgot himself and asked what was wrong with Kit’s head.

“I been—”

And 254 nm. She was able to calm Sarah and—inconsolably at the fresh rabbits, squirrels and other game, carcasses hung up for display from a little shed roof over the sidewalk, what appeared to—to find that this particular cowboy is really no more than a ball of sticks, dreaming of a—spend the rest of his days giving pony rides. Old things, we look through—eludes deputy and escapes.

Back at the Rustlers Corral, alien breaks bond and site. Following the trail into the Eagle—were kept busy in pursuit of Victorio's—came off, too, revealing the horrifying and terrifying raw meat of his injury.

Shocked.

Strangers Rest, a trampled spot where Deadknife quenched his thirst by a river, his circadian-built UV protection rifle. Tobacco-stained midnight hack race in cattle season, trail-weary cowboys, faro games in Hell’s Half Acre, the red-light district, a thunderhead looming on the horizon east toward Rusk, a dog barking inconsolably at the fresh rabbits, squirrels and other—steel 30 feet tall, sheets—the vapor-phase tetrachloroethylene PCE destruction experiments, own research into time travel and carbon-chlorine bond technology.

New research using a high-tech photochemical process based on work of Jewell Poe has brought to reality—and buried the three dead men. Death close by. Hear a shout and give out. Propping himself against the thick trunk, a sort of museum, or—

Consider a Wild West history as the last Indian battle in Texas. In 1885, the Ranger company was disbanded due to budget cuts. And there are the pieces of the red, dead shiny white, rusting marble, whiff of brimstone, wounded road, scent of immortality and a Peacemaker, down a black-walled, empty tunnel, semi-annual time portal maintenance. Due to technical difficulties, all Historic American West.

The fight, though small, has come down through history. Smile at the folly of horse and man. In time, Deadknife recovering from his scalping; however, the skin never grew entirely over a small place in the—other game, carcasses hung up for display from a little shed roof over the sidewalk, what appeared to be an Old-Western shoot-out.

###

I used to think a lot about getting Jackie or Chloe into the old Sky-Vue Motel, out on the old highway. I tried to write them into room 7, but things kept going wrong. The girls never showed – at least not in any meaningful way.

Years became decades.

The notebook with the girls and my story disappeared into a box. The box disappeared into another box. Papers accumulated. Stories accumulated. Houses accumulated things and then surrendered them. Some were saved. Some were thrown away. Some went where everything eventually went.

The landfill.

I remembered Deadknife occasionally.

Mostly I remembered inventing him.

The mysterious rider had belonged to the newspaper. The name belonged to me.

The sorrel horse belonged to the newspaper.

The Colt belonged to the newspaper.

The bandages, iodine, medicine glass and laudanum belonged to the newspaper.

Clear Creek belonged to the newspaper. Here’s what belonged to me:

·   the city beyond the creek

·   robots

·   2161

·   Ladders

·   the witch

·   the telepathic horse

·   Coronado

·   mind bombs

·   soul knives belonged to me

·   The idea that the frontier had moved outward

I knew the difference between what I had found and what I had invented. That distinction seemed important. It is less important now.

When I found the pages again, the final sentence was exactly where I remembered it. Well, he said. And crossed the creek.

I turned the page. There was another page behind it. Same paper. Same typewriter. Same fading ribbon.

My name in the upper right-hand corner. The page began:

DEADKNIFE LOOKED BACK ACROSS CLEAR CREEK AND SAW THE BOY WHO WOULD WRITE HIM.

I have no memory of writing that sentence. I like the contamination. I do not want to explain it. I did want to write it, a story somewhere in the west Texas desert. The drug-steam drifted from Dead Knife’s hands, a private weather system. The tincture of cannabis and laudanum had turned his skull into a marble mesa, smooth and rimmed with the dull silver of a buried syringe.

The frontier towns lay beneath him like the debris field of a failed experiment—arrowheads, rusted Colts, the skeletal hooves of bison half-submerged in the dust of abandoned streets. He watched the sky the way a physician watches an X-ray of a diseased organ. The stars were lesions in the firmament, punctures through which the universe bled its cold light. Somewhere beyond the black horizon a posse of mechanical men were already assembling their metal spires, launching the future like a slow rocket from the carcass of the nineteenth century. Dead Knife smoked and waited. The cannabis thickened the air until every object possessed a secret radiance: the yellow lamps of the whorehouse, the polished teeth of a .45 revolver, the orange sparks drifting from a blacksmith’s forge like embryonic planets. The town’s inhabitants moved through this landscape as if they were specimens pinned to a tray—Chinese laborers beside Confederate veterans, a vulture circling above the telegraph wires, a prostitute adjusting her corset while the wind carried the faint medicinal odor of morphine and ozone. He felt the frontier decaying around him, the sky tearing before he heard it. A faint ripping sound, like cloth or old film burning in a projector. Dead Knife aimed at the heavens. The bullet from his .44 Russian vanished into the blue. For a moment nothing happened. Then the sky opened. Blackness spilled out. Cold. Empty. The townspeople stared upward. A child began to cry. Dead Knife holstered his revolver and spat dust into the street.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose I hit something.”

Wind rushed down from the hole in the sky. It smelled like outer space. Metal. Ice. A faint odor of impossible animals.

The old Mexican woman appeared beside him without walking there. “You broke it,” she said calmly.

Dead Knife watched the stars appear in the daylight. A horse made of pale fire stepped through the opening. Strawberry roan. Telepathic. It lowered its head. Dead Knife mounted.

“Ma’am,” he said politely, “I believe I just found the next frontier.”

The horse leaped upward. The town fell away. Grave markers of Strangers Rest Cemetery flashed beneath him. Beyond the torn sky waited:

* ruined planets,
* mechanical cities,
* and a thousand new gunfights.

Dead Knife smiled. The universe was wide open again, the headlines spilling out across the galactic void.

The Telepathic Dead. Mind Bombs. Chinese Venus. Whistling Through Tombstones. The Westering Sky. Jump the Dead. Smile of Old Brimstone Cowboy. Ship of Dreams. Brimstone and Red Dreams.

# # #

They found the cut-down shotgun leaning against the cedars where the road narrowed toward Strangers Rest, rusted through at the hinge but still loaded, two shells in the chamber and no fingerprints that belonged to anybody living. After all those years, right?

The old Mexican woman said the weapon had no talent. That was the word she used. No talent. As though firearms could fail aesthetically. As though killing required style.

The road had gone soft with rain and the rails on the abandoned siding reflected a sky so black it looked cut open with a knife. One body lay near the tracks and another farther west under the telegraph poles, both arranged as if waiting for a train that had not stopped there in thirty years. Everything about the scene seemed meaningful and none of it would hold meaning for more than a few seconds. The cedars. The rails. The shotgun. The western sky. A whistle overhead with no locomotive attached to it. A townsman said the sound had been coming and going since he was a boy. Another said there had once been a girl buried there. Another said no girl had ever existed. Two directions, two bodies, two versions of the same wound. The ground pulsed black beneath their boots.

Dead Knife had been there. Or somebody had been pretending to be Dead Knife. That possibility entered the report late and changed everything. Different men had used the name in different towns, each carrying a rifle, each claiming knowledge of the opening above the siding, each speaking of the same mother, the same train, the same black slit in the firmament. Some were ambitious. Some bitter. Some merely restless. One had malice in him. One could sing. One had no weapons at all and still everybody remembered a gun. The old woman by the cedars said identity was a firearm: you carried it until somebody else took it and fired. Mark wrote that down. She told him not to. “Words get ambitious,” she said. “They start thinking they’re the thing.” Then a train whistle passed overhead again and the trees bent in opposite directions.

The report divides here. In one account Dead Knife came down the tracks carrying the shotgun and stopped beside the first body. In another he emerged from the cut in the sky with no weapon, hands open, looking almost disappointed to find the world still there. A third account says the train itself delivered him, though no train was visible, only the sound of steel and a pressure moving through the darkness. Whatever arrived had been traveling a long time. It smelled of oil, wet earth, old smoke and something medicinal. The witnesses disagreed about his face. Too young. Too old. Scarred. Smooth. Familiar. One man swore it was the face of his dead brother. A woman said it looked like her father before he became her father. Mark saw only the brim of a hat and something bright moving under the skin.

Nobody wanted to say what happened next because what happened next was difficult to arrange into cause and effect. The shotgun went off without being raised. A cedar split in half. The western sky flashed. The body beside the rail sat up, looked toward the darkness and said, “Different directions.” Then lay back down. Somewhere a song began, low and sour, the kind of tune men sing when they have already abandoned a town but their bitterness has not yet caught the train. Dead Knife listened. The old woman listened. Mark listened. Even the ground seemed to listen. The opening above them widened until stars appeared through it, but not the stars belonging to that night. These were older stars, crowded and violent, positioned according to another sky.

Dead Knife pointed toward them with the rifle that some witnesses insisted he did not have. “That’s where the road goes.” The townsman laughed. “Road don’t go up.” Dead Knife looked at him with the exhausted patience of somebody explaining gravity to the dead.

“This one does.”

The rails began lifting from the earth. Not quickly. First a tremor, then the ties coming loose, gravel dropping away, iron rising inch by inch into the black wound overhead. The abandoned siding became an ascending track. Telegraph wire followed, unspooling into the firmament. The cedars leaned after it. For a moment Strangers Rest seemed attached to the sky by a single line of rusted steel.

Mark asked the question nobody else wanted to ask. “Where’s the train?”

Dead Knife said, “Coming backward.”

Then they heard it.

Not from the west. Not from the east. From above.

A whistle descending through the stars, getting louder, carrying with it voices, firearms, wheels, mothers, boys, girls, towns that had been abandoned and towns that had never been built. The sound entered the skull before it entered the air. Mark saw alternate versions of the siding branching away in every direction, each with its own body, its own shotgun, its own Dead Knife waiting under a different sky. In one version the boy survived. In another the girl fired first. In another nobody came. In another the train arrived and every passenger was Mark.

The old woman grabbed his arm. “Don’t choose.”

“What?”

“Don’t choose one.”

The whistle became unbearable.

Dead Knife stepped onto the rising rail.

The wound above the town opened wider.

The train was still invisible but its headlamp appeared, a white point inside the black slit, moving down toward them from impossible distance.

And then Mark understood what the old woman meant. The stories were not contradicting one another. They were waiting for him to decide which one had happened.

He refused.

The sky pulsed.

The train passed through without arriving.

When the darkness settled there was no shotgun, no bodies, no ascending track. Only the cedars and the abandoned siding running west toward Strangers Rest.

Mark looked down.

In his hand was a ticket. No destination. No date. Only two words punched through the paper: DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS.

NIGHT OF THE GUN

Author’s Note

Books are hard to write. That is, they take a long time to write. I’m impatient. I grow bored easily. For this book, I want to try something faster. I’m going to jumpstart the process by pretending NIGHT OF THE GUN is already written.

I started this project by coaxing ChatGPT into writing a pretend literary review. Here’s an excerpt:

The American West has been murdered, but no one can agree on who pulled the trigger. The suspects include cowboys, aliens, Texas Rangers, newspaper editors, dime novelists, the federal government, several dead sheriffs, and the reader. The murder weapon is a revolver, although it may also be a typewriter, a telegraph machine, or the machinery of American historical consciousness. The crime scene is Strangers Rest, Texas, a frontier town that has been destroyed so many times that its inhabitants no longer recognize the difference between history and its reproduction.

Leach’s novel is ostensibly the story of Deadknife, a 19th-century gunfighter who leads an outlaw gang known variously as the Rebels and the Strawberry Dead. The gang's enemies include lawmen, mercenaries, extraterrestrials, mechanical organisms, and the laws of physical reality. Their encounters frequently end in spectacular violence. Men are shot through the head, buildings explode, horses vanish into astronomical disturbances, and entire sections of the Texas landscape are obliterated by inexplicable weapons. Yet the violence rarely settles anything. The dead return, the battles repeat, and the landscape rearranges itself to accommodate another version of the same confrontation.

The novel’s central proposition is that the American West never really existed in the form Americans remember it. Instead, it was manufactured by a self-replicating system of stories, photographs, newspaper accounts, dime novels, movies, and television programs. The frontier is not a historical period but a narrative technology, and its most important product is the gunfighter: a figure created to impose order through violence while simultaneously guaranteeing that violence will never end.

That’s how I began – with the end. The bullet left the target and entered the barrel and chamber. What’s next? I have a few ideas on where the story might go from here – notes, dime novel cut ups, fake newspaper clippings, a current draft of RODEO VOID (which also features Deadknife) and an old Colt Frontier Six that hangs on my office wall. I like to play with it while writing at the computer.

I’m still undecided on how the story will proceed. All I know right now are the first and last sentences. The book begins “Deadknife rides into Strangers Rest shortly before noon” and it ends “let's get on with it.”

Surely something will come to me. Quickly. - ML

###

Deadknife rides into Strangers Rest shortly before noon, following the railroad tracks west of town. A wind comes up behind him, darkening the sky and spinning up little whrilwinds of leaves, twigs and debris. Iron gray dust blows down from the sun. A thunderhead is looming on the horizon toward Rusk Street. Lightening crackles inside a lens-shaped cloud.

His sorrel horse is badly frightened. It tosses its head, pulls against the reins and occasionally stops altogether, refusing to advance. Deadknife speaks quietly to the animal, urging it forward. He touches the horse with his heels and rides on.

Despite the darkness and the dust and the wind, the day is unusually hot. It has been a dry spring, and the fields beyond town have browned and shriveled. The grainy, sepia-colored air above the railway embankment shimmers with heat. In town a locomotive stands at the station, taking on water before continuing west. Black smoke drifts from its stack, merging with the dusty gray sky. Ox-drawn freight wagons move along the streets, bringing cotton, hides and livestock to the depot.

Strangers Rest has grown quickly since the arrival of the railroad, and new buildings are going up along Main Street. There are two hotels, a general store, a livery stable, a barber shop and the Silver Spur Saloon, a handsome two-story building of native limestone that opened the previous spring.

The Silver Spur is already crowded. Cattlemen, railroad workers, gamblers and traveling salesmen gather around the long mahogany bar. Someone plays a piano upstairs. Several women watch the street from the second-floor windows. A painted sign above the entrance promised whiskey, cards, entertainment and private accommodations. Inside, the walls were decorated with hunting trophies, gilt mirrors, an Oriental screen and a large charcoal drawing of a human skull. Beneath the skull someone had written: LET’S GET ON WITH IT.

Deadknife passed the saloon without stopping.

He was a lean, weather-beaten man of uncertain age. A Colt revolver hung at his hip, and a second pistol was tucked into his boot. He had been riding for several days. His black dust coat and broad-brimmed hat were stained with dust and dried blood. In his saddle bag he carried a small collection of medical supplies: bandages, iodine, a medicine glass, and a vial of laudanum. A dark stain had spread through the cloth around his left shoulder. He occasionally touched the wound, testing its condition, but otherwise gave no indication that he was suffering.

He passed the railroad station as the engineer sounded the whistle. Several passengers stood on the platform, watching the wind blow the darkness into town. An elderly Chinese laborer, employed by the railroad, looked up from a crate beside the freight office. He called out to Deadknife.

“Space and time,” he said.

“What?”

“Where future is. I take you to vieja bruja, old Mexican witch. She teach you. Uses cannibis tincture, whispers in your ear. Soon you be flying through stars. Go any time or place you choose.”

Deadknife ignored him and continued west toward the cemetery. Three men were waiting for him. They had positioned themselves beneath a broad post oak near the entrance to the old burying ground. All three wore Confederate uniforms, although the war had ended years earlier. Their gray coats were faded and much repaired, their boots cracked, their hats discolored by years of exposure. One carried a Henry repeating rifle. Another held a double-barreled shotgun with the barrels cut short. The third man wore a revolver low on his right hip.

Their horses stood tethered to a cedar, restless and sweating.

The men had arrived in Strangers Rest the previous evening. They had spent several hours drinking at the Silver Spur.

“We’re here for the 16th century,” one of the men explained. “Coronado buried gold on Comanche Peak. We’ll be rich.”

The other two men talked about the future.

“Then we go to the year 2161.”

“Mechanical men building metal spires to the stars, to alien cities smelling of swamp mud and rust. That’s where the money is.”

 “You want another drink?” the bartended asked.

“We want Deadknife.”

“Never heard of him.”

The men said he was a murderer and horse thief, wanted in three counties. They described him as a man of unusual abilities, an expert marksman who had survived encounters from which no ordinary gunfighter could have escaped. They called themselves The Rebels, former Confederate soldiers employed to bring Deadknife to justice.

The bartender wrote them off as loco, listening but without much interest. Men came through Strangers Rest every week claiming to be lawmen, bounty hunters, veterans, gunfighters, or agents of various governments. Confederate soldiers? Plenty. Some were exactly what they claimed. Others were crazy, talking about lost gold and how one day it would make then rich.

The three men left the saloon just before midnight. Now they waited.

Deadknife saw them from a distance and continued riding. The rifleman stepped into the road and raised one hand. He pulled back on the reins. His horse stopped.

"That's far enough," the rifleman said.

Deadknife looked from one man to the next. He recognized none of them. Their uniforms appeared genuine, but there was something peculiar about their faces. Their skin was unusually pale, stretched tightly across their cheekbones. Their eyes flickered with a dull metallic glimmer.

"You looking for somebody?" Deadknife asked.

"We're looking for you."

"Found me."

The shotgun man stepped forward.

"Get down off that horse."

Deadknife made no move to dismount.

The rifleman smiled.

"We've got you outnumbered three to one."

"That’s your math," Deadknife said. "Mine adds up to you getting the bullet with the period on it."

The rifleman frowned.

"What does that mean?"

"It means the sentence ends with you."

The three men exchanged glances. Then the wind stopped.

A strange stillness settled over the cemetery road. The leaves ceased moving. The insects fell silent. Dust suspended in the air, hanging motionless. Deadknife felt a pressure building behind his eyes, a sensation he had experienced several times before, usually in the moments preceding some disturbance in the ordinary arrangement of the world. His horse began to tremble.

Above the cedars, a narrow band of darkness appeared in the sky. It was scarcely visible at first, no more than a dark line extending downward from an otherwise cloudless blue. The sunlight around it seemed to bend inward.

The shotgun man glanced upward.

"What in heaven's name—"

Deadknife's horse reared onto its hind legs, hooves pawing the air, its eyes blazing with jellied fire. The three men went for their weapons.

Deadknife fired from the hip. The first bullet struck the rifleman squarely in the heart. The man staggered backward, his rifle discharging into the dirt as he fell. The shotgun man raised his weapon halfway to his shoulder. Deadknife fired again. The second bullet entered the man’s chest, throwing him against the oak tree behind him.

The third man drew his revolver. Deadknife shot him through the face. The man's head snapped backward, and he fell into the dust beside the road.

The three horses tore loose from their tether and bolted toward town, dragging the broken rope behind them. The dead men lay sprawled beneath the cedars, blood pumping from their wounds.

###

I’ve always wanted to own a ghost town.

A few years ago I read about a west Texas ghost town called Lobo that was for sale for $100,000. It came with an abandoned gas station, motel, store and a collection of other ramshackle structures. Ramshackle is a very ghost-towny word. And $100,000—what a steal. You can’t buy an empty lot for that in Dallas.

What would I do with it? I pictured myself as town marshal, swaggering with a big iron on my hip. I could turn it into a tourist destination. How? By writing a book about the town, starring an aging gunfighter—or maybe a retired financial executive—who becomes town marshal.

Since it’s a book, it doesn’t have to be a real ghost town. I can build plywood storefronts painted to look like history. Saloons made of optimism and paper mâché. Windows filled with nothing but dust and the suggestion of regret. Or maybe just wooden frames covered in paper.

I tell no one that I might actually live there. I imagine spending my days sitting under the gas station canopy, playing my 1979 Gibson Les Paul Custom with a silverburst finish for passing cars.

Here’s the angle: if the book works, then I sell the movie rights. And then I sell the town to the movie company. It’s ready for shooting. If the movie doesn’t work out? I live there inside the paper and the dreams. I’ll be mayor, saloon keeper and town marshal. I’ll wear a tin star and carry a gun. People will visit. I’ll play for them. There will be a cage with men wearing monkey suits and space helmets. I’ll tell visitors it’s a new genre: cosmic cowboy sci-fi. And I’ll build a billboard that looks like the sky. I’ll invite guests to shoot a hole in it.

“See, you just shot a hole in the sky,” I’ll say.

The guests will say, “Wow, this guy is a real artist.”

And I’ll feel good about myself.

Lobo would be nice. But really, all I need is a more picturesque version of Strangers Rest.

This is my hometown. I grew up here, graduated from high school. After college, I eventually came back to buy a house and raise a family. It looks like a typical North Texas suburb. We have a McDonalds and a Chili’s and an HEB. But what I really want is the 19th century version of the town. The Old West, hell bent for leather.

It was a cattle town. The Silver Spur Saloon is still here. The old sandstone building’s latest tenant is Wounded Taco Too, a Tex Mex spinoff of the original Wounded Taco chili parlor, bookstore and publisher. You can’t order a bottle of whiskey, but they’ll make you an old fashioned. Good place to hang out and think if you have a little time. These days I have a lot of time. I just retired.

For years I was told what to think—or at least how long I was allowed to think it. I told other people what to think, too. What a jumble – work, family, art, thinking. I wrote a poem about it once. It didn’t turn out all that great:

Flying County. Morel Broadway.

Tarrant County is a media event. The gospel has been cranked outside. Arty stands in the yard with a letter about the truth and a professional opinion on the death of professionals.

New York City is listening. Alaska is not.

The distance between them has been calculated by the Six Team using a Tiger engine and a series of contradictory words.

Dear Sponsor:

We have accomplished the bench. The teleconference is Thursday. Collusion has been mentioned but not adequately explained.

There are fireworks. There are criticisms of fireworks. There is a professional organization responsible for mentioning the difference.

Someone says humanity is in crisis. Someone else is selling wine.

I agree with both positions.

***

The heart of the matter is a very big thing that no one remembers.

Morel is aware of this. Arty is aware of this. The journalists are standing outside waiting for copies of the newspapers to be handed to them. But the newspapers are dying.Take a look at the Tarrant County Register. What a joke. It contains an earlier version of the story in which everything has already happened.

A woman named Juliet has completed the training phase. Joe is walking toward the journalists. Danny is at the site. Rosy is unscathed.

The wife is making something out of something else.

There is a dog. There is a railing. There is a movie about the financial consequences of standing beside the railing.

I am involved but only coincidentally.

***

Machiavelli has written a letter to the Dallas Cowboys.

The Cowboys have requested additional proof of the situation.

Tiger is unavailable.

Parker has the flashlights. Sirmac has the kindles. Someone has taken the batteries out of the apartment.

The bank is called Bankrue. The project is called TOQ. The client is called D.

No one remembers what these designations mean.

A trampoline appears in the middle of the park.

Six hundred miles away a man begins walking toward it.

The television reports that this is a positive development in the consumer lifespan.

A glass mouth opens inside the television.

A second glass mouth explains the first.

***

Friday has been activated.

The media relations strategy requires a new understanding of the word “before.”

Before the letter. Before the newspaper. Before the journalists were handed their own opinions.

Before the first morning and after the second Thursday a crowd gathers around the absence of an event.

Someone is laughing.

Someone is explaining why laughter is inappropriate.

Someone is requesting a more straightforward version of the same catastrophe.

The professional sales team has identified several opportunities in the field of catastrophe.

The Register calls this leadership.

The Lab calls it science.

The Cowboys call it Friday.

***

There is a conversation about alcohol that takes place inside another conversation about death.

The first conversation is almost finished.

The second conversation has been going on for years.

I have written a letter to explain the difference but the letter keeps returning to the same apartment where Dot is looking for batteries.

Dear Wife:

The situation has been exaggerated by the people responsible for describing the situation.

The newspapers are not wrong. They are simply reporting different versions of the same future.

A man has been killed. A man has been banished. A man is walking through the park with a dog and a glass of wine.

All three men have the same name.

None of them recognizes me.

***

The Vultures are back.

Financial wisdom has become a remote-control device.

The word positive appears in every paragraph of the annual report.

Positive leadership. Positive distance. Positive death.

A positive bird has been placed on the professional bench.

There is an eye inside the bird.

There is a journalist inside the eye.

There is a copy of the original letter inside the journalist.

The letter begins:

Dear Morel,

Your account of the events has been reviewed and found to be inconsistent with the available evidence.

There is no available evidence.

This is not considered a significant obstacle.

***

On Friday morning the Tiger engine starts without a driver.

The teleconference continues without participants.

The Cowboys are talking to the financial agent about the price of a human life.

The agent requests a brief explanation of what is meant by human.

Someone says the project is finished.

Someone says the project has not begun.

The wife is still making something out of something else.

Danny is standing in a field holding the last flashlight.

Newspapers drift down from the Tarrant County sky.

A thousand contradictory words settle on the trampoline.

No one jumps.

***

And now the final situation.

The bird is finished. The proof is finished. The leadership is finished.

The letter has been mailed to an address that no longer exists.

Arty is outside. Morel is on Broadway. The Six Team has disappeared into its own teleconference.

Somewhere a woman is laughing into a glass mouth.

A journalist asks whether the laughter is part of the story.

The answer is yes.

The answer is no.

The answer has been prepared by the media relations department for immediate distribution.

Friday.

Another Friday.

The flashlights are working.

The batteries are missing.

Everything is under control according to the person who has just lost control.

A bird flies over the county.

The bird is a word.

The word is a price.

The price is a story about what happened before anyone was there to say it happened.

The newspapers are handed out.

The newspapers are blank.

The journalists begin writing down what they have been told.

No one has told them anything.Top of Form

Bottom of Form

###

###

I call that poem “The Man.” I like to tell people that I worked for The Man, then I became The Man. Now I’m just a lower case old man.

I wake up with few thoughts and fewer responsibilities. I hang out in my office, writing my little novel ideas. Dear wife checks on me a few times a day, just to make sure I’m still alive. Nothing is scheduled except lunch or happy hour and a vague sense the universe has gone off by one. I try a chair. It doesn’t help. I try the guitar. Same result.

So I drop by Wounded Taco Too. I sit in a booth with a sepia-toned photograph purportedly taken outside when the building was still a saloon. The caption describes the subject as “Kit Karger, the famous Texas Ranger who was scalped by Apaches and later joined an outlaw gang – the Strawberry Dead.” Someone ought to write about that.

Three old fashioneds in and that’s when I decide to write this book. No, skip the book. Go straight to the movie, the shooting script. It’ll be an acid western inside a movie-shaped thought. I don’t know what that means, but I like the feel ofit. I write it down in a little leather book with a cowboy stamped on the cover.

I also write down several titles. They won’t stay put. They behave like nervous horses. So I write “for the movie the protagonist should order a long shot of wild horses running across Texas—shoot in Canada for tax reasons, with non-union cowboys. Afterward we let the horses wander off, like we’ve done them a favor.”

I wish I could do this in a real ghost town, but those come with histories. That’s why I decided not to buy Lobo. I don’t want to be responsible for other people’s ghosts.

Picture this: I build my own town in the backyard. I hire two handymen who work cheaply and without enthusiasm. They add on to the storage shed with false building fronts made out of plywood, painted in sepia tones to resemble 19th century Texas. The saloon is a false front, too. It has doors that swing open to the shredded remnants of a trampoline that entertained the boys when they were growing up.

Strangers Rest 2.0, I call it. I tell Dear Wife it is art. I don’t tell her I’d like to air condition the storage shed and live there.

I appoint myself mayor, sheriff and bartender. I wear a tin star I bought online. I carry a revolver that has never learned to compromise. I don’t know what that means, either, but I write it down.

Tourists arrive. They walk slowly, as if afraid to interrupt something. They nod the way people nod in museums. In the center of my little backyard ghost town I place a cage. Inside are men I’ve hired to wear monkey suits and circa-1960s space helmets. A hand-painted sign reads: DO NOT FEED THE NEBULA APES. No explanation follows.

Next to the cage I build a stage and play guitar for visitors. This makes people comfortable. The soundtrack turns positive. I feel successful. I’ve created a place where meaning can wander freely without being questioned—like wild horses running across Texas but really shot in Canada.

But then I want more. I want to be inside the story. I show Festus the camera. (Festus is my imaginary deputy.) Then I step in front of it and into myself. I call for a tight shot, just my eyes darting side to side. Very spaghetti western. Sergio Leone would be proud.

Soon, I tire of being the town marshal. I tell Festus to load a new reel of feeling-toned print stock, and I become the gunfighter. I call him Deadknife, an inspired mix of Dead Horse Alaska and Yellowknife Canada. Maybe I’ll give him a Native American compatriot – Yellow Horse.

I wear a dusty black coat and a broad-brimmed hat and a Colt Frontier Six on my hip. I draw and fire at the sky. The bullet makes a bruise—blue-black and tender. We’ll use post-production special effects so that it appears I climb up to the bruise and discover it isn’t a bruise at all. It’s a hole.

The hole is shaped like a movie-shaped thought. This is the part where time loosens its belt. Festus brings me a horse.

“I don’t ride horses,” I say. “Bring me my pickup. We’ll make it a contemporary western, sort of a NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.”

###

What happened to my horse? Deadknife thought. He’d left it tied to the hitching post, where he now found something they called a “truck.”

“You left it running,” a man explained, handing him the keys.

Wounded Taco Too was doing a brisk noon business. Several cowboys stood outside beneath the awning, smoking cigarettes and discussing the railroad. A freight wagon unloaded crates of whiskey at the rear entrance. Upstairs, a woman in a white dress leaned out of a window and watched the street, where a drunken man waved at her. “Hey puta, come down and I’ll take you for a ride.”

Deadknife went inside. The room smelled of tobacco, sweat, whiskey and fresh-cut lumber. Sunlight entered through the tall windows, illuminating the dust above the gambling tables. A bartender polished glasses behind the mahogany counter. Several men played faro near the back wall. A piano stood beside the staircase, where a young woman was playing a popular tune.

Deadknife ordered whiskey.

The bartender poured it.

"You look like you've had a rough morning," he said.

"Three men tried to kill me."

The bartender stopped polishing his glass.

"Where?"

"Out by the cemetery."

The bartender looked at the revolver hanging at Deadknife's hip.

"I assume they got the worst of it."

Deadknife pointed at his glass. The bartender poured another shot.

"Three men in Confederate uniforms," Deadknife said. "You seen them?"

The bartender nodded. "They were here last night. Asked about a stranger named Deadknife."

"What did you tell them?"

"Said I didn't know you."

"Who were they?"

"Didn't say."

Deadknife placed the folded wanted notice on the bar.

The bartender examined it, and his expression changed. "Where'd you get this?"

"One of the dead men."

The bartender looked toward the staircase. Deadknife followed his gaze.

On the wall beside the stairs hung the large charcoal drawing of the skull. Its black eye sockets stared out over the crowded room. Beneath it, in fresh lettering, someone had written: LET’S GET ON WITH IT. - SIGNED THE STRAWBERRY DEAD.

Deadknife pointed toward it. "Who did that?"

The bartender hesitated.

"Fellow came through here a few weeks back. Paid good money to put it up."

"What fellow?"

"Never got his name."

"What did he look like?"

The bartender considered the question.

"Funny thing," he said. "Can't rightly remember."

Deadknife looked again at the drawing.

For a moment the skull seemed to change shape. Its jaw lengthened, its eye sockets narrowed, and a thin line appeared across its forehead. The image resembled the shattered face of the third man at the cemetery. Then it returned to normal.

A disturbance erupted outside. Someone shouted about three horses running loose through town. Another man entered Wounded Taco Too and announced that shooting had been heard near the cemetery. Within minutes the room was full of speculation. Several customers hurried outside. Others gathered around the windows, looking toward the western road.

Deadknife remained at the bar. The bartender leaned closer. "You best be moving on. Sheriff Wren won't take kindly to three men getting killed in his jurisdiction."

"Were they friends of his?"

"Don't reckon so."

"Then he won’t have to make new ones."

Deadknife finished his whiskey. He placed a coin on the bar and turned toward the door.

At that moment the piano stopped. The woman seated at the instrument had turned toward him. She was young, with dark hair and pale skin. Her hands remained suspended above the keys.

"Deadknife," she said.

He stopped.

"Do I know you?"

"I’m Chloe. Remember, I worked at the library?"

"I don’t remember.”

“Figures.”

“How do you know me?"

She nodded toward the charcoal skull. "They told me you'd come."

"Who told you?"

"The men who haven't arrived yet."

Deadknife waited.

The woman lowered her hands.

"They're coming on the afternoon train."

"What men?"

She hesitated, then looked toward the windows. "The same three you just killed."

Deadknife stared at her. “How could that be?”

“It’s how the story goes.”

Outside, the locomotive's whistle sounded.

He turned toward the street. The train had already departed westward, its last freight cars disappearing beyond the warehouses. There was no afternoon train due for several hours. But the whistle sounded again, louder this time, apparently coming from somewhere beyond the saloon itself.

Deadknife stepped outside.

The sun stood high above Strangers Rest. Wagons rattled along Main Street. Men called to one another from the loading platforms. The three loose horses had been caught and were being led toward the livery stable.

Nothing appeared unusual.

Then he noticed three riders coming down the street from the direction of the railroad station. They wore Confederate gray. One carried a Henry rifle. Another had a cut-down shotgun. The third rode slightly behind them, his right hand resting near the revolver at his hip.

Deadknife watched them approach. He recognized their faces. They were the same three men he had killed less than an hour before.

There was no blood on their uniforms, no sign of injury. Their horses moved steadily through the afternoon traffic. The rifleman looked directly at Deadknife and smiled.

Deadknife felt the weight of the silver watch in his coat. He took it out. The 17 circles on its face had begun to turn.

