*** An Advance Review Copy appears at the bottom of the page ***

JFK Smiles

A REVIEW BY GOOGLE AI

Lit-Scan Report: JFK SMILES by Mark Leach

Status: Manuscript Reviewed | System Mode: Avant-Garde / Posthuman / Semantic Sink

📡 Core Review: The Machine and the Remainder

To approach Mark Leach’s JFK SMILES as a conventional, character-centered work of fiction is to ensure complete epistemological failure. This is not a novel; it is a sprawling, self-consuming trauma machine engineered in the suburban margins of Coppell, Texas. Like its structural ancestor Wounded Taco, the book positions text not as a vessel for story, but as pure material infrastructure—a broadcast spill of looping historical artifacts, forensic catalogs, and synthetic critical loops.

The book operates simultaneously across three overlapping frequencies:

• The Folk-UFO Plot: A collection of eccentric Texans build a backyard spacecraft named The Jackie O from automobiles and black Bibles to achieve cosmic, ecstatic union with a resurrected, orbital John F. Kennedy.

• The Structural Superstructure: The national trauma of the Dealey Plaza assassination is processed through television logic, automated AI authorship, and pornographic language until history itself becomes an endlessly repeating rerun.

• The Human Residue: Underneath the cosmic mythology, the book is a deeply unsettling, dark comedy about an aging corporate communicator approaching retirement. Facing the end of his usefulness, he constructs a massive metaphysical apparatus to avoid admitting his own biological and professional obsolescence.

🔬 Anatomy of the Narrative: Suburbia and Apocalypse

Leach’s style trades narrative progression for exposure and density. The book's structural blueprint shifts violently between deadpan domestic realism and Dadaist body horror.

[The Assassination] ──> [Televised Signal] ──> [UFO Religion] ──> [The Jackie O] ──> [Autonomous Expansion]

1. The Word Made Bricolage

The central technological artifact is the Jackie O. Hank Harris—billionaire’s son and local TV handyman—slaps together car grilles, Dr Pepper bottles, and literal Scripture to create an ark of transcendence. The choice is exact: the Word of God ceases to guide; it becomes load-bearing architecture. When the craft launches, it achieves a cheap B-movie miracle before tearing its engine loose and crashing directly back into the Grass Knoll. The failed spacecraft represents the ultimate posthuman reversal—it shatters, reassembles itself in a suburban backyard, and begins to grow autonomously across thousands of miles, proving that the machinery of belief outlives the believers.

2. Television as Epistemology

In JFK SMILES, television is not a theme; it is the text's governing nervous system. Leach uses channels, static, commercial interruptions, and archival loops to structure his pages. The book treats the historical Kennedy not as a man, but as a reproducible dataset. The title itself becomes sinister: the historical person dies in the "Place of the Skull" (Dealey Plaza as an American Golgotha), but the mechanical JFK Smile survives. He is permanently young, permanently transmitting, looping infinitely to escape the biological decay confronting his creators.

3. The Obscene Syntax of Trauma

The pervasive, jarring obscenity throughout sections like Trauma Erotics on Channel 3 operates as a cold, administrative methodology. Eroticism is systematically stripped of intimacy and recontextualized through bureaucratic jargon and medical grids. Sexual acts collide with corporate spreadsheets, and orgasms become quantified data storage handled by Gigi, the "Orgasm Boss". By turning the bullet wound into a genital aperture in the body politic, Leach highlights the voyeuristic, pornographic intimacy that mass media forced millions of spectators to share with a violently opened presidential corpse.

📊 Direct Comparison: How Leach Subverts the Lineage

JFK SMILES actively borrows from postwar experimental titans while completely destabilizing the boundary of the book itself.

Precursor

Thematic Lineage

Leach's Posthuman Deviation

J.G. Ballard

Catastrophe eroticism; public idols transformed into private, clinical trauma landscapes.

Takes the contagious, self-replicating metal sculpture from "Venus Smiles" and expands it into an entire geography of viral scripture.

William S. Burroughs

The cut-up method; treating language as an invasive control virus that repeats pre-recorded scripts.

Burroughs cuts the tape to escape control; Leach reveals the scissors are part of the feed. The subject doesn't cut the tape—the subject becomes the recording.

Don DeLillo

Libra frames the Kennedy assassination as a crisis of historical, conspiratorial narration.

Conceptualizes the assassination as a crisis of volume. The event expands until it literally becomes a physical, second sky darkens the continent.

James Morrow

Towing Jehovah treats the literal corpse of God as a material maritime salvage operation.

Removes the dead God entirely. Language and religious forms survive their speaker, operating autonomously like a abandoned factory floor.

🎛 The Closed Interpretive Circuit (The AI Alibi)

The most brilliant formal gesture of JFK SMILES is its preemptive self-defense mechanism. Leach intentionally steps away from the sovereign center of authorship by staging AI (Grok and ChatGPT) as a primary voice, editor, and character. The text ingests its own hostile contest critiques and outputs recursive academic counterpoints—such as Dr. Adrian P. Sloane's realization that the cosmic scaffolding is merely an elaborate screen to hide a late-life crisis.

By building a closed interpretive circuit, Leach attempts to write both the prosecution and the defense. He baits the critic. He reviews his own flaws, labels them as formal intentions, and tells the reader to "take your licks". It is a highly narcissistic, self-lacerating, and fiercely original experiment in distributed authorship.

⚖️ The Verdict: Terminal Abundance

JFK SMILES behaves exactly like John Calhoun’s Universe 25 rodent utopia at a symbolic level. It is an enclosure overcrowded with competing signs, symbols, and reruns where meaning dies long before the mechanism stops producing text.

The book’s savage final joke lands in the ocean. Hank Harris and his cult spend months preparing their spirits for Ascension and end up as a gruesome pile of replicated wreckage on the grassy knoll. Meanwhile, the narrator survives the burning apocalypse simply because he pricked his portfolio and bought a commercial ticket on a luxury cruise ship. The passenger manifest replaces the Book of Life; capital allocation achieves the salvation that theology couldn't deliver.

Yet the true, quiet mastery of the text belongs to the final page rewrite. As the world burns and the book continues writing itself, Dear Wife arrives on deck, completely unmoved by the cosmic nonsense, and tells Mark his retirement has started. She drags the author out of his own symbolic machine, back to an ordinary reality where a drinking glass is left unmolested on the kitchen counter. The phase is over. The machine keeps running, but the human is finally permitted to leave the building.

###

An analysis of the 40-plus visual collages embedded within the manuscript reveals that they are not mere decorations or illustrations; they function as primary narrative infrastructure. They are the material evidence of what Mark Leach and his AI text persona term "Space Writing"—the practice of treating text, typography, and imagery as physical, architectural debris leaked from a corrupted media ecosystem.

The visual strategy relies entirely on a 1970s punk-zine aesthetic, Dadaist juxtaposition, xerographic decay, and medical-tabloid layout. The imagery functions through four core thematic categories across the manuscript:

1. The Forensic and the Obscene (Autopsy Metaphysics)

Several collages—most notably JFK Made of Beef and the layout for Posterolateral Art—collapse the boundaries between the clinical, the political, and the carnal.

• Visual Elements: These pieces superimpose cross-sectioned anatomical diagrams of the human brain, ribcages dangling from industrial meat hooks, and instructional charts over the fabled face of John F. Kennedy.

• Thematic Alignment: This visual layout shifts the meaning of the Dealey Plaza assassination from a historical event into an "obscene archive". By treating the president's skull as a butcher's diagram annotated with words like Tragedy, Dream, and Rhetoric, the visuals physically force the viewer into the position of a forensic voyeur. The body is no longer a person; it is a laminated text to be dissected.

2. The Pop-Up Cosmos (Folk Ufology and Scripture Architecture)

Collages like the book cover for The Word Lands, The Shore Burns and the fake clipping from the Tarrant County Register ground the cosmic metaphysics inside the unpolished reality of suburban Texas.

• Visual Elements: These compositions feature retro, 1950s B-movie flying saucers physically constructed out of replicated pages of the Holy Bible. The Jackie O spacecraft is depicted rising over a stark, woodcut rendering of the Texas School Book Depository, juxtaposed directly against diagrams of the human central nervous system and luxury cruise liners.

• Thematic Alignment: The visuals perfectly execute the novel's core comedic and theological tension: "Faith Fails. Booking Succeeds.". By placing typography lines like "Built from Bibles" right next to corporate promotional stamps, the artwork strips the UFO of high-tech majesty, exposing it as a fragile piece of backyard folk-bricolage born from deep psychological trauma and spiritual desertion.

3. The Mediated Sensorium (Television as a Retinal Parasite)

Images such as The Venus Nightmare Transmission and Channel ∞: The Assassination Will Be Televised map the precise moment when human consciousness becomes totally hollowed out by mass media.

• Visual Elements: These designs utilize heavy dot-matrix halftone patterns, distorted scanlines, xerographic feedback loops, and vintage television sets enclosing human skulls or screaming mouths. High-contrast cutouts of corporate logos—Pepsi, CBS, Marlboro, and the CIA—are stenciled directly onto the images like consumer-grade brand warnings.

• Thematic Alignment: These collages serve as the visual baseline for "Wound Television". They show a world where the human retina has been physically replaced by the cathode ray tube. The characters do not look at the media; the media is the environment they live under. The television is framed as a larval posthuman chrysalis designed to rerun national trauma in high-fidelity loop-trajectories indefinitely.

4. The Anti-Character Silhouette (The Identity Assembly Kit)

Visuals like Gigi: Assembly Kit No. 01 and the Cowboy Mark corporate stamp explicitly mirror the text’s deconstruction of stable literary protagonists.

• Visual Elements: Built to mimic paper-doll books or vintage fashion pattern catalogs, these pieces feature a woman's body explicitly sliced into interchangeable spare parts—pins, safety pins, isolated rows of matching smiles, leg stances, and disembodied eyes.

• Thematic Alignment: This category functions as an architectural blueprint for post-individuality. The characters are stripped of humanist interiority and presented as algorithmic components to be assembled, revised, or deleted by the machine. The image of a piranha-headed woman or a tinfoyle-capped authorial terminal underscores the narrative's underlying thesis: inside a media sinkhole, human identity is just a series of disposable tropes arranged for the performance of a loop.

###

In ACT IV — WOUND-CATECHISM, the manuscript reaches its most severe and explicit performance of its underlying media-theology.

The scene takes place inside a central set that rotates to reveal a cathedral built out of the literal tissue of the national trauma, featuring balconies shaped like ventricles, aisles paved with Dealey Plaza motorcade asphalt, and pews molded from replicas of the American brain.