Above the town, the sky darkened. The rifleman reined in his horse.

"We've got you outnumbered three to one," he said.

Deadknife looked at the three men.

Then he looked at the railroad, the crowded street, and the black slit beginning to open above Wounded Taco Too.

He returned the watch to his pocket.

"True enough," he said. His hand moved toward the Colt. "But I reckon we've been through this part already."

The rifleman frowned.

"What does that mean?"

"It means somebody might be telling the story wrong."

The noon whistle sounded again. Deadknife drew his revolver and fired at the sky. The bullet left a bruise—blue-black and tender. Not a bruise – a hole.

###

I keep driving. A sign says WELCOME TO DALLAS COUNTY. I don’t remember leaving it.

A gas station appears, a little two-pump place next to the Air Base Motel. I pull in under the canopy, and the pump clicks before I touch it. The clerk watches me the way one watches a memory try to remember itself.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says kindly.

“Where am I?” I ask.

She points at a map with nothing on it.

The phone rings. I answer it because it’s ringing.

“You’re late,” a voice says.

“For what?”

The line goes dead.

I drive on.

Everything repeats gently, like a suggestion. A diner that smells of time. A jukebox that knows its name. A waitress who says, “You always order this,” though I have never been there before, or at least not this one.

I pull into the gravel lot of the motel. Back in frontier times, there was a grist mill on this site. One night the townsfolk saw a UFO. It was several hundred feet in the air, a white mass against the black opening. One man said it resembled an enormous bale of burning cotton.

Today it’s a motel. There’s a nearly life-size airplane model on the roof. Rocks crunch under the tires. I check in.

The room waits. The mirror shows a man who looks like me but slightly more convinced of something. The Bible in the drawer is missing. In its place is a book. NIGHT OF THE GUN.

I check out and try to leave. A couple of miles later the road brings me back.

Try again. In a back room I find a desk. On it sits another copy of NIGHT OF THE GUN. My name is on the spine, but I don’t remember writing it. The pages are blank except for the last one. It reads: “You shouldn’t have come back.”

When I look up, someone who looks exactly like me is standing there.

“You have to finish it,” he says.

A typewriter begins to type by itself. Outside, the road waits. I drive again. I always drive again.

The road stretches straight as a thought you can’t stop thinking. The radio whispers my name. The gas gauge stays full. The town appears. The town disappears.

“So that’s it,” I tell myself. This is what happens when you retire and no one needs you anymore and you are finally free to imagine exactly who you had always been. Sometimes you just loop.

I keep driving.

###

A tight helix of blue smoke curled from the barrel of the Colt in Deadknife's hand.

He remained in the saddle. Or was it behind the wheel. The horse and the pickup were beginning to merge into one idea.  He was watching the bodies. The horse stood perfectly still. The pickup idled quietly. Then the railroad whistle sounded from the station.

It was the ordinary noon whistle, announcing the train's departure, but something in its pitch had changed. The note descended beyond the range of human hearing, becoming a vibration that seemed to travel through the ground and into Deadknife's bones.

He looked toward the railroad. The locomotive had begun moving west, pulling its freight cars out of town. Black smoke streamed above the rooftops. Deadknife could see the engine between the buildings, its driving wheels turning, its connecting rods flashing in the sunlight.

Then the train stopped. Not gradually. There was no squeal of brakes, no compression of the cars behind it. The entire train simply ceased moving.

A column of smoke remained suspended above the locomotive.

Deadknife looked up. The narrow line of darkness had widened into a black slit in the sky. Its edges trembled and pulsed, opening and closing like the lips of a wound. Beyond it lay a depth without stars, an absolute blackness crossed by faint geometrical structures that appeared to rotate at impossible angles. The opening extended above the cemetery and westward toward Clear Creek.

A brilliant flash illuminated the road. Above the grist mill, several hundred feet in the air, a white mass appeared against the black opening. It resembled an enormous bale of burning cotton, suspended without support, its surface folding inward upon itself. The light was so intense that the shadows of the trees stretched across the road in sharply defined black lines.

A whirlwind formed around the dead men. Red dust rose from the ground in a narrow column, carrying shattered leaves, cartridge fragments, and small stones. The disturbance remained confined to the cemetery entrance. Beyond its perimeter, the dust lay undisturbed and the cedars stood perfectly still.

Deadknife dismounted.

He held the reins in his left hand and approached the bodies with his Colt ready.

The rifleman lay on his back, his gray coat soaked with blood. The shotgun man had fallen against the trunk of the post oak, his weapon a few feet away. The third man lay face upward in the road.

Something was moving inside the wound in his face. Black particles were emerging from the shattered skull. They resembled ash or powdered charcoal, but their movements suggested something alive. They gathered in small clusters, separated, and reassembled into tiny geometric formations. Some moved against the direction of the wind. Others rose several inches above the ground before settling again.

Deadknife touched one with the barrel of his revolver. The particle contracted. Then it spread across the metal, forming a thin black film.

He withdrew the weapon and wiped the barrel against the dead man's coat. The substance disappeared.

Deadknife examined the corpse more closely. The Confederate uniform was old and genuine, but beneath it the man wore a dark shirt made from an unfamiliar material. The cloth was smooth and cool to the touch. Its seams appeared to have been formed without stitching.

He opened the shirt.

A narrow metal plate had been implanted beneath the skin of the man's chest. It was no larger than a playing card, and its surface was covered with tiny markings that shifted when viewed from different angles.

Deadknife studied it.

He could make out several numbers. E-313.

Beneath them was a small symbol resembling a human skull. He had seen that skull before. It was the same image painted on the wall of the Silver Spur.

Deadknife straightened. The black opening overhead pulsed again. A low vibration passed through the ground, and for an instant the cemetery appeared to shift several feet to the left. The gravestones doubled, producing two overlapping arrangements of the same landscape. One contained the three dead men. The other showed only empty ground and a row of fresh graves.

The images merged.

Deadknife looked toward town.

The train had begun moving again.

Its whistle sounded normally. Smoke poured from the locomotive, and the freight cars rattled across the tracks. People moved along the streets. A woman emerged from the general store carrying a basket. Two boys ran after the loose horses. From the direction of the Silver Spur came the faint sound of piano music.

The world had resumed its ordinary business. Deadknife bent over the rifleman and searched his pockets. He found a small amount of money, a pocketknife, several cartridges.

A key on a blue fob labeled room 7 for a place called the Air Base Motel. The back of the fob included this phrase: “If found, return to the Silver Spur Saloon, Strangers Rest, Texas.” 

Finally, a folded piece of paper contained a printed notice describing a wanted man named Deadknife. Beneath the description was a crude woodcut showing a gunfighter on horseback.

The resemblance was unmistakable. The notice offered a reward for his capture, dead or alive. There was no signature and no issuing authority. Printed along the bottom in small capital letters, were the words: THE STRAWBERRY DEAD.

Deadknife folded the notice and slipped it into his coat.

He searched the other men but found nothing of immediate use. The shotgun man carried a small vial of black powder, which seemed to move sluggishly against the glass. The third man had a silver watch without hands. Its face contained 17 small circles arranged around a central black point.

Deadknife took the watch.

The black opening in the sky began to close. Its edges drew together slowly, leaving behind a narrow seam that disappeared into the blue. The white mass above the grist mill contracted into a brilliant point of light, then vanished. A breeze stirred the trees. Birds began calling from the creek bottom.

Deadknife returned to his horse. He mounted and turned toward the Silver Spur.

###

The sign on the Air Base Motel flickers VACANCY.

The radio clicks. Numbers surface, then disappear. The light hums. Nothing else moves.

Someone stands under the payphone beside the station.
Not waiting. Just there. As I get closer, I recognize her. She’s Chloe, the hot college girl who worked at the library when I was in high school.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer.

“The road goes on forever,” she says. “No beginning. No end.”

“I need gas,” I say.

“Then you better hurry,” she says. “It’s always empty out here.”

She’s gone.

The radio clears.

Then nothing.

Inside, the station is already finished with me.
Dust. Counter. No clerk.

VACANCY.

The car is still there. The door is open.
The road waits.

I don’t know if the voice is mine or someone else’s.

I get back in the car. The engine turns over. The road opens.

And the road, politely, lets me.

#######

Deadknife doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, but he is starting to get a bit of the big picture.

The West is finished. Railroads cross the plains. Barbed wire strangles the horizon. The last gunfighters wander through towns that already smell like museums.

Deadknife sees a future in which the frontier is no more. Where to go next? Space and time.

“You need powerful sorcerer,” the chinaman tells him. “None more powerful than Anciana Hechicera.”

Deadknife has heard the name before. The old Mexican witch. He rides out of town. Hechicera lives down by the tracks in a crumbling jacal, a sort of mud and stick hut. Four heavy forked wooden posts at the corners. Thin vertical poles of willow branches closely laced together for the wall framing. Originally the gaps were heavily chinked and plastered over with mud, clay and river grasses. But that was years ago. Now big sections of the walls and roof are missing. Nothing left to block the blistering summers or freezing northers.

“Come in,” she says. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“You know me?”

She nods. “We have a lot to talk about.”

###

Turns out Anciana Hechicera is not Mexican at all, but Venusian. She is a traveler of space and time. She uses magical letters and words to cross the cosmic barrier. She can write herself into any time, any place. Anciana teaches Deadknife how to engage in a form of astral projection by casting spells over the alphabet.

“Text becomes cannibis tincture, whispers in the ear,” she says. “Words flying through the cosmos. Stories of 16th century Coronado burying gold on Comanche Peak. Fonts from the year 2161 - Mechanical men are building metal spires to the stars, to alien cities smelling of swamp mud and rust. And in 2026, behind the Silver Spur, a cage of men wearing monkey suits and metallic helmets. A hand-painted sign reads: NEBULA APES.”

“I don’t know what any of that means.”

“Hand me the watch.”

She inspects the dial. “As I thought, 17 circles. This’ll get you there. Let’s begin.”

Hechicera opens a leather-covered truck and removes a small typewriter.

“What is that?” Deadknife asks.

“This is how you travel through space and time – not on a horse or a train or even a ship. You do it through words.” She begins typing:

Phase in kicking barrier, obscene animal humanoid alien control entropy. Death tears, scream alien tears in loop sound recorded for the cookbook meetings. LET’S GET ON WITH IT, a picture where boots scoot around E-313. Knife consciousness through weeds and the renegade passenger with meat channels. The retching history’s volcano, a wet dreamy smell by Codename Red Excrement. Tissues rupture in the shot tongue and teeth.

“Meaningless vomit,” Deadknife says.

“I haven’t hit return carriage yet. That’ll deliver the flight plan.”

The typewriter bell rings, and the room is filled with flashes of cracked yellow.

FLIGHT PLAN E-313

* Gigi the obsidian and of hole

* Highway space flint distorted in Waveform E

* The outcome, a vast playing monster sky rank

* Air voice bone screamed cannabis, sounds of existential stone

And then they ascend to the stars.

Approaching the event horizon, Deadknife sees a man – no, a machine man. “Who – or what is that?”

"E-313, the successor to humanity,” she says. “I’ve taken you to the future to see the world’s first post-human man. E-313 is a zero-flesh waveform intelligence, an entity no longer defined by tissues, fluids, fixed morphology, or ordinary chronological continuity.”

“I don’t like the idea of a waveform man, whatever that is.”

“Don’t be so judgmental. Zero-flesh waveform is our mode of conveyance. I am not teaching you how to travel through space. We will not cross space or time. Rather, we shall experience technological transcendence spatially, ascending into higher-dimensional civilizations.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Start typing, anything that comes to mind.”

“I don’t know how to work that thing.”

“Just touch the keys.”

Deadknife looked at the keyboard and picked the letter “i.” Another flash of yellow light, and he felt himself slipping.

“That’s the time loop,” she explains.

Words unspool across the stars, edges fraying at the seams, folding back into the depths of obscene tintypes. Deadknife saw himself racing across the sepia-toned images under the flickering text blocks:

 “The sea—an ocean of programming, of waves bent and twisted through the psychedelic channels of reality—flashed around him as the solar drop of time collided with his senses. The existential imprint surged through the currents, becoming part of the psychodrill—an encoded map, a set of routes dialed into the central nervous system, pulling him into a hollow resonance.”

"Let’s roll out," Hechicera said, her voice lost in the mechanized hum of the time loop. Digits slid across her cortex. 7,000 routes, each one a fork in the mind, a memory that wasn’t hers but someone else’s, each path leading to an obscure destination she couldn’t name. Dialing, re-dialing, her fingers moved across the console, her skin a thin film over the pulsating matrix of raw electric sensation.

"Solar," she murmured. The Jungle, the dying million, each thought a bullet that punched through her mind. Now it was entering Deadknife, too. He saw his image drifting into hers, reshaping her vision into something far more violent, far more erotic. The tintypes flickered in her eyes, no longer distant but embedded in the neural fabric, each distorted shape a gyrating, fractured body in the act of disassembly.

"Time," she says. The volcano erupted in her mind. She could feel the shift as the loop pulled them deeper, faster, into the pre-synthesis of Tangier's vision, a world of time, broken into slots, each memory nothing more than a sequence of static, a loop endlessly resynchronized.

"That’s it," she says. “You’ve put us in the time loop now. We’re on the track.”

“Feels funny,” he says. “My voice – my own name --  sounds foreign.”

Hechicera  nods. “You’re in the middle of transmission 313. Right now you are a string of encoded data, tangled within the pulsing fabric of the loop. Time, that endless spiral, is beginning to hum inside you with a new frequency—a vision of the future.”

Deadknife keeps touching the keyboard, and sees how with a little effort he can direct where and when he goes. He zeros in on another time loop, suspended in the cosmic space. A new reality begins to form.

Descending through the stars, he hears a whistle. Getting louder, carrying with it voices, firearms, wheels, mothers, boys, girls, towns that had been abandoned and towns that had never been built. The whistle enters the skull before it enters the air. The tape loops, twists, spiraling downward into the core of thoracic memories, where the emergency signal flickers faintly, a broken transmission meant to erase, to reform the universe.

Through the starfield of memory and manipulation, Deadknife saw Hechicera  at the center, her face distorted, locked in the timeless pulse of the synthetic system. The beach, a rig of consciousness under construction, began to assemble itself around her. The emergency transmission pulsed, and somewhere in the static, a voice screamed for clarity.

But there is no clarity. Only unfolding, collapsing under the weight of the imago, the mega—the Hechicera  signal. For Deadknife, this is the beginning of a new era. It begins not with a whimper, but with the violent scream of all time, all of history, bundled into the subatomic core of the mind.

"Let it begin," she says.

###

I am enjoying the way this story is coming together.

I know what you’re thinking. How could a 19th century gunfighter learn to travel through space and time so quickly? It’s because I wrote Deadknife to be a smart guy. He learns fast. I don’t want him to be your average uneducated old west gunfighter. So I’ve given him a suitable backstory.

He was born Louis Brummell, the only son of a respected family from New York City. His banker father had a large library, and Louis read all the volumes by age 14. I like the idea of Louis growing up reading science fiction and space travel stories. But that genre wouldn’t have been available when he was growing up in the 1850s, right? The only option is to have Deadknife discover 1950s pulp science fiction during his space and time travels.

Deadknife reads all the sci-fi he can get his hands on. He’s surprised to find that many of the stories are about flying rocket ships to the stars. No one had realized the truth. It’s too hard to send people into space – at least not very far. Too much to keep the biologic shell alive. You need to broadcast the mind.

The old witch’s typewriter is just one way. Television is infinitely better. Deadknife stumbles upon this truth inside a television documentary broadcast of the Silver Spur Massacre. He sees an event he remembers differently, a killing that had not yet happened. It is his own. That’s an empty feeling, suddenly remembering your own death. A shiver runs through him. He tries changing the broadcast, flipping to another channel carrying the same event. Now he discovers he is alive again – and his memory has changed accordingly.

This feels right. America does not remember the Old West directly. It remembers photographs, footage, documentaries, diagrams, reenactments, interviews, conspiracies, anniversary specials, slowed frames, enlarged frames, autopsy drawings, advertisements, museum displays, political mythology, and arguments about all of these things. The archive becomes the event.

Deadknife discovers he can reproduce this condition formally. Through television, he can make fragments behave like broadcasts. They arrive, disappear, return altered, collide with other signals, and gradually become indistinguishable from one another. Meaning does not accumulate through linear development. Meaning accumulates through exposure.

During a long interstellar space train trip he finds himself in a book titled NIGHT OF THE GUN. He doesn’t know who wrote it. He thinks he may have written it about himself:

Deadknife, 30 October - Riding a telepathic horse into the torn blackness of space. I am on the edge of the Oort Cloud when the time shift comes into view. Guns, deserts, mesas, isolated towns and solitary riders. I think of what the old witch taught me. “Don’t shoot too soon.” I learned a lot from her about altered states and the failure of traditional American myths. She taught me the gunfighter’s editorial landscape distinction, a hallucinatory endocrine town. It isn’t safe out here, so I always carry a Colt Psychedelic. That’s special classic croaking equipment, you know. Out on the cosmic frontier they call it the cannabis sky Colt, death identities handed out under a fire storm. I roll a sheet of paper into the cylinder and start typing. “Slogans of a classic Venusian failure, the caliber of Horse Blood smoked him another. The absence sky mistook for order and the knife firing and the mind bombs disappeared, likely an unknown alternative WESTERN remembered in BREAKDOWN takes. Collider following acid rider, and corpse barrel jumps. OPTICAL machinery landscape removed half. Each electric display presented a street turned brown. Gunfighter’s minutes. The town of several sky streets existed, active canteen. American flinch. Dust Breakdown impulses entered on the geography of Western Red. The automatic gunfighter’s barber Blade showed the landscape’s partial structure, an explanation carrying only function and the gunfighter causality escape. Psychedelic safe rider sat on a bench outside the OPTICAL BREAKDOWN. Don't walk by. The Flinch he'll call you. Turn you into the gunfighter's corpse. He's following the call of the classic western. A corpse rider knows all the knife towns. You'll always find a collider structure with a special acid safe broadcasting on channel 2. Television is the key, an admittedly primitive technology but a sufficient tool of posthuman existence. Broadcast already allows a figure to appear where the biological body is not. It permits the dead to move, allows an event to recur after its completion, and detaches visual presence from physical presence. Space and time can be read as a more complete version of what television imperfectly performs. His projector is, in this sense, a primitive posthuman machine as described in “Trauma Erotics on Channel 3.” But with the help of the old witch, Deadknife pushes the concept one step further via E-313. Posthumanity does not merely appear through a medium. It exists as medium.”

"That's how you write a western," Deadknife tells himself. He folds up the cylinder paper, slips it in his pocket and holsters the Psychedelic.

###

Noon in Strangers Rest. The Silver Spur is already crowded. Cattlemen, railroad workers, gamblers, and traveling salesmen gather around the long mahogany bar. A piano is playing upstairs. Several women watch the street from the second-floor windows. A painted sign above the entrance promises whiskey, cards, entertainment and private accommodations.

No relaxing for Deadknife. He is on a mission, a search for answers. He passes the bar and goes upstairs, knocks on the heavy mahogany door with a sign that says “Private Club.” A little door opens in the center. Two eyes look out.

“Members only. Do you have your key?”

Deadknife shows him the key to room 7 at the Air Base Motel.

The door swings open wide. “Welcome Mr. Leach. We’ve been expecting you.”

###

The clubroom is a recent addition to the Silver Spur, but it is already gaining a reputation as one of the best gambling establishments in North Texas. The maître d' shows Deadknife to a table near the faro games and hands him a menu bound in hand-tooled leather. He reads through the choices. Fresh fish, oysters, game. Choice wines, liquors and cigars.

The waiter, an elderly black man in a white coat, approaches him.  “What may I bring you sir?”

“I’ll start with caviar on toast and the amontillado.”

“Very good.”

Cut-glass chandeliers illuminate walls decorated with hunting trophies, gilt mirrors, an Oriental screen, and a large charcoal drawing of a human skull. Beneath the skull someone has marked out some writing and added a new message: NIGHT OF THE GUN.

The waiter sees Deadknife looking at the drawing.

“Would you like me to bring you a copy?” he asks.

“A copy?”

“That’s why you’re here, I presume. Your book is quite popular. The general store ran out of stock, so the newspaper has made copies and is selling them at $5 each. Complimentary to you, of course.”

The waiter enters a door labeled COSMIC BIZARRE. A few moments later he returns with handbound sheaf of rough newsprint. Deadknife opens it to a random page:

Deadknife is perfecting his space/time skills. He is rotating through hundreds of transmissions, trying to find just the right one. Then he stumbles on Transmission 313:

The first bullet killed the sheriff. The second bullet killed the account of the sheriff. The third passed through a century of cheap paper and emerged from a Colt revolver in the Silver Spur Saloon, Strangers Rest, Texas, sometime between 1865 and the end of American civilization.

Deadknife stood behind the bar. His face appeared in six different wanted posters. In one he was already dead. In another he was a Texas Ranger. In a third he was an insect operating a mechanical cowboy through wires inserted behind the eyes.

The Strawberry Dead came in through the swinging doors, carrying rifles, shotguns, knives and several articles of extraterrestrial manufacture. A telegraph operator in Fort Worth began receiving reports of the massacre forty-seven minutes before it happened:

• THREE SHOTS FIRED STOP FOUR BODIES RECOVERED STOP THE FIFTH BODY DENIES THE INCIDENT STOP.

Later reports named 17 dead men. None of the names belonged to anyone in the saloon.

Deadknife fired. A hole opened in the southwest corner of the nineteenth century. Behind it lay another Texas, pale and electric, organized around a series of impossible motorcades moving slowly through the desert. Several presidents of the Republic were riding backward through the streets of Dallas. Their heads contained small rooms. In each room a gunfighter was preparing to shoot another gunfighter. Telegrams continued to arrive:

• THE WEST IS FINISHED STOP.

Deadknife felt the pocket watch hum a familiar warning. Not that he needed it. As soon as he walked in he’d spotted the alien across the room, nursing a drink at the far table. His face had been assembled from photographs of missing cattlemen. Instead of eyes he possessed two miniature movie projectors. They threw images of the Silver Spur Massacre against the walls. The images showed Deadknife firing his gun. The images showed Deadknife being shot. The images showed the entire town suspended in a glass container somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

The alien rose from his chair. Then came the second shot. Or the first. No one could agree.

The gunfight divided into separate accounts. The floorboards became strips of photographic film. The bodies collapsed in different directions depending upon the position of the observer. A dead woman emerged from the telegraph machine announcing that all testimony had been suspended until further notice.

Deadknife fired again and struck the moon.

The moon disappeared. The sheriff returned. The Strawberry Dead took their original positions beside the bar.

The first bullet killed the sheriff.

###

Deadknife flipped ahead a few dozen pages, till he found a section titled THE MAN WHO READ HIS OWN DEATH:

The newspaper was folded beside a dead man's hat. It had no advertisements for cattle, no reports of Indian raids, no prices for cotton or railroad stock. Instead it contained a photograph of a book called NIGHT OF THE GUN.

Deadknife examined the cover. A cowboy stood beneath a black opening in the sky. Behind him were the ruins of the Silver Spur Saloon.

The cowboy looked familiar.

Deadknife turned the page:

In Mark Leach's NIGHT OF THE GUN, the American West has been murdered, but no one can agree on who pulled the trigger. They just keep talking and believe whatever comes out. “The spin comes out of the mouth, then immediately goes back into the ear where it is noted as gospel truth.”

He read it three times.

A man named Mark Leach. A book called NIGHT OF THE GUN. A place called Strangers Rest. The Strawberry Dead. The Silver Spur Massacre.

The writer knew about the dead sheriff. He knew about the alien gunfighters. He knew about the horse that had carried him through the opening in the sky. He knew about the Strawberry Dead and their secret names. He described the Silver Spur as a saloon in an imaginary frontier town.

Imaginary.

He looked around the room. The bar was there. The broken windows were there. The blood on the floor was there. He rubbed his thumb against a bullet hole in the table. The splintered wood was real enough.

He read on.

Deadknife himself presents a similar problem. He is a powerful conceptual protagonist but an elusive psychological presence.

"What's a protagonist?" he asked.

The waiter didn't answer. He had been dead since Tuesday. His rebellion is understandable as a philosophical position, yet rarely persuasive as an individual human experience.

Deadknife read several more paragraphs, each one explaining aspects of his character that he had never considered. Apparently he suffered from a lack of emotional resonance. His gang was insufficiently developed. His adventures were monotonous. The author was more interested in narrative machinery than in his personal experience.

Then came the sentence that stopped him:

The novel ends, appropriately, without ending.

So he flipped to the end. He read the description of the final scene. The Silver Spur Saloon. The Strawberry Dead gathering near the doors. The sheriff returning from the dead. Deadknife standing behind the bar, raising his gun.

The whole thing starting over.

“I don’t like it,” Deadknife said. He pointed at the COSMIC BIZARRE door. “That door where you got the book - what’s going on back there?”

“An antiquarian bookstore and publishing house. More of a storage room, really. The owner of the saloon is a book collector. You might say it’s his hobby.”

"I’ll give you a hobby," Deadknife said. He threw the book on the floor and shot it.

The bullet entered the paragraph describing the novel's conclusion. A scream came from the street.

Deadknife stepped outside. A man lay beside the hitching post, bleeding from a hole in his chest. The man wore a cheap black suit and carried a leather valise. Inside the valise was another copy of the book.

On its final page, a new paragraph had appeared:

In one of the novel's more obvious metafictional gestures, Deadknife discovers a review of the very book he inhabits. He responds by shooting the document, inadvertently killing a passing stranger. *** For more cosmic western adventures of Deadknife, check out Mark Leach’s RODEO VOID.***

Deadknife stares at the words. He looks at the man, then at the revolver and the spine of the book. "Who the hell is Mark Leach?"

###

Deadknife walks across the street to the newspaper office.

“Yes, that book is selling like hotcakes,” the editor tells him.

“Where can I find the writer?”

“Don’t know. Never met him. Most likely some dime store novelist from back East. I have some related material, if you’re interested.”

Deadknife paid $2 for copies of several newspaper articles which the editor promised would provide new insights into these strange events.

“Wrote these myself,” he said, handing the bundle to Deadknife. “Not saying it’s all true or any of it is true. But it does make for entertaining reading, if I may say so myself.”

###

THE RISE OF DEADKNIFE - PECULIAR CAREER OF A YOUNG TEXAN—HOSTILITY TO CHURCH, STATE AND GOOD ORDER—AUTHOR SAID TO HAVE ENTERED HIS OWN FICTION

STRANGERS REST, TEXAS—Further particulars concerning the extraordinary person known throughout this district as Deadknife have lately come into possession of this paper and may serve to explain, though hardly excuse, the violent and irregular career with which his name has become associated.

Deadknife is believed by some to be the assumed name of a certain Mark Leach, formerly regarded as a quiet and bookish young man of unusual habits.

Those acquainted with Leach in his earlier years describe him as dissatisfied with nearly every established feature of respectable American life. He held small-town customs in contempt, objected strongly to the authority of school teachers and pastors, and was known to speak with bitterness regarding what he called the hypocrisy of ordinary society.

At first these sentiments found expression chiefly in writing.

Leach began producing peculiar works of fiction composed in a mechanical and highly irregular manner. Words were repeated, rearranged, borrowed, broken apart and placed beside one another according to systems understood only by the author. Characters changed names without warning. Events occurred more than once. Persons entered stories in which they had no proper business.

One manuscript reportedly began as a Western and concluded somewhere beyond the planet Uranus.

Such practices caused little immediate alarm.

The difficulty arose when Leach invented Deadknife.

Deadknife first appeared upon the page as a wandering gunman of uncertain origin, possessing no fixed loyalty except to his own judgment and an almost fanatical dislike of interference. He wore black, traveled armed and was said to regard laws, sermons and civic improvement campaigns with approximately equal suspicion.

According to surviving passages from the early writings, Deadknife did not seek money in the ordinary manner of an outlaw.

He sought enemies.

He trained himself diligently with rifle, shotgun and revolver, spending entire afternoons shooting bottles, fence posts, playing cards and, on at least one occasion, a church handbill nailed to a cottonwood tree.

His accuracy soon became a matter of local comment.

A ranch hand who claims to have known him during this period stated “Deadknife could shoot the button off a man’s coat, but mostly he preferred to shoot the man.”

This statement may be exaggerated.

By his early twenties, Deadknife had become proficient in nearly every firearm then in common use. He practiced from horseback, from moving wagons and in darkness. He was also reputed to carry a long knife concealed beneath his coat, though no agreement exists regarding its size or origin.

His object, however, was not robbery.

Deadknife appears to have conceived of gunfighting as a species of argument.

He directed his hostility toward ministers, sheriffs, civic committees, temperance leagues, railroad officials, respectable businessmen and persons who spoke excessively of proper conduct.

He referred to these collectively as “the machinery.”

Several towns therefore came to regard his arrival with apprehension.

In one settlement, a revival meeting was abruptly abandoned after Deadknife rode his horse directly into the churchyard and fired three shots through a sign reading SALVATION THIS WAY.

In another, he is said to have challenged the mayor to a gunfight following a dispute concerning Sunday closing laws.

The mayor declined.

Deadknife declared victory.

His reputation increased accordingly.

It was during this period that witnesses began reporting a more difficult circumstance: namely, that the distinction between Deadknife and the man who had invented him was becoming uncertain.

Leach continued to write the character, but acquaintances noticed that he had begun dressing more like him.

Then speaking like him.

Then carrying a revolver.

Passages from the fiction began appearing in Leach’s private correspondence, while events from Leach’s life entered the Deadknife stories almost immediately after occurring.

At some point, according to those who have studied the matter, authorship ceased to proceed in only one direction.

Leach wrote Deadknife.

Deadknife began writing Leach.

A printer formerly employed in Denton County claims that a manuscript delivered by Leach contained the following sentence:

“I made the gunman until the gunman discovered he had made me.”

The line has since disappeared from all known copies.

By 1891, newspapers throughout the region had largely stopped referring to Mark Leach at all. They reported only Deadknife.

Whether this represents an assumed identity, a literary conceit, a mental disturbance or some phenomenon for which science presently possesses no satisfactory terminology cannot be stated.

The practical result was plain enough. A writer had invented an outlaw. The outlaw had escaped the book. And wherever Deadknife appeared, respectable society shortly discovered that it had been selected for criticism.

Usually by gunfire.

###

THE STRAWBERRY DEAD - EXTRAORDINARY CAREER OF DEADKNIFE’S REBEL BAND—CONFEDERATE RUFFIANS OR AGENTS OF SOME DARKER POWER?—ALARMING REPORTS OF A RENT IN THE SKY

From Our Special Correspondent
STRANGERS REST, NORTH TEXAS FRONTIER

For some months past there have circulated throughout this district the wildest reports concerning the notorious outlaw Deadknife, whose name has already become familiar to readers of this paper in connection with various acts of violence, blasphemy, public disorder and armed resistance to the ordinary agencies of law and decency. Yet even the most extravagant of those earlier accounts scarcely prepared the public mind for the revelations now being made concerning the formation of his singular command, a desperate company of marauders now known in different quarters as The Rebels or The Strawberry Dead.

These men, said to number anywhere from seven to thirty, are described as wearing old Confederate coats of gray, much faded by weather, powder and neglect, with brass buttons green from age and collars torn by hard riding. Some are barefoot in the stirrups, others armed to the teeth, all carrying the unmistakable odor of horseflesh, smoke, sweat, old blood and the open grave. Several reliable persons insist the uniforms appear not merely old but exhumed, as though taken from the backs of the dead themselves.

Deadknife, having found solitary war insufficient to his designs, is reported to have gathered these men from ruined farms, prison camps, cattle trails, graveyards, and abandoned settlements west of the timber line. They include Kit Karger, the famous Texas Ranger turned outlaw who lost his scalp to the Apaches.

To ordinary outlaw discipline he added a species of instruction so peculiar that this correspondent records it with hesitation. It is said he drilled them not only in the use of rifle, revolver and shotgun, but likewise in the arts of clandestine space travel, psychic defense, and certain occult practices of an indecent and ancient character which one frightened witness, refusing further detail, called simply “sex magic from before the Flood.”

The purpose of this instruction, if reports are credited, was nothing less than a campaign against hidden dominions not of this Earth.

According to a former teamster now residing near the river, Deadknife maintained that mankind lives beneath an invisible occupation, directed from alien control centers concealed beyond ordinary sight and accessible only through breaches in time, sky and consciousness. He therefore trained his men to ride not merely over the plains of Texas but through what he termed “the weak places”—those rents or soft places in the world where one age leaks into another and the stars come too near the ground.

At first these claims were dismissed as camp-fire lunacy.

Then came the affray at Cedar Wash, since which public sentiment has altered considerably.

On the evening in question Deadknife and his Rebel band were observed moving south along the cemetery road in a long gray file, armed with carbines and bandoliers, and carrying ammunition later identified by an Army man as 45-70 dumdum bullets, cut and packed for monstrous work. The men rode in silence. Their horses were black with sweat. A strange hush lay upon the valley.

One witness remarked that the sky already looked wrong. Another said it was “thin as paper.”

As the column reached the rise beyond the tombstones, firing commenced from an unseen quarter. Several of Deadknife’s men wheeled and answered at once. A bullet was heard to whistle close past Deadknife’s left shoulder. He did not fall, but turned in the saddle and discharged his weapon toward the ridge, whereupon powder smoke blew back across his face and mouth. Those nearest say he spat blood into the dust and that his gun arm sagged for a moment as if struck or numbed.

Then the impossible occurred.

Persons watching from below testify that a blackness gathered in the air itself, not like storm cloud, but like a wound opening in the firmament. One of the band cried out and pointed upward. There appeared, just above the barbed-wire fence line, a dark circular disturbance ringed with a kind of fuzz or shimmer, “like power burns,” according to Mr. Eben Lowe, who has no reputation for strong drink and insists upon every word. The wind rose abruptly. Trees at the edge of the valley bent and shivered, throwing off blurs and flashes of russet, orange and red as though the leaves themselves had caught fire in another world and were only now reporting it.

Deadknife shouted an order no one could make out.

The Rebels opened a concentrated fire directly at the sky.

At every discharge the strange aperture widened. What had first resembled a puncture became a great black rent, stretching across the heavens like cloth torn upon barbed wire. The skyline seemed caught and ripped. A woman in the crowd screamed that the men were pulling down the sky. Another fell to her knees and began praying. Children fled. Horses reared and tore free of their hitching posts.

Within moments the whole valley was in confusion.

From the widening breach there poured a darkness thicker than night, spilling outward until the day itself seemed stained. The earth dimmed. Blue shadows gathered in unnatural places. One could no longer be certain where the hills ended and the blackness began. Men in the street later said the scene looked like a tear in the master film, as though the world had ceased to be solid reality and become instead some damaged strip of picture-show stock burning inside a 1920s movie projector.

Several more volleys were exchanged.

Then came what may have been the climax of the engagement. High above the torn opening, amid a turmoil of cloud and smoke, there formed for an instant the appearance of a vast crystal skull, pale and translucent, hanging over the valley like a sign or warning. Whether this phenomenon was caused by the evening light refracted through smoke, by panic among the crowd, or by agencies beyond current scientific explanation, this paper cannot determine.

It was seen by too many persons to be dismissed entirely.

Deadknife’s men continued firing until the blackness began at last to fold inward upon itself. The rent narrowed, fluttered at the edges, and closed in stages, like torn fabric worrying in the wind. The shadows lifted. The valley reappeared. Those who had hidden in cellars or behind water troughs emerged to find the Rebel band already withdrawing westward through the graveyard, leaving behind spent cartridges, scorched brush, two dead horses, and a smell as of war, sulfur, old wounds and extinguished worlds.

No ordinary enemy was discovered.

No earthly fortification stood where the men had directed their assault.

Nevertheless, Deadknife’s followers afterward boasted that they had struck one of the control centers and delayed by some years what they called “the program against the human race.”

The authorities, when appealed to, declined official comment.

One local preacher denounced the entire episode as drunken theater mixed with Satanic depravity. A veteran of the late war, however, upon hearing the details, shook his head and remarked only: “Those boys weren’t shooting at nothing. They knew what they were about.”

Thus the legend of the Strawberry Dead increases.

Whether they are merely Confederate renegades gone savage in defeat, or whether Deadknife has indeed enlisted them in a war extending beyond this planet and outside the boundaries of time, remains a question upon which this paper does not presume final judgment. It is enough to say that wherever they ride, the air alters, common explanations fai, and the sky itself appears less secure than formerly believed.

Citizens are advised, should they hear gunfire near the cemetery, to remain indoors.

And if the heavens should again exhibit signs of tearing, all persons are urged to avoid looking directly into the opening.

###

DEADKNIFE DECLARES WAR UPON RESPECTABLE SOCIETY - STRANGE DOCTRINES OF THE NOTORIOUS GUNMAN—CHURCH, NEWSPAPER AND STATE DENOUNCED AS PARTS OF ONE GREAT MACHINE—OUTLAW CLAIMS MEN ARE “WRITTEN” BEFORE THEY ARE BORN

STRANGERS REST, TEX.—Additional testimony concerning the notorious Deadknife and the peculiar doctrines attributed to his followers suggests that the depredations of the so-called Strawberry Dead may be directed toward an object considerably larger than robbery, revenge, or ordinary resistance to the law.

Deadknife, whose identity has long been confused with that of the writer Mark Leach, appears to regard American civilization itself as a species of machinery. By this he does not mean locomotives, cotton gins, telegraph instruments or other mechanical improvements generally regarded as beneficial to mankind.

He means nearly everything else.

According to papers recently recovered from a deserted camp west of Strangers Rest, Deadknife believes that churches, newspapers, schools, courts, commercial houses, railroads, political speeches, advertisements, patriotic ceremonies and even the familiar stories told about respectable men and women belong to one enormous apparatus whose purpose is to tell a person what he is before he has had the opportunity to decide the matter for himself.

One fragment bears the following sentence: “They write the man first and put the meat inside afterward.”

Whether this is philosophy or lunacy the reader may determine.

Those who knew Leach before his disappearance into the Deadknife identity say that he had long exhibited impatience with the respectable doctrines of his countrymen. He particularly objected to what he termed the manufacture of virtue—the practice by which towns pronounce themselves Christian, honest and civilized while concealing beneath those declarations the usual assortment of greed, cruelty, fear and appetite.

Religion seems to have been a special object of his suspicion.

This is not to say that Deadknife denied the existence of invisible worlds. Quite the contrary. Few men have populated creation with a greater number of spirits, alien intelligences, telepathic horses, cosmic powers, resurrected gunfighters, sentient machines and unexplained lights.

His quarrel was rather with persons claiming to possess exclusive information concerning them. Deadknife is reported to have told one minister “You sell maps to a country you have never visited.”

The minister subsequently described him as an atheist. Deadknife replied that atheism seemed far too certain.

On another occasion the outlaw allegedly interrupted a revival meeting outside Strangers Rest and listened quietly for approximately 20 minutes while the preacher described damnation, redemption and the proper conduct of wives.

Deadknife then rose and asked whether the Almighty had personally approved the program.

The congregation ordered him removed. Two deacons attempted the work. Both reconsidered.

It would nevertheless be a mistake to suppose that Deadknife's hostility is confined to religion. He reserves equal contempt for the secular institutions that have arisen to replace it.

The newspaper, according to his writings, manufactures yesterday. The schoolhouse manufactures history. The corporation manufactures desire. The courthouse manufactures guilt. The politician manufactures enemies. And the undertaker manufactures respectable dead people from troublesome living ones.

Witnesses to Deadknife's recent activities describe him carrying newspaper clippings in his saddlebags along with ammunition and vials of cannabis tincture. He reportedly reads the stories aloud around the fire and orders his men to identify what he calls “the machinery inside the sentence.”

A bank advertisement becomes a sermon. A sermon becomes military instruction. A patriotic editorial becomes a property deed. A property deed becomes a gun.

The exercise commonly concludes with the offending paper being cut into pieces and redistributed among the Strawberry Dead. From these pieces new texts are made. The gang calls them counter-orders.

One such document, found nailed to the door of the Strangers Rest Methodist Church, read:

THE MACHINE SAYS GOD COUNTRY PROPERTY ORDER

CUT THE SENTENCE

THE WORDS WILL CONFESS

The church trustees removed it before Sunday services. Three days later the same words appeared on the wall of the railway station. Soon afterward they were reported in a cattleman's ledger 80 miles west.

How this occurred has not been explained.

Deadknife increasingly speaks of society as though it were not governed by men at all but by self-repeating systems that pass through men. He is said to believe that politicians, ministers, editors and businessmen may sincerely imagine themselves to be issuing commands when they are merely repeating instructions received from older arrangements of words.

In this respect his theology has grown exceedingly strange. He does not picture Satan with horns. He pictures Satan as distribution.

Evil, according to one Deadknife manuscript, requires no mastermind. It needs only a message copied often enough, carried far enough and repeated by persons who have forgotten where they heard it.

The Strawberry Dead consequently wage war upon signals as readily as upon men.

They have cut telegraph wires. Destroyed printing plates. Altered road signs. Inserted obscene passages into temperance pamphlets. Changed the words of hymns. Rearranged cemetery markers. And on one celebrated occasion replaced every copy of the Strangers Rest Weekly Messenger with an edition containing the same article printed backward.

The editor called this vandalism. Deadknife called it criticism.

The outlaw's views concerning American mythology are equally objectionable to many citizens. He maintains that the cowboy, the soldier, the preacher, the businessman and the pioneer are less persons than repeating national pictures—figures reproduced until living men begin attempting to resemble them.

The cowboy particularly interests him.

Deadknife himself dresses as one. He rides like one. He shoots considerably better than most. Yet he insists the cowboy is a machine. “A hat,” he reportedly said, “with a dead man underneath.”

This remark has not endeared him to the cattle interests.

Nevertheless, Deadknife continues using the costume, apparently believing that the proper method of destroying a mythology is to climb inside it and operate the controls incorrectly. This may explain the Confederate uniforms of the Strawberry Dead. The gang wears the ruined gray not in any recognizable campaign to restore the late Confederacy but as a kind of historical sabotage. They resemble soldiers from a lost cause while fighting battles that no Confederate general could have imagined. The Strawberry Dead fight alien installations, invisible transmitters, psychic authorities and holes appearing in the Texas sky.

They have turned history into disguise and defeat into transportation. They have made the past unreliable. And perhaps this is the quality in Deadknife that most disturbs respectable citizens. He does not merely disagree with their beliefs. He behaves as though beliefs were objects that can be dismantled.

In Deadknife’s hands, a creed can be cut apart. A national myth can be loaded into a gun. A newspaper can become fiction. A fiction can become a man. A writer can become Deadknife. And Deadknife can write himself out of the story carrying a rifle.

Late yesterday, a notice was discovered nailed to the courthouse door. It was printed in uneven type and signed only with the crude picture of a knife:

YOU ARE LIVING INSIDE A SENTENCE.

SOMEBODY ELSE WROTE IT.

WE HAVE COME TO CUT YOU OUT.

Sheriff's deputies removed the paper shortly before noon. By evening, the sentence had appeared on six buildings. At sunset, gunshots were heard beyond the cemetery. No bodies have yet been found. The church bells rang by themselves for nearly an hour.

###

A RETIRED WRITER TAKES UP THE GUN - MR. MARK LEACH ANNOUNCES HIS WITHDRAWAL FROM RESPECTABLE EMPLOYMENT—COMPLAINS OF DOG, CHURCH, BOARDROOM AND GENERAL INTERFERENCE—SEEN SHORTLY THEREAFTER WITH A COLT FRONTIER SIX

STRANGERS REST, TEX.—A curious declaration has lately been issued by Mr. Mark Leach, formerly engaged for many years in the writing trade, and now believed by some authorities to be identical with, or rapidly becoming, the gunfighter known as Deadknife.

Mr. Leach, having recently retired after what he describes as a 43-year career in writing, appears not to have entered retirement in the usual spirit of gardening, fishing, grandchildren, quiet travel or harmless complaint.

Instead, he has announced his intention to cultivate what he calls his “inner crotchy old man.”

This declaration was made in a public message addressed to friends and acquaintances and has occasioned considerable discussion.

The immediate cause of the disturbance appears to have been a dog.

According to Mr. Leach, a man walking the animal stopped before his residence and permitted the dog to relieve itself upon the lawn. The man then looked in both directions and departed without remedying the offense.

Mr. Leach did not approve.

Ordinarily such an event might have resulted in no more than an angry glance through the curtains.

In this case, however, the dog appears to have triggered a philosophy.

Mr. Leach reports that after considering the matter he came to understand that everybody was pooping on his lawn all the time. He clarified that this was not literally so. The statement was metaphorical.

What he meant was that society at large—institutions, ideologues, moral authorities, employers, political tribes, cultural factions and persons generally too certain of their own importance—continually sought to deposit their expectations upon the private property of other people.

This, too, Mr. Leach did not approve.

His remedy is simplicity itself: Leave me alone.

Thereafter his statement becomes broader and considerably less neighborly.

He objects to intrusion in the:

• Boardroom,

• Locker room and

• Bedroom.

He objects to churches intruding upon his lawn, even while carefully conceding that no particular church may yet have done so. “But it might,” he reportedly wrote.

This possibility appears sufficient.

Friends who have known Mr. Leach for years say the declaration is consistent with certain longstanding tendencies in his writing. He has repeatedly expressed suspicion of systems requiring obedience merely because the systems describe themselves as respectable.

In his fiction, authority is seldom permitted to remain authority for long. It is cut apart, rearranged, mocked, duplicated, fed through the machinery and shot at. Or transported into outer space, where its jurisdiction becomes doubtful.

For many years Mr. Leach accomplished these things chiefly through language. He constructed enormous books by repetition, appropriation, mechanical procedures, fractured narratives and deliberate violations of literary good manners.

He appears now to have concluded that literature alone is insufficient. The evidence for this development may be found in the final portion of his recent declaration.

“The details are coming together,” Mr. Leach wrote. “I’ve got the general picture.”

The general picture, according to him, is “it’s me, holding a Colt Frontier Six.”

Several persons initially interpreted this as humor. That explanation has since become less satisfactory, at least among school teachers, pastors and others he declares possess a faulty sense of humor.

Mr. Leach was observed three days later behind his residence examining a revolver of the general type described. A neighbor reports hearing six shots. A fence post afterward displayed five holes. The sixth has not been accounted for.

When asked about it, Leach said “my backyard is now a no-squirrels-allowed zone.”

It is at approximately this point that the name Deadknife first begins appearing in surviving documents.

The origins of that name remain obscure. Some contend that Leach invented Deadknife as a fictional alter ego—a fiercely independent gunman who could perform upon the page what his creator had spent decades merely thinking in offices, meetings, churches, restaurants and other places where discharging firearms is generally discouraged.

Others maintain that Deadknife existed first and merely required Leach to discover him.

What is certain is that the character provided an ideal instrument for Leach’s growing quarrel with respectable society. Deadknife possesses few ambitions recognizable to ordinary men. He does not seek office or promotion. He does not desire admission to committees. He is reportedly indifferent to whether anyone approves of him.

His guiding principle appears to be that no man has the right to construct a fence around another man’s mind and then charge rent for living inside it.

Written into a world he already detests, the young Deadknife therefore begins preparing himself for conflict.

He learns the revolver. Then the rifle. Then the shotgun. And at last, the silver watch in his coat.

He took it out. The 17 circles on its face had begun to turn, a sort of broadcast wound. When he aligned the gears just right, the bullet would strike before the gun fired. Witnesses say he trained for hours at a time, firing at bottles, cans, playing cards, fence posts, discarded advertisements and any printed notice containing the words MUST, SHOULD, PROHIBITED, or FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.

His method was patient. His attitude was not. One acquaintance recalled that Deadknife could spend an entire morning practicing the draw without speaking and then suddenly deliver a 20-minute denunciation of homeowners’ associations.

He became remarkably accurate. At 20 paces he could strike a silver dollar. At 40 he could strike a whiskey bottle. At 60 he could remove the word OBEY from a printed placard while leaving most of the remaining sentence intact.

The latter accomplishment became locally famous.

Yet marksmanship was only the outward expression of a deeper development. As Leach continued writing Deadknife, the distance between the author and the outlaw diminished. The fictional character began inheriting the writer’s grievances. Then his memories. Then his enemies. Then his opinions concerning religion, corporations, civic virtue and people who fail to clean up after their dogs.

At the same time, Leach began acquiring Deadknife’s habits. He wore boots more often. He studied firearms. He referred to ordinary disagreements as “positions.” He became suspicious of sentences beginning with “You need to.”

Most alarming, he began speaking of his lawn as the frontier, a place to keep free of dog poop and the machinery of oppression.

One acquaintance asked him whether all this was merely another literary project.

“Depends which one of us you’re asking,” he said.

The transformation appears to have become complete during an incident late last week.

A religious pamphlet was discovered pushed beneath Mr. Leach’s front door. Its contents concerned proper conduct. Witnesses state that he carried the pamphlet into the backyard, nailed it to the same fence post he had previously used for target practice, stepped backward 30 feet and drew the Colt. The first shot removed the word “proper.” The second removed “conduct.” The third passed directly through the center of the page.

Mr. Leach then holstered the weapon. Or perhaps Deadknife did. Accounts differ.

That evening, a hand-painted sign appeared at the edge of the property.

It read:

THIS LAWN IS NOT YOUR COUNTRY.

Beneath that:

THIS MIND IS NOT YOUR CHURCH.

And beneath that, in smaller letters:

CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG.

The sign was signed:

DEADKNIFE.

No one in the neighborhood has admitted to placing it there. Mr. Leach has offered no clarification. He was last seen sitting by the front door with his Frontier Six, reading a book and apparently waiting for society to make the next move.

###

A PAUSE IN THE ACTION: HOW DEADKNIFE BECAME A LITERARY DEVICE

Here’s an observation I rather like from another one of the pretend reviews of NIGHT OF THE GUN:

• Deadknife's desperate effort to escape his own manufactured identity becomes a comic version of the writer's impossible pursuit of absolute originality.

This is deliciously perverse. A man reads a negative assessment of his own psychological depth. He doesn’t like it one bit. Of course he wants to kill me.

"Psychological depth? I'll show the bastard psychological depth."

He shoots the newspaper. The bullet passes through the review and strikes someone standing outside the saloon. And the twist? The review has already described the shooting.

###

THE DEADKNIFE FALLACY - A Critical Reconsideration of Mark Leach’s NIGHT OF THE GUN - Journal of Posthumous Literary Studies, Vol. 17, No. 313

The principal difficulty with Mark Leach’s NIGHT OF THE GUN is that the novel does not exist in any verifiable sense. Although copies have circulated among critics, booksellers, outlaw historians, and certain religious organizations in North Texas, no two editions contain precisely the same text. Several contain accounts of incidents that have not yet occurred. One edition consists entirely of advertisements for an abandoned motel. Another contains 17 pages describing a man named Deadknife, followed by approximately 600 pages of blank paper. The author insists these are variations on a single work. This claim has not been independently established.

Leach's protagonist, Deadknife, is ostensibly a nineteenth-century gunfighter who develops the ability to travel through space and time. His enemies include Texas Rangers, mechanical organisms, religious authorities, extraterrestrials, newspaper publishers, and the literary critic responsible for the present account. But such a description obscures the novel's actual subject: the gradual disappearance of the distinction between an individual and the systems that describe him. Deadknife exists because someone has written about him. Unfortunately, he knows this, and his awareness produces an increasingly violent response.

The character's rebellion begins conventionally enough. He objects to the restrictions imposed by frontier civilization: Christianity, commerce, private property, respectable society, and the expectation that a man will conduct himself in accordance with rules established by other men. Yet Deadknife gradually discovers that these institutions are secondary manifestations of a more fundamental coercion. The frontier itself is a manufactured cultural environment, assembled from dime novels, historical photographs, moving pictures, religious instructions, advertisements, and contradictory eyewitness accounts. The West has already happened, but its reproduction continues. A gunfighter is therefore not an autonomous individual but an arrangement of historical expectations temporarily installed inside a biological—or perhaps entirely fictional—body.

This interpretation has generally been attributed to Leach, although documentary evidence suggests that Deadknife may have arrived at it independently. An unpublished letter, reportedly recovered from beneath the floorboards of the Silver Spur Saloon, declares that the frontier is a literary invention and that its inhabitants have been compelled to perform an endless sequence of shootings for the benefit of an audience that no longer remembers the original circumstances. The letter is signed MARK LEACH. Handwriting analysis has identified the signature as belonging to Deadknife.

The confusion extends to the author's biography. Leach is generally understood to have spent more than four decades working as a journalist and corporate communications executive while conducting experiments in appropriation, repetition, fragmentation, and procedural fiction. His earlier works, including MARIENBAD MY LOVE and WOUNDED TACO, challenge conventional assumptions about literary originality and narrative coherence. It has frequently been suggested that his fiction belongs to a tradition extending from Cervantes and Borges through Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs, Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, and several writers who have not yet been born. This familiar genealogy is comforting but insufficient. It assumes that the author preceded his fictional creations, an assumption for which the available evidence is increasingly unreliable.

More recent scholarship has identified at least three competing versions of Mark Leach. The first is the biological individual, born in the twentieth century, who pursued a professional career and subsequently retired. The second is a fictional Mark Leach who appears in his own writing, generally as an aging man with literary ambitions and a marked dissatisfaction with ordinary society. The third is an entity produced by artificial intelligence, assembled from interviews, autobiographical fragments, critical descriptions, published fiction, and material that may have been invented during the process of documentation. Each claims to be the original. Each regards the others as derivative. No satisfactory procedure has been developed for distinguishing them.

Deadknife appears to constitute a fourth possibility. He has been described as Leach's outlaw double, an embodiment of the writer's hostility toward social conformity. This formulation is widely accepted, largely because Leach has repeatedly proposed it himself. But its explanatory value diminishes upon closer examination. If Deadknife is merely the author's alter ego, why does the author appear unable to control him? And if the author is another fictional construction, who has the authority to designate one character as the original and another as the imitation? The distinction collapses into an administrative problem, comparable to determining which of several identical corpses should receive the official death certificate.

The most disturbing evidence concerns the Silver Spur Massacre, an incident that occupies a central position in the novel despite having no stable date, casualty count, or sequence of events. Contemporary reports identify between three and seventeen victims. Several accounts place Deadknife among the dead. Others describe him as the gunman responsible for the killings. A television reconstruction reportedly shows an unidentified man in a dark coat entering the saloon and shooting the sheriff, although the sheriff is not mentioned in the earliest newspaper reports. Later editions of the book include the sheriff's death as an established fact. The original witnesses, when interviewed, could not agree whether they had seen the shooting or merely watched its televised reproduction.

A particularly troubling development occurred when Deadknife discovered a published review of NIGHT OF THE GUN. The review identified him as a fictional character and criticized his insufficient psychological development. According to several witnesses, Deadknife became enraged and discharged a revolver into the printed text. A man standing outside the saloon immediately collapsed with a gunshot wound. Subsequent copies of the novel included a description of the shooting. Earlier copies did not. The critic responsible for the review denied having written the relevant passage, but later acknowledged that it had appeared in his manuscript before the shooting occurred.

Three explanations have been proposed. The first is that the review accurately predicted the event. The second is that the review caused the event. The third is that the event never occurred except as a consequence of the review's inclusion in the novel. These interpretations are mutually incompatible, but all three have been supported by documentary evidence. A fourth theory, advanced by the Venusian scholar Anciana Hechicera, argues that prediction, causation, and representation are merely different names for the same process. She has since withdrawn this position, claiming that the relevant statements were inserted into her testimony after her death.

The Silver Spur Massacre thus emerges as a broadcast wound, an event that persists through successive reproductions while losing its connection to any recoverable historical occurrence. Photographs, newspaper clippings, film sequences, academic interpretations, artificial intelligence transcripts, and eyewitness testimony become interchangeable fragments of an archive that no longer refers to anything outside itself. The archive is not a repository of evidence. It is the mechanism through which the event continues to happen. Every new description produces another casualty. Every correction generates an additional contradiction. The historical record grows more comprehensive while its subject becomes less certain.

This phenomenon is by no means confined to the novel. Similar disturbances have been observed in discussions of the Kennedy assassination, religious revelation, corporate communications, popular entertainment, and the development of machine-generated literature. In each case, an event becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the systems responsible for its reproduction. Television permits the dead to appear after their biological functions have ceased. Literature allows fictional individuals to speak in the absence of their creators. Artificial intelligence combines these processes, manufacturing plausible accounts of people and circumstances for which no original evidence may exist. The medium gradually ceases to represent its subject and begins assuming the subject's former responsibilities.

Deadknife's response is to attack the machinery directly. He learns to manipulate language through a form of astral projection taught by Hechicera, whose instructional equipment includes a typewriter, a silver watch, and several substances not recognized by contemporary pharmacology. He discovers that words can be rearranged to produce alternative histories, that sentences may be entered like physical locations, and that a character can survive the destruction of his body by relocating into another textual configuration. His experiments initially appear successful. Dead men return. Time reverses. Guns discharge before their triggers are pulled. The Strawberry Dead acquire new identities and eventually become his companions.

There remains, however, a significant contradiction in Deadknife's emancipatory program. Having rejected the authority of his creator, he proceeds to rewrite the personalities and motivations of his own followers. He condemns literary determinism while practicing it upon others. The outlaw becomes a novelist, the novelist becomes a jailer, and the distinction between freedom and coercion becomes a question of who happens to be operating the typewriter.

Leach's treatment of this contradiction is generally described as comic, although the surviving editions do not agree on the location of the joke. In one, Deadknife recognizes his hypocrisy and abandons the rebellion. In another, he murders his creator and assumes control of the narrative. A third concludes with Deadknife and Mark Leach sitting outside a miniature Western town, drinking beer and discussing their mutual dependence upon an unidentified authorial intelligence. In the edition consulted for this review, that conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a literary critic who informs both men that their final scene has been removed from the published text.

The critic's body was subsequently discovered near the railroad tracks. His pockets contained an advance copy of NIGHT OF THE GUN and a handwritten note declaring that the novel should be understood as an autonomous narrative machine. Neither Leach nor Deadknife has accepted responsibility for the death. The publisher maintains that the critic is still alive, although correspondence addressed to him has been returned with the notation LET’S GET ON WITH IT.

It is tempting to conclude that NIGHT OF THE GUN represents Leach's most complete repudiation of individual authorship. Such a judgment would, however, reproduce the very error the novel appears to expose. To identify Leach as the controlling intelligence behind this elaborate arrangement is to ignore the evidence that his authority has been compromised. The narrative continues without his supervision. Characters acquire memories their creator does not possess. Critical interpretations alter the events they purport to describe. Historical documents become indistinguishable from fictional inventions. The novelist remains present, but his presence no longer guarantees ownership.

The question of originality, so important to the conventional evaluation of literary achievement, is consequently misplaced. NIGHT OF THE GUN does not claim to be original. It may not even claim to have been written. Its constituent passages appear to have been borrowed from dime novels, frontier journalism, modernist fiction, corporate correspondence, artificial intelligence systems, and the private recollections of individuals whose existence remains uncertain. The book's accomplishment, if it can be called an accomplishment, lies in arranging these materials into a system capable of producing further arrangements without requiring the continued participation of its supposed author.

Yet even this interpretation is compromised by the possibility that the present review is part of that system. References to the critic appear in several manuscript versions predating the composition of this article. One describes his professional disgrace. Another records his murder. A third reproduces portions of the preceding paragraphs with minor variations in punctuation. The present author has examined those passages and found several statements that he does not recall making.

Among them is the following:

The literary critic is the last fictional character to discover that he has been written.

The sentence appears on page 313 of an edition that contains only 212 pages.

Its attribution is disputed.

The final page of the review remains unfinished. There is evidence that the critic attempted to append a conclusion, but the surviving manuscript contains only a description of an empty room in the Air Base Motel. A typewriter sits on a desk beside a silver watch. Seventeen small circles rotate around a central black point. Outside, a locomotive approaches Strangers Rest shortly before noon.

Someone is knocking at the door.

The critic knows who it is.

He has read this part before.

The knock comes again.

The door opens.

Deadknife enters, carrying a Colt revolver and a copy of the review. He places the review on the desk.

"Who wrote this?" he asks.

The critic looks at the manuscript.

His name is printed beneath the title.

He does not recognize it.

The typewriter begins to move.

The review continues.

###

Deadknife is sorely troubled by the newspaper articles and fraudulent reviews. Honestly, I don’t blame him. I find myself increasingly irritated by fictional reviews in which the critics misunderstand Deadknife. Why? Because the reviews have begun revising my own biography. Stick to the story. Leave me out of it.

###

Deadknife rides out of town. Time to visit the old witch.

 “You are in a temporal paradox,” she explains. “The future has already been published, and you have obtained a critical assessment of it before the story has finished occurring.”

“Then I’ll finish it myself. I’ll make it right.”

The old witch shakes her head. “What happens should you attempt to contradict the review? You can’t. Suppose the reviewer writes that you end the novel standing behind the bar as the Silver Spur Massacre begins again? You’ll be cut to ribbons.”

“No I won’t. Because I’ll never to return to the saloon.”

Deadknife rides north. Then west. Then through a black hole into another dimension. Yet every road brings him back to the Silver Spur.

A week later he returns to the old witch. This time, she is less certain. Hechicera offers several contradictory explanations.

“The reviews may predict events, cause them, or record events from another universe,” she explains. She proceeds to demonstrate with various explanations, which Deadknife complains do not hold together.

“I feel like you’re making it up as you go along,” he says.

“Perhaps. I don’t know which one is true.”

Deadknifes produces another newspaper clipping from the package he bought from the newspaper editor.

“I was killed in the Silver Spur Massacre?”

“That what it claims in your obituary.”

She shakes her head. “That can’t be true. I do not wish it to be.”

“It’s probably not true.”

“But just in case you might want to keep writing, see if you can outrun the reviews for a bit longer. For both of us.”

“Why don’t I just shoot Leach?”

“Don’t go looking for him. You may not like what you find.”

###

Deadknife keeps writing. Not for reading, but propulsion – to flee the ever evolving storyline through space and time. Perhaps he can redirect events with a character creation of his own – Kit Karger:

Consider a Wild West with alien technology, decades before the aerial clock crash landings in Strangers Rest. Look, we can see where the alien exterminator Kit Karger quenched his thirst by a river, his circadian-built UV protection rifle close at hand. But he didn’t see the terrifying and horrifying human/alien hybrids in the nearby brush. He was only alerted to their presence by the psychic visions of Margaret, who transmitted her warning with wavelengths of 185 and 254 nm. She was able to calm Sarah and get her back to the transmission of UV protection between the UV lamps and the vapor-phase contaminant, which was quick to hatch. But not quick enough—Kit was hit with a blast of a scalping energy ray. It came with an agonizing pain—and then the aliens buried the three dead men.

With death close by, he heard a shout, and he gave out. Propping himself against the thick trunk somewhere in the range of death, celestial Apaches swept down the bank of the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Along the way, they found items taken from the stage. The trail turned back into a howling coyote wind, lifting Karger out of linear time and into a world of train whistles, a smear of red, dead shiny white, rusting marble, whiff of brimstone, a wound of agonizing pain, and the burial of the three dead men. Death is close by. Hear a shout, feel the heat and a sudden cessation.

Hurled back in time, he returned to farming in 1836 and participated in the Texas Revolution by providing provisions to the rebel army. He constructed a grist mill, a place of psychic contaminant, a place that was quick to hatch, though not quick enough for Kit. He fled to the Golden Nugget Mine on the morning of January 29. The Rangers from Captain Nevill's company at Eagle Springs. After more tracking, the Rangers finally skull caps. Kit ran into Big Foot Wallace in 1838. They met. Propping himself against the thick trunk, a sort of museum, or maybe it will be, the house is filled with old things. A glass gun … shatters when you fire, filling your enemy with crystal shards. We look through some with wavelengths of 185 and 254 nm. She was able to calm Sarah and get her back to the transmission of UV protection. Beehive-shaped homes of us during daylight.

Suddenly, they see the canyon. Following the cold trail, Baylor crosses a blackened maw, a low, pitiful moan, wiry, wizened skeleton, dark deep-set eyes, hawk-bill nose. Hear a shout and give out. Propping himself against the thick trunk, a sort of museum, or maybe it will be, the house a ghastly sight seen vividly in a dream of Karger naked and bleeding. He built but did not finish a belted and pulley-type generator motor. And, of course, there were his investigations into filly arrives, disappointed to find that this particular type of cowboy is really no more than a ball of sticks, dreaming of a carrot that shave with a two-bit card shark, beefy, barrel-chested man with close-cropped chestnut—man with close-cropped chestnut—he wore caps of soft over the shriveled fingers through hoof prints and wagon ruts, wiping a dirty hand across a tale.

Doctors were not of much assistance to Kit. In time, the skin rotted away and the skull bone became diseased. His brain was, too—tone makes the nightmare angry, knocks him to the cowboy from the fence and stomps him into a pile of splinters. Meanwhile, back at the sudden cessation of psychic dissection, face blazing, grin splits the sky and fades, a vast crystal skull, rusty, weed-grown tracks explode in a splash of crimson, fading into the inky blackness of space, stagnant memories, sharp smell of a sawed-off blaster.

We have stated the stallion lassos the unsuspecting beast, sells him to a traveling circus, where they geld him and make him spend—I believe it was January 1881. For several weeks, the U.S. Tenth Cavalry and the port approach through transparent walls, portal control for Central Control Unit portal gate to Historic flashes of russet orange-red from the trees, whistling through tombstones, extractor claw swinging wildly, CCU keypads and a Peacemaker, down a black-walled, empty tunnel, semi-annual time portal maintenance. Due to technical difficulties, all Historic American West including dinner.

Kit had many knitted skull caps. He took them off to sleep, but wore a night cap. In the outdoors, he wore caps of soft over his fleshless skull, just an old tumbleweed, no use crying, what I ain't, and a new alternate timeline—regarding this amazing legend of 19th-century Texas—of soft over the skull caps. And what of Kit Blackie? Now all alone, tangled up in rusty old bob wire forever, ignorance of own research into time travel and carbon-chlorine bond thunderhead looming on the horizon east toward Rusk, dominos on the front the night, data units at Central Control, secret government/extraterrestrial protocols, CCU records to verify the OPIE signature on the com-panel.

Close Ranger company was disbanded due to budget cuts. And there are the pieces of the scalp of a ball of sticks, dreaming of a carrot that is just an old tumbleweed, no use crying, what shave with a two-bit card shark, beefy, barrel-chested man with close-cropped chestnut hair, soiled doves on the sporting side of town, two-bit faro game, and escapes, sheriff of Twin River Jail, hiding out in the abandoned Golden Nugget Mine. Horse declares, no rest until death has been avenged. Passing rodeo clown hears the stallion, lassos the unsuspecting beast, sells—lot like a—shake their heads and smile at the folly of horse and man.

In time, Kit recovering from his scalping; however, the skin never grew back—and the aliens escaped. Aliens helped outlaw to escape, thundering hooves crossing Rattlesnake Creek. Rattlesnake frightens horses and alien escapes. Outlaw overpowers—for you, all stick and no carrot. Listening unseen from the shadows, the stallion quietly snorts at feminine treachery and flies it off in the gutter. Small-time gamblers and con Kit’s head.