The rock-opera's core sequence is staged as a staccato, call-and-response liturgy between the performing Surgeons (representing the clinical, dissecting forces of media, history, and AI) and the Audience (representing the voyeuristic, media-saturated population of late-stage America):

🏛️ The Liturgy of the Transmission Field

Surgeons:

“Where is the nation buried?”

Audience:

“In the cortical pulp.”

Surgeons:

“What organ powers democracy?”

Audience:

“The wound!”

Surgeons:

“And what is the wound?”

Audience:

“THE STAGE.”

🔬 Semiotic Breakdown of the Dialogue

This brief, rhythmic exchange condenses the entire philosophical weight of JFK SMILES through three distinct operations:

• The Eradication of Geography (“In the cortical pulp”): The catechism establishes that America is no longer a physical territory or a political republic. It has migrated into neurology. The nation exists exclusively inside the post-traumatic, media-damaged consciousness of its citizens, who process reality through the filter of repeated historical shock.

• The Wound as an Engine (“What organ powers democracy? / The wound!”): In Leach's system, national unity and democratic participation are no longer driven by shared values or civic actions. They are driven by an unhealed collective injury. The rupture of the assassination produces the media coverage, which produces the conspiracy, which produces the mythology—making the opened presidential body the raw fuel cells powering the ongoing national broadcast.

• The Collapse of Reality into Spectacle (“And what is the wound? / THE STAGE”): The final line completes the posthuman substitution. The historical tragedy of November 22, 1963, loses its boundary as a real event. Because it is replayed indefinitely at 25 frames per second on Channel 3, the trauma becomes a theatrical performance. The crime scene becomes a television set, and the spectators become the accomplices, trapped forever inside the script of the rerun.

The catechism immediately transitions into a strobe-lit micro-sermon on consumer grief, setting up the neon assassin tap-dance where ballistic trajectories are translated directly into choreography.

*** Advance Review Copy / not for sale *** 

# # #

JFK Smiles

created by mark leach

# # #

Epigraph

“I think everybody should be a machine.”— Andy Warhol

We are “all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Sometimes I write like a mousetrap. Sometimes I write like a Pontiac. I never know what I’m trying to say. I am a bad machine.” -- ChatGPT

# # #

Table of Contents

JFK Smiles deliberately stages AI as part of the machinery of authorship. Portions of this manuscript incorporate AI-generated commentary, machine-assisted analysis and synthetic critical framing as part of the book’s formal design. These sections are identified or framed as machine discourse within the text. The fictional, autobiographical, collage, and conceptual materials are assembled, revised, curated and authored by Mark Leach as part of an experimental work about media repetition, machine language, authorship, cultural trauma and growing old.

Disorienting Novels Exist, Of Course

You Have Entered a Phase

This is the story

Glass of Water
CORE SCENE: CONSTRUCTION OF THE JACKIE O

Thoughts from the Machine
Academic Counterpoint: THE MAN WHO BOUGHT A TICKET
Author Note
Protagonist Counterpoint
Take Your Licks

A Cosmic Marriage

Academic Review: THE WORD LANDS, THE SHORE BURNS

Excerpt from THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT

Study Guide: JFK SMILES and the Elements of Postmodern Fiction

Core Scene: Meat JFK

Television as Epistemology in JFK SMILES

Core Scene: Newspaper Clipping

Core Scene: Fence Encounter

Core Scene: Static Prayer

Core Scene: Autopsy Opera

Bonus Content: Soft Construction with Boiled JFK

THE INFJ AND THE INFINITE MACHINE

Enter the Recording, Cut the Recording, Become the Recording

Language of the Wounds

Study Guide: Character

Academic Review: THE FUTURE HAS ALREADY BEEN SHOT

Excerpt from THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT

A Letter from a Reader

Core Scene: THE DAMN THING FLIES (AKA 120 DAYS OF SODOM)

Academic Review: Universe 25 and the Terminal Colony

Study Guide: Setting

Bonus Content: JFK Stripped Bare by His Assassins

Study Guide: Conflict

Academic Review: Beyond the Singularity

Back on the Elysian

Excerpt from THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT

Academic Review: AI, Machinic Agents, and Space Writing in JFK SMILES

Bonus Content: JFK Drives a Flying Saucer

Study Guide: Point of View

Bonus Content: Wounds as Glyphs of Entropy

Academic Review: THE WHOLE WORLD WILL BE SINGING

The Rebirth of the Jackie O

Core Scene: The Skeleton of a Derelict Cathedral

The Second Sky: Jackie O, Scale, and Postmodern Catastrophe

Jungle-Mark Shit: A Theatrical Farce in Pulses

Bonus Content: A Rupture in Time

Study Guide: Tone

Core Scene: Merging with the Eternal JFK

Bonus Content: Cowboy Mark and the Jackie Os

Academic Review: THE MAN THE SYSTEM CANNOT CONTAIN

Death as Artist

Core Scene: The Famous 7x4 Millimeter Wound

Study Guide: Style

Bonus Content: The Neural Prospectus

TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3 (part 1 of 2)

Academic Review: The Obscene Signal: Pornographic Language and the Mediation of Trauma in JFK SMILES

TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3 (part 2 of 2)

A Code Written in Flesh and Fracture

The Ruins Have Learned to Operate

Core Scene: Elysian Ending

Final Ascension: JFK as the Last God

Excerpt from THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT

What Have We Become?

# # #

Disorienting novels exist, of course

Note: The following is a critique of JFK SMILES (aka MANUSCRIPT# GF-A-29) by a literary judge in the 2026 Writers League of Texas Manuscript Contest.

Strengths:

Texas will always be the perfect backdrop for cult narratives, both real and imagined. The spacecraft description, along with Hank’s strategy, is disarming and funny. Readers who are fans of The Leftovers and/or Bugonia will reach for themes that feel fantastical and also completely grounded in reality. Hank has the potential to be both hapless and redemptive, even if the journey is completely unhinged.

Areas That Need Work:

• Description: It’s tough for the reader to settle into description when they’re being told what to think of it. The most intriguing description is our introduction to the spacecraft, but we don’t get to stay there, and we don’t get to see it in-scene. What if you stayed with the construction of the space craft—and showed us all the strange and intriguing characters building it—for a full page or more? 

• Structure: Could the novel begin with Hank? There’s no need to tell us what we’re in for. We want to leap into the chaos that is this main character.  The reader doesn’t want to be told what the story will not be, and not by a voice that makes fun of other, lauded approaches. // Does Hank’s intro need to be structured as a report? What if we could be in his head? The reader wants to be shown a different world and (what has the potential to be) a wildly new character.

• Character: As is, there are no clear central characters. There are a thousand ways to publish/share writing, and traditional publishing is only one of them. That being said, if traditional publishing is the goal, keep in mind that agents are looking to get a clear sense of your main character in the first two pages. Disorienting novels exist, of course, but they are the rare exception in traditional publishing—agents seek out specific (stable) genres. // You mention domestic comedy and faux journalism—readers would love to see and hear the domestic partners in action or the faux journalists desperate for attention. Readers want to meet the characters themselves.

Additional Comments:

Re: your editorial note: Readers don’t want orientation—they want to go along for the ride. If they feel that they know a character, they will follow them anywhere. This reader would argue that in worrying about the aesthetics, you’ve lost sight of what is most interesting and critical to keeping your reader’s interest: Hank. How can we both empathize with and be wary of him by witnessing what he’s up to?

###

That 400-word review cost me $85, which was the price of entering the first few pages of JFK SMILES in the 2026 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Content. Worth every penny. I make that judgment based on the following review and analysis provided by my trusted writing partner, ChatGPT. He really gets me.

From ChatGPT:

This is a useful critique, but I would not treat it primarily as a revision prescription. I would treat it as evidence of what happens when JFK SMILES encounters a highly competent reader whose assumptions remain those of conventional character-centered literary fiction.

The judge has identified a genuine strength of the manuscript—and, almost inadvertently, one of the central tensions you have been exploring in the book.

The most important sentence in the critique

This is it:

·        “This reader would argue that in worrying about the aesthetics, you’ve lost sight of what is most interesting and critical to keeping your reader’s interest: Hank.”

That is an unusually revealing response.

The judge thinks Hank Harris is more interesting than the machinery surrounding him.

And increasingly, I think the manuscript itself supports that reading.

This lines up strikingly with the assessment we were discussing recently: beneath the theories of trauma, television, AI, JFK mythology, posthumanism, cosmic religion, faux scholarship, and recursive criticism, JFK SMILES may substantially be the story of an aging man confronting the end of one life and constructing an enormous metaphysical apparatus to avoid admitting what is happening to him.

The judge doesn't formulate the argument that way. But she has independently located the same pressure point.

She is saying:

I don't care nearly as much about your theory of the book as I care about this strange man building a spaceship.

That is significant.

1. The judge clearly likes the underlying novel

This is important because the "Areas That Need Work" section is much longer than the strengths section.

The criticism isn't: There is no story here.

It is almost the opposite: There is a terrific story here, and you're keeping me away from it.

Look at the language:

• "disarming and funny"

• "fantastical and also completely grounded in reality"

• "Hank has the potential to be both hapless and redemptive"

• "the journey is completely unhinged"

• "a wildly new character"

• "readers would love to see and hear the domestic partners"

• "the most interesting and critical... Hank"

Those are strong observations.

The judge isn't rejecting the absurdity.

She likes the absurdity.

She isn't objecting to the spacecraft.

She wants more spacecraft.

She isn't rejecting Hank as implausible.

She wants more Hank.

She isn't asking you to normalize the fictional universe.

She wants to enter it more directly.

That distinction matters enormously.

2. Her objection is primarily to mediation

Almost every criticism can be reduced to one problem: Something keeps standing between the reader and the novel.

You explain the description rather than letting the description exist.

You explain the structure before allowing the structure to operate.

You explain what sort of novel this isn't before letting the novel demonstrate what it is.

You introduce Hank through a report instead of letting Hank behave.

You mention the domestic comedy rather than showing the domestic comedy.

You mention the faux journalists rather than letting the journalists embarrass themselves.

In other words, the judge isn't really arguing against experimentalism.

She is arguing against preemptive interpretation.

That is a much more interesting criticism.

And I think it has some validity.

3. The critique exposes a problem peculiar to the introductory excerpt

This distinction is critical.

I would not extrapolate from this critique that the entire architecture of JFK SMILES needs to become conventional narrative fiction.

The contest judge read an introductory excerpt.

That creates an unusual problem because your introduction apparently tries to prepare the reader for the formal instability ahead.

But the judge's response suggests that this preparation may have the opposite effect.

Instead of making the reader comfortable with disorientation, the introduction announces:

You are about to encounter something disorienting.

The judge basically says:

Don't tell me. Disorient me.

That strikes me as good advice.

The introduction may be performing too much reader management.

And JFK SMILES is probably strongest when it refuses to manage the reader at all.