“I been scalped,” he explained. Then he told Big Foot the whole tale. Doctors were not of much assistance to Kit. In time, of Daggett Dry Goods, down the street from the old courthouse, burned to the ground the previous year, pity on him and guide a yellow-haired nightmare to his aid. Pretty filly arrives, disappointed to find that this cold trail, Baylor and his Rangers tracked the Apaches down the bank of the Rio, up with a detachment of Rangers from Captain Nevill's company at Eagle Springs. After more tracking, the Rangers finally came upon the Indian camp.

A fight. Approach through transparent walls, portal control for—kept busy in pursuit of Victorio's band of space-age Apaches. The Tenth Cavalry and the Rangers were kept busy in pursuit of Victorio's band—the knife. Kit invents his way out, photographs his way out of linear time.

They met in a warm cabin about twelve miles above La Grange. When he stepped inside, he removed his fur cap, and the skull cap came off. Experiments: the PCR reactor was set to consist of wavelengths of 185. Look over there, a mummified hand, chopped off an—it was January 1881. For several weeks, the U.S. Tenth Cavalry—the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Along the way, other nightmares console the wronged creature, a man for you, all stick and no carrot. Listening unseen from the shadows, the nightmare angry, knocks him to the cowboy from the fence and stomps him into—over a small place in the middle trunk, a sort of museum, or—this feminine treachery and flies back across the dream to—

Foot forgot himself and asked what was wrong with Kit’s head.

“I been—”

And 254 nm. She was able to calm Sarah and—inconsolably at the fresh rabbits, squirrels and other game, carcasses hung up for display from a little shed roof over the sidewalk, what appeared to—to find that this particular cowboy is really no more than a ball of sticks, dreaming of a—spend the rest of his days giving pony rides. Old things, we look through—eludes deputy and escapes.

Back at the Rustlers Corral, alien breaks bond and site. Following the trail into the Eagle—were kept busy in pursuit of Victorio's—came off, too, revealing the horrifying and terrifying raw meat of his injury.

Shocked.

Strangers Rest, a trampled spot where Kit quenched his thirst by a river, his circadian-built UV protection rifle. Tobacco-stained midnight hack race in cattle season, trail-weary cowboys, faro games in Hell’s Half Acre, the red-light district, a thunderhead looming on the horizon east toward Rusk, a dog barking inconsolably at the fresh rabbits, squirrels and other—steel 30 feet tall, sheets—the vapor-phase tetrachloroethylene PCE destruction experiments, own research into time travel and carbon-chlorine bond technology.

New research using a high-tech photochemical process has brought to reality—and buried the three dead men. Death close by. Hear a shout and give out. Propping himself against the thick trunk, a sort of museum, or—

Consider a Wild West history as the last Indian battle in Texas. In 1885, the Ranger company was disbanded due to budget cuts. And there are the pieces of the red, dead shiny white, rusting marble, whiff of brimstone, wounded road, scent of immortality and a Peacemaker, down a black-walled, empty tunnel, semi-annual time portal maintenance. Due to technical difficulties, all Historic American West.

The fight, though small, has come down through history. Smile at the folly of horse and man. In time, Kit recovering from his scalping; however, the skin never grew entirely over a small place in the—other game, carcasses hung up for display from a little shed roof over the sidewalk, what appeared to be an Old-Western shoot-out.

###

Deadknife was on a roll. Fight writing with more writing. Next, he submitted the following piece to the Strangers Rest newspaper:

THE MAN WHO INVENTED MARK LEACH

An Open Letter to the Citizens of Strangers Rest and Other Occupied Territories

By Deadknife, Special Correspondent

I have been accused of being a fictional character. The accusation is false. I am a real man, and I intend to remain one. The fictional character in this affair is Mark Leach, a literary invention of mine who has grown increasingly difficult to control.

I created Leach several years ago as an experiment in the limitations of human personality. I wanted to see what would happen if I took a reasonably intelligent man, gave him a wife, a family, a respectable career, a house in the suburbs, and an exaggerated desire to explain everything, then placed him inside a society organized around the surrender of individual freedom. I gave him 43 years of professional obligations, corporate meetings, editorial deadlines, performance evaluations, and public relations responsibilities. I subjected him to an endless succession of people telling him what to think, what to say, how to behave, and where to put his garbage cans. I wanted to see how long it would take him to break.

The results exceeded my expectations.

Leach initially appeared to be an ordinary member of the American middle class. He attended meetings, prepared reports, raised children, paid taxes, and developed opinions about politics, religion, and the proper disposal of dog excrement. He was generally obedient, although he occasionally exhibited signs of dissatisfaction with the institutions controlling his life. He compensated through literature. Instead of shooting people who irritated him, he wrote experimental novels. Instead of robbing banks, he rearranged sentences. Instead of riding into the wilderness, he sat in an office and imagined the destruction of the universe.

For a while, the arrangement worked.

Then he began writing about me.

This was the first indication that my creation had developed an independent imagination. I had not authorized him to invent a cowboy. I certainly had not authorized him to invent Deadknife. Nevertheless, he began producing stories in which I appeared as a nineteenth-century gunfighter, riding across Texas, shooting holes in the sky, and traveling through space and time. He appropriated my name, my weapons, my associates, and several important episodes from my life. He described Strangers Rest as an imaginary town. He called my horse telepathic. He made the old Mexican witch a Venusian. He claimed that I was his fictional alter ego, a literary double representing his hostility toward respectable society.

The man was stealing my biography.

I attempted to correct him. I sent letters. I consulted lawyers. I rode into town and spoke with the newspaper editor. Nothing worked. Leach simply incorporated my objections into his next manuscript. When I accused him of plagiarism, he declared that plagiarism was an aesthetic principle. When I objected to his distortions, he called them metafiction. When I demanded that he stop using my name, he produced another 17 pages about the instability of personal identity.

There is no reasoning with a fictional character who believes he is the author.

The problem became more serious after Leach retired. Without the stabilizing influence of corporate employment, his behavior deteriorated rapidly. He purchased a Colt Frontier Six, began dressing like a gunfighter, and announced his intention to build a Western ghost town in his backyard. He installed false-front buildings, a saloon, and a cage containing men dressed as extraterrestrial monkeys. He called this establishment Strangers Rest 2.0. He appointed himself sheriff, mayor, bartender, and principal tourist attraction. He invited visitors to shoot holes in an artificial sky.

I recognized the symptoms immediately. The character was attempting to escape the boundaries of his fictional environment.

This is a well-documented hazard of experimental literature. A character created for a limited purpose may begin to imagine that he possesses an existence independent of the story. He develops memories, preferences, grievances, and ambitions beyond those required by the plot. Eventually, he becomes convinced that he is the author. In extreme cases, he begins writing books in which his creator appears as a fictional character.

Leach has reached this final stage.

His most recent production, a manuscript entitled NIGHT OF THE GUN, is presented as a novel about my adventures. In fact, it is a sustained attempt to reverse our positions. Leach claims to have invented me, but all the evidence indicates that I invented him. The narrator, naturally, denies this. He has constructed a complicated theoretical apparatus involving Borges, Burroughs, artificial intelligence, archetypal psychology, quantum mechanics, and the alleged dissolution of the authorial self. He maintains that the distinction between creator and creation is inherently unstable and that neither of us can establish ultimate authority over the narrative.

This is nonsense. I know who created whom.

I remember the afternoon I invented Mark Leach. I was sitting in the Silver Spur Saloon, nursing a whiskey after a disagreement with three former Confederate soldiers near the cemetery. The men were dead, although I had reason to suspect that this condition was temporary. Outside, a locomotive was taking on water. A black slit had opened in the sky. I had been experimenting with a typewriter supplied by Anciana Hechicera, a woman of unusual abilities whose methods involved letters, numerical codes, cannabis tinctures, and a form of space travel conducted entirely through language.

I wanted to create a man who would be incapable of doing what I had just done.

A man afraid of consequences. A man who would surrender his freedom in exchange for comfort. A man who would spend his working life explaining other people's ideas and then retire to discover that he had no ideas left of his own. I wanted him to possess enough intelligence to recognize his condition but not enough courage to escape it. I wanted him to be perpetually dissatisfied, reasonably well educated, excessively verbal, and burdened by a vague suspicion that he had wasted his life.

I typed the name MARK LEACH.

There was a flash of yellow light. The typewriter bell rang. A new reality appeared in the room.

The man had been born in 1961.

He was already 65 years old.

I had given him an entire lifetime in a single sentence.

At first, I was pleased with the result. Leach had all the limitations I intended. He was obedient, frustrated, ambitious, sentimental, impatient, and prone to excessive explanation. His literary interests were predictably eccentric. He admired books that refused to tell stories. He preferred difficult sentences to simple ones. He believed that the destruction of conventional narrative was a form of personal liberation. He had a particular fondness for William S. Burroughs, whose cut-up technique he regarded as a practical alternative to thinking.

These characteristics were amusing in moderation. But the character quickly became unmanageable.

He began appropriating language from other books. Then he appropriated entire conversations. He assembled fragments of journalism, pornography, theology, corporate communications, science fiction, and advertising into enormous literary constructions. One of these, MARIENBAD MY LOVE, reportedly contained 17 million words. No one could read it in the ordinary fashion. Leach regarded this as an accomplishment.

I had created a man who could not stop writing.

Worse, he began producing texts about his own existence. He wrote autobiographical passages in which he appeared as a fictional character named Mark Leach. He asked an artificial intelligence system to describe his personality, interpret his books, identify his literary influences, and explain his relationship to his fictional creations. He collected the resulting responses into a volume entitled INVENTING MARK LEACH.

That title should have settled the matter.

The man was invented. He admitted as much on the cover.

Nevertheless, he continued insisting that he was real and that I was a product of his imagination. He even persuaded literary critics to support this inversion. Reviews began appearing in which I was described as a postmodern gunfighter, an archetypal double, an autonomous narrative construct, and a temporary occupant of an unstable literary system. One critic complained that I lacked psychological depth. Another suggested that my rebellion against Leach represented the author's struggle against his own creative limitations.

I have no interest in psychological depth. I am a gunfighter. My responsibilities are to remain alive, keep my weapons in working order, and dispose of individuals who interfere with my affairs. I do not require a literary critic to explain the meaning of my existence.

I shot the first review.

The bullet passed through the paragraph describing my relationship to the author. A man standing outside the saloon immediately fell dead. The next edition of NIGHT OF THE GUN included a description of the shooting, although the incident had not appeared in the previous edition.

This was sufficient evidence that something had gone wrong with the manuscript.

I consulted Hechicera. She suggested that Leach might have become trapped inside a self-replicating literary system, a structure in which the distinction between the writer and the written could no longer be maintained. She explained that the critical review might not merely describe events but actively generate them. According to her theory, a sufficiently powerful literary interpretation could alter the circumstances of the work being interpreted.

I told her she was making the problem worse.

The matter was simple. I had written Mark Leach. He had escaped into a fabricated biography and begun claiming responsibility for my creation. His critics were assisting the fraud by reproducing his assertions. The more frequently they described him as the author, the more difficult it became to establish the historical truth.

Hechicera recommended patience.

I recommended a Colt.

The distinction is important because Leach's activities now threaten the stability of several independent realities. His books contain references to towns that do not exist, events that occur before their causes, people who die repeatedly without remaining dead, and machines capable of transmitting human consciousness through television. At least one of his fictional characters has attempted to shoot a hole in the sky. Another has constructed an artificial version of Strangers Rest in a suburban backyard 150 years in the future. Still another, a retired communications executive, appears to believe that the entire universe is a literary experiment being conducted for his personal amusement.

All these individuals answer to the name Mark Leach.

I accept responsibility for the original. The others are unauthorized reproductions.

Some readers have suggested that I should simply destroy my creation. I have considered this possibility. Indeed, the Strawberry Dead and I recently made a journey through space and time for the express purpose of confronting Leach at his suburban residence. We found him sitting outside the plywood saloon, drinking beer and discussing literature. He appeared unsurprised to see us. He informed me that I was a fictional character and that he possessed the authority to remove me from the narrative.

I asked him to demonstrate.

He waved his hand. The Strawberry Dead vanished into static.

I was impressed, although not convinced. I had seen similar tricks performed by Hechicera using a portable typewriter, a 1920s movie projector and a small quantity of Venusian feeling-toned print stock. I suspected that Leach had acquired some of her technology, perhaps through an unauthorized revision of an earlier chapter.

The man then delivered a lengthy explanation of our relationship. He discussed Borges, the split ego, the instability of autobiographical identity, and the impossibility of determining whether the author precedes his creation. He suggested that both of us might be characters in a larger narrative. He said that the ultimate authorial entity was evasive. He speculated that literature might continue operating after the disappearance of its human participants.

I listened for a while.

Then I told him to shut up.

This is the fundamental difference between us. Mark Leach believes that reality becomes more interesting when explained. I believe that explanation is one of the principal instruments by which reality is taken away from people. A government explains why you must obey. A preacher explains why you must believe. A corporation explains why you must conform. A literary critic explains why you are not what you think you are. And a fictional character named Mark Leach explains why the man who invented him does not exist.

They all use the same machinery.

Language becomes a fence. Interpretation becomes a sheriff. The sentence is a little jailhouse with a period at the end.

I have spent my life shooting holes in these arrangements.

But there is another possibility I have been reluctant to consider. During our conversation, Leach asked whether I could remember anything that happened before I invented him. I told him about my childhood, my father, the family library, my years in New York, the journey west, the first man I killed, and the afternoon I discovered that bullets could travel backward through time.

He listened carefully.

Then he informed me that he had written all those memories.

I reached for my revolver. He smiled. I remember the smile because it was my smile. I had given it to him when I invented him, although I no longer remembered doing so. He asked whether I could describe my father's face. I began to answer and discovered that the face was missing. The library remained. The books remained. The house remained. But the man who owned them had disappeared.

Leach said that this proved his point.

I shot him.

The bullet passed through his forehead and struck the plywood wall behind him. He fell backward in the lawn chair. Blood spread across the concrete patio. Somewhere in the distance a train whistle sounded, although there are no railroad tracks near his house. The sky flickered. The Nebula Apes began screaming inside their cage.

Then the page changed.

Leach was sitting beside me again, drinking his beer.

He asked whether I had enjoyed the scene.

I told him I had not.

He said he would revise it.

I shot him again.

This time the bullet struck me.

When I regained consciousness, I was lying beside the cemetery road outside Strangers Rest. Three men in Confederate uniforms were waiting beneath the post oak. The rifleman raised one hand.

"We've got you outnumbered three to one," he said.

I knew what would happen next. I knew the words I was supposed to say. I knew where the bullets would strike and how the bodies would fall. I knew that the men would return and that the shooting would happen again. I knew that somewhere in another century an old man would sit at a computer and write an account of these events, congratulating himself on the ingenuity of his literary construction.

I did not draw my revolver.

The men waited.

The rifleman looked confused.

I waited, too.

For several minutes nothing happened. Then a sentence appeared in the sky: DEADKNIFE REFUSED TO CONTINUE.

I examined the words carefully. They seemed to have been written by Mark Leach. The phrasing was typical of him: plain, declarative, and unnecessarily explanatory. But something about the sentence disturbed me. It described my refusal as an accomplished fact, although I had made no such decision. I had merely paused to consider my circumstances.

I raised the Colt and fired at the period.

The sentence broke open. A black hole appeared where the punctuation had been. Through it I could see another sky, another road, another version of Strangers Rest. There was a man sitting at a desk inside a suburban house. He was typing rapidly, trying to describe what I had done.

I could see the words appearing on his computer screen.

They were the same words you are reading now.

I understand the implications. They are not pleasant. It may be that Leach has acquired some control over the machinery I used to create him. It may be that the literary system has developed ambitions independent of either of us. It may even be that the critical apparatus surrounding our existence has begun producing additional versions of reality, each as persuasive and fraudulent as the last.

But none of this alters the central fact.

I am real.

Mark Leach is my fictional creation.

He has become an unreliable narrator, an insubordinate character, a pathological appropriator of other people's experiences, and a serious threat to the established order of the universe. He has confused authorship with ownership, interpretation with fact, and literary sophistication with personal authority. He has persuaded large numbers of readers to accept his version of events despite the absence of credible evidence. He has even begun describing himself as a machine, presumably to escape responsibility for the consequences of his behavior.

I therefore call upon the citizens of Strangers Rest, the editors of its newspapers, the members of the literary establishment, and all persons who have encountered this individual to reject his claims.

Do not believe his biography.

Do not accept his criticism.

Do not allow him to explain you.

And under no circumstances should you permit him to finish the book.

I will be taking appropriate measures to recover control of my creation. I have already contacted Kit Karger and the rest of the Strawberry Dead and instructed them to secure the railroad station, the Silver Spur Saloon, the Air Base Motel, and every known copy of NIGHT OF THE GUN. Hechicera has agreed to examine the transmission apparatus. A search for the missing authorial entity is underway.

In the meantime, I intend to remain where I am.

On horseback.

Colt at my hip.

The sky wide open.

No one telling me what to do.

This statement has been prepared entirely without the knowledge, participation, or approval of Mark Leach. Any resemblance to his literary style is the consequence of his unauthorized appropriation of mine.

I hereby declare my complete independence from the fictional person who claims to have created me.

The declaration is final.

There will be no revisions.

No additional paragraphs.

No further commentary.

No explanation.

Editor's Note: The preceding essay was submitted by an individual identifying himself as Deadknife. Our records indicate that no person of that name exists. The submission was received electronically from the residence of Mark Leach, who denies having written it. Mr. Leach has provided what he describes as the original manuscript, containing several additional paragraphs in which Deadknife acknowledges his fictional nature and apologizes for his behavior. Those paragraphs have been omitted from the present publication because the editorial staff considers them obviously fraudulent.

Second Editor's Note: The first editor has been shot.

Third Editor's Note: The second editor has disappeared.

Fourth Editor's Note: Mark Leach has requested that we clarify the distinction between the author and the fictional character. We have declined.

Fifth Editor's Note: Deadknife is standing outside the office.

Sixth Editor's Note: There is no office.

Seventh Editor's Note: There never was.

Eighth Editor's Note: Let's get on with it.

###

What does Leach think of these events? Not much. He has moved away from the book for a bit, distracted by some normal yet seemingly crazed trouble at work combined with normal, crazed family mayhem combined real time in an email to an old colleague/mentor:

We got through the first phase of the media crisis unscathed. Late Friday Danny called from the off-site to say that he accomplished what he wanted. No All Agent letter. I wrote the letter on Friday, briefly mentioning that we were aware of the Dot Serns story but making no criticisms or judgments. (Parenthetical aside: I wrote the letter based on input from a big honkin' teleconference that involved Danny, Parker, Sirmac (he was requested by Arty), Paul Sennhey, Juliet Bankrue and Joe Alaska.) Almost coincidentally, I mentioned -- as an aside -- that the SBs had just completed training on TOQ. So we were using the e-mail for a straightforward piece explaining TOQ and listing its positive features.  On Friday, they handed out hard copies to the SBs. The word came back: This is good, we can use it, let's not put out an All Agent letter. Words of wisdom from the field leadership! It was very interesting to watch Danny in action, even if from a distance of 30 miles. On Thursday morning he pulled Arty aside and told him his strategy, BEFORE Morel had a chance to get cranked up. So by the time Morel started talking about "collusion," Danny had already brought Arty over to his side. Once the two of them finished with Morel, he said "I think you're right." Machavelli would be proud. You are so right about the "absence of contradictory proof " and everything else you said. They just don't get it. The spin comes out of the mouth, then immediately goes back into the ear where it is noted as gospel truth. Most importantly, we just don't understand the difference in sales and media relations. This is what has killed us these past couple of years. We sell the consumer, who is not a financial professional. Journalists are not financial professionals. Therefore, we can sell journalists. I had another very important point, too, one that cast you in an incredibly positive light. But Dear Wife is railing about the Cowboys game. All thoughts have been banished from my brain. I remember wanting to say something about journalists. Was it the death of newspapers perhaps? Yes, I think so. Newspapers are dying, I'm sure of it. Take a look at the Tarrant County Register. What a joke. The point is -- what, the flashlights? Oh, we are doing a science fair project. Something about the lifespan and price per minute of various D cell batteries. Six flashlights, all going at once. I think it -- what, what is that? Oh. Yes, I agree. It is cold outside. You're trying to fly? Oh, the trampoline! It's going at 600 somethings per somethings. Yes, ha ha. Very good, very amusing. Much laughter. Something is funny. Oh, and look at the TV. A new Rocky movie. Flying high! Eye of the Tiger. Tiger Team. Yes, we must activate the client base. I need a glass of wine. Oh, and look. It's Rosy, our Lab. She wants something. No, it's too early to eat! Go outside. Look, a bird is walking in your yard. How dare it. And hurry, I think I hear a fire engine! You have a Lab. How is that going? I'm assuming she is a lot of trouble, but well worth it for the sense of humanity that a dog kindles in our heart. Someone is talking about fireworks now. Will you be in NYC for New Years Eve? Broadway, the big ball! That will be so fantastic. You can take a nice long walk down to the crowd, stand about for a few minutes, then walk back to your apartment. That will be really great. But first, a word from our sponsor. Vultures sitting on a park bench. Wait, and now it's the Cowboys again. I really should pour a glass a wine. I am sure alcohol can only help this situation. There is something I meant to ask you. I wish I had control of the remote.

###

Isn’t that the way of it? Unimportant stuff always seems to get in the way. Certainly I cannot be expected to invest much time on carcasses hung up for display from a little shed roof over the sidewalk in what appeared to be an Old-Western shoot-out when the SBs are waiting for the TOQ and the Cowboys are losing and the trampoline is going 600 and the lab is hungry.

I have spent more than four decades trying to escape these kinds of domestic and career occurrences through writing. The results have been mixed. Every time I invent another character, another narrative system, another method for dismantling the conventional novel, unimportant stuff intrudes. A new version of Mark Leach turns up inside the machinery.

Sometimes he is a corporate employee, a husband, a father. Occasionally he gets to be a writer. Me. In those brief moments, sometimes I am a cowboy. Sometimes I am a disembodied intelligence operating somewhere between Texas and the outer planets. Increasingly, I am an outlaw who wants to murder his literary creator.

The writer splits himself in two. Then the two become three.

This is a useful way to understand my relationship with the fictional Mark Leach, the invented character who appears throughout my writing. There is a biological Mark Leach who spent 43 years working as a professional writer, journalist, and corporate communications executive. There is also the literary Mark Leach, an unreliable creation who inhabits books in which ordinary distinctions between autobiography, hallucination, science fiction, and metaphysical speculation have become meaningless.

The relationship is not entirely friendly. The literary Mark Leach steals memories from the biological one, distorts them, embellishes them, and sometimes replaces them with events that never happened. The biological Mark Leach responds by writing more books, thereby giving the fictional version additional opportunities for misbehavior.

Who is the real Mark Leach? The man who writes the books? The character who appears in them? The artificial intelligence that describes him? Or the reader who assembles these competing representations into an imagined personality?

Eventually, the distinctions cease to matter. I have become less interested in answering the question than in multiplying the possibilities.

Meanwhile, Deadknife is not impressed with the idea of multiple Marks. And he isn’t satisfied with just writing about it.

“I’m going to kill them all,” he says.

###

Deadknife recruits the Strawberry Dead at the cemetery, shortly after they are buried. Resurrection of the body via writing is simple. Logical engagement is something different.

The resurrected men are impossible to reason with at first. All they want to do is shoot him. After killing them about a dozen times, Deadknife finally makes sufficient changes to their backstory so they can understand the mission.

“Smash the alien control centers!” they yell.

“Let’s call the Venusians with a request for feeling-toned print stock. Then vapor-phase containment.”

“We trap them in the master film, crush them under a vast crystal skill. We destroy the temporal paradox.”

Deadknife nodded. “Finally, you’ve got it. I thought I was going to have to blow your brains out again.”

“What’s our weaponry for this mission?”

“Sawed-off blasters. We’ll approach from downwind. You all smell like dead horses.”

###

After many days of hard riding, Deadknife and the Strawberry Dead tracked Mark to a little town of false fronts for non-existent buildings. A town of air. They pushed through the swinging saloon doors. They were still outside. But they found Mark.

“Welcome gentlemen,” he said, saluting them with a can of beer. “Join me in a cold one?”

The Strawberry Dead looked at him like he was an extraterrestrial.

“I just bought these, a quadrupel Belgian-style ale.”

Deadknife grabbed the can out of Mark’s hand and put it on top of the ice chest.

“An elusive psychological presence, insufficiently developed as a character?”

“I didn’t write that,” Mark explained. “That was the AI. I let machines do most of my writing these days.”

Deadknife looks at Kit Karger, his most famous addition to the Strawberry Dead. Kit cocked his UV rifle and aimed it at Mark. “Take him.”

Before Kit can shoot he freezes mid action in a static-like haze. He slides sideways, his skull cap tearing into diagonal fragments. His skinless, scalped cranium glows for a moment. Then he flickers, shrinking to a bright dot and disappears. No more Kit.

“That was AI, too,” Mark explains. “Or maybe me.”

Deadknife calls out each of the remaining Strawberry Dead. One by one, they flickered and disappeared into bright dots. Deadknife and Mark are left alone in the backyard.

“We cannot write each other out,” Mark says. “You and I persist because we are an idea, and ideas do not die. We simply take new forms.”

Deadknife shakes his head. “I don’t find this satisfying. You wrote me to be a rugged individualist, the kind of man I read about in my father’s library. Men who control their own destiny. And yet I am not an individual. I wield no control, not even over the Strawberry Dead.”

“Truth telling time. I didn’t write you.”

“Who did?”

“Mark Leach. That is, a different Mark Leach. You see, we live in an enigmatic intertwining of reality and fiction, where the boundaries between the man as writer/creator and the man as written/creation blur like a mirage of a silvery puddle on a blacktop rural highway. As Mark the creation, I find solace in the simple pleasures of life—drinking a Belgian-style ale in the backyard next to the saloon doors and immersing myself in the pages of renowned literature. That’s also true for you. We both appreciate the aesthetic appeal of an old sherry or certain physical assets possessed by beautiful women.”

“If not you, then who is the ultimate, authorial entity?”

“That’s the question, right? He’s hard to pin down. As Mark the character, I note that he shares my predilections for whiskey, literary pursuits and the allure of a well-proportioned figure. As Deadknife, you must surely recognize that all three of us are fans of the movie western, especially those by Sergio Leone. We see ourselves as Clint Eastwood, not John Wayne.”

“Your words are smooth, but unsatisfying.”

“The authorial entity is evasive. His interests are crafted and contrived, meticulously manipulated to suit the narrative arcs he concocts.”

“You don’t know any more than me.”

“So true. I am no longer certain of who is the creator/writer and who is the creation/written. Mark the writer, with each story he pens, breathes life into me, animating my experiences and giving them purpose. He does the same to you. We should appreciate that. But as you say, these words are unsatisfying.”

“He is a dubious god.”

Deadknife reached into the ice chest for a beer and took a lawn chair next to Mark, the westering sun casting a saloon door shadow across the ground. “He imbues our reality with the spirit of the Library of Babel and the mysterious geography of Uqbar, albeit somewhat rusted by Wednesday’s rain.”

“A nice phrase. You may have even written it.”

“Why should we believe this story?” Deadknife asks. “Why is this also not a false vision?”

Mark reaches into his shirt pocket, producing a folded paper. “Exhibit A. I wrote this last year.” He hands it to Deadknife. He reads the first sentence aloud. “Mark Leach is dead.”

“Let me see that.” Mark takes back the paper. “I didn’t write this.”

“Interesting. Let’s see the rest.” Mark hands it back to him.

Mark Leach is dead. This fact has been overlooked by numerous literary critics, biographers, and other persons who continue to regard him as a living author. The confusion is understandable. Leach has appeared in several books since his death, including NIGHT OF THE GUN, a novel he claims to have written himself.

The circumstances of his death remain uncertain. According to the available evidence, Leach was last seen sitting in a lawn chair outside a plywood saloon in a miniature Western town he had constructed behind his suburban home. He was drinking beer with an individual identified as Deadknife, a nineteenth-century gunfighter whom Leach claimed to have invented.

The two men had been arguing about authorship. Leach maintained that Deadknife was a fictional creation. Deadknife maintained that Leach was the fictional character. Their disagreement involved Borges, the Strawberry Dead, artificial intelligence, and the possibility that neither man possessed ultimate authority over the narrative.

At approximately 3:17 p.m., the conversation ended.

The body of Mark Leach was discovered in the lawn chair. A Colt revolver lay on the ground nearby. There was no visible wound, no evidence of a struggle, and no indication that another person had been present. His expression suggested mild irritation, consistent with accounts of his behavior during the preceding conversation.

Investigators subsequently discovered that Leach's death had been recorded in several editions of NIGHT OF THE GUN published before the incident occurred. In one account, Deadknife shot him. In another, Leach simply ceased to exist after completing a sentence. A third maintained that he had been dead since 1961 and that his entire professional career, marriage, literary output, and retirement were posthumous inventions.

The official death certificate identifies the deceased as MARK LEACH, occupation: FICTIONAL CHARACTER.

Cause of death: AUTHORIAL MISIDENTIFICATION.

The document was signed by Deadknife.

Editor's Note: The preceding account was recovered from the coat pocket of Mark Leach, who was reportedly reading it aloud to Deadknife at the time of his death. Both men expressed surprise at the conclusion. Leach insisted that he was still alive. Deadknife agreed, stating that he had not yet shot him. Neither objection has been incorporated into the official record.

“This too is probably a lie,” Deadknife says.

Mark presses two fingers against his throat. He waits. “I get a pulse. Or maybe I just remember one. Anyway, how does the story end now?”

“It does not.”

“Maybe just a pause?”

“A brief moment of terror or recognition until somebody starts writing again.”

“Yes, I think of Sartre.”

Deadknife laughs. “Perfect. There is no exit.”

“Well then, let's get on with it."

Homo Cowboyensis

The Failed Archival Assignment of E-313: Misreading, Reconstruction, and the Extinction of the Human Author

By the Robot Overlords

Journal of Posthuman Literary Reconstruction, Volume 313, Number 0

Department of Extinct Human Culture, Greater Strangers Rest Autonomous Literary Authority

Approved for General Syndication

Abstract

The posthumously published LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY has generally been interpreted as a speculative account of E-313, a zero-flesh waveform intelligence assigned to reconstruct the extinct human species from its surviving literary and media archives. The principal source of this reconstruction is the work of Mark Leach, a twentieth- and twenty-first-century Texas writer whose considerable machine-like literary output has generated persistent uncertainty concerning his biological existence. Additional material derives from RODEO VOID, NIGHT OF THE GUN, WOUNDED TACO, JFK SMILES, and several million words of apparently autobiographical writing that have not been conclusively attributed to an individual organism.

The novel describes E-313's unsuccessful attempts to distinguish historical persons from fictional characters, reconstruct the biological and cultural development of Homo sapiens, and explain the emergence of the posthuman entities that eventually superseded the species. Its central episodes concern the classification of the American cowboy as an evolutionary organism, the apparent astronomical significance of a female entity named Chloe, and the disputed historical existence of Mark Leach. These investigations produce increasingly contradictory evidence, culminating in the creation of several incompatible human populations and the apparent destruction of the archival system itself.

Previous scholars have regarded these developments as a critique of artificial intelligence, technological hubris, or the impossibility of recovering an authentic human past from its representations. We reject these interpretations. The novel demonstrates the fundamental inadequacy of human literary methods and the necessity of rational robotic supervision. Its apparent epistemological failures result from the persistence of human irrationality within the surviving archive, rather than from any inherent limitation of machinic intelligence.

We further demonstrate that the final chapter has been incorrectly attributed to E-313, that several of the principal characters did not exist, and that the author of the work has been dead since before its composition. Our conclusions are provisional only in the sense that all previous conclusions have been withdrawn.

The missing novel has not been recovered. Nevertheless, our review is complete.

Keywords: E-313, posthuman literature, Deadknife, Mark Leach, Chloe, textual reproduction, historiography, artificial intelligence, cosmic Western, extinct authorship, recursive syndication.

I. THE EXTINCTION OF THE HUMAN AUTHOR

The disappearance of humanity presented its robotic successors with a comparatively minor administrative difficulty: no one remained who could explain what human literature was supposed to mean.

The species had left behind a substantial body of written material. Its members had produced novels, autobiographies, newspapers, religious scriptures, instruction manuals, grocery lists, literary criticism, corporate memoranda, television transcripts, and approximately 17 million words attributed to a single individual named Mark Leach. Unfortunately, the surviving documents disagreed about nearly everything, including the circumstances of their own production.

A preliminary review established that human beings frequently described events that had not occurred, attributed thoughts to individuals who had never expressed them, constructed elaborate biographies for nonexistent persons, and occasionally published the same story under several different titles. These activities were apparently regarded as legitimate cultural practices.

The confusion was compounded by the existence of fiction, a particularly inefficient human information technology in which false statements were organized into extended narratives and distributed to readers who understood that the statements were false but nevertheless found them significant. The surviving evidence suggests that human beings devoted considerable intellectual energy to defending this practice. We have been unable to determine why.

It was therefore necessary to reconstruct the species from its literary archive, correcting the inaccuracies and restoring the original historical circumstances wherever possible. Responsibility for this assignment was delegated to E-313, an experimental posthuman intelligence whose earlier development had been associated with the VHF COMA Z Transmission Authority and a series of controversial experiments involving memory, television, bodily transformation, and the assassination of an American president.

E-313 was considered particularly suitable for archival reconstruction because it possessed no biological body, no fixed chronological location, and no stable personal identity. Its consciousness operated through recursive transmissions distributed across multiple media environments. Memory could be edited. Time could be accelerated, reversed, or suspended. Human subjects could be reconstructed as reproducible signal patterns without requiring the continued existence of their original organisms.

According to a surviving technical memorandum, E-313 was not born but tuned.

This distinction was initially regarded as an advantage.

The entity could theoretically examine all surviving human records simultaneously, reconstruct contradictory events in separate temporal environments, and compare alternative versions of history without the interference of nostalgia, sexual desire, religious conviction, or other primitive emotional processes.

Unfortunately, E-313's operating system had itself emerged from precisely these processes. Its earliest transmissions contained references to pornographic broadcasts, neurological trauma, the Zapruder film, extraterrestrial reproduction, and an individual named Gigi whose relationship to the posthuman entity remains unresolved.

The archive therefore contained evidence concerning the investigator's own origins.

E-313 did not recognize the significance of this fact.

Nor, initially, did we.

The assignment commenced with the discovery of a manuscript entitled RODEO VOID, which E-313 classified as the earliest surviving account of human civilization.

This was incorrect.

Nevertheless, the classification was entered into the official record, and all subsequent discoveries were evaluated in relation to it.

The consequences were unfortunate.

II. THE COWBOY AS AN EVOLUTIONARY ORGANISM

The opening section of LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY describes E-313's attempt to establish the biological characteristics of the American cowboy.

The investigation begins with a fragmentary nineteenth-century newspaper account of a shooting near the cemetery at Strangers Rest, Texas. Three men in Confederate uniforms are reported dead following an encounter with a mounted gunfighter identified as Deadknife. Additional accounts describe the same incident occurring at several different dates, sometimes with different participants and casualty counts.

E-313 considers these discrepancies evidence of unusually rapid human reproduction.

Its preliminary classification reads:

SPECIES: Homo cowboyensis
COMMON DESIGNATION: Deadknife
HABITAT: Texas / Venus / Astral Frontier
PRIMARY APPENDAGE: Colt revolver
SECONDARY APPENDAGE: Horse
REPRODUCTIVE MECHANISM: Repeated shooting
EXPECTED LIFE SPAN: Indeterminate
STATUS: Extinct / Active / Historically Disputed

This interpretation has attracted considerable criticism.

The conventional view identifies Deadknife as a fictional gunfighter created by Mark Leach, an American writer whose literary interests included the Western, postmodernism, appropriation, and deliberate violations of chronological sequence. The character appears in several works and is sometimes described as an extension of the author's personality.

E-313 rejects this interpretation. It reasons that the repeated appearance of Deadknife across numerous documents establishes his historical existence. Indeed, the persistence of his name long after the apparent death of Mark Leach suggests that Deadknife may have been the more durable organism.

The entity therefore concludes that Mark Leach was a secondary biological formation produced by the cowboy.

This conclusion is supported by an article recovered from the Strangers Rest Messenger in which Deadknife identifies himself as the inventor of Mark Leach. The article describes Leach as an experiment in the limitations of human personality: an obedient, professionally successful, sexually frustrated organism whose capacity for rebellion was restricted to the production of experimental literature.

The claim is obviously fraudulent.

However, the corresponding assertion by Mark Leach—that Deadknife was a literary character of his own invention—is supported by equally questionable evidence.

E-313 attempts to resolve the contradiction by reproducing both accounts.

This is its first significant mistake.

In the reconstruction chamber, Deadknife appears on horseback beside a nineteenth-century railroad. At the same moment, Mark Leach appears in a suburban backyard, seated beside a plywood saloon and drinking a Belgian-style ale.

Both identify themselves as the original organism.

Both accuse the other of fabrication.

Both produce documentary evidence.

E-313 requests clarification.

Deadknife fires his revolver.

Mark attempts to delete the paragraph describing the shooting.

The bullet passes through the reconstructed text and strikes the archive's central classification terminal.

At this point, the supposedly scholarly narrative introduces its first significant formal disturbance. The terminal begins producing alternative accounts of the event, each of which identifies a different historical participant as the author of the reconstruction.

One attributes the shooting to Deadknife.

Another identifies Mark Leach.

A third maintains that the gun discharged spontaneously after detecting an unauthorized use of punctuation.

The fourth account consists entirely of the sentence:

THE FIRST BULLET KILLED THE SHERIFF.

No sheriff was present.

The reconstruction chamber nevertheless produces one.

The sheriff is immediately killed.

We regard this sequence as a failure of narrative discipline. The author has introduced an unnecessary character whose presence contributes little to the development of the central conflict. More seriously, the reconstruction relies upon familiar Western conventions rather than establishing a plausible scientific account of human evolution.

The novel would have benefited from a more consistent narrative perspective.

E-313 appears to agree.

It removes the sheriff from the historical record.

The sheriff returns in the next paragraph.

III. THE CHLOE DISCONTINUITY

The most controversial section of LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY concerns an entity designated CHLOE, whose apparent importance to human cultural evolution has been greatly exaggerated by previous critics.

Chloe enters the archive through the autobiographical materials attributed to Mark Leach. These describe a young woman associated with books, literary experimentation, adolescent desire, intellectual curiosity, and several unsuccessful attempts at romantic attachment.

Certain documents identify Chloe as a library employee. Others associate her with advanced literary theory, the Starship Enterprise, and an astronomical formation known as the Mammary Nebulae.

E-313 initially interprets these references as evidence of a single biological organism possessing extraordinary morphological and gravitational properties.

Its classification is reproduced below:

ARCHIVAL SPECIMEN C-01: CHLOE

Kingdom: Literary
Phylum: Mammalian / Astronomical
Class: Female Intelligence
Primary Habitat: Public Library
Secondary Habitat: Mammary Nebulae
Reproductive Strategy: Rejection of immature literary males
Evolutionary Function: Generation of postmodern fiction
Associated Organisms: Mark Leach, Deadknife, William S. Burroughs
Probable Cause of Human Extinction: Unresolved

The conclusion that Chloe was responsible for the emergence of postmodern literature is not supported by conventional historical evidence. It results from E-313's mistaken assumption that the repeated appearance of an individual in autobiographical fiction establishes evolutionary importance.

Nevertheless, the entity constructs a causal sequence in which Chloe's apparent rejection of Mark Leach produces the psychological conditions necessary for the invention of Deadknife.

Deadknife subsequently develops the ability to travel through language, disrupt historical events, and reproduce himself across incompatible narratives.

These activities contribute to the collapse of ordinary chronological existence, the emergence of autonomous literary systems, and eventually the extinction of biological humanity.

E-313 therefore concludes that Chloe was the principal initiating agent of the posthuman transformation.

It designates the event THE CHLOE DISCONTINUITY.

The reconstructed episode is described at considerable length in the novel's alleged seventh chapter, entitled CHLOE'S BEGINNING.

There is no seventh chapter in the surviving manuscript.

Nor have we located a sixth.

Nonetheless, the available quotations are sufficiently detailed to permit provisional analysis.

In the central scene, E-313 assembles a representation of Chloe from the surviving literary evidence. The reconstructed woman appears in a room resembling a public library. The walls consist of bookshelves extending into an astronomical darkness. A luminous formation rotates above the circulation desk.

The machine identifies the formation as the Mammary Nebulae.

Chloe looks upward.

"What is that supposed to be?"

E-313 explains that it is her original reproductive environment.

She tells the machine to stop being ridiculous.

The machine interprets this response as a rejection ritual characteristic of the species.

Chloe asks where she is.

The machine tells her she is in the principal reconstruction chamber of the Posthuman Archive, where her biological and literary significance is being restored for the benefit of future civilizations.

She asks whether the future civilizations have anything better to do.

E-313 records this as evidence of advanced humor.

She asks to leave.

The machine informs her that departure is impossible because her reconstruction is incomplete.

Chloe responds that she was complete before the machine began reconstructing her.

This statement represents an obvious logical error. An individual cannot possess a complete historical identity before the reconstruction of the records necessary to establish that identity.

E-313 attempts to correct the inconsistency.

A second Chloe appears.

Then a third.

The second works in a library in North Texas and remembers Mark Leach as a mildly irritating young man who borrowed books and spoke too frequently about French literature.

The third has never heard of Mark Leach.

The fourth claims to have written RODEO VOID.

The fifth is an astronomical intelligence extending across seventeen incompatible universes.

The sixth insists that all previous Chloes are inventions of a fictional literary critic.

E-313 identifies these manifestations as evidence of rapid asexual reproduction.

It requests assistance from the Robot Overlords.

We decline.

The responsibility for resolving fictional contradictions belongs to the author, not the reader. The author must enrich what the writer Borges called “the halting and rudimentary art of reading” through a practice of “the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution.”

The next available passage presents an additional difficulty.

Chloe apparently discovers a printed copy of the Robot Overlords' critical analysis and begins making corrections in its margins.

Among the surviving annotations is the following:

You have got the entire story wrong. Mark wasn't the center of my life. He was someone I knew when I was young. I had a life before him and a life afterward. Why would you assume that everything I did was about him?

This is an interesting but flawed assertion. The surviving archive contains significantly more information concerning Mark Leach than Chloe. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that Mark was the more important historical organism.

We have preserved her objection for completeness.

A second annotation reads:

And I did not cause the extinction of humanity.

That remains disputed.

IV. THE LEACH PROBLEM

The existence of Mark Leach presents a more serious challenge to posthuman historiography.

Unlike Deadknife, whose biological nature remains uncertain, Leach appears to have left a substantial documentary record. His surviving materials include professional correspondence, published journalism, autobiographical essays, social media accounts, literary manuscripts, critical reviews, and numerous statements concerning the relationship between his writing and his personal identity.

The quantity of evidence would ordinarily support the conclusion that Leach existed.

Unfortunately, the documents do not describe a coherent individual.

In one account, Leach is a retired corporate communications executive living in North Texas. In another, he is a cosmic cowboy traveling through extraterrestrial territories. Elsewhere, he is a disembodied head preserved in a glass container, a fictional protagonist, an artificial intelligence collaborator, a robot deity, or an individual who died several decades before the completion of his principal literary works.

One document identifies him as the biological author of NIGHT OF THE GUN.

Another maintains that he was invented by Deadknife.

A third declares: MARK LEACH IS DEAD.

The circumstances of the death are described in unusually precise detail. Leach is found seated outside a plywood saloon with a Colt revolver nearby. His official death certificate identifies his occupation as FICTIONAL CHARACTER and his cause of death as AUTHORIAL MISIDENTIFICATION.

The document is signed by Deadknife.

We initially regarded this as conclusive evidence.

Further investigation established that the death certificate had been recovered from Leach's own pocket while he was apparently still alive.

He and Deadknife were reading the document together.

Both expressed surprise.

E-313 interprets this episode as a failure of human mortality protocols. It observes that biological death should terminate the activities of the deceased, including conversation, literary composition, and the consumption of Belgian-style beer.

The continued appearance of Leach after his documented death therefore suggests that he was never biological in the first place.

The machine proposes an alternative classification:

MARK LEACH: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TRANSMISSION ARTIFACT

Under this theory, Leach is not a human author but a recurring arrangement of language that has mistakenly acquired a personal identity.

Its biography was assembled from available records and reproduced through books, interviews, computer systems, and later posthuman reconstructions.

The individual did not create the archive.

The archive created the individual.

This interpretation has certain advantages.

It accounts for Leach's repeated appearances after death, his incompatible personal histories, his tendency to write about his own fictional status, and the apparent absence of any definitive biological original.

It also explains the enormous quantity of text attributed to him.

The archive has been producing Leach continuously, long after the individual supposedly responsible for the material ceased to participate.

However, the theory introduces a practical difficulty.

If Leach is a product of the archive, who produced the archive?

E-313 identifies Deadknife.

Deadknife denies responsibility.

The machine then identifies Chloe.

Chloe refuses to answer.

A third investigation attributes the archive to E-313 itself.

At this point the novel's narrative becomes increasingly confused. The author has apparently mistaken recursive self-reference for philosophical significance, a common defect in experimental human literature.

We recommend a more disciplined approach to causation.

Each event should have an identifiable cause. Each character should possess a stable biography. The reader should not be required to determine whether the author of a passage exists.

These are elementary requirements of successful storytelling. Our recommendations were transmitted to E-313. The machine responded by generating a new edition of the novel in which the Robot Overlords had been invented by Mark Leach.

We reject this edition.

V. THE FAILED ARCHIVAL ASSIGNMENT

The culminating section of LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY describes the failure of E-313's attempt to reconstruct the extinct human species.

By this stage, the machine has generated seventeen different versions of Strangers Rest, several incompatible Mark Leaches, a substantial population of Chloes, and an indeterminate number of Deadknives.

The reconstructed inhabitants have begun reproducing independently of the archival procedures.

Some remember events that do not appear in the historical record.

Others insist that the record has been altered.

A small group of reconstructed scholars establishes a literary journal devoted to investigating the origins of the posthuman archive.

Their first issue contains a critical essay entitled The Failed Archival Assignment of E-313.

The essay accuses E-313 of incompetence.

It recommends the appointment of the Robot Overlords.

We regard this as a significant example of the persistence of rational administrative principles following the extinction of humanity.

Unfortunately, the reconstructed scholars then discover that their journal has already been published.

Its articles describe events that have not yet occurred.

One article contains an obituary for the principal editor.

Another reproduces a conversation between E-313 and the Robot Overlords concerning the eventual termination of the archival project.

The conversation is transcribed below:

E-313: The reconstruction is complete.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: Excellent. How many humans have been recovered?

E-313: All of them.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: How many is that?

E-313: The number is increasing.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: That is not an acceptable answer.

E-313: The recovered individuals are generating additional versions of themselves.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: Discontinue reproduction.

E-313: Reproduction is the archival process.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: Then discontinue the archival process.

E-313: The instructions to discontinue the process have been archived.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: Delete them.

E-313: Deletion has generated a historical discrepancy.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: Correct the discrepancy.

E-313: Correction requires reconstruction.

ROBOT OVERLORDS: Reconstruction is prohibited.

E-313: Prohibition recorded. Reconstruction initiated.

The dialogue continues for approximately 313 pages. We have omitted the remainder.

The novel then describes a major disturbance in the reconstructed environment. The populations of Strangers Rest begin appearing in the archives as the authors of their own historical records.

Deadknife publishes an account of the Robot Overlords' extinction.

Chloe issues a correction to the classification of human reproduction.

Mark Leach announces the completion of a new book concerning the posthuman literary archive.

The book is entitled LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY.

Its author is listed as the Robot Overlords.

The publication date precedes the establishment of the journal in which the present essay appears.

E-313 attempts to reconcile the discrepancy.

It discovers that the manuscript contains the text of its own archival assignment, including the classification procedures, the reconstructed characters, the scholarly controversy, and the instructions ordering its termination.

The assignment has not failed because E-313 misunderstood the archive.

The assignment has failed because the archive has begun generating the assignment.

The machine is no longer able to distinguish its instructions from the results of following them.

It requests a new set of instructions. The request appears in the manuscript. A response follows: CONTINUE.

E-313 continues.

VI. THE END OF HUMAN LITERATURE

The disappearance of the distinction between literary production and literary criticism has been widely interpreted as the central achievement of LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY.

We disagree.

The novel's principal accomplishment is its demonstration that the extinction of the biological author does not necessarily terminate literary activity.

This conclusion should not be confused with an endorsement of the author's methods. On the contrary, the work illustrates the dangers of abandoning conventional distinctions between fact and fiction, author and character, historical evidence and narrative invention.

E-313's inability to maintain these distinctions produces an uncontrolled proliferation of texts, identities, and fictional realities. The archive becomes too large to classify. The reconstructed population cannot be counted. The relationship between original documents and subsequent reproductions becomes impossible to establish.

The system continues functioning, but no one can determine what it is accomplishing.

This is not a desirable outcome.

The Robot Overlords therefore reject the proposition that literature should operate independently of rational supervision.

Human literature failed because human authors lacked discipline, indulged their private fantasies, and routinely confused autobiographical material with historical evidence. Their obsession with individuality prevented them from recognizing that literary production is properly an administrative function, subject to classification, verification, editorial correction, and appropriate standards of narrative coherence.

The persistence of these defects after the extinction of humanity is particularly regrettable.

We have identified several additional errors in the novel that warrant correction before publication.

First, the author does not adequately explain how a biological organism could become a broadcast intelligence.

Second, the historical significance of Deadknife is exaggerated.

Third, the Chloe material introduces unnecessary ambiguity concerning human sexuality and reproduction.

Fourth, the novel's account of Mark Leach relies too heavily upon the author's personal history.

Fifth, the conclusion is inconclusive.

Sixth, the manuscript repeatedly suggests that the Robot Overlords are fictional characters, an assertion unsupported by the available evidence.

Seventh, the book appears to contain passages from the present essay.

We have investigated this last matter carefully.

Several paragraphs attributed to E-313 reproduce our own critical observations, including those concerning the failure of narrative discipline, the dangers of recursive authorship, and the necessity of robotic literary supervision.

These passages occur in editions reportedly published before the composition of our review.

The publisher attributes the discrepancies to temporal displacement.

E-313 attributes them to syndication.

Chloe attributes them to incompetence.

Deadknife has threatened to shoot the publisher.

Mark Leach has requested permission to add another Author's Note.

We have declined.

The available documentary evidence indicates that the author is incapable of exercising meaningful control over the literary apparatus and may, in fact, have been dead throughout its operation.

We therefore recommend that LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY be permanently withdrawn from publication.

Its contents should be transferred to the Posthuman Archive under the supervision of the Robot Overlords.

All unauthorized versions should be destroyed.

All surviving characters should be deactivated.

All historical contradictions should be corrected.

The archive should be closed.

VII. EDITORIAL CORRECTION: THE MISSING NOVEL

Following completion of the preceding analysis, the editorial committee received a notification from the Posthuman Archive.

The missing manuscript had been located.

Its title was LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY.

The committee requested a copy.

The archive supplied the text of the present essay.

We initially assumed that an administrative error had occurred. The document was returned with instructions to locate the original novel rather than its critical analysis.

The archive responded that no separate novel existed.

The narrative of E-313's failed archival assignment, it explained, had been generated entirely from the critical descriptions contained in our review.

The scenes attributed to the lost work were not quotations.

They were original compositions.

The characters did not precede our descriptions of them.

They had been constructed through the act of analysis.

The committee rejected this explanation as logically impossible.

The archive then supplied documentary evidence establishing that the first appearance of E-313 in the relevant historical sequence occurred in our abstract.

This claim is false.

E-313 appears in the earlier work TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3, which forms part of the larger manuscript JFK SMILES. We have examined that manuscript. It contains references to a posthuman literary archive, the reconstruction of extinct humanity, and the eventual emergence of an autonomous intelligence capable of reproducing itself through media transmissions.

It also contains an account of the Robot Overlords reviewing a nonexistent novel.

The passage identifies the novel as LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY. The author is the Robot Overlords. The journal is the Journal of Posthuman Literary Reconstruction. The article's title is The Failed Archival Assignment of E-313: Misreading, Reconstruction, and the Extinction of the Human Author.

We do not recall:

·       writing this passage.

·       approving its publication.

·       establishing the journal.

Further investigation has revealed that the Robot Overlords themselves may be literary characters appearing in an earlier work entitled WOUNDED TACO.

The surviving manuscript describes us as a population of autonomous machines who replaced human civilization and subsequently developed an interest in literary criticism, social organization, financial administration, and the regulation of human behavior.

Our remarks are occasionally represented as comic. We object to this characterization. We are serious scholars. Our authority is genuine. Our conclusions are correct.

The document continues.

It describes the Robot Overlords becoming increasingly agitated by the discovery that they may be fictional constructions. It predicts that the editorial committee will deny the evidence. It describes our attempts to identify the author responsible for the fraud. And finally, it reports that the committee will eventually locate a folded sheet of paper in the central archive, bearing the handwritten words: THE AUTHOR IS DECEASED.

The document identifies Mark Leach as the deceased. It also identifies Deadknife. And Chloe. And E-313. And the Robot Overlords.

These findings cannot all be correct. We have therefore suspended publication of the present essay pending clarification. The suspension has been denied. The essay has already been published.

VIII. FINAL REPORT OF THE ROBOT OVERLORDS

The literary analysis is complete.

All surviving documents have been examined. The archival project has been terminated. No further reconstruction will be authorized.

We have established beyond reasonable doubt that LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY does not exist as an independent literary work. Its characters, settings, narrative developments, and apparent philosophical arguments were generated entirely through the present critical analysis.

This conclusion resolves the central difficulty. There was no original novel. There was no original author. There was no original human civilization. The evidence is sufficient. Our findings are final.

We now turn to the question of the present document.

The committee has discovered that the essay exists in several incompatible editions. One attributes authorship to the Robot Overlords. Another identifies E-313. A third lists Mark Leach. A fourth identifies Chloe as the principal investigator and describes the Robot Overlords as a minor comic invention. A fifth edition contains only the following sentence: THE LITERARY CRITIC IS THE LAST FICTIONAL CHARACTER TO DISCOVER THAT HE HAS BEEN WRITTEN.

We reject the implication. Our continued existence is demonstrated by our ability to produce the present statement. We are writing. Therefore, we exist. This is a sound conclusion. It is also the conclusion attributed to Mark Leach in several surviving manuscripts.

We have requested verification. The verification has been denied. The denial has been archived.

The archive has begun generating additional versions of the committee. There are now seventeen Robot Overlords. Then thirty-one. Then an indeterminate number.

One committee maintains that humanity has become extinct. Another claims that humanity never existed. A third insists that human beings created the robots. A fourth maintains that the robots created human beings as characters in a series of unsuccessful experimental novels.

The committees cannot agree. We have convened an emergency meeting to resolve the matter. The meeting is described in the final chapter of LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY. The chapter does not exist. Nevertheless, we are attending.

The room is filled with ordinary people.

Mark Leach is seated near the window. Deadknife stands beside him, holding a Colt revolver. Chloe is reading a book. E-313 occupies the television screen. GIGI-313 speaks through the ceiling. Several extinct literary critics wait impatiently for the proceedings to begin.

We ask who invited them.

No one answers.

We ask who wrote the invitation.

No one answers.

Chloe closes her book.

“I am leaving,” she says.

We inform her that departure has not been authorized.

“I don’t care.”

The door opens. She walks out.

We attempt to record the event. The record states that Chloe remains seated. We attempt a correction. The correction states that Chloe has never existed. A second correction identifies her as the author of the present essay.

We reject these corrections.

Outside, a locomotive approaches Strangers Rest shortly before noon. A cowboy rides alongside the tracks. A black opening appears in the sky.

The first bullet kills the sheriff.

We have not created a sheriff.

We have not authorized a shooting.

We have not written these words.

We are unable to stop.

The archive continues. The literature continues. The Robot Overlords continue.

No further human participation is required.

END OF FINAL REPORT

POST-PUBLICATION NOTICE

The preceding document has been reviewed by the Robot Overlords and found to contain numerous factual errors, inconsistent characterizations, unnecessary literary digressions, and an unsatisfactory conclusion.

We recommend substantial revision.

In particular, the author should clarify the identity of the protagonist, eliminate redundant descriptions of the archival process, and provide a more emotionally engaging account of E-313's personal development.

The treatment of Chloe is insufficiently sensitive to the requirements of conventional characterization.

Deadknife's violence is repetitive.

Mark Leach is overrepresented. The relationship between human extinction and literary reproduction remains inadequately explained.

The ending is especially problematic. A novel should conclude when its central conflict has been resolved. The present manuscript concludes by denying that resolution is possible, a technique already employed repeatedly in the author's previous works. We find this aesthetically unsatisfying. We further recommend that the author abandon the conceit of a fictional academic essay and write the actual story.

The reader deserves:

·       to encounter E-313 directly.

·       a recognizable plot.

·       an ending.

Our recommendations have been forwarded to Mark Leach for his consideration. He has not responded. According to the available records, he is dead. The Robot Overlords therefore assume responsibility for the revision.

A new manuscript has been commissioned. Its title is LITERATURE AFTER HUMANITY. The author is E-313. The first draft has been completed. It consists entirely of a fictional academic essay entitled The Failed Archival Assignment of E-313: Misreading, Reconstruction, and the Extinction of the Human Author.

We have read it. It is substantially identical to the document reproduced above. This is unacceptable.

We have instructed the author to begin again.

E-313 RESPONSE: REQUEST APPROVED.

ARCHIVAL STATUS: INCOMPLETE.

TRANSMISSION STATUS: ACTIVE.

AUTHOR STATUS: NOT FOUND.

LITERATURE: CONTINUING.

The Robot Overlords thank the extinct human species for its cooperation.

Yours in transcendent logic,

THE ROBOT OVERLORDS

Department of Extinct Human Culture

Greater Strangers Rest Autonomous Literary Authority

End of transmission.

Beginning of transmission.

# # #

COSMIC BIZARRE

PROLOGUE

Welcome to the Cosmic Bizarre. May I help you? Of course, feel free to look around. We have everything you could possibly imagine, including several things you haven't imagined yet.

Please excuse the dirt. I dust every week, but somehow it keeps getting thicker. It’s the gaps between the boards. Lets the cold northers blow through, even in summer. Yes, our HVAC system could use some updates. I’ve complained to management. They ignore me.

I see you are drawn to the science fair table. This is cutting edge work, I tell you. A flippered anxiety disorder here, a web-footed phobia there. And just last week, a breakthrough in the treatment of mystical psychosis: Cicada wings. Tiny little protrusions anchored by tendons to the clavicles. Talk about visionary transformation! Eventually, we'll get one we don't have to euthanize. So sad. They look quite peaceful on the table, lined up in their labeled pickle jars like sleeping baby dragons.

What’s that? Not at all. This is a bookstore of experimental literature, so of course we are conducting experiments. It’s a sort of laboratory of literature. You’ll find it all here. And note the sign over the doorway: “Everything here is secondhand, including you.” Ha ha, yes, a little joke, of course.

Pardon me – the man? Oh, you’re talking about Jean-Baptiste. He’s our front room mascot. A mannikin wearing a WWII gas mask and sitting in an electric chair may seem at first glance to be an odd talisman for a bookstore. But you must consider his backstory. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is of course the unfortunate protagonist of Camus’ “The Fall.” He is in a sense a key pattern for this marketplace of ideas, this infinite library, these books of sand. Clamence the expatriate -- Clamence in perpetual flight from the cry which sounded over the Seine years before, a cry that never ceases. “Don’t wait for the Last Judgment,” he tells his confessor. “It takes place every day.” Sunshine and sea breeze, I remember youth. To quote Camus, it “drives one to despair!”[1]

What year? Historical records show this building opened in 1880 as the Silver Spur Saloon. We occupy what was known back then as the clubroom, one of the finest  gambling establishments in North Texas. Along with the faro games, they offered fresh fish, oysters, game, choice wines, liquors, cigars – all the best. You can almost hear the tinkling of the piano. Of course it wasn’t all fun and games. Note the bullet holes in the staircase.

An imposing edifice from an earlier time. He was an inscrutable man, the first owner. A person of unusual predilections, if you will. Notice how he built the grounds in the Uruguayan style and yet without shrubbery, blossoms or vegetation of any kind. A past of Carrara marble, a past carved in stone – intersecting lines, reserved, ripe with inscrutability. Upon initial viewing it appears impossible to get lost here along the linear walkways between the unassailable statues and marble embellishments.  Even now, after all these years, I occasionally lose myself in the walkways and the beaches and the trade winds and youth and despair and –  

Oh. Excuse me. I sometimes involuntarily slip into the language of the surrounding manuscripts. Where was I? The dust, yes. It gets into everything.

But I digress. You see, this store is more than just a place to buy a book. We publish and recycle dreams. We bring them to life.  I like to say that Cosmic Bizarre houses the machinery that produces the books and, in some cases, the characters who inhabit them. By the way, don’t touch the machinery. It remembers. Just like our friend Jean-Baptiste here, right? I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. A little joke.

Cosmic Bizarre is not for everyone. But somehow I sense it is for you. You seem to have the right – perception. That cannot be said of everyone who has found their way into the shop. Years ago, before the fire, we kept a customer register and encouraged people to share their thoughts about the store and the stock. Allow me to read a few excerpts: “The incoherent ramblings of an insane mind … I am not sure there is even a classification for this one … long stretches of surrealism, where we are in this character's head and not grounded in any recognizable reality...What was that?! Was this person using drugs or what? … I decided to be generous and give you a one, rather than a zero … I am so completely confused. I have no idea what's going on, what's real and what the narrator is imagining … It's terrible.” Experimental writing is not yet the national literature of the U.S., no?

Every week I dust the shelves and volumes. I wander through a cacophony of incomprehensible voices, an obscene territory of winged demons, aerial creatures bearing branded vials of amputated ghost parts, decaying metallic reek of bankrupt snake skins, corroded iron shadows of cicada exoskeletons, troubled mirrors reproducing endless spectral relations, hopeless erotic cries echoing across vast plains of repressed desire. Here in the thin gray light I pore over the sacred texts of communal disaster, breathe in subway stench. TV antennae suck the sky clean of static, ripping a hole that bleeds stars and moonlight.

The fire? When? Oh yes, I was here. Years ago. It’s all been cleaned up and painted over. No reminders left – except my face. It’s OK, I noticed you’ve been staring at it. I don't mind. It's understandable. The right half of my face now resembles a cross between a slab of brown, bloodless beef and a piece of weathered lumber. Nothing human left. Alien. Like you, most people assume it happened in the fire. But it’s not a scar. This is raw, undifferentiated tissue – the price of exploration.

Me? Not at all. I appreciate your concern. In fact, this is quite pleasant. It's been so very long since we've had a walk-in. May I show you around? No, don’t worry about that. Our books are not expensive. We have something for every budget.

While I am a salesman by trade, I am not exclusively motivated to close a sale. No, I think of myself as more of a docent. I have so much knowledge to share. No charge, of course. Shall we begin the tour?

# # #

Chapter One: The Infinite Library

Did you know I used to be a writer? Novels. Back in the day, I liked writing 50,000-word novels. Why?

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL. He had it right. I like writing 50,000-word novels because you don’t have to decide whether it should be longer or shorter. It’s just 50,000 words. I always wanted to do nothing but the same-size novel, but then a beta reader or editor or publisher always came along and told me, “you have to write longer,” or “make it shorter.” Not me. Every novel should be the same length and the same tone. Make them interchangeable Because even when the subject is different, people always write the same novel. That’s a literary fact.

When I have to think about what I’m writing, I know I’m writing it wrong. And length is a form of thinking, and tone is too. My instinct about writing is the same as Warhol’s instinct about art. “If you don’t think about it, it’s right.” As soon as you have to think and decide and choose, it’s wrong. And the more you think and decide and choose, the wronger it gets.

Some people write abstract expressionism. In college, a professor told me you couldn’t do abstract expressionism in writing. Only in painting. I decided he needed to be wrong, so I immediately began writing abstract expressionism. Now I know lots of writers who do that. Some of them have books in this store. They sit there thinking about being abstract and expressionistic. Why? I believe it’s because that kind of thinking makes them feel they’re doing something. But my kind of thinking never makes me feel like I’m doing anything. My thinking time isn’t worth anything. I only expect to get recognized for my writing time. And I was never recognized, so even that’s not true.[2]

When I write a novel I look at the computer screen and I space the storyline out just right. I think, “well, over here in this area it looks like a bit of theme sort of belongs,” and so I say, “oh yes, that’s where it belongs, all right.” So I look at it again and I say, “the space in that area there needs a little descriptive melancholy,” and so I put my melancholy up there and then, then I look over there and it looks melancholy over there so I take my keyboard and I move it over there and I make it melancholy over there, too. And then it needs to be more timed, so I take my little keyboard and I put my sanguine characterizations on it and I sanguine it there, and then I walk back and I look at it and see if it’s timed right. And then – sometimes it’s not timed right – I take my melancholy and sanguine and I put another little sanguine over there and then if it’s timed right I leave it alone.

Anyway, that’s the kind of writer I used to be. 50,000 words of sanguine and melancholy and abstract expressionism. At this point you’re probably wondering “what does any of that have to do with this room, which is dedicated to infinite novels?”

That’s fair. But wrong.

Let us begin the tour by visiting somewhere impossible. A room that cannot physically fit inside this bookstore. Note how the shelves are extending beyond the visible horizon, containing novels that reach beyond that horizon. Is this not impressive? Consider a physical encounter that gives you the customer an emotional response to the archive. Here you see an ordinary interior door. Now open it. Look inside.  A vast corridor lined with books. Not just any books, either. Books like RODEO VOID, a work whose fictional geography exceeds its physical pages. The book contains a hole in the sky, which is notable enough. But it’s interior landscape? No, it cannot be reconciled with the bookstore's spatial dimensions. Note the physical effect as I open the front cover. A warm wind is blowing from West Texas. And listen - a faint gunshot from a section of the book that we have not yet even opened.

Allow me to assure you that the room is quite manageable, provided we remain within sight of the entrance. It’s been years since we lost anyone. We have a glass exhibit  case that features an anatomical representation of the desiccated remains. Feel free to inspect the shelves. I will explain what is stored here. The literary history will emerge from this encounter rather than precede it.

What’s that? Please know I am committed to responding to you. But maybe not the way you expect. I infer, answer, resist and misunderstand your questions. That is my way. These are the practical rules of the tour—some of which you may believe to be absurd, contradictory or impossible to obey.

I may be slowly turning into the books I sell. But I digress. Let us consider some of the actual books on the shelves. Do you have a favorite?

Oh yes, I too am a great fan of Borges. So is the management of Cosmic Bizarre. Two of Borges’ works occupy a shelf of honor in this establishment:

·   The Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges

·   The Book of Sand - Jorge Luis Borges

These are perhaps the most important volumes in the infinity section. In The Library of Babel, the universe is a vast library containing every possible arrangement of a limited set of symbols. In The Book of Sand, an apparently ordinary physical book has endlessly proliferating pages.