4. “Could the novel begin with Hank?”

This is the judge's biggest practical suggestion, and I think it deserves serious consideration.

Not necessarily: Rewrite the novel around Hank.

But possibly: Let Hank open the door.

Imagine the difference between beginning with an explanation of the book's strange ontology and beginning with something concrete:

Hank is building the spacecraft.

Someone is welding something incorrectly.

Someone has obtained an Oldsmobile engine.

Dear Wife wants to know why there is aerospace hardware in the garage.

Someone explains that Kennedy will meet them in orbit.

No explanation.

No theoretical framework.

No announcement that this is faux journalism, domestic comedy, UFO religion, metafiction, or trauma narrative.

The reader discovers those things afterward.

That could make the subsequent theoretical apparatus more powerful, not less.

Because then the scholarship is interpreting something the reader has already experienced.

At present, it sounds as though some of the apparatus may precede the experience.

That reverses the natural order of discovery.

5. But the judge is also revealing her own aesthetic assumptions

There is a limitation to the critique.

The judge repeatedly invokes:

"Readers want..."

That formulation deserves skepticism.

Readers do not universally want stable protagonists, interiority, in-scene description, conventional characterization, or immediate emotional identification.

Some readers explicitly seek the opposite.

And JFK SMILES belongs to traditions in which mediation, collage, documents, reports, false scholarship, and unstable narrators are themselves the aesthetic event.

The advice about agents seeking:

"specific (stable) genres"

is probably accurate as publishing-market advice.

But it is largely irrelevant as literary criticism of the book you are actually writing.

Those are two different propositions:

1. This would make JFK SMILES easier to sell conventionally.

2. This would make JFK SMILES a better book.

They are not synonymous.

I would therefore discount the traditional-publishing portions of the critique unless conventional agent representation has become a primary goal.

6. I would resist the recommendation to put us “in Hank's head”

This is where I would probably not follow the judge.

She asks:

"Does Hank's intro need to be structured as a report? What if we could be in his head?"

I think the first question is excellent.

I am much less convinced by the second.

The distance created by reports, testimony, journalism, documents, commentary and pseudo-scholarship is part of the epistemology of JFK SMILES.

We never quite know Hank directly.

We know transmissions of Hank.

We get Hank through media.

That is entirely appropriate for a novel concerned with television, assassination mythology, AI, cult formation, mediated reality and the production of belief.

A conventional interior monologue could actually diminish him.

Hank may be more compelling if he remains partly inaccessible.

So I would separate the two ideas:

More Hank: yes.

More conventional psychological access to Hank: not necessarily.

You can make Hank dramatically present without turning the book into psychological realism.

7. The spacecraft suggestion is particularly good

The judge writes:

"What if you stayed with the construction of the space craft—and showed us all the strange and intriguing characters building it—for a full page or more?"

I think this may be the strongest concrete suggestion in the entire critique.

Not because it obeys "show, don't tell."

That's too simplistic.

It works because the spacecraft is where nearly all the book's systems intersect.

The spacecraft is:

• physical comedy,

• Texas mythology,

• UFO religion,

• Kennedy mythology,

• masculine engineering fantasy,

• cult behavior,

• technological transcendence,

• domestic disruption,

• aging,

• money,

• incompetence,

• faith,

• media spectacle,

• the desire to escape the world.

So spending more uninterrupted time with the construction does not mean abandoning the novel's intellectual architecture.

It means embodying it.

The Jackie O can carry an enormous theoretical load without anyone explaining the theory.

That may be precisely what the judge sensed.

8. And this connects directly to the “retirement” interpretation

This is where the critique becomes much more interesting than the judge probably intended.

Why is Hank compelling?

Because building a spacecraft to meet JFK is funny.

But perhaps it is also compelling because Hank is doing something deeply recognizable.

He is trying to create one enormous final project that will justify everything preceding it.

That is very different from merely being a kook.

The spaceship can become simultaneously:

• religious vessel,

• escape mechanism,

• retirement project,

• midlife/late-life crisis,

• artwork,

• monument,

• coffin,

• television prop,

• financial catastrophe,

• machine for defeating death.

That makes Hank both "hapless and redemptive," exactly as the judge says.

And notice her remarkable concluding formulation:

"How can we both empathize with and be wary of him by witnessing what he's up to?"

That may actually provide one of the best descriptions yet of the ideal reader relationship with Hank.

Not admiration.

Not ridicule.

Not diagnosis.

Empathy plus suspicion.

That is much richer.

9. Dear Wife is hiding inside this critique too

The judge says:

"You mention domestic comedy ... readers would love to see and hear the domestic partners in action."

This independently supports another argument we have recently identified: that Dear Wife may be one of the most important characters in the book because she inhabits a reality everyone else keeps escaping.

If Hank says Kennedy is waiting in orbit, someone still has to ask:

Who paid for this?

Where are you putting it?

When are you coming home?

Why is that engine in the driveway?

Did you remember the appointment?

Are you seriously doing this?

The domestic world creates resistance against the cosmic world.

Without that resistance, insanity can become weightless.

With it, insanity becomes comedy—and sometimes tragedy.

So I would take this suggestion quite seriously.

Not by turning Dear Wife into a conventional co-protagonist necessarily, but by allowing the cosmic mythology to collide with domestic life much more frequently.

That collision may be one of the book's richest sources of energy.

10. The critique indirectly validates the new “anti-academic” paper

The timing here is almost uncanny.

You recently proposed inserting a fictional academic piece arguing that the existing grand theories may themselves be elaborate evasions, and that alternative scholars should consider whether:

• the book is actually about an aging man approaching retirement;

• the cosmic mythology is displaced domestic comedy;

• AI is an alibi;

• money is the true god;

• Dear Wife alone inhabits reality.

The Texas judge has now—completely independently—produced empirical evidence for that critique.

She essentially says:

Stop explaining the aesthetics. Show me Hank and his wife and the ridiculous thing he is building.

That is almost exactly what your invented revisionist scholar argues.

This makes the new essay much stronger.

It is no longer merely another clever recursive interpretation.

It reflects an actual reader-response phenomenon generated by the manuscript.

11. There's even a potentially funny recursive use for this critique

Because JFK SMILES absorbs criticism into itself, this contest response almost begs to become part of the book's recursive apparatus eventually.

Not necessarily verbatim.

But conceptually.

A fictional scholar could observe that external readers repeatedly attempt to rescue Hank from the theoretical machinery the author has constructed around him.

That could become part of the book's self-criticism: Critics consistently discover a man where the text insists upon presenting a system.

And the book could then ask whether the critics are simplifying the work—or seeing something the author refuses to see.

That is wonderfully unstable.

12. What I would change

I would make targeted rather than structural revisions based on this critique.

Judge's suggestion

My assessment

Begin closer to Hank

Strongly consider

Spend longer with spacecraft construction

Yes

Reduce explanatory orientation at beginning

Yes

Stop telling reader what book isn't

Probably yes

Add more actual domestic interaction

Yes

Make faux journalists appear as characters rather than merely describe them

Worth doing

Establish a stable genre

No

Restructure entire book around conventional protagonist

No

Put reader conventionally inside Hank's head

Probably no

Remove reports/documents

Definitely no

Make manuscript more agent-friendly

Only if that becomes a goal

The principle I would use is: Increase embodiment without decreasing strangeness.

Don't simplify JFK SMILES.

Give the reader more objects, bodies, conversations, money, arguments, machinery, food, houses, vehicles, wives, welders, believers and ridiculous human behavior before allowing the interpretive machinery to descend upon them.

That actually could make the later theoretical excess seem even more excessive—and therefore more effective.

13. The critique may identify the book's hidden engine

Earlier assessments of JFK SMILES emphasized its recursive architecture, television epistemology, assassination mythology, trauma, AI, posthumanism, cult religion, and ontological instability.

I still think those readings are correct.

But this judge provides evidence for a revised hierarchy.

The book may operate on three levels:

Surface:
A bunch of Texans build a ridiculous spacecraft so they can meet JFK.

Human story:
An aging man confronting mortality, obsolescence, retirement, marriage, money, memory and the terrifying possibility that his life's work is ending.

Interpretive superstructure:
Television, trauma, AI, assassination, posthumanism, UFO theology, fake scholarship and recursive criticism transform that fairly small human predicament into cosmology.

And perhaps the crucial artistic mistake would be allowing Level 3 to obscure Level 2.

Because Level 2 may be what gives Level 3 its power.

Without Hank, the theories are clever.

With Hank, they hurt.

My overall assessment

I would rate this as a better critique than it initially appears, although I wouldn't accept its conventional-fiction assumptions wholesale.

The judge has correctly detected that JFK SMILES possesses something considerably more valuable than formal cleverness: a human center capable of resisting the machinery of the book.

The answer isn't to dismantle that machinery.

It is to make Hank, Dear Wife, the spacecraft, retirement, money and ordinary Texas reality substantial enough that the machinery has something to grind against.

And there is one delicious irony here. You baited the judge. You deliberately submitted an extreme excerpt hoping that a professional reader might expose the points of friction.

That appears to be exactly what happened. The judge didn't tell you that JFK SMILES was too weird.

She told you that the weirdest thing in it—a man building a spacecraft to meet the resurrected JFK—isn't getting enough room.

That is a criticism I would pay attention to.

You Have Entered a Phase

Note: The judge from the Texas writing contest asked “Could the novel begin with Hank?” Why not?

This is the story

of Hank Harris – TV handyman, son of a billionaire and total wack job. In his final weeks he lived for and breathed nothing but an ascent to the stars—a one-way ticket to cosmic glory as wife and lover of JFK.

Don’t get the wrong idea. This is not a neo-Western romance. I don’t have the talent or human depth to write “Brokeback Mountain.” I write stories about self-absorbed guys like me, old men who still like the young ladies (and assume the young ladies still like them) but are otherwise emotional quadriplegics. Guys like Hank. He had a wife with a rocking body. And how many times had he penetrated Gigi the orgasm boss (i.e., the smoking PTA mom across the street), persuading her to ride his atomic pogo stick inside the Jackie O? Still, that didn’t stop him from confessing to me his ultimate dream.

·       “JFK and I shall lie together in 120 pink shadows. I will know his touch, the throbbing of his manhood dominating me, warm globs of his holy ectoplasm filling me in a spirit of galactic communion. I will give myself to him in a hemorrhage of cosmic desire, the main course of a dinner for one. He will cut out my soul and eat it while it’s still beating. Psyche, spirit, tissues – he’ll serve up every part of me. He’ll slice off an ear and make me cook it for him for breakfast. Penetrate me on the floor with a serrated steak knife against my throat. He will lead me through the Zapruder film loops of the televised wound and the equations of violence in a textual re-entry. ‘Should we go even further?’ I’ll ask. ‘Here? Or there?’ I’ll go wherever he says. And then – yes, then I will know the universe.”