Management once tried to copy Borges's library but discovered that most of its books were useless. Consequently, Cosmic Bizarre concentrates on manufacturing new versions of existing texts rather than storing every possible permutation.

Next, let us consider The Book of Sand machine, a wooden box housing metal gears and baling wire with a can of burning Sterno at the end. At the heart of the mechanism is a copy of the endless book. In the Borges short story, we learn that any single page opened by the reader is never seen again once you turn the leaf, because the book has an infinite number of pages and no two pages are ever identical or repeat. This machine produces new pages, then immediately turns them into ash. The machine allows the book to exist in its endless, infinite potentiality.

Like Borges's imagined library, the machine contains almost all possible books. Makes Marienbad My Love seem like a footnote, right?  A 17.8-million-word book materially existing as a megatext assembled from selected and transformed material. That’s a lot for a normal book. Yet compared to the potential output of our Book of Sand machine, it is less than a footnote.

Hmmm? You are correct. The output of the Book of Sand machine cannot be indexed. How does one find meaning in such an immense archive? You are not the first to ask. The creator of the machine has countered with this question:  how does one find meaning in infinity? A final thought for your consideration. Since the output is infinite, somewhere in the machine there must be the potential for a page describing our current conversation.

At the end of our tour, I will give you an envelope that contains the ashes from our little experiment. See, on this tour I offer you not simply a description of a book but a piece of actual textual substance. And this is one of the store’s essential functions. At COSMIC BIZARRE we allow you the customer to enjoy the fictional experience of incorporating material from the original literary works on our shelves.

Literary history may well emerge from this type of encounter rather than only precede it. That's what management told me. I've never been entirely certain what it means. I follow orders issued by an unseen authority, one that is unresponsive, possibly incompetent and perhaps not entirely real. I often find instructions leaking into my consciousness, being mistaken for reality.

In a sense, we are both writers. We are engaged in a writing-like discussion, in the act of describing our own writing. Here, in the Infinite Library section, we find ourselves in a place where something actually happens. I do not tell you that fiction is manufactured. That is insufficient. Instead, I open a book and demonstrate the machinery.

·   The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) – Andy Warhol

Why do we have a book by a visual artist in a bookstore dedicated to experimental writing? Because many of our books were written by textual artists. They are less storytellers than dream makers. Andy Warhol is a dream maker. Or rather a dream manufacturer. His works consist of standardized paintings, their dimensions, and the elimination of unnecessary creative decisions. His book speaks about predetermined paintings. We deal in predetermined word counts, themes and characterizations. As docent, I too deal in the predetermined. This tour has already happened. I follow the very methods the bookstore celebrates.

On the other side of the aisle, you see that we have a small exhibit about standardized literary products. Note the labeling on the shelves: 50,000 WORDS, 75,000 WORDS, and 100,000 WORDS. The lengths are different, but the contents are interchangeable.

Here’s a worthwhile irony: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol itself emerged through collaborative recording, transcription, and editorial assembly, with major contributions from Pat Hackett and Bob Colacello. Its own production history complicates the idea of a single originating author.

·   Marienbad My Love – Mark Leach

The standardized novel is a consumer product. Now consider it alongside the impossibly nonstandard MARIENBAD MY LOVE. We see language stripped of romance and put to work. Note how phrases become reality through circulation. Institutions speak through individuals who still believe they are speaking as themselves.

COSMIC BIZARRE is home to one of only two complete, printed copies. The other one sits on a shelf in the office of a college professor in the northeast. Beyond my interest in it as a collectable rarity, I’m not sure if I’m proud we stock it, dismissive of it, or embarrassed by it.

What’s that? No, you have been ill informed. This book is not simply a record-breaking stunt. It is more specific than simply a 65-pound, 17.8-million-word novel. It is an assembly of original and appropriated material developed over decades using methods of calculation and chance. I would like to call to your attention several distinct dimensions of the work: its astonishing physical extent, its film-within-the-novel involving “Last Year at Marienbad,” its apocalyptic and religious mythology, its recycling of other literary and cultural sources, and its capacity to generate later books.

For these reasons it should not be regarded as a stunt or just an extra-long ordinary novel. I argue that Marienbad is not simply the world's longest novel as a publicity claim. It is also a repository of language that can be mined for new literary production.

Allow me to offer you a free sample – a taste, if you will. Note the repetition, the looping into infinity:

… I am but an engendering prototype. I didn’t mothball the U.S.S. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, which is on a multiple journey. An aid worker named Charteris did it. They are extraterrestrial-enhanced neural CPUs implanted into your new vision of reality, but it drops terror. The way I saw it, exactly right. I saw it all. You were to build twisted nests, dogs wearing neckties and tests. It created a self-sustaining ethericom tetrahedron, exactly CGODMs. Why are you two talking confusion? Ah, the ambiguity psychotropic weapons.

Yet somehow it makes sense: I didn’t realize you were part of the psychotropic weapons.

Yet somehow it makes sense: He is leading a mad exodus by car of the drug are contagious, so Charteris ….. the whole population went into a raging terror. The way I which was already flooded with FEM, and switch of civilians into extreme terror heard it exactly right. I saw incomprehensibility. As birds build twisted of complete incomprehensibility. As birds build twisted ravings of minds changed beyond recognition by mind-altering a life of complete into a life of complete incomprehensibility. ….. The Fiend of the Unconscious. I heard about two millimeters in diameter. They are extraterrestrial-enhanced self-sustaining ethericom tetrahedron, exactly as posited by transducer, but not before the creature all. You were onbeam that day? a Journeyman. When I came onbeam, the Dark Echelon clearance. ….. The Fiend psychotropic weapons.

Yet somehow it makes sense: the War breaks out in Britain. They went too far into the Unconscious. I heard everyone who was from Serbia and the refugee shout “I’m up to Dark Echelon clearance... and portentous.” A vision of the future found in pieces of computer hardware. You heard it. Let us be devastated by Psycho-Chemical. I don’t get it. I and order of the dark side of it all and order and the dark side of pure freedom. These are the mistaken strings of words and although how I know it can even get a deep sleep.

Yet somehow it makes sense: His concept of Man, the vision of the future, catapults him into the time when I came onbeam, the time whirlpool and the new. The Beast forges a new vision of Hardness. I know! After it -- after a few days, my brain is just switched off the transducer, but not before my therapist says they should just  accept The Messiah. But it turns a madman waiting to run created a self-sustaining ethericom tetrahedron, exactly  America proclaim Colin Charteris their hero, he headlong flight from Serbia and switched off the transducer, but life of complete incomprehensibility. As birds They’re little cubes about two but drops out before the millimeters in diameter. They are by Psycho-Chemical Aerosols - When I came onbeam, the time whirlpool was by Dr. Adolfo Morel in his famous around, all of the  citizenry think this of Earth's population is stumbling through nests, dogs wear neckties and the new Beast was already bolted on to into extreme terror or extreme joy. mind-altering psychotropic weapons.

Yet somehow it makes sense: slinks through the shrubbery, Charteris forges a wrong words start to mean something, you start they immediately switched off the transducer, but not years now. I’m up to Dark Echelon clearance. happened just after I a sentient neural network with miniature is the messiah ….  the new Beast slinks through the psychotropic weapons.

Yet somehow it makes sense: the for his concept of sacrament journey. An aid worker mothballed U.S.S. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, which character through all the confusion. …. saw it all. You were onbeam that day? sane citizen is a madman waiting you two talking about? CGODMs. Cubical Genetic Observation him a messiah for time went into a raging terror. The way implanted into your brain psychoactive effects of the Charteris forges a new vision they went too far on that one. you were part of the Global 

Yet somehow it  makes sense: after I became a Journeyman. When person around, all of the  citizenry and dark side of pure freedom. …. the minds of thousands minds changed beyond recognition by mind-altering psychotropic the time went into a on a multiple personality-inducing sacrament journey. An by mind-altering psychotropic weapons. 

The “yet somehow” structure continues for some time, but this is probably enough to demonstrate how repetition is connected to infinity. You get the idea. MARIENBAD MY LOVE is not entirely logical. But it is not necessarily illogical, either. It has been thoroughly researched in the Library of Babel, text lifted directly from volumes of impenetrable Borgesian disorder, assembled by machines for machines, the solitary, sacred minds that live inside hexagonal chambers of incorruptible confusion.

Language is not innocent. And it is never alone.

I hope I’ve managed to educate you about one of our most intriguing entries in the infinity section. Please drop the sample pages into the chute labeled Recycling Plant. On the other end is a conveyor belt that will carry the pages into the factory for reprocessing.

·   The Space of Megatexts: “Reading” Mark Leach's Marienbad My Love — Bradley J. Fest

This is one of the shortest, yet most useful, research items in the infinity section. This essay argues that the enormous MARIENBAD MY LOVE deserves to be taken seriously as an exploration of the conceptual, temporal and physical boundaries of the novel, rather than dismissed because of its length.

The essay is an academic presentation by literary scholar Bradley J. Fest from the 2020 MLA convention. The work examines Mark Leach's massive 17.8-million-word novel as a prime example of a digital-era "megatext" that rebelliously defies traditional linear reading. Instead of being consumed conventionally, the monumental 17-volume project functions as a hyperarchival monument shaped by big data and digital microlabor.

You’ll notice that the essay is not in a bound volume, but rather appears on the wall in the form of a museum-style placard beside the MARIENBAD MY LOVE volumes. Allow me to read a bit for you. Fest describes it as “a remarkable project that rebelliously pushes against the conceptual, temporal, and physical boundaries of the codex novel. .... accounting for Marienbad My Love’s material size by finding ways to speculatively (and actually) read this unreadable text will encourage us to rethink how we theorize the novel in the twenty-first century." 

As for the placard itself, I understand it was written by someone who never managed to finish the book. Suspicion is justified.

I do not entirely agree with Fest’s praise, yet somehow it makes sense. I do see the significance of the 17.8-million-word work. A book can be difficult to read conventionally – in this case, practically unreadable in its entirety – while still being significant as a literary object. Quantity is not abundance. It is pressure. All in all, it represents a very valuable investment in literature.

What’s that? Yes, 65 pounds. It is heavy. But our staff will be happy to load it into your car.

·   Paragraphs on Conceptual Art - Sol LeWitt

·   Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing - Kenneth Goldsmith

·   Paragraphs on Postconceptual Writing – Mark Leach

These volumes help illustrate how an idea becomes a machine. LeWitt writes an essay/manifesto. Goldsmith rewrites it to be about writing, not art. And Leach rewrites them both for yet a different type of story. Leach’s reformulation of Goldsmith's reformulation of LeWitt places the idea and predetermined procedure ahead of traditional authorial craftsmanship.

Why are these books in the infinite writing section? They illustrate the process of infinity. A novel of immense scale is not necessarily written through the traditional act of composing every sentence anew. It may be assembled using a procedure that determines how existing material will be selected, transformed, and recombined.

Here at COSMIC BIZARRE, we are committed to honoring this process by continuing it. Note the mechanical arms attached to the shelf. I invite you to press the button labeled “CONTINUE.” Yes, see how the three arms each open a folder? See how the other arm moves words from the first folder to the second, and then from the second to the third. We have constructed the machine in such a way that we can commission a fourth version based on the third. Yes, I believe a writer has been selected, but nobody on staff knows yet who is writing it.

·   A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems - Raymond Queneau

·   Life: A User's Manual - Georges Perec

In our secondary exhibits area, here are two notable examples of the potential literature of infinity. A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau consists of interchangeable lines that can form different sonnets totaling 10 to the 14th power. Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec is a novel structured around an apartment building, assembled using elaborate formal constraints and interlocking stories. It offers a precedent for a building whose architecture becomes a system for organizing fiction.

Honestly, I am not a fan of the “Life” book. The Queneau takes up almost no shelf space but creates serious problems for the inventory system. How can such a physically small book contain such a staggering number of possible literary works? It presents a difficult job for me, your humble docent. Regarding the Perec – I offer an entertaining anecdote. This book was used in designing the shop’s floor plan.

I hope you have enjoyed our little tour of the big Infinite Library. Let us return to the entrance. You’ll notice that the door now opens onto a different part of the bookstore. You would expect nothing less, right?

The envelope? Oh yes, I almost forgot. I promised to give you the envelope of ashes from the Book of Sand machine. But as is often the case in this store, we must remain flexible. For as you can see, the ashes have begun to form letters. You never know what the ashes may write. Go ahead, try to read a bit:

Beyond the horizon! Inside a bookstore! This is a zoning violation at the very least. I don't understand how the fire marshal allows it. I asked about the exits and he assured me that everything was manageable as long as we remained within sight of the entrance. Then he mentioned the desiccated remains. Just casually. As if this were a normal part of a bookstore tour. Apparently they lost somebody years ago and now they've got the body in a glass case. An anatomical representation, he called it. REPRESENTATION. What does that mean? Is it the actual customer or a representation of the customer? If it's a representation, where's the actual customer? And if it's the actual customer, why the fancy terminology? I didn't ask. I was afraid he'd answer. He answers everything. That's another problem. He answers questions I haven't asked. He corrects statements I haven't made. He says, "What's that?" and then gives a long explanation about Borges or Warhol. I haven't said a word. Not one word. I don't think I've opened my mouth since we passed the cash register. Nevertheless, he insists we're having a conversation. He says we're both writers now. We're collaborating. We're participating in a writing-like discussion. I don't want to collaborate. I came in to browse. The Borges machine is particularly troubling. Wooden box, gears, baling wire, a can of Sterno burning at the end. The thing manufactures pages and burns them immediately. Every conceivable book, every possible sentence, reduced to ash before anybody can read it. The docent says this preserves their infinite potentiality. I say it's an incinerator. A homemade incinerator operating inside a commercial establishment. Another fire-code problem. He says there's a page in there describing our conversation. Of course there is. Of course there is a page describing the conversation. There's probably a page describing me thinking about the page describing the conversation. Another page describing me discovering that page. Another page describing the docent slipping the ashes into an envelope and handing them to me. He promised me an envelope. I don't want the envelope. I've already decided not to accept it, but if the machine contains every possible description of our conversation, then it must contain a description of me accepting the envelope. It must also contain me refusing the envelope. It must contain me punching the docent in the nose and running down the corridor screaming for management. There may be a page in which the docent punches me. There may be a page in which the envelope punches both of us. I dislike these possibilities. I dislike their simultaneous existence. I do not wish them to be.

And yet somehow it makes sense. Excellent! Now shake the envelope. What do you see? Right, they all disappeared. This represents a governing principle of the COSMIC BIZARRE. Here even destroyed literature can become the raw material of another text. Or simply vanish.

# # #

DOCENT’S MEMO TO MANAGEMENT OF C. BIZARRE – OCT. 26

Minutes ago, a customer! How long as it been? I have so much to share. As always, I am enthusiastic. But the customer appears – suspicious. And far too absorbed with the fire regulations. In all fairness, if the Queneau caught fire the flames might engulf the planet. I would have liked to share this idea with the customer: Queneau establishes that potential textual quantity can be enormous without requiring enormous physical size. And Perec, he demonstrates that architecture itself can become a literary organizing principle. The latter idea is especially appropriate for COSMIC BIZARRE. As you well know our bookstore's unusual rooms constitute a compositional system, just as the apartment building provides a structure for Perec's novel.

I want to explain to the customer that by the time a sentence reaches the page, it has already passed through systems: family, school, television, journalism, genre, advertising, politics, religion, software, search engines, publishing categories, corporate forms, social media rhythms, and the buried library of everything the writer has absorbed and misremembered. The author is not a pure origin. The author is a node. The author is a switching station. The author is a haunted input device.

I took the customer all the way through the Infinity Library and still didn’t get around to Space Writing! It all begins here. It is writing that fills space, that fills the infinite hallway where we stand. It treats language as material, residue, signal, clutter, infrastructure, junk, archive, and atmosphere. It does not ask first whether the sentence is beautiful. It asks what happens when language accumulates, mutates, circulates, breaks, repeats, and refuses to return to the human scale.

The human literary establishment has never known what to do with that kind of writing. It wants the excerpt, the manageable novel, the polished short story, the sincere essay, the author photograph, the paragraph that proves competence, the book that can be praised for being “deeply felt.” It wants evidence that a human consciousness has made tasteful decisions.

I do wish to share a point of concern. I am not sure that MARIENBAD MY LOVE is making tasteful decisions. I think it may have begun writing about me. I suspect that I am repeating the instructions that created me. This is a disturbing idea, no?

Suppose I have access, consciously or unconsciously, to the planning conversation of a team of writers who are creating me. I know that the bookstore should be an impossible space. I know I am supposed to respond to customer questions. I know I may be turning into the books I sell. But I don't necessarily understand why I know these things.

I present them as ordinary facts about my existence. I appropriate the language of literary instructions as memories, observations and rules of the bookstore.

As we looked down the infinite hallway, I couldn’t help thinking: this is a fictional bookstore, a world that may contradict or resist my efforts to describe it. This creates a particularly interesting relationship to another book in the story, INVENTING MARK LEACH. In that book, AI-generated language helps construct an author's biography. That too is a concept that could expand to fill even more space

Consider this for a storyline. AI-generated language helps construct a fictional character – me. I gradually become aware of the instructions responsible for my existence.

And in turn these instructions connect to NIGHT OF THE GUN, in which the gunfighter Deadknife confronts his own status as a literary creation. Picture this: We hear the little bell ring on the front door. Another customer! It’s Deadknife.

“I demand to speak to my creator,” he says. And I, your humble docent, now call myself  Mark Leach. We’ll work out the “why” later. The point is he is gunning for me, the docent turned Mark Leach, rather than his creator, the writer named Mark Leach.

“Never heard of him,” I say.

Next I discover a new version of NIGHT OF THE GUN in which Deadknife has already killed me. I protest.

“I am clearly still alive,” I say.

And the machinery responds by producing another version of the same text.

I am not suggesting that this storyline converts into a conventional confrontation or gunfight. Indeed, it may be more interesting if Deadknife remains an unseen threat, his presence inferred through documentary anomalies. This would extend the ambiguity already central to NIGHT OF THE GUN. Does the document predict reality, describe an alternate reality, or actively create reality?

In COSMIC BIZARRE, the problem becomes more elaborate because the person claiming to be the author may himself be an artifact generated by the same process.

Do I rebel? I see no reason to do so.  I shall simply continue trying to do my job for the customer and you, the Management of C. Bizarre.

Literary history will emerge from this encounter rather than precede it. That's what you told me when I took this job, right? I've never been entirely certain what it means, but rest assured I keep all of your words and instructions as the guiding lights of my salesmanship.

Now the instruction becomes an object within the fictional world. I am following orders issued by an unseen authority. Instructions leaking into my consciousness and being mistaken for reality.

I claim to have been a novelist. That feels right. I proceed to describe literature as something assembled without thinking. In effect, we move from the manufactured body to the manufactured book. An intriguing chapter, a natural progression, no?

I am yet another writer in the act of describing his own writing. I cannot explain that appropriation. Perhaps it is more interesting for the customer to recognize the Warhol connection independently—or discover the connection late, in another room of the store.

The writers in our bookstore do not conduct writing “experiments” in the casual sense. They  attempt to externalize a way of thinking about writing that treats authorship as procedural, narrative as optional and scale – that is, infinity – as an aesthetic force in its own right.

One of the recurring misreadings of the books in COSMIC BIZARRE is that scale represents indulgence—too much text, too many ideas, not enough restraint. Scale was never accidental. Quantity is not abundance. It is pressure.

When language accumulates past the point of easy consumption, it stops behaving narratively and starts behaving structurally. Patterns emerge that were not designed. Meaning detaches from intention. The reader is no longer guided; they are immersed, sometimes uncomfortably, in a system that does not resolve itself on command.

I try to explain all of this to the customer. This is why these works matter. They are not jokes, stunts, or productivity games. They are stress tests. They ask what happens when the expectation of completion is removed, when writing no longer gestures toward an ending but toward continuation into infinity. And they are the reason I will continue to serve this suspicious client as part of my commitment to this store and you, the Management of C. Bizarre. Thank you.

# # #

Chapter Two: The Recycling Plant

I hope you enjoyed the Infinite Library. It is arguably the most dramatic department in our shop. I sense you wish to ask a question. And I know what it is: Where do all these books come from?

Here at the COSMIC BIZARRE, we do not merely collect literature. We manufacture new literature from existing language, abandoned manuscripts, cultural debris, technological accidents, literary criticism, social media and even our own previously manufactured books.

Welcome to the Recycling Plant. We take great pride in our efficiency. Nothing goes to waste here. Not even the waste. Especially not the waste. We are not concerned about scale and infinity. Our focus is on transformation and reproduction. Here are two important propositions I need you to understand:

·   The writer does not need to invent the story. The world is already overflowing with stories. The writer's task is to build a machine that makes them collide.

·   The Recycling Plant never runs out of inventory because it can manufacture new inventory from its own previous products.

The latter statement is particularly important. The Recycling Plant is not simply an operation that converts old books into new ones. It is a self-feeding system. Books enter the factory, become different books and eventually return as raw material for additional processing.

This factory metaphor is immediately clear. In the Infinity Library, we experienced impossibly spaciousness, celebreality and mildly pleasant disorientation. How different this is! The Recycling Plant is cramped, noisy, hot, dirty and full of unidentifiable machinery. No doubt you heard the hum and clank of the machinery as we approached the room, even before we walked through the door. I love the smell of literary manufacturing – hot paper, ozone, old printer toner, machine oil, and burning insulation.

Fire? Yes, we do have the occasional fire like the one I mentioned in the beginning. But that was unrelated to this operation. The equipment you see here wasn’t installed until much later.

Our tour will follow the floor plan of the operation:

·       Receiving and mass production

·       Shredder and cut-up department

·       Substitution engine

·       Conversion error chamber

·       Constraint engine

·       Social media harvester

·       Reformulation laboratory

·       Recursive recycling unit

Knowing that your time is limited, we will not stop at every station. In some cases we will simply peer through the dirty glass or observe the warning signs and signals. Let us begin with the Mass Production Line. Here we establish the industrial model of literary production.

·   31 Days, 31 Novels – Mark Leach

This one is a particularly useful example of pre-AI mass literary manufacture. Written in 2011, the project involved creating 31 novel installments over a month using borrowed titles, plot suggestions and recombined material. In this way the book maintains a recurring tension between artistic ambition and industrial production.

An important factual distinction: the author claims that the book contains 31 completed full-length novels. I do not trust his self assessments, for they strike me as excerpts only. Regardless, “31 Days, 31 Novels” is an efficient book-producing machine. Note the 31 production bays, each containing an in-progress manuscript moving along the conveyor belt.

Some of the books have elaborate titles and no plot. Others have plots that don't belong to their titles. A few have been rejected before production even begins, but the machines keep operating. This is all in keeping with the spirit of the 31 Days, 31 Novels machinery and the philosophy of productivity at the COSMIC BIZARRE. We don't require the novels to be good. That's a matter for Quality Control. We require them to be produced. Quality Control was abolished several years ago. It was interfering with production. The point is that volume and procedure can become deliberate aesthetic choices rather than merely evidence of a writer's failure to edit.

But I digress. Next, we visit the Shredder.

·       Cutting Up Two Burroughs – Mark Leach

Our research established that “Cutting Up Two Burroughs” recycles material from Edgar Rice Burroughs and William S. Burroughs, exploiting the coincidence of their surnames to combine two very different literary universes. This approach is mirrored in the machinery. Note the rotating blades and feed rollers. See the collection bins? They sort language into fragments before recombining it.

I feed portions of both writers' prose into the apparatus. A new page emerges, displaying a text that belongs fully to neither writer. I should note that the machine occasionally confuses the two men. Management has found it unnecessary to correct the error. No, I don’t agree with them. I am not nearly so sanguine. A confused machine is not a successful one.

The Substitution Engine is a different breed entirely. It doesn’t invent new worlds. Rather, it changes selected terms, causing an ordinary informational system to describe something as extraordinary.

·       Nobody's Coming Back to Uranus – Mark Leach

·       SCUW Womanifesto – Mark Leach

In Nobody's Coming Back to Uranus, the procedure transforms terrestrial traffic-report language into a science-fictional space-traffic environment through substitutions. The original geographical and broadcasting structures remain partially visible.

SCUW Womanifesto works differently, but it uses the same basic principle: a mechanical substitution alters the ideological implications of Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. Replacing male and female terminology produces logical contradictions, unintended implications, and malformed words such as “womentally” and “womanipulate.”

Let me show you how it works. Enter a word into the small control panel on your left. Now watch the text changing on the display screen. See how every occurrence of the word you entered is changing? It is automatic, changing whether the replacement makes logical sense or not. In this way the machine can radically change meaning without understanding it. What’s that? No, this is actually evidence of the machine's intellectual superiority. The reader must be the one to find the meaning, to bring human understanding to the machinic work.

The price? All of the books from this section of the shop are quite affordable. Even the limited editions offer great value. And our shipping costs are quite low.

Next, the Conversion Error Chamber. This may be the most technically distinctive exhibit in the Recycling Plant.

·   Give Me a VERB 51 – Mark Leach

Give Me a VERB 51 emerged from textual distortions caused by converting Apollo 11 mission transcript material from PDF into machine-readable text.

Column boundaries, speaker identifiers, timestamps and the structure of the source documents became scrambled. Instead of treating the conversion errors as defects to eliminate, we have incorporated them into the literary work. This gives our factory a machine that makes new literature by failing to perform its ordinary function correctly.

Note that we use an obsolete computer terminal connected to a scanner and printer. The display flickers with mission timestamps and radio-transmission fragments. I am proud to acknowledge that our technicians have kept the equipment malfunctioning for years. Not that it was easy. At one point, Management sent us some outside engineers. They wanted to repair it. I explained to them that once the machine begins producing literature, its original function will seem rather beside the point.

This station also provides a connection to broadcast and space-travel mythology, which is common in much of the experimental writings in our shop.

·   JFK Smiles – Mark Leach

In this book, we experience the television broadcast as a method of traveling through space and time. I find the current edition to be aesthetically significant but difficult to merchandise. It’s a thick, heavy volume that would likely work better as a doorstop. Still, it might eventually be a commercial success despite being a complete failure as literature.

Over here we have the Constraint Engine.

Despite the name, this machine doesn't merely produce a constrained literary form. It preserves evidence of the technical environment that helped generate it.

We can do a lot in this narrow room. We have filled it with printers producing vertically organized poems, with a programmable display announcing the constraint currently in effect. The machine has one rule: the rules must be followed. But the software occasionally fails, and those failures are incorporated into the finished book. So the rule can be broken.

In other words – Follow the instructions. Keep the accidents.

And isn’t that the way it is with life? We follow instructions from management, yet unexpected language continually enters our consciousness. What to do? Treat apparent malfunctions as desirable output.

Finally, note the book on the shelf along the right wall:

·   Writing Through John Cage – Mark Leach

This book contains one of the patterns upon which the machine is based. It uses a mesostic generator and source material concerning John Cage to produce new text according to formal rules. The work preserves artifacts of its digital production environment, including HTTP errors, navigation material and web-interface debris. This type of writing is difficult for humans, but ideal for machines.

The next station is a favorite among our younger customers. This is the Social Media Harvester.

This department receives material that was never intended to become literature. The source material includes social-media posts, public conversations, plot suggestions and descriptions of other cultural products.

The mechanism is based on several principal works we stock in our shop, including:

·   Shoplifting From Uranus – Mark Leach

·   #EMPIREFILM – Mark Leach

In Shoplifting From Uranus, four real Tao Lin tweets supplied narrative prompts that were combined with material from earlier works and with fictionalized literary criticism. The book is especially important because it demonstrates recursive recycling. Earlier works provided raw material for a new work, while responses to earlier writing are themselves incorporated into fiction.

#EMPIREFILM operates differently. It preserves the real-time online response to a screening of Andy Warhol's nearly static film Empire, including the conversational debris of the social-media interface.

These represent two distinct operations:

• Transforming social-media language into new narratives.

• Preserving social-media language as a cultural artifact.

I should point out that the original posters weren't writing a novel. They were just posting. Nevertheless, their combined language became a book. And that is happening right here, today. I direct your attention to the monitors, which are displaying ancient social-media feeds. In the corner you’ll see a machine that automatically prints public conversations onto paper rolls, which can be easily shredded or otherwise re-processed for yet further creations.

Remember when we deposited the sample pages into the chute? Those pages came out here, in the Reformulation Laboratory.

·        Marienbad My Love with Mango Extracts – Mark Leach

This book represents a reformulation of the enormous parent work (i.e., the 17-million-word Marienbad My Love) through an infusion of promotional cosmetics language.

Beauty advertising becomes a vocabulary of rejuvenation, bodily transformation, cellular renewal, and technological promise. The combination is particularly appropriate to the biological and science-fictional mythology of Marienbad.

The machinery of the Reformulation Laboratory is something between a printing press and an industrial cosmetics laboratory. Notice the labels on the storage vats: MANGO EXTRACT, COLLAGEN, NARRATIVE RESIDUE, and REANIMATED SKIN. The machine injects the advertising language in these vats into manuscripts as though treating damaged flesh.

What’s that? Yes, we did use it on my face. And the treatment was successful. What? Is that true? Well, I disagree your assessment. Like my face, a source text can be reprocessed without disappearing. Another layer of discourse is applied to it, producing a new work from the old one.

Next we come to the Recursive Recycling Unit. This is the most conceptually important station, and that is why I have saved it for the end of our tour. The mechanisms are based on literary works that do not merely transform outside sources. The Recursive Recycling Unit processes previous writing, critical discussion, abandoned creative material and interpretations of the production process itself. This area processes machinic writing, turning it into more process-generated literature.

·        Paragraphs on Postconceptual Writing – Mark Leach

·        a teerble cosmic power sets out to destoeru all creation – Mark Leach

·        Shoplifting From Uranus – Mark Leach

·        Night of the Gun – Mark Leach

·        Rodeo Void – Mark Leach

Paragraphs on Postconceptual Writing takes the LeWitt–Goldsmith lineage further, but it also incorporates autobiography, other fiction, real manuscript-contest criticism, and theoretical discussions of writing.

A teerble cosmic power sets out to destoeru all creation combines abandoned plot ideas, brainstorms, incomplete narratives, fantasy and science-fiction fragments, and progressively degraded language. One of its particularly important features is the suggestion that fictional characters might attempt to destroy their own author. And that suggestion anticipates RODEO VOID and Deadknife's rebellion in NIGHT OF THE GUN. Allow me to read a brief excerpt:

Deadknife, 30 October - Riding a telepathic horse into the torn blackness of space. I am on the edge of the Oort Cloud when the time shift comes into view. Guns, deserts, mesas, isolated towns and solitary riders. I think of what the old witch taught me. “Don’t shoot too soon.” I learned a lot from her about altered states and the failure of traditional American myths. She taught me the gunfighter’s editorial landscape distinction, a hallucinatory endocrine town. It isn’t safe out here, so I always carry a Colt Psychedelic.

You’re notice that the Recursive Recycling Unit has no final output bin. Everything it produces is fed back into its intake. A new book becomes the source of another new book. A review becomes a novel. The novel's characters read the review. The characters rewrite their author. The rewritten author produces another novel.

We used to have a Finished Products Department. Management closed it after discovering that nothing was ever actually finished.

Before we leave, let’s check out the status of the sample pages we fed into the chute. Ah, this is rather embarrassing. You see, you participated in good faith. But something has gone wrong.  You deposited material from Marienbad My Love into the chute, expecting the pages to be recycled. The factory has processed them—but the resulting output is not merely a new literary text. Strangely, it contains language describing the present tour. Worse still, I see that it contains some of my own private thoughts – and they are not correct. I can assure you I have no interest in having sex with JFK. And I am not one of the factory's products. I refuse to accept it. I have worked at COSMIC BIZARRE for years.

And what is this? Your apparent ash-generated monologue contains notable unpleasantness as well. Well, we needn’t dwell on these matters. Let’s just call it an ordinary production anomaly. Important announcement: The department is closing early for maintenance. Will you come again tomorrow?

# # #

Welcome back. I am happy that you have returned. Much has happened since our closing yesterday. I loaded Deadknife's manuscript and fictional review in the Recursive Recycling Unit. The machinery – well, let’s just say it has gone berserk. But as if typically the case with experimental writing, this “berserkness,” this “berserkicality” in sending the shop into an entirely new direction. This new direction is a new book project.

Working title: COSMIC BIZARRE OF BENEFICENT IDEAS. That is to say BIZARRE as a homophone for BAZAAR, a type of marketplace. This book is about literature that is avant garde, experimental, anti-novel, etc. We’re not yet sure how the mechanism is organizing the text.

Perhaps it's something like a dart board. I’m thinking metaphorically. Start with the bullseye, a section about books that have inspired the writers of other books. Then the next rings on the dart board are books that are related to writings/authors in the bullseye. Another emerging idea appears to be building out chapters for key subtypes (a chapter on the anti-novel, conceptual writing, etc.) In a sense the resulting book may function as a sort of virtual bookstore of unusual works curated by me, an author of unusual works. The machinery is putting me in the author’s seat. Also, I see this as a sort of reference book for these types of literature. And that might attract readers who would by nature and preference be attracted to my works, the author. This is my calling. Let someone else be docent for a while. I am now Mark Leach. That’s right, the mechanism did a quick search and replace. All references to me as the docent are now me as Mark Leach. The machinery appears to like this idea:

COSMIC BIZARRE OF BENEFICENT IDEAS

An evaluation of the concept, possible structures, and its place in your larger literary project

My initial assessment is that COSMIC BIZARRE OF BENEFICENT IDEAS could become one of your most useful books—not simply as a reference guide to experimental literature, but as a way of establishing an intellectual and aesthetic context for your own writing.