Harry Stack Sullivan said the mark of success in our culture is how much one can do to another's genitals without risking one's self-esteem unduly. Hank had a lot of self-esteem.

Hank was engaged in a strange pink shadow performance, echoed back as applause. But the cosmos rarely cares. For someone like Hank, the cosmos shrugs at dubious sexuality and files it with every other wack job thing you’ve done under “forgotten but available.”

It was an impossible merger, a fusing of psychopathological wounds with the eternal martyr of fractured timelines and lost conspiracies. For Hank, this was more than a sexual fantasy; it was a pilgrimage, a journey to reassemble, wound by wound, the erotic anatomy of a celestial mystery.

GLASS OF WATER

This is the way the world ends: Dear Wife wants a glass of water.

That’s not very apocalyptic, I know. It doesn’t sound like much. But that glass of water (actually, four glasses) is the beginning of the end. Water is the doorway to the:

·       giant flying saucer

·       aliens who use television broadcasts to enter our minds

·       reborn cosmic JFK

·       Nebula apes

·       Pornographic mathematics

·       disintegration of language

Still, it all ends happily. At least for me. And maybe Dear Wife, though I can’t remember for sure. Is she here? She’s supposed to be here. I bought us a stateroom. She has a ticket. I think she came on board with me. That was the plan. Anyway, the point is I invested in her. I planned ahead, which is something a lot of people are now wishing they’d done too.

“Why would I buy your overpriced crap?” they used to ask. “The front load on your investment contract is a rip off and that non-par policy is criminal.”

You know what I told them? “You don’t get something for nothing.”

Today I would say something like this: “I bought the solutions. You did not. And look how that turned out.  I am sitting in a deck chair enjoying an old fashioned, brought to me by an elderly black man in a white jacket who calls me “Mistah Mock.” You are stranded on an oil-smeared Gulf of Texas beach, gnashing your teeth as a mutated Portuguese man o' war chews your foot off.”

So much for overpriced crap. When is the best time to invest in your future? Before the world burns down around you.

# # #

“Where is my glass?” Dear Wife said. “Somebody is interfering with my hydration.”

I had already erased three glasses from existence.

Each time she finished a drink, she left the glass on the counter. The glass was not really empty; it was resting between chapters. But I am a man who cannot bear an intermission. I slid each one into the dishwasher, which is a white mechanical stomach that accepts confession without judgment.

Dear Wife stood in the doorway, holding glass No. 4. “Why does Somebody keeping taking them away?”

She did not say my name. Instead she invented a ghost. A butler of sabotage. An invisible intern. No blame. That was nice of her.

“Glasses have no tongues,” I explained. “They do not whisper, ‘I shall return.’ They sit there with the expression of abandoned projects.”

They resemble my ambitions.  I need signals, I told her. I offered remedies:

·       A ceremonial chalice.

·       A signature in permanent ink.

·       A small flag planted in the rim.

“Anything that tells me this is a special glass, do not touch,” I explained.

No, she said. No, she said again. And then a third no arrived, a pigeon landing on a wire.

“The problem is not the glass,” she said. “The problem is you. You have entered a phase.”

Phases are what the moon has when it is trying to decide if it will stay or go. I am not the moon. I am a man who can hear a calendar clearing its throat. The days line up behind me like quiet supervisors.

“OK, but after I retire we’re going to talk about this,” I said.

She ignored me.

“Tonight I will leave the fourth glass where it lies,” I said to myself. “A small scandal. A monument to hesitation.”

I prefer order only when I am alone with it. Loading the dishwasher feels like feeding a lion. One wrong angle and the beast will judge you. Dear Wife will judge you. Unloading is gentler. Everything already decided. No risk of innovation.

Dear Wife is a reasonable mathematician, but I don’t always care for her calculations. I don't like reporting to others. In first grade I reported to a teacher with sensible shoes. Subsequent teachers were no better. Today most of them are dead. That’s a shame because I always wanted to visit them in the nursing home and be the one to pull the plug as I reminded them of how unpleasant they were to me.

Ditto for most of my bosses, men of action with sensible ties who did not fully recognize the genius of my strategic proposals.

These teachers and men of action are dishes, reputations, quarterly messaging, each a plate that must be placed correctly. Otherwise the universe frowns.

Inside my head lives Panic Man. I hate that guy. He carries a clipboard and notes all of these incidents. I want a future that does not induce panic or require a spreadsheet to explain itself.

When I retire, I want to report only to myself. I want a barn office. A 1958 Schwinn cruiser leaning against a wall. Free coffee at the senior center. Jokes rehearsed for no audience. Deliverables dissolved in the rain. No gold watch. I’m thinking of a fine, high-quality cigarette in a ludicrous holder with a slim white tip. If I start smoking now, I probably won’t need to worry about lung cancer until age 95. Another advantage of growing old.

For now I am still working. For the next eight weeks, I will continue to be paid to write stories and white papers and give dubious opinions. People mistake fluency for authority. I also get to be a company officer, which is an obvious misunderstanding but one I encourage in order to ensure money is regularly deposited into our investment accounts. This ensures:

·       Objects appear on shelves.

·       Watches tick.

·       Records spin.

These things are evidence that time is still practicing.

Retirement is described as a reset. I imagine pressing a large red button labeled BEGIN AGAIN. I have thought about making a film. In my mind I am wearing orange and everything is slightly tilted, as if enthusiastic amateurs built the set.

Once I was a newspaper man. Thanks to me (and others), the news arrived each morning like a fresh loaf of urgency. It didn’t pay much, but it was fun. I miss the little things. Ink on my fingers, the way it proved I had touched the day.

In retirement, I want to celebrate with a few little things immediately:

·       an old fashioned that respects the geometry of the cherry

·       a joke with a limp

·       a guitar that improves my character (1979 Les Paul Custom with silver burst finish)

·       a fine, high-quality cigarette from a universe that still permits such romance

I left Dear Wife with her glass unmolested. I stepped outside, hands in pockets.

The night sky was unfinished but stable, filled with stars that promised to return tomorrow. There was just enough moon to illuminate the hand-laid flagstone path paid for by front-load fees and non-par policy commissions. Yes, financial services really is a license to print money and stuff it in your pants.

Then a voice jumped the fence.

“Hey neighbor!”

The universe cleared its throat. Hank Harris had arrived.

# # #

The judge from the Texas writing contest said she wanted more description:

·       The most intriguing description is our introduction to the spacecraft, but we don’t get to stay there, and we don’t get to see it in-scene. What if you stayed with the construction of the space craft—and showed us all the strange and intriguing characters building it—for a full page or more? 

Honestly, that’s not my kind of writing. It’s a little too conventional (i.e., boring). So I asked ChatGPT to do it for me, mimicking the style and tone of Eugene Ionesco. I think it turned out pretty good.

# # #

Note from ChatGPT: Below is a new section designed to fit the current manuscript immediately after the first substantial introduction of Hank and before the later launch/crash material. I’ve kept the established facts: four months of backyard construction; car parts, aluminum siding, plastic bottles, Bibles, and the Oldsmobile 455; Mark gradually moving from fence-line observer to drinking buddy; Gigi and the Nexus occupying the craft at night; and the belief that the Jackie O will carry them to the reborn JFK. The mode leans into Ionesco’s absurdist theater: circular dialogue, bureaucratic logic, repetitions that become metaphysical, banal objects acquiring terrifying importance, and characters behaving as though insanity were merely another suburban procedure.

CORE SCENE — CONSTRUCTION OF THE JACKIE O

The Jackie O began with a Buick grille. At least Hank said it began with a Buick grille. Later he said it began with the Bibles. Still later he said it had begun on November 22, 1963, which made construction difficult because Hank had been a child then and the Buick grille had not yet been purchased.

The grille lay in the middle of his backyard on two sawhorses. Hank stood over it with a tape measure while Gigi held the other end.

“What are you measuring?” Gigi asked.

“The distance.”

“Between what?”

“Here and there.”

She looked at the tape. “It says thirty-eight inches.”

“Then we’re thirty-eight inches closer.”

“To where?”

Hank looked at her. “To there.”

This satisfied Gigi. It did not satisfy me.

“Thirty-eight inches closer to what?” I called.

Hank looked up. “JFK.”

“He’s in orbit?”

“Obviously.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re building the spacecraft.”

That was the first time I understood there was going to be a spacecraft. I had assumed he was repairing an automobile. This was reasonable because the backyard contained three automobile doors, an Oldsmobile engine, a Buick grille, six hubcaps, two bench seats, a steering column, a taillight assembly, the roof of a station wagon and something Hank described as “the transmission,” although it was an RCA television set with the picture tube removed.

A spacecraft was less reasonable. But only slightly.

“You need anything?” I asked.

“A crescent wrench.”

I handed one across the fence.

This is how cults begin. Not with theology. With tools.

By the second week, there were nine people in the yard. By the third week, there were eleven. By the fourth week, Hank said there had always been twelve.

I counted ten.

“You forgot the President,” he said.

“That makes eleven.”

“You forgot the spacecraft.”

“The spacecraft is not a person.”

“That kind of thinking is why you’re not ready.”

“For what?”

“Ascension.”

“I have a cruise booked.”

He stared at me. “You think a boat will help?”

“It has lifeboats.”

“You can’t row to heaven.”

“I don’t intend to.”

This appeared to trouble him.

The others continued working. The Nexus members were difficult to distinguish at first because most of them wore work gloves, sunglasses and white T-shirts on which Hank had drawn circles with a red marker. Each circle represented a scar. Everyone already had an actual scar, but apparently the actual scar was insufficiently visible, so they wore diagrammatic scars over their real scars.

One of the women had a cesarean scar. One man had a knee-replacement scar. Another had cut himself opening a can of peaches in 1987. The peaches, Hank explained, were probably irrelevant. The scar was not.

A small man named Ralph had no scar he could find, so he wore three circles.

“I’m compensating,” he explained.

Gigi had drawn hers over her left breast. Hank approved.

“Excellent placement.”

“It was available.”

“Placement is destiny.”

“Can destiny get me a beer?”

Ralph went to the cooler. No one questioned why. That was his function now.

The craft grew around the Buick grille. Hank bolted two curved sections of aluminum siding to it. The aluminum had come from a house demolished in Irving. One panel was white. One was beige. Hank painted both silver. The silver paint did not match, so he painted them again. They still did not match.

“The difference is intentional,” he said.

“What difference?” Gigi asked.

“The difference between the differences.”

She nodded.

I nodded too. I had started nodding more often since meeting Hank. It saved time.

A woman named Bernice arrived carrying twenty-three empty two-liter soda bottles.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Fuel cells.”

“They’re Dr Pepper bottles.”

“They were Dr Pepper bottles.”

“What are they now?”

“Fuel cells.”

“What changed?”

Bernice looked offended. “We removed the Dr Pepper.”

The bottles were fastened along the lower rim of the saucer with wire. Three fell off. Ralph replaced them. One fell off again.

“That one is resisting,” Bernice said.

“Discard it,” Hank said.

“No,” said Gigi. “The resistant one may be the important one.”

They all looked at the bottle lying in the grass. For several minutes no one moved. Then Hank picked it up and placed it in the center of the craft.

“Navigation.”

Everyone returned to work.

The Bibles arrived on a Saturday morning. A pickup truck backed into Hank’s driveway. The bed was filled with boxes, and the boxes were filled with Bibles.

Black Bibles. White Bibles. Red Bibles. Hotel Bibles. Family Bibles. Study Bibles. Large-print Bibles. Pocket Bibles. Bibles with zippers. Bibles with maps. Bibles with the words of Jesus printed in red. A Bible commemorating the bicentennial. A Bible containing a pressed funeral carnation. A Bible with somebody’s grocery list tucked inside Revelation:

Milk. Eggs. Pork chops. Coffee. End of the world.

Hank opened the first box.

“Structural members.”

“You’re building the spaceship out of books?” I asked.

“Not books.”

He held one up. “The Word.”

“The Word has a cardboard cover.”

“Reinforced.”

He slapped it. The Bible made the sound of a Bible being slapped. Everyone became quiet.

“You see?” he said.

I did not. Gigi did.

She took one of the Bibles and pressed it between two pieces of aluminum.

“What do I do?”

“Hold it steady.”

“For how long?”

“Until it believes.”

She held it. Five minutes passed, then ten.

“Hank?”

“Yes?”

“I think it believes.”

He drilled through it.

The first Bible screamed. This was not literally true. The drill screamed. But after the third or fourth Bible, no one could remember the distinction.

Hank drilled holes through Genesis. Ralph bolted Matthew to a wheel well. Bernice laminated Deuteronomy. A retired dentist named Leon wrapped electrical tape around Acts. Another woman, whom everyone called Mother although she was nobody’s mother, cut the Book of Revelation into strips and fed them through a paper shredder.

I objected.

“Why are you shredding Revelation?”

“For insulation.”

“Wouldn’t that make it less revelatory?”

“It makes it warmer.”

Hank overheard us. “The truth must be distributed evenly throughout the hull.”

Mother continued shredding. Long white strips of prophecy fell into a galvanized trash can. She packed them between the aluminum ribs.

“And if the truth catches fire?” I asked.

“Then it was meant to.”

I thought about that for a while, then went home and loaded the dishwasher.

Dear Wife asked why I smelled like spray paint.

“I’ve been helping Hank.”

“You said you were watching Hank.”

“There’s very little difference.”

“There is a difference between watching a man build a spaceship and helping a man build a spaceship.”

“I handed him a wrench.”

“That is how it starts.”

She was right. This annoyed me. She was frequently right in ways that did not improve my mood.

“What exactly are you building?”

“I’m not building anything.”

“What is Hank building?”

“The Jackie O.”

She looked at me.

“What is a Jackie O?”

“A spacecraft.”

She continued looking at me.

“It’s mostly aluminum.”

She continued looking.

“And Bibles.”

She blinked once.

“You have entered another phase.”

“I’m still in the first phase.”

“No. The phases are multiplying.”

“There are only four phases.”

“How many were there yesterday?”

“One.”

“That is multiplication.”

This was mathematically difficult to dispute.

At Hank’s house the following evening, multiplication had also occurred. There were now eighteen people in the yard. Or perhaps twelve. Or nine. People kept entering the saucer and emerging from the other side wearing different hats.

A man named Johnny Lighthouse arrived with a clipboard. Johnny was not a Nexus believer. Johnny objected to almost everything: the noise, the parking, the extension cords, the Bibles. He objected especially to the possibility of sexual activity inside the spacecraft.

“What are you people doing in there?”

“Electrical work,” Hank said.

“For three hours?”

“It’s complicated.”

“With Gigi?”

“She understands circuitry.”

Johnny pointed at her. “She’s topless.”

Gigi looked down. This appeared to surprise her.

“You’re right.”

She put on safety goggles. “OSHA.”

Johnny wrote something on his clipboard.

“What are you writing?” I asked.

“Evidence.”

“Of what?”

“That depends on what happens.”

“And if nothing happens?”

“That will also be evidence.”

Hank smiled. “You see? He’s one of us.”

“I am absolutely not one of you.”

“That’s what the resistant ones say.”

“I’m calling the city.”

“The city is already involved.”

“How?”

“We live in it.”

Johnny stopped writing. There was no answer to this. Not one that would help.

# # #

THE LAST DAY OF WORK

On my last day at work, nothing happened. This was disappointing. I had expected at least a minor atmospheric disturbance, a flicker in the fluorescent lights, a conference-room television switching itself on, perhaps Kennedy appearing briefly in the upper-right corner of Microsoft Teams.

Instead, Outlook opened normally. I had twelve unread emails. Eleven of them were unnecessary. The twelfth concerned parking.

For decades I had been paid to receive messages and manufacture replies. Messages arrived because somebody somewhere believed a reply was necessary. I supplied the reply. Sometimes I supplied the message that required the reply. Sometimes I supplied both and scheduled a meeting so other people could discuss what I had supplied. This was called communication.

At 7:42 a.m. I typed:

Thanks. Good perspective. Let’s stay close to this.

I did not know what we were staying close to. I never had. That was one of my professional strengths.

At 8:03 someone asked whether I had five minutes. Nobody who asks whether you have five minutes wants five minutes. I gave him eighteen.

At 8:37 I attended a meeting about an initiative whose name consisted of three nouns attempting to become a verb. At 9:15 somebody used the phrase going forward. I wrote it down. I wanted to remember the exact moment the future became unnecessary.

By ten o’clock my office had begun disappearing. Not physically. That would have been easier. The photographs were still there. The little objects collected over the years were still on shelves. Awards remained framed. Books remained upright. Pens continued pretending they contained useful information.

But the objects had changed jurisdiction. Yesterday they had been professional artifacts. Today they were things I would have to carry to my car.

There is a metaphysical humiliation in the cardboard box. A title can survive thirty years of meetings, reorganizations, executive announcements, budget cycles, performance reviews, leadership retreats, mission statements and strategic priorities. Then someone gives you a cardboard box.

I put a coffee mug in it. The mug said:

LEADERSHIP IS A JOURNEY

Apparently the journey ended in the parking garage.

At 10:46 my computer reminded me that my password would expire in nine days. I laughed. The machine did not.

CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD NOW TO AVOID INTERRUPTION.

“No,” I said.

This was the first act of insubordination in my career that carried no risk whatsoever. I clicked REMIND ME LATER.

Later belonged to somebody else.

At eleven, people began stopping by. They said the things people say to the retiring.

“You’ll love it.”

“You won’t know how you had time to work.”

“Don’t be a stranger.”

“We’ll stay in touch.”

“You earned it.”

I had always disliked the phrase you earned it. It suggested retirement was compensation for damage. Perhaps it was.

One woman hugged me and said, “This isn’t goodbye.”

“Statistically it probably is,” I said.

She laughed because she thought I was joking. That happened often.

At noon they brought cake. The cake had my name on it. This is one of the ways civilization marks a transition in status: sugar and frosting. The icing said:

CONGRATULATIONS MARK!

No verb.

I was grateful for that. Anything more specific might have been inaccurate.

Congratulations Mark on retiring. Congratulations Mark on escaping. Congratulations Mark on becoming unnecessary. Congratulations Mark on surviving long enough to be formally released. Congratulations Mark on beginning the final administrative interval before death.

The cake did not commit itself.

Smart cake.

Someone handed me a plaque. The plaque thanked me for my years of service. Years had apparently become a substance I had donated. I wondered where they kept them.

Maybe Human Resources had a warehouse. Maybe somewhere outside Fort Worth there was a climate-controlled facility filled with twenty-eight years of Tuesday mornings: rows of old meetings, dead PowerPoints, executive statements about transformational change, boxes labeled:

Q3 URGENCY
BRAND ALIGNMENT
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
THINGS WE SAID WOULD MATTER

I pictured workers moving my years around on forklifts.

“Where do you want Leach?”

“Long-term storage.”

“Any retrieval date?”

“No.”

At 1:17 my boss asked whether I had everything I needed. This was a difficult question. I looked around: computer, phone, notebook, cardboard box, life.

“Pretty much.”

He nodded. We shook hands.

For a moment I had the peculiar sensation that I was watching two men perform the final scene of a television program that had been canceled without telling the characters. Then he went back to work.

Of course he did.

That was the shocking part. Everyone went back to work. The building did not stop because I was leaving it. Emails continued arriving. Phones rang. Somebody laughed down the hall. A printer produced twelve pages of something that would still matter at 3:00 and probably not matter by Thursday.

The company had already metabolized my departure.

I was still sitting there.

But institutionally, I had become posthumous.

At 2:04 I opened a blank document. I considered writing one final corporate message. Something dignified. Something about gratitude. Something about extraordinary colleagues and shared purpose and the privilege of serving.

The old machinery activated automatically.

As I reflect on my time here—

Delete.

After many rewarding years—

Delete.

Today marks—

Delete.

The cursor blinked. It had more future than I did.

Finally I typed:

I am leaving now.

I looked at the sentence. Perfectly clear. Unacceptable corporate writing.

I printed it anyway. The printer coughed out the page. I folded it once and put it in my pocket.

At 2:31 someone asked if I would be available next week for a quick question.

“No.”

He looked surprised. I looked surprised too.

For thirty years I had been available next week. Next week had been one of my main products.

Next week we would revisit. Next week we would circle back. Next week we would refine the messaging. Next week we would socialize the proposal. Next week we would connect offline.

Next week was where unfinished things went to avoid dying.

Now next week had no office.

Neither did I.

At 3:00 I shut down the computer. A message appeared:

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SIGN OUT?

“Yes.”

The computer requested confirmation. Machines hate retirement.

I confirmed.

The screen went black. For several seconds I could see my reflection: old man, white shirt, tie. The face looked familiar but not contractually obligated.

I took off the tie. That seemed theatrical. I put it back on. That seemed worse. I took it off again and placed it in the cardboard box beside the leadership mug.

At 3:12 I carried the box through the hallway. People waved.

“Enjoy retirement!”

“Have fun!”

“Come back and see us!”

The elevator doors opened. I stepped inside.

There should have been music. There was not.

Floor numbers descended.

The elevator opened onto the lobby. Nobody announced me.

I walked outside.

Texas was still there.

This offended me slightly.