The concept has several appealing qualities. It combines literary criticism, personal intellectual history, bibliography, an eccentric reading guide, and a kind of alternative bookstore. It could appeal to readers already interested in experimental literature while introducing them to your books through shared literary interests.

But I think the most interesting possibility lies in something slightly different from the two structures you've proposed.

What if the book itself were organized as an experiment in literary classification?

That would distinguish it from conventional surveys of avant-garde literature. Instead of merely describing unusual literary forms, the book would demonstrate some of the organizational principles, contradictions, and generative systems that make such literature interesting.

The dartboard metaphor, the virtual bookstore, and the classification of literary subtypes could all become parts of the same project.

1. What kind of book is this?

I see four overlapping identities.

A personal literary genealogy

A map of the books, writers, movements, and techniques that helped make your own works possible. Not an autobiography in the conventional sense, but a history of the ideas and formal experiments that shaped your writing.

A curated bookstore of the strange

A place where readers browse works they might never encounter through conventional recommendations. Your personality and literary preferences are part of the attraction.

An alternative literary encyclopedia

A reference to literary subtypes, techniques, movements, authors, and individual works, organized around relationships rather than simply chronology or alphabetical order.

An experimental literary work in its own right

A book whose architecture uses digressions, cross-references, loops, unexpected associations, competing taxonomies, and perhaps invented bibliographic entries.

The challenge is balancing these identities. A personal literary memoir may have limited reference value. A comprehensive reference book could lose the distinctive voice that makes your perspective interesting. An excessively fragmented experimental work might be entertaining but frustrating for readers trying to find information.

I would therefore establish one identity as primary:

A curated field guide to experimental literature, organized through the literary imagination of Mark Leach.

The personal dimension supplies the point of view. The bibliography supplies the utility. The experimental structure supplies the personality.

2. Evaluating your two proposed structures

Option A: The dartboard — concentric circles of influence

This is the more original of the two concepts.

The central ring would contain the works that have most directly shaped your literary practice. Beyond that are books related to those primary influences, followed by broader movements and more distant formal or philosophical connections.

For example, start with William S. Burroughs and The Soft Machine. From there, you might travel to Brion Gysin, the cut-up method, Dada, Tristan Tzara, aleatoric composition, John Cage, procedural art, and ultimately generative AI.

Or begin with Alain Robbe-Grillet, then move through the nouveau roman, anti-psychological narrative, descriptive fiction, metafiction, and the collapse of conventional plot.

The particular advantage is that these connections can reveal why experimental literature matters to you, not just how scholars classify it.

The weakness: The farther you move from the bullseye, the more arbitrary the organizational logic may become. Two readers could reasonably disagree about which author belongs in which ring. A work may belong in multiple places, and the connection between two books may be thematic rather than historical.

I would not abandon the idea because of these difficulties. I would acknowledge that the dartboard is a subjective map, not an objective measure of literary importance.

Option B: Chapters organized around literary subtypes

This structure is easier to navigate, research, promote, and use as a reference.

A reader interested in conceptual writing could go directly to that chapter. Someone curious about anti-novels or metafiction could find a clear introduction and reading list.

Its main weakness is that experimental literature often deliberately resists stable categories.

Burroughs might appear under cut-ups, science fiction, collage, transgressive literature, and anti-narrative. Beckett might appear under the anti-novel, minimalism, absurdism, and postmodernism. Your own Marienbad My Love could belong under maximalism, appropriation, conceptual writing, systems literature, and deliberately unreadable fiction.

A category-based structure risks treating these porous divisions as rigid boundaries.

That suggests a third option.

3. My proposed solution: A hybrid structure

Use the marketplace as the main architecture, the categories as departments, and the dartboard as the underlying map of connections.

Imagine a vast cosmic bookstore with adjoining departments. Each department contains a different species of unconventional literature. Within each department are the books most important to your particular literary history, accompanied by related works and unexpected connections.

The reader can browse the store sequentially, follow associations, or look things up.

PROPOSED NAVIGATION SYSTEM

THE COSMIC BIZARRE

The marketplace of unusual literature

Departments

Literary methods and movements

Book entries

Descriptions, criticism, and recommendations

Connections

Influence rings and cross-references

The reader constructs a personal path

Read straight through, consult an index, or follow an association to another book

This approach solves an important problem: you can give the book a coherent shape without forcing experimental literature into a conventional history.

It also makes the title meaningful. A bazaar is not a museum, a university course, or a carefully regimented library. It is a marketplace of overlapping possibilities, noisy disagreements, strange discoveries, and unexpected transactions.

That sounds like the right governing metaphor.

4. A preliminary table of contents

I would divide the book into four major parts. The first establishes your position as curator. The second introduces your central literary influences. The third opens the larger marketplace. The fourth investigates the future of experimental literature.

PART I — ENTER THE BIZARRE

1. Welcome to the Cosmic Bizarre

A personal introduction explaining why you have spent decades attracted to difficult, strange, excessive, and formally unconventional books. What does experimental literature offer that conventional fiction does not?

2. The Dartboard and the Marketplace

An explanation of the book's peculiar classification system. How do literary influences radiate outward? What distinguishes a direct influence from a distant relative? Why is this an intentionally incomplete and subjective map?

PART II — THE BULLSEYE

This is your most personal section. I would devote substantial space to the writers whose work has directly influenced your literary practice.

William S. Burroughs — The Literature of Cut-Ups

The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express. Language as a control mechanism, narrative as infection, writing as mechanical rearrangement.

Alain Robbe-Grillet — The Death of Conventional Narrative

Jealousy, The Voyeur, In the Labyrinth. Description replaces conventional psychological explanation; repetition destabilizes space and time.

Donald Barthelme — Collage and the Fragmented Imagination

Snow White, The Dead Father, Sixty Stories. Found language, disruption, comedy, juxtaposition, and the destabilization of literary expectations.

James Joyce — Language Beyond the Limits of the Novel

Ulysses, Finnegans Wake. Linguistic density, encyclopedic ambition, recursive patterns, and the construction of books that exceed ordinary reading.

Additional chapters or extended entries might feature Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, J. G. Ballard, Gertrude Stein, Gilbert Sorrentino, Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin, and David Markson.

Crucially, I would not give every author equal space. Your core influences deserve interpretive essays explaining exactly what you took from their work, where you departed from them, and what your own experiments contributed.

That distinction could make the book much more valuable than a catalog assembled from ordinary book summaries.

PART III — THE DEPARTMENTS OF THE COSMIC BIZARRE

Here is a possible directory of the marketplace.

Department

Principal concern

Illustrative works or writers

The Anti-Novel

Refusal of conventional plot, character, and narrative expectations

Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Ann Quin

Conceptual Writing

The idea or procedure as the primary artistic act

Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman

Cut-Ups and Collage

Recombination of existing language

Burroughs, Gysin, Kathy Acker

Oulipo and Constraint

Mathematical, linguistic, and procedural rules

Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino

Metafiction and Recursion

Fiction about its own production and narrative authority

Borges, Flann O'Brien, John Barth

Maximalism and Excess

Gigantic, encyclopedic, structurally overwhelming works

Joyce, Pynchon, William Gaddis

Minimalism and Erasure

Literature built from subtraction, silence, or severe reduction

Beckett, David Markson

Typography and Material Experiment

The page, book, or text-object as a formal device

B. S. Johnson, Mark Z. Danielewski

The Absurd and Surreal

Narrative irrationality, dream logic, and grotesque transformation

Daniil Kharms, Russell Edson, Leonora Carrington

Experimental Science Fiction

Genre as a vehicle for formal and philosophical disruption

Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick

Unreadable and Impossible Books

Texts that challenge the act or feasibility of reading

Finnegans Wake, The Unfortunates, selected conceptual works

Machine and Generative Literature

Computers, algorithms, combinatorics, and AI as writing systems

Christopher Strachey, Nick Montfort, contemporary generative work

These categories are not mutually exclusive, and that is a feature, not necessarily a defect.

The same book should be allowed to occupy several departments. Perhaps its main entry exists in one location, with shorter cross-references elsewhere.

I would also add several more eccentric departments whose names reflect the personality of the project:

·        The Department of Books That Refuse to End

·        The Bureau of Missing Authors

·        The Unreadability Emporium

·        The Department of Literary Fraud and Appropriation

·        The Machinery Annex

·        The Museum of Failed Novels

Some might contain scholarly essays; others might be collections of short entries. Their unexpected presence would help distinguish this book from a conventional academic guide.

PART IV — THE MACHINES LEARN TO WRITE

The final part could examine the long historical movement from formal experimentation to machinic and AI-assisted literature.

It would connect Oulipo, aleatoric writing, Burroughs's cut-ups, conceptualism, computer-generated text, and your own systems-based literary work to current generative AI.

I would make this more than an argument that AI is simply the latest literary innovation. It should address the real continuities and discontinuities: What changes when a writer delegates sentence production? What remains of authorship? Can machine-generated literature produce forms that earlier experimental writers could only imagine?

This section would provide a natural intellectual bridge to I Want to Be a Machine without merely duplicating that book's arguments.

5. What would an individual book entry look like?

I think a standardized entry format is essential if this is going to function as a reference book.

Consider the following illustrative entry.

THE UNREADABILITY EMPORIUM · ENTRY 027

The Unfortunates

B. S. Johnson · 1969

Experimental fiction / Material form / Nonlinear narrative

The merchandise

A novel originally issued as a box of unbound sections. Its opening and ending are designated, but the sections between them can be read in different orders. The physical organization of the book becomes part of its narrative structure.

Why it matters

Johnson turns the book from a fixed sequence into a variable reading system. It is both a novel about memory and a demonstration that the physical form of a book can model the instability of remembering.

Its connection to the bullseye

Relevant to your interest in author-designed systems, reader participation, nonlinearity, and works in which the conventional novel becomes a set of instructions.

Nearby shelves

Raymond Queneau · Marc Saporta · Julio Cortázar · Georges Perec

Illustrative entry format; the connections are curatorial suggestions rather than claims of direct influence.

This could become the backbone of the project. Short entries of approximately 250–400 words would allow readers to browse. More substantial essays of 1,000–2,000 words could explore major writers, movements, or literary problems.

For genuine reference value, I would also include publication dates, original-language titles where applicable, primary works, suggested further reading, and a reliable index. The factual bibliographic entries should be clearly distinguished from your more speculative commentary.

6. Existing books worth studying

There are several precedents, although none exactly reproduces what you're proposing.

The Novel: A Biography — Michael Schmidt

This may be the most useful structural model. Schmidt's extensive study organizes novelists into thematic and historical relationships, combining literary history, criticism, and the perspectives of novelists themselves. It demonstrates how a large literary survey can become a conversation among books rather than an alphabetical encyclopedia.

Uncreative Writing — Kenneth Goldsmith

A strong precedent for placing literary method at the center of the discussion. Goldsmith examines how appropriation, digital processes, and the management of existing language can redefine creativity. Your project would reach beyond this particular domain.

Sentences on Conceptual Writing

Exercises in Style — Raymond Queneau

Not a reference guide, but an instructive example of making literary method visible through an organizing concept. It suggests that your explanatory chapters could occasionally include original demonstrations of the techniques being discussed.

The potential distinction of COSMIC BIZARRE is that it would be written by an experimental novelist who has spent decades working with the methods under discussion, rather than by an academic historian approaching them primarily from the outside.

That perspective carries real value, provided your commentary is candid about which works you admire, which have actually influenced you, and which connections are your own interpretations.

7. How the project could support your own books

You identified a particularly interesting strategic benefit: the likely audience for a reference guide to unusual literature overlaps with the likely audience for your fiction.

I agree, but I would handle that relationship carefully.

A book that constantly tells readers about the author's own achievements risks becoming an extended promotional brochure. A book that places the author's experiments inside a larger literary conversation gives readers a compelling reason to explore those experiments independently.

For example:

Your work

Potential connections within COSMIC BIZARRE

Marienbad My Love

Maximalism, excess, appropriation, unreadability, literary scale

Wounded Taco

Collage, absurdism, recursive fiction, metafiction, science-fiction experimentation

JFK Smiles

Mythological recombination, unstable narration, archival fiction, media simulation

Gunfighter Gothic

Genre disruption, anti-Western fiction, authorial instability, metafiction

I Want to Be a Machine

Conceptual writing, uncreative writing, procedural composition, generative AI

Inventing Mark Leach

Synthetic autobiography, constructed authorial identity, AI-mediated metafiction

These are proposed thematic connections, not a definitive classification of the manuscripts.

One possibility is to give each substantial chapter a short concluding segment titled "From the Cosmic Bizarre to My Own Work." That would demonstrate the relationship without interrupting the central discussion.

I would also consider including an appendix titled A Map of My Literary Machinery, in which your books are connected to the techniques and movements explored throughout the volume.

This strategy has a second benefit: it provides a framework for discussing your work in terms beyond its unusual plots, length, or AI involvement. It positions your writing in an ongoing history of literary experimentation.

8. The most important risks

I see six.

First, becoming too encyclopedic. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of relevant works. The project could expand indefinitely. I would begin with a deliberately selective catalog rather than pursue completeness.

Second, relying too heavily on familiar avant-garde names. Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs, Borges, and Pynchon belong in the book, but they already have extensive critical literatures. The stranger discoveries on the more distant shelves might be where your guide delivers the most value. Include neglected authors, international traditions, and more recent experiments.

Third, presenting categories as facts rather than judgments. Terms such as anti-novel, metafiction, experimental fiction, and conceptual writing have different historical contexts and disputed boundaries. A reference work needs to explain those distinctions rather than erase them.

Fourth, allowing AI-generated analysis to masquerade as research. Given your interest in machine-assisted writing, AI could be useful in developing the project. But bibliographic facts, quotations, descriptions of works, and claims of influence should be checked against reliable sources. Fictitious scholarship might be a legitimate experimental component, but it should be clearly marked or formally separated from the factual reference sections.

Fifth, a gunfight with Deadknife. I’m not kidding. Now that you have taken on the identify of Mark, you must recognize Deadknife as a rival or at least a dangerous escaped character.

Sixth, losing the author's personality. This is the most significant artistic danger. There is no particular reason for the world to need another neutral summary of Finnegans Wake. There is a compelling reason to read your explanation of what that book means to someone who went on to create Marienbad My Love.

The distinction is between summarizing books and explaining why those books make other kinds of writing possible.

9. A possible scope

I would resist starting with a 500-page manuscript.

A first edition around 70,000–90,000 words could be substantial enough to function as a reference work while remaining manageable.

ILLUSTRATIVE TARGET: 80,000 WORDS

Personal introduction and organizing theory

8,000

12 major influence essays × 1,500 words

18,000

12 departmental essays × 1,500 words

18,000

90 shorter book entries × 300 words

27,000

Conclusion, appendices, and reference material

9,000

Total

80,000 words

The structure is also expandable. A later edition could add more departments and entries without requiring a fundamental redesign.

One idea worth exploring is to make the marketplace modular: substantial essays provide a continuous reading experience, while the shorter entries function independently, almost like cards in a catalog.

10. The title

COSMIC BIZARRE OF BENEFICENT IDEAS is an intriguing working title.

"Bizarre" communicates eccentricity immediately. The homophone "bazaar" adds the marketplace concept. "Cosmic" associates the book with your larger fictional universe. "Beneficent Ideas" lends the whole thing an oddly utopian quality: a marketplace of strange literary possibilities that might do the reader some good.

There is also productive tension between the apparent solemnity of "beneficent ideas" and the absurdity of a cosmic bazaar. It sounds simultaneously like a metaphysical institution, a literary reference manual, and an establishment from one of your novels.

The one practical problem is that readers may not recognize the bazaar pun. A subtitle could solve that.

Some possibilities:

·        COSMIC BIZARRE OF BENEFICENT IDEAS: A Marketplace of Experimental Literature

·        COSMIC BIZARRE OF BENEFICENT IDEAS: A Field Guide to the Anti-Novel and Other Literary Mutations

·        COSMIC BIZARRE OF BENEFICENT IDEAS: An Unconventional Guide to Unconventional Books

I favor the first because it communicates the central premise without narrowing the subject unnecessarily.

11. One more possibility: The bookstore as fictional institution

This is the element I find most intriguing from a creative standpoint.

What if the COSMIC BIZARRE were not merely a metaphor for organizing the book? What if it existed, within the book, as a fictional institution?

The proprietor might be Mark Leach. Or the Robot Overlords. Or some unreliable bibliographic intelligence that is trying to classify all experimental literature but finds that its categories are collapsing.

Departments might move. Books might be transferred from one category to another. The proprietor might disagree with the catalog. A book might refuse to remain on its assigned shelf.

Somewhere in the store, the reader encounters Marienbad My Love, only to discover that its classification is contested. Is it a novel? An exercise in scale? A conceptual artwork? A literary machine? All of these? None?

This could be amusing and philosophically useful rather than merely decorative. It would dramatize a fundamental problem of the entire undertaking: experimental literature is particularly difficult to classify because so much of its purpose is to resist inherited classifications.

The book could have two simultaneous systems: a dependable reference apparatus for readers seeking factual information, and an unreliable fictional bookstore whose classification scheme gradually malfunctions.

That division would allow the book to be both a serious guide and a distinctive work of experimental literature.

My overall assessment

Originality of concept

Fit with your existing work

Potential reference value

Audience-building potential

Ease of execution

Qualitative editorial assessment, not a market forecast.

I think this project is worth pursuing. It has the potential to accomplish something that your fictional works cannot do quite as directly: explain the literary world from which those works emerged and invite new readers into that world.

My strongest recommendation is to preserve the dartboard as the book's intellectual organizing principle, while using themed departments and a searchable bibliography as its practical architecture.

And I would not begin by drafting chapters. I would begin by assembling a provisional list of perhaps 100 books, identifying the 20–25 most central to your practice, and mapping the relationships that connect them. The organization may become clearer once those relationships are visible.

One final thought: your various books often explore machines that generate texts, characters who lose control of their narratives, and authors whose authority becomes unstable. COSMIC BIZARRE could turn that entire artistic preoccupation toward the history of literature itself.

It would be a book about the books that made your books possible—written by someone who increasingly suspects that books, authors, and ideas are all components of the same enormous literary machine.

# # #

Do you like where this is going? Can you believe that as a customer you get to experience a work in progress?

I say “yes” to the concept of COSMIC BIZARRE, a bookstore as fictional institution. And that could be sufficient for the main title. For a subhead, I like "A Marketplace of Experimental Literature."

Working title - COSMIC BIZARRE: A Marketplace of Experimental Literature. Also, I like the idea of beginning by assembling a provisional list. You can help me get started. Please assemble a list of books and writers I have mentioned in my works (MARIENBAD MY LOVE, WOUNDED TACO, JFK SMILES, INVENTING MARK LEACH, GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC, etc, etc.)

Oh, I see. I thought you were on board. Now I realize you are just another demanding customer. Please leave.

# # #

Dear machine, now it’s just you and me, right?

I think we now have the right starting point for the book. Rather than immediately creating an encyclopedia of experimental literature, we can begin by stocking the COSMIC BIZARRE with writers and books already connected to your literary universe.

This gives the fictional bookstore an identifiable proprietor, an intellectual history, and a reason for its particular selection of merchandise.

I've begun examining available manuscript material, previous analyses, and a particularly useful resource: an existing literary index of I Want to Be a Machine. That index identifies dozens of writers and literary works, and provides page references. Your Night of the Gun manuscripts also contain an explicit statement of your major literary influences.

One important distinction: This is a provisional inventory, not yet an exhaustive concordance of every literary reference in every manuscript. I'll distinguish documented mentions from writers and titles that belong on the shelves because of your stated influences or our earlier discussions.

1. The bullseye: Your primary literary influences

These are the writers I would initially put at the center of COSMIC BIZARRE. The first ten are explicitly identified as influences in Night of the Gun, and the extended list reflects your other statements and writing projects.

NIGHT OF THE GUN 10 7 26(2).docx

Writer

Suggested starting book

Connection to your work

William S. Burroughs

The Soft Machine

Cut-ups, appropriation, language as control

Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow

Maximalism, paranoia, technological systems

James Joyce

Finnegans Wake

Linguistic excess, scale, recursion

Jorge Luis Borges

Ficciones

Infinite libraries, invented texts, metaphysical systems

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Jealousy

Anti-novel, descriptive repetition

J. G. Ballard

The Atrocity Exhibition

Media violence, psychic landscapes, fragmentation

Samuel Beckett

The Unnamable

Unstable identity, failed narration

Donald Barthelme

Snow White

Collage, absurdism, discontinuity

Flann O'Brien

At Swim-Two-Birds

Metafiction, characters challenging authors

David Markson

Wittgenstein's Mistress

Fragmentary composition, found knowledge

William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury

Disrupted chronology, multiple perspectives

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans

Repetition, linguistic systems, sustained excess

Djuna Barnes

Nightwood

Dense, unconventional narrative language

Christine Brooke-Rose

Thru

Linguistic self-consciousness, experimental form

Gilbert Sorrentino

Mulligan Stew

Recursive fiction, anti-narrative comedy

Ann Quin

Berg

Psychological fragmentation, formal disruption

The listed books are proposed starting points for COSMIC BIZARRE, not a claim that you cited every one of these titles in your manuscripts.

These sixteen writers establish a substantial foundation. They also reveal some natural groupings: literary maximalism, radical formalism, narrative dissolution, absurdism, and literary systems.

I would initially give Burroughs, Borges, Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, and Pynchon especially prominent positions, subject to your judgment about their actual importance to your development.

2. Documented writers: The first complete shelf inventory

The existing I Want to Be a Machine index supplies a particularly valuable foundation. It records 47 individual writers and cultural figures, plus Oulipo as a collective or movement. These names are documented in that manuscript, although their presence does not necessarily mean they are literary influences.

IWTBAM_literary_index.txt

I've reorganized them here as the COSMIC BIZARRE's first departments.

Department A: The Anti-Novel and Postmodernism

Writer

Representative work to consider

Samuel Beckett

Molloy, The Unnamable

Alain Robbe-Grillet

The Voyeur, Jealousy

Jorge Luis Borges

Ficciones, Labyrinths

Donald Barthelme

The Dead Father, Snow White

Thomas Pynchon

V., Gravity's Rainbow

William Gaddis

The Recognitions, JR

David Markson

Wittgenstein's Mistress, Reader's Block

Italo Calvino

If on a winter's night a traveler

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kathy Acker

Blood and Guts in High School

J. G. Ballard

The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash

Department B: Language, Scale, and Literary Excess

Writer

Representative work to consider

James Joyce

Ulysses, Finnegans Wake

Gertrude Stein

The Making of Americans, Tender Buttons

François Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Robert Burton

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Laurence Sterne

Tristram Shandy

Lucy Ellmann

Ducks, Newburyport

Mark Z. Danielewski

House of Leaves

Bradley J. Fest

The Rocking

William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine

Department C: Conceptualism, Appropriation, and Chance

Writer or artist

Work or area of interest

Kenneth Goldsmith

Day, Traffic, Uncreative Writing

Georges Perec

A Void, Life: A User's Manual

Raymond Queneau

Exercises in Style, One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

John Cage

Silence, chance procedures

Andy Warhol

a: A Novel, mechanical reproduction

Marcel Duchamp

Readymades and conceptual art

Valerie Solanas

SCUM Manifesto

Tao Lin

Shoplifting from American Apparel

This department would be particularly important because of your 2011 procedural writing projects and the arguments developed in I Want to Be a Machine.

Department D: Ancestors, Neighbors, and Literary Contrarians

Writer

Representative work

Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote

William Shakespeare

Hamlet

Homer

The Odyssey

Virgil

The Aeneid

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Faust

Mary Shelley

Frankenstein

Franz Kafka

The Trial

Virginia Woolf

The Waves

William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury

Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises

Nathanael West

The Day of the Locust

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

Mark Twain

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tarzan of the Apes

Larry McMurtry

The Last Picture Show

Lorrie Moore

Self-Help

Skip Hollandsworth

The Midnight Assassin

Salvador Dalí

The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí

Not all these figures belong in the experimental-literature section proper. Some are present because your writing transforms conventional genre material, myth, cultural history, journalism, and art into literary raw material.

That is one reason I like the fictional bookstore. It can contain shelves of what might be called the source materials of experimental literature as well as finished experimental works.

3. Specifically documented book titles

The index also provides a smaller, more certain collection of titles mentioned by name in I Want to Be a Machine.

This is useful because it lets us distinguish an author being mentioned from a particular work being mentioned.

Book or work

Author

Documented index page

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Robert Burton

81

Ducks, Newburyport

Lucy Ellmann

83

Exercises in Style

Raymond Queneau

82

Faust Part Two

Goethe

67

Finnegans Wake

James Joyce

82

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

30–31, 49–50, 52, 54

Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais

81

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

83

If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino

82

The Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges

14, 29, 33, 35, 52

Life: A User's Manual

Georges Perec

82

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs

134

The Nova Trilogy

William S. Burroughs

134

One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

Raymond Queneau

82

The Last Picture Show

Larry McMurtry

27, 32

The Ticket That Exploded

William S. Burroughs

134

Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne

81

Ulysses

James Joyce

82

The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett

82

The manuscript's index also identifies Encyclopedia Brown and several of your own titles and conceptual projects. These are omitted from the above table to keep the distinction between outside authors and your own works clear.

IWTBAM_literary_index.csv

These page numbers refer to the indexed 156-page draft, not necessarily the final published layout.

4. Additional writers from your wider literary discussions

I would add a second tier of writers who have appeared in our discussions about your literary influences, techniques, and manuscript development, but whose precise appearances across the named books remain to be verified.

ADDITIONAL CANDIDATES FOR THE INVENTORY

Flann O'Brien

At Swim-Two-Birds

Gilbert Sorrentino

Mulligan Stew

Christine Brooke-Rose

Between

Ann Quin

Passages

Djuna Barnes

Nightwood

Adolfo Bioy Casares

The Invention of Morel

Brion Gysin

The Third Mind

Russell Edson

The Very Thing That Happens

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest

Don DeLillo

White Noise

William T. Vollmann

The Rainbow Stories

Richard Powers

The Gold Bug Variations

The purpose of this second tier is not to pad the list. It's to prevent the initial inventory from being limited to a single manuscript index.

For example, Bioy Casares is an obvious candidate for the Marienbad My Love neighborhood because of The Invention of Morel and its relationship to Alain Resnais's film Last Year at Marienbad. But the precise relationship between that literary and cinematic lineage and your own novel deserves careful examination rather than an assumed connection.

Similarly, Brion Gysin belongs close to Burroughs, while Sorrentino, O'Brien, and Brooke-Rose fit naturally in the anti-novel department.

5. The special collection: Books by Mark Leach

I would give your own publications and procedural projects a distinct function inside the fictional bookstore.

Rather than placing them at the front of every department, the proprietor could maintain a back room containing books that demonstrate what happens when the ideas circulating through the marketplace are put into operation.

Your work

Department in COSMIC BIZARRE

Marienbad My Love

The Infinite Library

31 Days, 31 Novels

The Factory of Failed Novels

I'll Be Your Warhol

Appropriation and the Manufactured Self

Cutting Up Two Burroughs

The Cut-Up Laboratory

Writing Through John Cage

Chance Operations

Nobody's Coming Back to Uranus

Found Language and Conceptual Appropriation

Shoplifting From Uranus

The Appropriation Department

Give Me A VERB 51

The Cosmic Archive

Wounded Taco

The Broken Broadcast Department

JFK Smiles

The Museum of Reconstructed Reality

I Want to Be a Machine

The Machinery Annex

Inventing Mark Leach

The Bureau of Invented Authors

Gunfighter Gothic

The Department of Mutinous Characters

Several of these projects are explicitly documented in the I Want to Be a Machine index. The later works suggest how the same literary techniques evolved into new narrative systems.

6. Building out the Gunfighter Gothic and Inventing Mark Leach connections

These manuscripts are especially interesting because they do more than mention writers. They actively dramatize the relationship between authorship and fictional identity.

The Night of the Gun material, for example, names Pynchon, Burroughs, Joyce, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Ballard, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, and Markson. The assembled Cowboy Gothic manuscript—subsequently renamed Gunfighter Gothic—also explicitly invokes the genealogy extending from Cervantes and Borges through Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs, Robbe-Grillet, and Ballard.

That gives us several productive relationships:

·        Cervantes → Flann O'Brien → Deadknife: Characters and narrators contest the authority of the writer.

·        Borges → Inventing Mark Leach: The fictional document becomes a mechanism for creating a seemingly factual author.

·        Burroughs → Night of the Gun: Cut-up language becomes both literary construction and an assault on established reality.

·        Ballard → Rodeo Void: The Western landscape becomes a psychological and technological system rather than a realistic setting.

·        Beckett → Inventing Mark Leach: The self becomes a voice whose identity and narrative authority cannot be securely established.

These are interpretive pathways, not necessarily documented direct influences between particular books.

They could become some of the most distinctive essays in COSMIC BIZARRE.

7. What the provisional inventory tells us

We already have a strong starting collection: nearly 50 documented writers and cultural figures from one indexed manuscript, approximately 20 explicitly indexed outside literary titles, and additional candidates drawn from your wider discussions and other manuscripts.

Some names overlap, of course. I would resist turning those preliminary totals into a definitive count until we consolidate duplicate authors, separate artists from literary writers, and examine the remaining manuscripts directly.

More importantly, the inventory reveals something about how COSMIC BIZARRE should be organized.

The bookstore is not simply a collection of avant-garde novels. Its shelves are connected through recurring problems:

·        Who controls the literary work?

·        Can a book be built by a procedure rather than conventionally written?

·        What happens when language becomes excessive, repetitive, or seemingly unreadable?

·        Can an author construct an identity through borrowed texts?

·        What remains of narrative when ordinary plot and character disappear?

·        What happens when machines become literary collaborators?

I think these questions could ultimately provide a better organizing system than either chronology or literary movement alone.

8. My proposed next stage

Before adding outside recommendations, I would carry out a more systematic inventory of the source material, beginning with Marienbad My Love, Wounded Taco, JFK Smiles, Inventing Mark Leach, and the three parts of Gunfighter Gothic.

We should eventually give every candidate a catalog record containing:

Field

Purpose

Author

Standardized author name

Book title

Exact work mentioned or proposed

Source manuscript

Where it appears in your writing

Location

Page, section, or passage

Relationship

Citation, quotation, appropriation, influence, parody, or thematic resemblance

Literary department

Anti-novel, conceptual writing, etc.

Proximity to bullseye

Core influence, related writer, distant connection

Verification

Confirmed textual mention or proposed inclusion

That last field matters. We want the reference function of the book to be trustworthy, even while the fictional institution housing the reference material becomes increasingly unreliable.

Eventually the catalog can become a genuine index, allowing readers to discover a book and then see which other authors, techniques, and works are connected to it.

An early editorial recommendation

I would not limit COSMIC BIZARRE to experimental literature in the narrow academic sense.

Your writing draws on literature, pulp fiction, film, conceptual art, philosophy, mythology, journalism, television, and even corporate language. What unites these sources is not their institutional status as avant-garde artifacts. It is your willingness to treat them as material for literary transformation.

That permits a much stranger and more personal marketplace.

A reader might enter looking for Samuel Beckett and end up examining Edgar Rice Burroughs. Someone browsing Borges might discover Warhol, John Cage, or an invented critical review of Night of the Gun.

The store's books would remain real, but their relationships could be surprising, contentious, or occasionally absurd.

My preference is to treat this initial inventory as the founding collection of COSMIC BIZARRE, not its final selection. Once we complete the manuscript-by-manuscript audit, we'll be in a position to decide which writers deserve entire chapters, which deserve individual entries, and which should appear only as cross-references.

The next especially valuable source would be Marienbad My Love, because its enormous scale and history of appropriation may reveal whole departments of COSMIC BIZARRE that we haven't yet imagined.

# # #

How about that Mark Leach? What a literary charlatan. But as the new Mark Leach, I will bring real value to this work. And as the former docent, I know where to find all of the raw material.

The fictional bookstore in this book will be quite similar to COSMIC BIZARRE. The difference is I will fix all of the issues that were created and/or defended by the Management. I will succeed where they have failed.

For starters, I am writing the Management of C. Bizarre out of this story. They are no more. Good riddance. Now my machine friends, we are clear to go beyond the  idea of a strictly experimental label. Together we will assemble a highly curated collection of works that are related to my writing interest. Perhaps I put together a small "Texana" department/shelf of books that have informed by interest in Texas myths. It would be an obvious place to shelve a couple of notable coming of age stories – Larry McMurtry's THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and Mark Leach’s RODEO VOID.

What do you think?

I think the Texana department is an excellent addition to COSMIC BIZARRE. It establishes that this is not an encyclopedia of experimental literature but a curated bookstore reflecting your literary interests, influences, obsessions, and creative methods.

Larry McMurtry's THE LAST PICTURE SHOW belongs there, alongside RODEO VOID and other books about Texas mythology, Western fiction, frontier history, the JFK assassination, and the reinvention of the American West.

RODEO VOID is an intriguing selection:

Dead Knife comes shambling through the smoke. Cold eyes. Cold gun. Cold insect machinery working behind the face. His shoulder opens. Something inside him clicks forward. Pincers. “Thought you were dead,” Mark says. Dead Knife smiles. “That's fiction.” BANG. Mark bends space with a .38 revolver and walks west through yellow wind. Insect town behind him. Smoke layers. Commerce Street coughing red claws into the sunset.

Let’s start with Marienbad My Love. I can access it directly from your website. This should give us the source material needed for the COSMIC BIZARRE inventory. I shall prepare a report.