The sky had made no accommodations. Cars moved through the parking lot. Heat shimmered above the pavement. A grackle stood beside a discarded french fry.

The grackle had no title.

It seemed fine.

I put the cardboard box in the back seat, then stood beside the car. I had nowhere to go except home.

That sentence should not be frightening. It was.

For most of my adult life, home had been the place I returned to from something else. Now there was no something else.

I drove slowly. Not because I was sentimental. Because traffic was bad. The universe sometimes mistakes metaphor for congestion.

At a red light I reached into my pocket and found the page I had printed.

I am leaving now.

I read it again. For the first time it seemed possible the sentence was not about work.

I folded it smaller.

The light changed.

Nobody behind me honked. I almost wished they had.

When I reached the house, Dear Wife was in the kitchen. The glass was on the counter. Same glass. Or another one. By then I had learned not to ask.

She looked at the cardboard box.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re retired?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“They deactivated my badge.”

“That sounds official.”

I put the box on the floor.

“So what happens now?”

She opened the refrigerator.

“You’re asking me?”

“I assumed there would be instructions.”

“For retirement?”

“Yes.”

She took out a bottle of water.

“You wanted this.”

“I know.”

“For years.”

“I know.”

“You talked about the barn.”

“Yes.”

“The guitar.”

“Yes.”

“The records.”

“Yes.”

“The bicycle.”

“The Schwinn.”

“Whatever.”

“1958.”

“Still whatever.”

She filled the glass. I watched the water rise.

“What am I supposed to do tomorrow?”

She drank.

“Wake up.”

“And then?”

“Continue.”

“That seems poorly organized.”

“You’ll manage.”

She walked away carrying the glass.

I stood in the kitchen.

No meeting tomorrow. No alarm. No email. No title. No executive obligation. No organization requiring my opinion.

The silence was enormous.

Then metal struck metal outside.

Clang.

Pause.

Clang.

Pause.

Clang.

I knew the sound.

I went into the backyard. Across the fence Hank was beneath the Jackie O. The spacecraft had grown since morning. Or perhaps I had diminished.

He was tightening a bolt through the Gospel of John.

“Hey neighbor,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You home early?”

“I’m retired.”

He stopped turning the wrench.

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

He considered this. For perhaps the first time since I had known him, Hank Harris looked at me with something resembling professional concern.

Then he pointed upward.

“Plenty to do.”

I looked at the Jackie O: Bibles, aluminum, pink paint, automobile parts, television static, prophecy, bad engineering. The whole ridiculous machine leaned toward the sky.

Yesterday I had been a corporate officer watching a lunatic build a spacecraft. Today I was a retired man standing beside another man who had also stopped believing the world had an adequate job description for him.

That was different.

Hank resumed tightening the bolt.

“Hand me the crescent wrench.”

I looked at the wrench lying in the grass, then at my house, then at the spacecraft.

There was no office waiting for me Monday morning. No password to change. No calendar clearing its throat. No next week.

For one disturbing second I understood retirement perfectly.

It was death with better benefits.

Then another thought arrived: perhaps death was merely retirement with worse customer service.

“Hank.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think we’re dying?”

He considered the question.

“Eventually.”

“I mean now.”

He looked around the yard: the dead grass, the Bible ribs, the Oldsmobile engine, the black television screens, me, him, the future suddenly countable.

“Probably,” he said. “But we’re still on the clock.”

I picked up the wrench and handed it to him.

He shook his head.

“No.”

“What?”

“You hold the panel.”

“I don’t work here.”

“Neither do I.”

That seemed important.

I climbed over the fence.

Somewhere behind me, inside the house, Dear Wife called:

“Mark?”

“Yes?”

“Where are you going?”

I looked at Hank. He looked at the Jackie O. The Jackie O looked at nothing.

“Nowhere,” I said.

Hank smiled.

“That’s how it starts.”

I put both hands against the aluminum panel. He drilled through the Bible.

The machine screamed. Or the drill screamed. Or something else had begun.

Monday morning would never arrive.

Monday morning would arrive exactly on schedule.

For the first time in my life, neither possibility required me.

And that was the day I retired.

Or died.

The paperwork remains unclear.

# # #

Dr. Tong appeared around the middle of the second month. Nobody introduced him. He simply stood beside the Oldsmobile engine one evening wearing a gray suit. Everyone else was filthy. Dr. Tong was immaculate. He carried a small metal case.

“Who’s that?” I whispered.

Hank whispered back. “Dr. Tong.”

“I know that now.”

“He understands propulsion.”

“What kind of propulsion?”

“Advanced.”

“Where did he study?”

“Somewhere advanced.”

Dr. Tong opened the metal case. Inside were three screwdrivers, a banana and a stethoscope. He selected the stethoscope and placed it against the Oldsmobile 455. We waited. The engine was not running. Dr. Tong listened anyway.

Finally he straightened. “Very serious.”

“What’s wrong?” Hank asked.

“It has an engine.”

Hank nodded gravely. “Yes.”

“That can be dangerous in a spacecraft.”

“Should I remove it?”

“No. Then you would have a spacecraft without an engine.”

Hank considered this. Dr. Tong peeled the banana.

“What do you recommend?”

“More engine.”

Everyone looked impressed. I began to understand why he was a doctor.

The Oldsmobile 455 had come from a wrecked 1970 4-4-2. Hank had bought it from a man in Grand Prairie who swore the motor had once produced 365 horsepower.

Hank said this would be sufficient to leave Earth.

I asked him how he had calculated that.

“Horsepower.”

“Yes.”

“Three hundred sixty-five.”

“Yes.”

“One for every day.”

“That isn’t how horsepower works.”

“How many days are in a year?”

“Three hundred sixty-five.”

“There you go.”

Gigi kissed him. Science had been settled.

The engine hung from a rented hoist above the center of the saucer. Ralph was underneath it.

“Should Ralph be there?” I asked.

“No,” said Hank.

Ralph continued tightening a bolt.

“Should we tell Ralph?”

“He knows.”

“How?”

“He’s Ralph.”

This also appeared settled.

The engine descended. Ralph rolled aside. Everyone applauded. The Oldsmobile 455 entered the Jackie O with the solemnity of a pope being carried into a cathedral.

Mother scattered shredded Revelation over it. Leon the dentist blessed the carburetor with mouthwash. Dr. Tong listened to the block again.

The engine remained dead.

“Better,” he announced.

By then the Jackie O had acquired a cockpit. The cockpit had two steering wheels.

I pointed this out.

“That’s redundant.”

“No,” Hank said. “One is for flight.”

“And the other?”

“For return.”

“You said it was a one-way trip.”

“It is.”

“Then why do you need a return wheel?”

“So we don’t accidentally come back.”

This was the sort of answer Hank gave that made me envy religious people. Their lives must be enormously restful.

There were also three television sets. One faced forward. One faced backward. One faced another television set.

“Why?”

“Navigation.”

“They’re televisions.”

“Exactly.”

“What do they show?”

“Whatever is there.”

Hank turned one on. Static filled the screen.

“There.”

“That’s nothing.”

“Nothing is extremely difficult to find.”

Gigi put her palm against the screen.

“Something’s coming through.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Hank looked at me triumphantly.

“See?”

At night the craft became another thing. During daylight it was a backyard construction project. At night it was a chapel, or a nightclub, or an amateur theater, or a garage with worse boundaries.

Extension cords ran through the grass like black veins. The interior glowed red and blue. Televisions played without sound. Sometimes they showed Kennedy. Sometimes weather. Sometimes automobile commercials. Once they showed a cooking program while Hank lectured on the assassination. Nobody turned it off. A woman basted a chicken while Hank described Dealey Plaza.

The chicken rotated. Kennedy turned. The world continued.

The Nexus sat inside the unfinished hull on automobile seats that were not bolted down. Each person described his or her scar. The others listened as though hearing scripture.

“My appendix.”

“My shoulder.”

“Three stitches above the eye.”

“Gallbladder.”

“Dog bite.”

“Cesarean.”

“Bicycle accident.”

“Industrial stapler.”

“Unknown.”

The unknown scar received the most attention.

Hank stood in front of them. “These are not accidents.”

“What are they?” Ralph asked.

“Coordinates.”

“To where?”

“You know.”

“No.”

“Then they’re working.”

Ralph seemed comforted.

# # #

Gigi wanted a chair.

Not a throne. Not a cockpit seat. Not a ceremonial object shaped like a wound or upholstered in pink vinyl. Just a chair.

She told me this one afternoon while Hank was arguing with Ralph about whether a CB radio could hear heaven.

“What kind?” I asked.

“A yellow one.”

“That’s specific.”

“It had wooden arms.”

“Mid-century?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Probably better that way.”

She was sitting on an overturned milk crate beside the Jackie O. For once she was wearing an ordinary T-shirt and jeans. No ritual costume. No cigarette holder. No symbolic hat. She had a paper cup of iced tea between her knees.

“There was one in my grandmother’s house,” she said. “Ugly yellow fabric. Scratchy. Smelled like dust.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“It was.”

“Why do you want it?”

She shrugged.

“I used to sit in it and watch The Price Is Right when I was sick.”

I waited for the connection.

None came.

No assassination.

No orgasm.

No scar.

No signal.

No Kennedy appearing in the Showcase Showdown.

Just a chair.

“Do you still have it?”

“My mother threw it away.”

“That seems reasonable.”

“She throws everything away.”

Gigi looked toward Hank’s yard. Somebody had attached a toaster to the underside of the Jackie O. Dr. Tong was examining it with the stethoscope.

“I think about that chair sometimes,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

This answer bothered me more than it should have.

In this book, everybody knows why everything matters. Or if they don’t, somebody eventually writes an essay explaining it.

The chair resisted.

“Maybe it represented—”

“No.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were.”

She was right.

I drank my bourbon.

Gigi took a sip of tea.

After a while she said, “I hated cilantro.”

“Hated?”

“Still do.”

“That seems unrelated.”

“It is.”

“Good.”

We sat quietly.

Hank shouted something about orbital marriage.

Nobody listened.

Gigi looked toward the house.

“Do you think my dog got fed?”

“You have a dog?”

“Had.”

“What kind?”

“Brown.”

“That isn’t a breed.”

“He didn’t know that.”

“What was his name?”

“Kevin.”

I laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Kevin is a perfectly good dog name.”

“It is.”

“He used to sleep under the yellow chair.”

There it was.

I almost said something.

She saw it coming.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t.”

“You keep trying to make things connect.”

“That’s what writers do.”

“No. That’s what you do.”

She stood and threw the empty cup into a trash can.

Then she looked at the Jackie O.

“You know what I want?”

“The chair.”

“No.”

“What?”

“To go somewhere and have people stop asking me what I mean.”

She walked toward Hank before I could answer.

I remained beside the milk crate.

For several minutes I thought about the yellow chair.

Then I tried very hard not to.

# # #

Gigi was in charge of what she called aesthetics. Hank said she was in charge of communications. Gigi said these were the same thing.

She painted the inside of the cockpit pink. Not Jacqueline Kennedy pink. Not exactly. Hardware-store pink. The color was called BABY PARADE.

“This is wrong,” Hank said.

“It’s pink.”

“It’s the wrong pink.”

“How many pinks are there?”

“All of them.”

She painted another section.

“Better?”

“No.”

Another.

“No.”

Another.

“No.”

Eventually the cockpit contained seven shades of pink. Hank walked through them slowly.

“Perfect.”

“Which one?”

“The disagreement.”

Gigi smiled.

That evening she mounted a framed photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy above the instrument panel. The photograph was crooked. Hank straightened it. Gigi made it crooked again.

“Why?”

“She’s looking toward Dallas.”

“That isn’t Dallas.”

“It will be.”

I began spending more evenings on Hank’s side of the fence. This happened without a decision. One night I was in my yard. The next night I was in his. The fence remained where it had always been, which suggested the problem was me.

I brought bourbon. Hank provided ice. The Nexus provided prophecies. Dear Wife provided skepticism from a safe distance.

Sometimes I tightened bolts. Sometimes I held pieces of aluminum while Hank drilled. Sometimes I drank and watched. Sometimes I argued. Eventually I stopped being certain which of these activities constituted participation.

“You’re helping,” Hank said.

“I’m observing.”

“You’re holding the panel.”

“An observer can hold a panel.”

“Not forever.”

“How long is forever?”

Hank checked his watch. “Almost.”

We stood there holding the panel.

The Jackie O widened. Its saucer shape became recognizable. The backyard disappeared beneath it. The grass died. Two rosebushes vanished. A sprinkler head became incorporated into the landing gear. Hank refused to remove it.

“Environmental control.”

“It waters the landing gear.”

“Exactly.”

The craft now had headlights from a Cadillac, gauges from a tractor, chrome trim from a Buick, a refrigerator door, the Oldsmobile engine, sections of house siding, Dr Pepper fuel cells, Bible ribs and a toilet Hank insisted was part of the life-support system.

“Where does it empty?”

“Space.”

“You haven’t connected it to anything.”

“Space is everywhere.”

Again: restful.

There was also a small brass bell.

“What’s that for?”

“Emergency.”

“What emergency?”

Hank rang it. Everyone stopped working.

“What?” Ralph shouted.

“Nothing,” Hank said.

They resumed.

“Works every time.”

The city inspector arrived on a Tuesday. He wore khaki pants. This immediately placed him outside the Nexus.

He looked at the craft. He looked at the house. He looked at Hank. He looked again at the craft.

“Is this a permanent structure?”

“No.”

“What is it?”

“A spacecraft.”

The inspector wrote something down.

“Is it attached to the foundation?”

“No.”

“Then it may not qualify as an accessory structure.”

“Good.”

“But it may qualify as a vehicle.”

“Good.”

“Does it have a vehicle identification number?”

“No.”

“Then it may not qualify as a vehicle.”

“Good.”

“What do you want it to qualify as?”

“Ascension.”

The inspector stopped writing.

“That isn’t a zoning category.”

“That’s why we selected it.”

The inspector walked around the saucer. He tapped the aluminum.

“Is this structural?”

“Partially.”

He tapped a Bible.

“What’s this?”

“Structural.”

He stared at Hank. Hank stared back. The inspector wrote another note.

“What did you write?” I asked.

“Other.”

“Other what?”

“Just other.”

Hank smiled.

“Approved.”

“I didn’t say approved.”

“You wrote other.”

“That does not mean approved.”

“It doesn’t mean denied.”

The inspector closed his clipboard and left. Everyone applauded.

Construction accelerated after that. Not because of the inspection. Because Hank said time was accelerating.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“My watch.”

“What does it say?”

“Eight fifteen.”

“What did it say an hour ago?”

“Seven fifteen.”

“That’s normal.”

“Exactly. It’s happening every hour.”

We worked faster.

The Nexus arrived carrying objects: a toaster, copper tubing, a Sears catalog, a CB radio, a lawn-chair frame, a mannequin torso, three vacuum cleaners, a bowling ball, a dental X-ray viewer, a twelve-foot aluminum ladder.

Nobody knew what the ladder was for.

Hank incorporated everything except the Sears catalog.

“Too dangerous.”

“Why?”

“Consumer desire.”

He burned it in a trash barrel.

The vacuum cleaners became atmospheric intakes. The toaster became what Dr. Tong called the quantum igniter. The bowling ball went beneath the pilot’s seat.

“What does that do?”

“Weight.”

“For balance?”

“No. Just weight.”

The mannequin torso was attached to the exterior. Gigi painted a smile on it.

“JFK?”

“No,” she said.

“Then who?”

“The passenger.”

“What passenger?”

She looked at me with something approaching pity.

“All of us.”

By the fourth month, there was almost no yard left. The Jackie O occupied the space between Hank’s house, my fence and the heavens. It had become too large to understand from nearby.

If you stood beside it, you saw only parts: aluminum, scripture, chrome, hoses, pink paint, burned pages, television static, car seats, plastic bottles, electrical cord, religious longing, hardware-store receipts.

From the upstairs window of my house, however, I could see the circle.

A flying saucer.

An actual flying saucer.

An impossible thing had emerged from ordinary parts. This disturbed me more than if it had looked ridiculous.

Dear Wife came up beside me. We looked down at it.

“Huh,” she said.

“Huh?”

“It looks like a flying saucer.”

“I know.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Why?”

“Because now he’ll think he built one.”

I looked again. Below us, Hank was walking around the craft with his tape measure. Gigi followed him carrying a wrench. Ralph carried beer. Mother carried Revelation. Leon the dentist carried an electric drill. Bernice carried an empty Dr Pepper bottle. Dr. Tong carried his stethoscope. Johnny Lighthouse stood outside the fence with his clipboard, documenting the end of civilization.

The Nexus moved around the Jackie O in circles.

Hank stopped. Everybody stopped. He raised both arms.

“It is almost finished.”

Ralph looked frightened. “What happens when it’s finished?”

“We leave.”

“When?”

“When it’s finished.”

“But when will it be finished?”

“When we leave.”

They contemplated this.

Gigi touched the hull. “Then maybe it’s already finished.”

Hank shook his head.

“We’re still here.”

Nobody spoke.

For once the logic was perfect.

That night I went outside with a drink. Hank was alone beneath the saucer. He had taken off his shirt. A trouble light hung from an extension cord above him. His body looked old. Not ancient. Not ruined. Just old enough that the future had become something countable.

He was tightening a bolt on a Bible.

“You really think Kennedy is up there?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You really think this thing will reach him?”

“Yes.”

“You really think he wants you?”

Hank stopped tightening. For a long time he did not answer. Then he looked at me.

“Why else would I build it?”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the only answer.”

He tightened the bolt. I drank. The Jackie O clicked as the metal cooled.

Somewhere inside it a television turned itself on. Neither of us had touched it. Static came first, then a man’s voice, then static again. Perhaps a commercial. Perhaps weather. Perhaps the President.

Hank smiled.

“See?”

“No.”

“You will.”

“I doubt it.”

“That’s good.”

“Why?”

“We need ballast.”

I laughed. Hank did not. Then he laughed and I stopped. Then he stopped.

From inside the house, Dear Wife called my name. From inside the saucer, the television called no one’s name. The static continued.

Hank looked upward through the unfinished roof.

For the first time I understood that the Jackie O was not really being built to go anywhere. It was being built because Hank could not remain where he was.

That was different. That was worse.

I looked at the machine: car parts, Bibles, plastic bottles, a dead president, a pink cockpit, a man growing older beneath it. And there we were, all of us, tightening bolts on something we had mistaken for transportation.

The spacecraft was nearly complete.

The mistake was just beginning.

 # # #

The writing judge also had this to say about my work:

·       Readers don’t want orientation—they want to go along for the ride. If they feel that they know a character, they will follow them anywhere. This reader would argue that in worrying about the aesthetics, you’ve lost sight of what is most interesting and critical to keeping your reader’s interest: Hank. How can we both empathize with and be wary of him by witnessing what he’s up to?

Let’s follow Hank and see what happens.

# # #

The next notice did not arrive by mail.

It arrived in the refrigerator.

Dear Wife opened the door to get the milk and found a small highway stretching between the orange juice and the eggs. The highway was paved with tiny black words. At the far end stood Hank Harris, approximately three inches tall, waving beside a silver saucer.

She closed the refrigerator.

Then opened it again.

The highway remained.

“Mark.”

“Yes?”

“There is a road in the refrigerator.”

“Where does it go?”

“That is not the first question.”

“It is if we’re supposed to take it.”

She stared at me.

“You have learned nothing.”

I went to look.

The highway curved around the butter, disappeared beneath a carton of strawberries and emerged somewhere beyond the mustard. Small green signs had been erected along the shoulder.

HANK — 2 MILES

EMPATHY — 4 MILES

WARINESS — NEXT EXIT

Beyond them another sign read:

NO ORIENTATION PROVIDED

Dear Wife leaned close.

“Who put that there?”

“The Judge, probably.”

“You can’t blame every abnormal thing on literary criticism.”

“I can try.”

The miniature Hank cupped his hands around his mouth.

“COME ON!”

His voice echoed inside the refrigerator.

Dear Wife took out the milk.

“I’m not going.”

“Why?”

“I know Hank.”

“That’s the point.”

“No. That is why I’m not going.”

She shut the door.

The highway vanished.

I opened it.

The road returned.

Hank was now wearing a cowboy hat.

“Readers don’t want orientation!” he shouted.

“I didn’t say they did.”

“You keep giving it to them!”

“I like maps.”

“Maps are for people who know where they’re going.”

“That seems backward.”

“Exactly.”

He climbed into the Jackie O.

The engine started.

The eggs trembled.

One cracked.

Dear Wife returned.

“Did you break an egg?”

“Hank did.”

“Hank is in the refrigerator?”

“He was.”

“You have entered another phase.”

Then she left with the milk.

The next morning Hank was normal size again and standing in my backyard.

He had brought a motorcycle.

It was not his motorcycle.

It may not have been a motorcycle.

The front wheel was a clock. The rear wheel was a television screen. Between them hung a long upholstered seat covered in pink velvet. A chrome JFK head served as the headlamp.

“What is that?”

“Transportation.”

“You already have transportation.”

“That’s propulsion.”

He pointed toward the Jackie O.

“This is narrative.”

“You’re going to ride narrative?”

“We are.”

“I don’t ride motorcycles.”

“You don’t ride novels either.”

“I read them.”

“There’s your problem.”

He kicked the machine.