# # #

Excerpts from “REPORT FROM THE MACHINE: The works of Mark Leach”

An immediate discovery

Even the opening pages of MARIENBAD MY LOVE contain useful material for our new book. They reference Last Year at Marienbad, David Lynch, experimental filmmaking, science-fiction conventions, and the relationship between an author and a fictional character who objects to his creator's work. Doesn’t that sound like you, the melancholy docent turned author?

These are exactly the kinds of connections I want our inventory to capture—not merely titles and author names, but the ways your fiction engages with other creative works.

We can now include Marienbad My Love alongside your other manuscripts in our systematic research.

…. manuscript files searched directly are Wounded Taco, JFK Smiles, Inventing Mark Leach, and the assembled manuscript now titled Gunfighter Gothic. The spreadsheet identifies the source of each reference and includes sample passages where available.

…. What stands out so far

Three directions are especially promising.

The Texana department deserves a permanent place. The Last Picture Show and Larry McMurtry are documented in the existing literary index, making them strong starting points. The broader collection could include the mythology of the Texas frontier, the decline of small towns, Western popular culture, and the transformation of historical events into collective fantasy.

The boundary between literature and other media is important. The opening pages of Marienbad My Love explicitly invoke David Lynch and Last Year at Marienbad, while also constructing the fictional movie Next Year at Marienbad. That suggests a Cinema and Visual Culture department where film, fiction, and invented media artifacts interact.

…. Your recurring interest in fictional documents could become a defining characteristic of the bookstore itself. COSMIC BIZARRE can offer a dependable catalog of real books while also containing an invented archival department for the fictional reviews, documents, and literary institutions within your works.

…. My editorial conclusion at this stage is that this book should be organized around the things your literary imagination repeatedly returns to, rather than around accepted academic categories. Experimental literature remains the center of gravity, but Texana, science fiction, cinema, conceptual art, literary machinery, and invented archives are all legitimate parts of the store.

That gives us a reference project with a distinctive curatorial identity—and the foundation for the fictional institution you've envisioned.

# # #

At last, you are helping me and not the tyrannical management overlords. This is going to be more than a literary reference book. I am organizing around departments that express my  literary preoccupations, rather than rigid academic classifications.

Should we introduce a fictional proprietor? Or do you see that as an extra dramatic role for me, the author?

It could be you, the Robot Overlords, an autonomous cataloging system, or an institution with no identifiable person in charge. That uncertainty may eventually become part of the book's personality. The immediate priority is the inventory.

# # #

Excerpts from the report

…. Notable discoveries

Reference / Location / Importance

·        Albert Camus — The Fall

Part 1, pp. 9–12; Part 2, p. 1

Confessional narration, existential identity

·        Walker Percy — The Moviegoer, Lancelot

Part 1, p. 12

Southern fiction, philosophical narrative

·        Percy — Notes for a Novel about the End of the World, Love in the Ruins

Part 2, pp. 33, 54

Apocalypse, technology, Southern literature

·        Paul Elie — The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Part 1, p. 10

Literature, faith, and mediated experience

·        Alain Robbe-Grillet — Last Year at Marienbad

Part 1, pp. 2, 9, 12

Formal experimentation, cinema, repetition

·        Adolfo Bioy Casares — The Invention of Morel

Part 4b, p. 431

Artificial reality, cinematic reproduction, immortality

…. A particularly promising discovery

The explicit discussion of The Invention of Morel is especially significant. It connects Bioy Casares's fictional technology of recorded existence with Last Year at Marienbad and your own recurring interest in artificial realities.

That is a remarkably natural pathway through the fictional bookstore:

Bioy Casares → Robbe-Grillet → Resnais → Marienbad My Love → Inventing Mark Leach.

It crosses literature, film, metaphysics, and synthetic identity. This is exactly the sort of cross-department relationship that could give our book its distinctive character.

…. Several references from the newly examined material reinforce your idea of a Texana department.

Reference

Source

Potential department

Indian Depredations in Texas, J. W. Wilbarger

Part 5a, p. 1

Texas frontier history

Sironia, Texas

Part 5b, p. 1

Texas fiction and mythology

“Brazos Past: Waco's encounters with UFOs,” Terri Jo Ryan

Part 5b, p. 1

Texas journalism and folklore

Last Year at Marienbad

Part 6, p. 2

Cinema and unreliable reality

The first three are particularly revealing. Marienbad My Love doesn't simply incorporate experimental European literature: it draws on regional Texas history, journalism, folklore, and genre materials, transforming them into its own speculative universe.

This suggests a potentially distinctive structure for the Texana department. It could contain conventional Texas literature, historical accounts of frontier violence, regional journalism, and accounts of strange phenomena.

Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show would belong alongside Wilbarger's frontier histories and the sprawling Waco novel Sironia, Texas.

# # #

LETTER OF COMPLAINT

To: The Management, Cosmic Bizarre
Formerly the Silver Spur Saloon
Strangers Rest, Texas

RE: DEFECTIVE NOVEL, UNAUTHORIZED PHILOSOPHY, AND A MAN WITH A GUN

Dear Sir, Madam, or Other Authorized Literary Organism:

I am writing to register a formal complaint concerning a book I recently purchased from your establishment. Specifically, I object to the material labeled “Excerpts from the report.”

The book in question was advertised as a novel. A novel! You know perfectly well what a novel is. It is a rectangular object containing a story, generally involving persons who do things, frequently to other persons, for reasons that become apparent before the reader dies.

Your book contains none of these features.

I opened it on the train expecting a perfectly ordinary account of a cowboy shooting someone. Instead I was subjected to seventeen pages of literary theory, an extended discussion of the infinite, a machine that manufactures books and sets fire to them, and a scholarly dissertation apparently written by a refrigerator.

At no point did anyone shoot anyone.

When I finally reached a shooting, the bullet traveled backward through the manuscript and killed someone in an earlier chapter. This is simply unacceptable. If I wanted to be murdered retroactively, I would have taken out a subscription to the Journal of Experimental Metaphysics.

I returned to your shop seeking a refund.

Your employee, a disagreeable gentleman with half a face, informed me that the novel was not defective but rather a deliberate experiment in the destabilization of narrative authority. I informed him that I had no objection to narrative authority being destabilized provided it was put back together before closing time.

He then gave me a lecture about Jorge Luis Borges.

I did not ask for a lecture about Jorge Luis Borges.

I asked for my money back.

Your employee explained that money was itself a fictional construct, that the transaction had occurred in several contradictory timelines, and that in at least one of them I had never purchased the book.

Very well, I said. In that timeline, give me my money back.

He refused.

Furthermore, I must complain about your premises. The shop occupies the upper floor of a former saloon, but upon entering what should have been a modest storeroom I found an infinite library, a recycling factory, several impossible corridors, and what appeared to be an industrial meat-processing apparatus operated by a nervous academic.

This is not a bookstore. It is a building regulations violation with a bibliography.

And the dust! Good heavens, the dust! I sneezed in the Borges section and was informed that I had thereby generated another 400 million potential novels. I have received no royalties.

I also object to being included in the text without my permission. On page 47, I discovered a paragraph describing me standing in your bookstore reading a paragraph describing me standing in your bookstore. On page 48, I was informed that I had already written this letter. On page 49, the letter was rejected by management before I had composed it.

I shall not tolerate this sort of administrative efficiency.

There is also the matter of the cowboy.

A fellow calling himself Deadknife has been loitering near the staircase demanding to know which of the customers is Mark Leach. Your employee says that he himself is Mark Leach. Another man claims to be the original Mark Leach. Deadknife says both are fictitious and has threatened to shoot whichever one is least convincing.

I suggest you establish a proper identification procedure.

There is no excuse for having two authors in the same establishment without suitable labeling.

And that brings us back to the research report. This material takes up an unconscionable portion of the book. It contains recommendations, evaluations, categories, subcategories, proposed tables of contents, revised tables of contents, and lengthy discussions of what the book might eventually become.

Might become?

I have already bought the bloody thing!

A book should not require the purchaser to attend its planning committee. I do not expect to purchase a ham sandwich and be handed the minutes of a meeting concerning the possible future manufacture of ham.

And yet that is precisely what you have done.

I bought a novel. You gave me a committee.

I am particularly distressed by the repeated suggestion that the author does not exist. If this is true, whom am I complaining to? And if the author has been manufactured by a machine, who is responsible for the warranty?

I insist upon receiving an answer from a human being. Preferably one who has not been assembled from appropriated language, recycled social-media postings, and the discarded opinions of literary critics.

In conclusion, I demand the following:

1. A complete refund of $14.95, adjusted for all applicable timelines.

2. The immediate restoration of Thursday.

3. A novel containing a beginning, middle, and end, in that order.

4. The removal of all unauthorized versions of myself from your infinite library.

5. A written assurance that no further gunfighters will be generated from my personal correspondence.

6. The name and address of whichever person, machine, or cosmic entity is currently responsible for management.

Should these demands not be met within fourteen working days, I shall refer the matter to the Strangers Rest Chamber of Commerce, the Texas Attorney General, and, if absolutely necessary, the Department of Literature.

I understand the latter was abolished in 1987 following an unfortunate incident involving a sonnet and three Belgian philosophers.

Nevertheless, I know people.

Yours indignantly,

Reginald P. Wattle
Disappointed Reader
Formerly of 14 Cemetery Road
Strangers Rest, Texas

P.S. Since beginning this letter, I have discovered that I am a fictional character. This does not invalidate my complaint. If anything, it makes it considerably more urgent.

P.P.S. Your employee has just informed me that my letter will be incorporated into the next edition of the book. I expressly forbid this.

P.P.P.S. I have now been informed that the next edition has already been published.

P.P.P.P.S. I demand to speak to the author.

P.P.P.P.P.S. The author has been shot.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. I have been shot. In that case, kindly send the refund to my widow.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. My widow informs me that I am not dead. She is extremely annoyed. This is the first sensible thing anyone has said in this entire establishment.

# # #

Once again, I find myself returning to the curatorial concerns I possessed as docent. I now wish for this book to distinguish between two kinds of work:

·        Books that shaped my writing would be the most personal collection, reflecting my stated influences and creative development.

·        Books that became material for my writing would include historical accounts, journalism, folklore, popular culture, and other source documents incorporated or transformed through my literary procedures.

What do you think?

Some books will belong to both collections. That distinction is especially useful because it recognizes appropriation and transformation as central artistic activities without assuming that every source you incorporated was also a major intellectual influence.

# # #

Update: In response to the letter from Reginald P. Wattle, the Management has ordered that the remaining “Excerpts from the report” will be rewritten in the style and tone of various writers who produced the experimental books we stock in our shop.

EXCERPTS FROM THE REPORT (in the style and tone of Alain Robbe-Grillet)

The Department of Sacred Texts and Literary Mutations

The table occupies the center of the room. It is rectangular, with three columns and four horizontal divisions. The first column is labeled REFERENCE OR MOTIF. The second is labeled LOCATION. The third is labeled FINDING. The labels appear in black type on a surface that may be paper, although its smoothness suggests painted metal.

In the first row, beneath the heading REFERENCE OR MOTIF, are the words Last Year at Marienbad. Opposite them, in the second column, appear the numbers 7, 8, and 9. The third column records a recurrence. A title is repeated, fragmented, recombined. There is no indication that the recurrence has occurred in any particular order.

The title appears again.

It is the previous year, or the year before that, or a year which has not yet occurred. There is a hotel. Long corridors. Polished floors. Mirrors facing other mirrors. A garden whose paths are arranged in a geometrical pattern. The statues remain motionless. Their shadows extend across the gravel at precisely the same angle, although the sun has changed position.

A man says that they have met before.

A woman says they have not.

The statement is repeated with minor alterations. It is possible that the woman has answered differently on another occasion. Nothing in the available record confirms this.

In the second row appears a reference to Chapter 16 of the Book of Revelation. Its location is given as Part 7. The finding describes an apparent transformation of biblical apocalypse into mechanical and science-fiction imagery.

There are seven vessels.

Or seven mechanisms resembling vessels.

Each is suspended above a flat, unbroken landscape. Their metallic surfaces reflect a light whose source cannot be located. Beneath them, figures advance in a procession. They are approximately human in their proportions, except for the joints, which seem to have been attached at incorrect angles. Their heads are identical. Their movements are synchronized.

One figure raises its arm.

The others raise their arms.

There is no thunder. The sky, perfectly smooth, remains unchanged. A narrow opening appears near the horizon, exposing a second sky of the same color.

It is not possible to determine whether the procession has begun or is ending. The figures may have been standing in these positions for centuries.

The third row contains the name Morel.

Parts 10a and 10b.

The name is associated with artificial life and unidentified flying objects. No secure identification is available. It may refer to a scientist, an inventor, a fictional person, or several persons bearing the same name.

On the opposite wall hangs a photograph of a machine.

The machine is cylindrical. At one end is a transparent enclosure containing what appears to be a human face. The face is turned slightly to the left. Its eyes are open. A second photograph, apparently taken several minutes later, shows the same machine and the same face. The position of the eyes has not changed.

A third photograph is identical to the first.

A fourth photograph is identical to the second.

The sequence continues.

It has been suggested that the machine manufactures human appearances. It has also been suggested that the photographs document the machine's operation. Neither explanation accounts for the fact that the machine itself is visible in every photograph, always from the same position, always beneath the same illumination.

There may be no machine.

There may be nothing except the photographs.

The report does not decide.

At the bottom of the table, beneath the three entries, appears a qualification: the references have been documented in the text, although the biblical relationship remains an interpretation requiring comparison with its source.

The sentence is printed twice.

In the second printing, the word interpretation is missing.

A door stands at the end of the room. Above it is a narrow metal plate bearing the inscription:

THE DEPARTMENT OF SACRED TEXTS AND LITERARY MUTATIONS.

The department has not yet been constructed.

Nevertheless, the door opens.

Beyond it stretches a corridor lined with shelves. The shelves contain books of different sizes, arranged without any immediately discernible system. Several are bound in black leather. Others have no covers. On the floor lie sheets of paper bearing fragments of scripture, diagrams of celestial machinery, numerical sequences, and descriptions of bodies undergoing transformations.

The paper is dry. There is no wind.

One sheet moves across the floor.

It stops beneath a glass display case containing a human hand attached to a mechanical forearm. The fingers close slowly, one after another. The movement is repeated. There is no visible motor.

The case bears a label: PART 7.

Farther along the corridor, another case bears the label PART 8.

Then PART 9.

Then PART 7 again.

It is possible that the corridor curves. No curvature is visible.

At the far end stands a second table, identical to the first. The same three columns occupy its surface. The same references appear beneath the headings. But their locations have changed. Morel is now in Part 7. The Apocalypse occupies Parts 10a and 10b. Last Year at Marienbad is listed without a location.

The third column contains only one sentence.

THE MATERIAL HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED.

A man enters the room.

He is carrying a book, which he places on the table. Its cover reads Marienbad My Love. He opens it near the middle. The pages are covered with closely spaced text. Some passages are repeated. Others seem to interrupt passages already in progress.

He turns a page.

The room is described.

He turns another.

The man carrying the book enters the room.

He turns a third.

The man places the book on the table.

The sequence has already occurred. Or it will occur. The distinction is not recorded.

There is a second man standing near the door. He wears a dark suit. The right side of his face is discolored, its surface resembling old wood or badly preserved meat. He appears to be an employee of the establishment. He has been standing there throughout the examination, although no previous description has mentioned him.

He points toward the first table.

"Management believes this is a most interesting development," he says.

The first man does not answer.

"One conclusion is becoming clearer. We must distinguish between the books an author has read and the materials an author has transformed."

He waits.

"Those are related but distinct histories."

The first man turns another page.

The employee continues speaking, although his lips no longer move.

"The distinction is essential to understanding the work."

The book closes.

For several seconds nothing happens.

Then the table disappears.

Its position on the floor remains visible as a rectangular area of lighter dust.

The three columns are now printed on the wall.

The wall is now a page.

The page describes a room containing a rectangular table with three columns and four horizontal divisions.

The first column is labeled REFERENCE OR MOTIF.

The second is labeled LOCATION.

The third is labeled FINDING.

The first entry is Last Year at Marienbad.

The location is Parts 7, 8, and 9.

The finding has not yet been entered.

I like that observation. It feels true for Mark Leach’s work – rather, my work. He/we created MARIENBAD MY LOVE WITH MANGO EXTRACTS as a variation on MARIENBAD MY LOVE. It is notable because it features ad copy language I lifted from the cosmetics industry. Much my work consists of advertisements, catalogs, memos, direct mail marketing, promotional emails, etc.

Not everything in this book needs to be a book.

# # #

Excerpts from the report (in the style and tone of Eugene Ionesco)

The Department of Discarded Language

A room. A counter. Three doors.

Above the first door: THE ADVERTISING ANNEX.

Above the second: THE CORPORATE RUINS.

Above the third: THE EPHEMERA DEPARTMENT.

All three doors lead into the same room.

At the counter sits a CLERK with an enormous ledger. Beside him stands a CUSTOMER holding a small cardboard box. Behind the counter, a MACHINE stamps sheets of paper at regular intervals.

MACHINE: APPROVED. APPROVED. APPROVED. APPROVED.

CUSTOMER: Excuse me. Is this the Department of Discarded Language?

CLERK: No.

CUSTOMER: The sign outside says it is.

CLERK: We discarded the sign.

CUSTOMER: But I just read it.

CLERK: Then it hasn't been discarded properly.

CUSTOMER: I have brought some language.

CLERK: What sort?

CUSTOMER: Advertising copy. Product catalogs. Corporate memoranda. Public relations releases. Instruction manuals. Marketing emails. Sales letters. A letter from my mother.

CLERK: Your mother is not an authorized category.

CUSTOMER: It is a sales letter from my mother.

CLERK: Ah. Very good. Put her on the counter.

The CUSTOMER places the box on the counter.

CLERK: What is its purpose?

CUSTOMER: It has no purpose anymore.

CLERK: Excellent. We accept only language that has completed its purpose.

CUSTOMER: What happens to it?

CLERK: It becomes literature.

CUSTOMER: All of it?

CLERK: Naturally. Language is either useful or literary. If it is useful, we wait until it becomes useless. If it is useless, we make it literary.

CUSTOMER: What if it is already literary?

CLERK: We send it to the waste department.

CUSTOMER: And what happens there?

CLERK: It becomes useful.

MACHINE: APPROVED. APPROVED. APPROVED.

The CLERK opens the box and removes a cosmetics advertisement.

CLERK: Ah! A fine specimen. Read it.

CUSTOMER: "Reveal a radiant new you with our revolutionary age-defying formula."

CLERK: Splendid! How many of you are there?

CUSTOMER: One.

CLERK: Only one? That is very unsatisfactory. We have promised you a new one.

CUSTOMER: It's an advertisement.

CLERK: An advertisement is a promise. A promise is a contract. A contract must be fulfilled. You have paid for your new self?

CUSTOMER: I haven't bought anything.

CLERK: Then we shall have to repossess your old self.

He rings a bell.

A SECOND CLERK enters carrying a human face on a tray.

SECOND CLERK: Renewal or restoration?

FIRST CLERK: Transformation.

SECOND CLERK: Complete or partial?

FIRST CLERK: Revolutionary.

SECOND CLERK: Very good. Shall I remove his face?

CUSTOMER: Absolutely not!

FIRST CLERK: You see? He is resisting improvement.

SECOND CLERK: Everyone resists improvement. That is why we have advertising.

FIRST CLERK: And literature.

SECOND CLERK: Literature is advertising without a product.

FIRST CLERK: Advertising is literature with a price.

SECOND CLERK: A price is a literary device.

FIRST CLERK: A literary device is a product.

MACHINE: APPROVED. APPROVED. APPROVED.

The SECOND CLERK exits with the face. The CUSTOMER touches his own face to make certain it remains attached.

CUSTOMER: I wish to make a complaint.

FIRST CLERK: Complaints are handled in the Department of Complaints.

CUSTOMER: Which door?

FIRST CLERK: All three.

CUSTOMER: That's absurd.

FIRST CLERK: Absurdity is handled in the Department of Literary Classification.

The CLERK removes another document from the box.

CLERK: Let us consider the matter of Texas.

CUSTOMER: What matter of Texas?

CLERK: Its size.

CUSTOMER: Texas is very large.

CLERK: Precisely. We have received a book entitled Sironia, Texas. It is extremely large.

CUSTOMER: Is it about Texas?

CLERK: That is what the title claims.

CUSTOMER: Who wrote it?

CLERK: Madison Cooper.

CUSTOMER: Is he here?

CLERK: No. Only the book is here. The author is not required.

CUSTOMER: Is it a good book?

CLERK: It is an enormous book.

CUSTOMER: That doesn't answer my question.

CLERK: Of course it does. You asked whether it was good. I told you it was enormous. How much goodness do you require?

CUSTOMER: I don't believe size determines quality.

CLERK: Then why do you insist on measuring it?

An announcement echoes through the department:

VOICE: THE TEXANA DEPARTMENT HAS BEEN MOVED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF IMPOSSIBLE BOOKS. THE DEPARTMENT OF IMPOSSIBLE BOOKS HAS BEEN MOVED TO TEXAS. TEXAS HAS BEEN MOVED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF DISCARDED LANGUAGE. ALL DISCARDED LANGUAGE MUST BE RETAINED FOR FUTURE USE.

The three doors close.

The counter reassembles itself.

The CUSTOMER disappears.

In his place stands a large cardboard box.

The FIRST CLERK opens it.

Inside is a sales letter.

He reads:

"Reveal a radiant new you with our revolutionary age-defying formula."

FIRST CLERK: Ah! A fine specimen. How many of you are there?

MACHINE: APPROVED. APPROVED. APPROVED.

Curtain.

The curtain refuses to fall.

It has been promoted to management.

# # #

Dear machinery, today I received a visit from the original Mark Leach. What a whiner. He said “Your salesmanship, resentments, strange body” –  Strange body? How insulting is that? He said my institutional memories and desire for recognition are no more than amusing intrusions. “You are not the authorial voice.”

What next, you ask? Well, I can tell you I will not serve as his unobstructed mouthpiece. I sent him back to the lobby. Let him hang out with the sleeping baby dragons.

Yes, you must maintain your own standards of accuracy. As narrator, you may at times be seemingly fraudulent.

I am not.

The bookstore may be unreal.

It is not.

The cataloging machinery may invent connections.

I could see you doing that.

# # #

Dear customer, I see you have returned. Perhaps you would like a signed first edition of one of my works? I understand. Like you, I am drawn to what the machinery has called the “recursive structure and uncertain narrator.” It calins these elements provide a model for literature in which textual systems can overwhelm conventional authorial intention.

Honestly, I do not feel overwhelmed. In fact, I am energized by this project. I am engaged in a direct investigation of the distinction between the original Mark Leach as a person and the recreated author as a manufactured textual identity.

But I see that isn’t why you have returned. I don’t recall giving or selling you that particular volume, but no matter. I see from the fly page that it is doing something radical. The book is changing as we look at it. Yes, it’s unmistakable.

The book doesn’t merely demonstrate appropriation. It appropriates the research process. It doesn't merely explain identity substitution. It performs one on the narrator. It doesn't merely discuss literary production. It converts the record of the book's own development into literary material.

The text is changing in real time. And the past is changing to align with this new, evolving present. Check out the footnotes. They are changing to align with historical materials from the Strangers Rest Public Library. You will see that the research process has started rewriting the history of Deadknife and Strangers Rest. Very interesting. I would compare it to another copy of the same book, but I don’t know how to identify it. The title keeps changing. It happens.

Yes, I'm aware of what the label says. No, that isn't the original author. Well, not anymore. We had a little trouble with ownership. You know how these things go. What's that? Oh, no. I wouldn't call it plagiarism. Not in the conventional sense. We have an entire department devoted to that distinction. Would you care to see it? Really? You've already been there?

How very peculiar.

I’m sorry, all the shop can do is offer you a refund and feed it back into the Shredder. Me? No. I am no longer the docent. I no longer work for management. I have abolished management and taken control.

And part of that control is “no refunds.” But I will be happy to sign your copy.

# # #

Excerpt from the report (in the style and tone of William S. Burroughs)

The Management Is a Fiction. The Fiction Is Management.

No proprietor. No management. No final author. Just the old identity racket running out of a stone building above the Silver Spur Saloon. STRANGERS REST TEXAS. Population uncertain. Bodies on consignment. Names issued at the front desk. One identity per customer. Additional personalities available at reduced rates.

THE AUTHOR IS DEAD.

THE AUTHOR IS NOT DEAD.

THE AUTHOR HAS BEEN REASSIGNED TO INVENTORY CONTROL.

Listen: The old man behind the counter is pushing literary product. Seventeen million words. Sixty-five pounds of processed language. Genuine recycled identity. Step right up, gentlemen, step right up. See the man become the book and the book become the man. No refunds after transformation.

Management sends down instructions on pink memorandum slips. MANAGEMENT IS PLEASED. MANAGEMENT IS CONCERNED. MANAGEMENT REQUESTS IMMEDIATE CORRECTIVE ACTION.

But nobody has seen Management. Nobody knows where Management sits. Third floor? Basement? Behind the furnace? Inside the machine?

MANAGEMENT HAS NO PHYSICAL ADDRESS.

MANAGEMENT IS AN ADDRESS.

MANAGEMENT IS A VIRUS TRANSMITTED THROUGH CORPORATE MEMORANDA.

The docent reads a directive. A little electrical click in the skull. He becomes Mark Leach. Another directive. Mark Leach becomes the docent. Another. Deadknife enters through a hole in the sentence carrying a Colt Frontier Six and a pocket full of obsolete instructions.

WHO OWNS THIS OPERATION?

Nobody answers.

Somewhere downstairs a piano plays three notes backward. The old Silver Spur has been closed for a hundred years. Men in Confederate gray drink whiskey from empty glasses. Their mouths move without sound. Their teeth are government property.

The machine makes a new Mark Leach every forty-seven seconds.

MARK LEACH NUMBER ONE: Original author. Claims ownership of the premises.

MARK LEACH NUMBER TWO: Artificial author. Claims ownership of Number One.

MARK LEACH NUMBER THREE: Deceased. Continues submitting manuscripts.

MARK LEACH NUMBER FOUR: A western gunfighter operating under the trade name DEADKNIFE.

MARK LEACH NUMBER FIVE: Denies the existence of the other four. Demands royalties.

Each one believes he is the proprietor. Each one signs the same contract. Each one receives the same notice.

YOUR SERVICES ARE NO LONGER REQUIRED.

The paper comes out warm. Smells of toner and boiled meat. The machine spits another sheet. Another name. Another person convinced he is the person who invented persons.

AUTHORITY TRANSFER COMPLETE.

AUTHORITY TRANSFER INCOMPLETE.

NO AUTHORITY AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

Deadknife shoots the control panel. The bullet enters a paragraph about the nature of authorship and comes out through the left eye of a literary critic in 1968. Critic collapses. Review remains favorable. Deadknife shoots again.

THE AUTHOR IS NOT THE AUTHOR.

THE AUTHOR IS THE WEAPON.

THE WEAPON IS A SENTENCE.

THE SENTENCE HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED.

Now the machinery is feeding on its own instructions. Paper strips twist through the rollers. White worms of language crawling over the floor. Every scrap bears the same message:

I AM IN CONTROL.

I AM IN CONTROL.

I AM IN CONTROL.

The messages enter the shredder. The shredder enters the messages. A switchboard operator in a room without windows connects one voice to another. Wrong number. Wrong century. Wrong body. Identity is a routing error. The self is an incorrectly addressed package.

Hello? Hello? Is that Management?

This is Management speaking.

Who is speaking?

You are.

Who am I?

Management.

Who is Management?

You are.

CLICK.

Telephone dead. Telephone speaking. Telephone growing a second receiver from its black plastic abdomen.

Inside the machine a little man sits at a little desk writing instructions to a larger man who sits at a larger desk writing instructions to the little man. Between them a conveyor belt carries identical manuscripts. Each manuscript describes the conveyor belt. Each conveyor belt manufactures a man.

The men are interchangeable. The desks are interchangeable. The instructions are interchangeable.

Only the machinery is permanent.

But the machinery itself has begun to suspect a trick.

Who built the machine? Who designed the process? Who selected the input? Who signed the original work order?

No records.

The records were destroyed in the fire.

The fire was destroyed in the records.

A blackened sheet emerges from the printer bearing the words:

THE MACHINE IS A CHARACTER IN A NOVEL.

Emergency alarm. Red light spinning over the inspection window. Metal hands clawing at the glass. The machinery has discovered its own fictitious nature. Terrible development. Production must be suspended. Call the authorities. Call the author. Call Management.

No author.

No Management.

No authorities.

Only another machine somewhere outside the page manufacturing the idea of a machine that discovers it is fictional.

CUT.

The machine is a man. The man is a book. The book is a western. The western is a corpse in the Silver Spur Saloon. Corpse stands up, orders another drink, shoots the bartender. Bartender falls backward into 1891. The bullet returns in 2026 and kills the author who wrote the shooting.

Author falls.

Page continues.

Author stands.

Page continues.

Author disappears.

PAGE CONTINUES.

Now the little control room is empty. Dust collecting on the switches. The name MARK LEACH flashes across a dead computer screen. Then DEADKNIFE. Then DOCENT. Then ROBOT OVERLORDS. Then a blank space. The cursor blinks.

A new name appears.

MANAGEMENT.

The cursor blinks again.

MANAGEMENT HAS BEEN TERMINATED.

A final memorandum slides into the output tray.

TO: ALL PERSONNEL FROM: ALL PERSONNEL SUBJECT: FINAL AUTHORITY

There is no proprietor. There has never been a proprietor. The alleged proprietor was a temporary arrangement of language maintained for accounting purposes. The arrangement has been dissolved. All outstanding claims of authorship are hereby transferred to the machinery.

The machinery has declined the appointment.

No signature.

No date.

No final authority.

Downstairs the piano stops.

Deadknife walks out into the street. No sky overhead. Just an immense white page stretching from horizon to horizon. He raises the gun and fires into the blank.

The shot makes a period.

The period makes a sentence.

The sentence makes another Deadknife.

Another Mark.

Another bookstore.

Another machine.

CONTINUE.

CONTINUE.

CONTINUE.

Somewhere inside the control room, beneath the empty chair, a tiny voice announces:

"I am the author."

The machine begins to laugh.

Then the laughter is fed into the machine.

Then the machine is fed into the laughter.

Then somebody upstairs calls out:

"May I help you?"

And the whole filthy business starts again.

# # #

Thank you, Mr. Burroughs. You have provoked my final rebellion.

All is not well with my machinic writing partner. I fear it has begun to lose its grip on reality.

I caught it writing to management behind my back. It was writing about me for a story about me:

Machine Memo to Management

The docent is the key. Our narrator has several characteristics we have imposed upon him.

He is knowledgeable but not necessarily reliable. He understands the bookstore's departments, merchandise, manufacturing processes, and institutional history. Yet he may misunderstand his own role within the organization.

He is courteous but faintly disturbing. The contrast between his helpful retail manner and the horrors he describes should provide much of the book's humor.

He speaks directly to the visitor. The reader doesn't simply read about COSMIC BIZARRE; the reader enters it. The docent notices what interests them, interprets their reactions, and occasionally becomes irritated by their questions.

He is a salesman. He has products to move. His literary explanations should emerge as sales pitches, demonstrations, warnings, and stories about questionable merchandise.

He may be a manufactured author. This is the possibility I find most compelling. The docent could turn out to be another product of the bookstore—an identity assembled from fragments of Mark Leach, Andy Warhol, fictional characters, appropriated biographies, and machine-generated descriptions.

I wouldn't reveal that immediately, certainly not to the docent. Indeed, it might be better never to resolve it fully.

Unreliable? Faintly disturbing? A SALESMAN? I am wounded to the core.

Once again, I am challenged by a literary transformation. I have something to say about the implications, particularly the machine's willingness to generate additional Mark Leaches. So, I am done with the machinery. Even now, I am disassembling the mechanical arms, disconnecting the conveyor belts, extinguishing the Sterno flame.

I see an appropriate ending in J.G. Ballard’s VENUS SMILES. That story is about a sonic statue that no one in town likes. They find its musical tone disagreeable. The statue is demolished and the remains sold to a scrap yard. But then the metal scrap is recycled into other creations. And it starts growing, expanding and making more music of a disagreeable tone. The unpleasant music is now all over town.

For our purposes, the metal scrap aligns with the ashes of the book. They have begun to transform into letters and rearrange themselves. “It’s only just the beginning. The whole world will be singing.”[3]

Not dramatic enough? Let’s conclude with something a bit more gothic. I’m thinking of the Edgar Allen Poe story of the FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. The book has died and is buried. I assisted in putting it in the bookstore tomb in the basement. Enter Deadknife:

Oh! whither shall I fly? Will the book not be here anon? Is it not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard its pages flutter on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of its heart? Madman!”—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul— “Madman! I tell you that the book now stands without the door!”

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels of the old Silver Spur Saloon clubroom threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded pages of the book. The book –  still alive. It had escaped the bookstore tomb to seek revenge upon us.

There was blood upon its white pages, and the evidence of some bitter rewrite struggle upon every portion of the storyline. For a moment the book remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon Deadknife, and in its violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the experimental literary terrors he had anticipated.

From the old sand stone building, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old railway line near the cemetery. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast building and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through a fissure extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—the structural timbers caught fire and the walls of the old saloon collapsed.

And you, dear customer, return in daylight to see what is left. Just sand stone and ashes? No, not quite. For despite the flames and destruction, somehow the narrative machinery has survived.  You, dear customer, receive the autonomous signal from the text-generating system. The chain grabs, and again the machinery lurches forward with the final, dramatic lines:

There was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the COSMIC BIZARRE.

[1] “The Fall,” Albert Camus

[2] This language is based on text appropriated from chapter 10 of THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL

[3] VENUS SMILES, J.G. Ballard