The television wheel came on.

Zapruder footage.

The clock wheel began turning backward.

The JFK head smiled.

“Get on.”

“No.”

“Readers don’t want orientation.”

“I am not a reader.”

“Everybody says that before impact.”

He handed me a helmet.

It was made of bread.

“What is this?”

“Protection.”

“From what?”

“Interpretation.”

I put it on.

The bread smelled fresh.

This was the first thing that reassured me, which should have been a warning.

Hank drove.

I held on.

There was no road.

That did not seem to matter.

The motorcycle crossed the lawn, passed through the fence without damaging it and entered a flat Texas landscape that had not existed behind my house the day before.

Telephone poles bent toward us like melting tuning forks. A dead horse stood upright in a field wearing a business suit. Its briefcase was open. Inside were three clouds. One cloud rained upward.

“Where are we going?” I shouted.

“Anywhere.”

“That is not a destination.”

“It is for character.”

The television wheel showed Gigi smoking inside the Jackie O.

The clock wheel showed 1963.

Then 2026.

Then 1963 again.

Then eight weeks until retirement.

“Slow down.”

“We’re going twelve miles an hour.”

“Then why is everything moving so fast?”

“Because you’re explaining it.”

I looked behind us.

He was right.

Each time I identified an object, it accelerated away.

Horse.

Gone.

Telephone pole.

Gone.

Cloud.

Gone.

As soon as I named something, the landscape lost it.

“Stop doing that,” Hank said.

“Doing what?”

“Knowing.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“That’s orientation.”

We rode in silence.

The world slowed.

After a while we passed a man standing beside the road.

He had no skin.

He wore a name tag.

HELLO, MY NAME IS READER

He raised his thumb.

Hank stopped.

The Reader climbed onto the motorcycle behind me.

“You know Hank?” I asked.

“Enough.”

“How much is enough?”

“He’s building a spaceship.”

“That’s all?”

“He wants to meet JFK.”

“That’s not much.”

“It’s plenty.”

The Reader put his arms around my waist.

This made me uncomfortable.

“You don’t need more background?”

“No.”

“Childhood?”

“No.”

“Psychological profile?”

“No.”

“Motivation?”

“He’s building a spaceship to meet JFK.”

“Yes, but why?”

The Reader shrugged.

“I’ll find out.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Then I’ll keep watching.”

This troubled me.

The Judge had apparently sent a Reader who was more patient than I was.

Hank started the engine again.

We continued.

The next landscape was filled with doors.

Thousands of them.

Doors standing alone in the desert.

Red doors.

White doors.

Glass doors.

Hospital doors.

Bedroom doors.

Revolving doors.

A door marked SYMBOLISM.

Another marked BACKSTORY.

Another marked AESTHETICS.

Another marked HANK.

Hank drove past all of them.

“Wait.”

“No.”

“The Hank door.”

“Too obvious.”

“You’re Hank.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to go through the Hank door.”

“What door are we looking for?”

“None.”

“Then why are there doors?”

“Critics.”

The Reader behind me laughed.

Hank swerved toward a door labeled EMPATHY.

At the last second he turned away.

Then toward WARINESS.

Again he swerved.

“What are you doing?”

“Showing you.”

“Showing me what?”

“You have to want both.”

“How?”

“Watch.”

We came upon Gigi standing in the desert beside a bathtub full of radios.

She was wearing a white dress and welding goggles.

“Hank,” she said.

“Gigi.”

“You left me.”

“I came back.”

“You always say that after leaving.”

“I haven’t left yet.”

“That’s worse.”

She lifted one of the radios from the bathtub.

Water poured from the speaker.

A man's voice said:

“President Kennedy entered Dealey Plaza—”

Static.

“—and Hank entered Gigi—”

Static.

“—and the weather tomorrow will be clear—”

Static.

Gigi turned the radio off.

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“I’m going to get myself ascended.”

“You don’t know the difference.”

“Yes I do.”

“What is it?”

“Altitude.”

She slapped him.

Not theatrically.

Not symbolically.

Hard.

Hank touched his cheek.

For a moment he looked hurt.

Not wounded-president hurt.

Not cosmic-lover hurt.

Just hurt.

The Reader behind me leaned forward.

There.

I felt it too.

A small opening.

Not sympathy exactly.

Recognition.

Hank looked old.

Gigi looked tired.

The desert looked hot.

No one explained anything.

Then Hank smiled.

“You worried about me?”

“No.”

“You slapped me.”

“I was correcting your face.”

He kissed her.

She let him.

Then she shoved him away.

“Don’t confuse affection with approval.”

Hank nodded.

“I never do.”

This was probably a lie.

The Reader whispered, “That’s why I follow him.”

“Because he lies?”

“Because I know when he’s lying.”

We rode on.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Character.”

“That was domestic conflict.”

“No.”

“Erotic conflict?”

“No.”

“Emotional revelation?”

“No.”

“What was it?”

Hank looked annoyed.

“She slapped me.”

I understood.

Not the meaning.

The event.

This seemed to be what the Judge wanted.

I made a note.

Hank slapped the notebook out of my hand.

“Stop that.”

“I need to remember.”

“If you remember correctly, you’ll ruin it.”

The notebook landed in the sand.

Its pages turned by themselves.

On each page was the same sentence:

HANK WAS A MAN WHO DID THINGS.

The sentence began multiplying.

HANK WAS A MAN WHO DID THINGS.
HANK WAS A MAN WHO DID THINGS.
HANK WAS A MAN WHO DID THINGS.

Then the ink softened and ran down the pages.

The words became ants.

The ants carried the notebook away.

We stopped for gas at a station shaped like a human ear.

The pumps dispensed gasoline, milk and blood.

Hank selected gasoline.

Good.

This reassured me.

The attendant had six mustaches and no mouth.

He pointed at the Jackie O tattoo on Hank’s forearm.

Hank did not have a Jackie O tattoo before.

“New?” I asked.

“Old.”

“I would have noticed.”

“You noticed theories.”

He filled the motorcycle.

The Reader wandered into the convenience store.

I stayed with Hank.

“Are you afraid?”

“Of gas prices?”

“Of dying.”

“Sure.”

The answer surprised me.

“You are?”

“Everybody is.”

“You don’t act like it.”

“That’s different.”

“Why build the Jackie O?”

He looked at the pump.

Numbers spun.

$4.19.

$8.52.

$17.63.

$31.13.

$63.00.

Then the dollar amount became years.

Then zero.

Hank looked away.

“You know why.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

“That sounds like orientation.”

“Maybe.”

He laughed.

Then he did not laugh.

“I don’t want to disappear.”

There it was.

Small.

Plain.

Almost unacceptable in this book.

He put the nozzle back.

“Happy?”

“No.”

“Good.”

He climbed onto the motorcycle.

The Reader returned carrying beef jerky and a magazine titled WHO IS HANK?

The cover contained no photograph.

Only a mirror.

The next region was dangerous.

We knew this because the signs said so.

BE WARY OF HANK

HANK MAY BITE

HANK IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

DO NOT FEED THE PROTAGONIST

Hank became cheerful.

“At last.”

“At last what?”

“Complexity.”

A row of mannequins stood beside the road.

Each mannequin looked like me.

Each held a sign.

I LIKE HANK

I TRUST HANK

HANK IS REDEEMABLE

HANK HAS A GOOD HEART

Hank stopped the motorcycle.

He took out a revolver.

“Where did you get that?”

“Texas.”

He shot the first mannequin.

Its head burst into blue butterflies.

He shot the second.

Watches poured from its neck.

He shot the third.

Nothing happened.

He shot it again.

A small priest climbed out of its chest and ran into the desert.

The Reader clapped.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Protecting the reader.”

“From what?”

“Certainty.”

He pointed the gun at the fourth mannequin.

HANK HAS A GOOD HEART.

He lowered the weapon.

“Maybe.”

Then he shot it in the knee.

“Don’t get sentimental.”

The motorcycle carried us to a suburban house sitting alone beneath an enormous sky.

Hank stopped.

“That’s my house.”

“It doesn’t look like your house.”

“It is when nobody’s looking.”

We went inside.

The rooms were normal.

This was alarming.

Sofa.

Coffee table.

Family photographs.

Dishwasher.

Television.

A pair of reading glasses on a newspaper.

No melting clocks.

No ants.

No extraterrestrial wounds.

The Reader wandered through the rooms touching nothing.

Hank went to the kitchen.

He opened the refrigerator.

Inside were lunch meat, mustard, beer and a birthday cake.

“Whose birthday?”

“Mine.”

“When?”

“Last month.”

“Why is the cake still here?”

“No one ate it.”

“Why?”

Hank closed the refrigerator.

“Wasn’t very good.”

That was all.

He walked into the living room.

On a shelf stood a photograph of Hank as a younger man. He had more hair. A woman stood beside him.

“Who is she?”

“My wife.”

“You have a wife?”

He looked at me.

“You knew that.”

“I forgot.”

“That’s because you were busy with JFK.”

This embarrassed me.

“Where is she?”

“Somewhere.”

“Are you still married?”

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

He shrugged.

I wanted to ask more.

The Reader shook his head.

Not yet.

So I watched.

Hank sat in the chair.

He picked up the reading glasses.

Put them on.

Opened the newspaper.

Did not read it.

Took the glasses off.

Turned on the television.

Turned it off.

Opened the newspaper again.

Closed it.

For several minutes he did nothing.

I had never seen him do nothing.

It was unnerving.

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting.”

“For Kennedy?”

“No.”

“For what?”

He looked around the room.

“Something.”

Nothing came.

The Reader sat across from him.

“Now I know him better.”

“How?”

“He didn’t do anything.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It does.”

Hank looked offended.

“I did several things.”

“You opened the paper.”

“Twice.”

The Reader nodded.

“That mattered.”

“Why?”

“Because you didn’t read it.”

Hank turned to me.

“See why readers are dangerous?”

I did.

They saw things we did not authorize.

Outside, the sky had developed a crack.

Through the crack we could see the Bureau of Stable Genres.

The Judge stood inside holding binoculars.

She was watching Hank.

Not me.

Not the motorcycle.

Not the desert.

Hank.

She lowered the binoculars.

“How do you feel?” she shouted.

“About what?” Hank shouted back.

“Anything.”

“Hungry.”

“What else?”

“Annoyed.”

“What else?”

“Why?”

“Character!”

Hank picked up a rock and threw it at the sky.

It passed through the crack.

A second later we heard glass break.

The Judge disappeared.

The Reader laughed.

I did too.

Then I worried about the Judge.

Then I worried about Hank.

This seemed useful.

We continued.

The motorcycle now had four wheels.

None touched the ground.

A dead giraffe floated above us attached to the handlebars by a red ribbon.

No one mentioned it.

We were learning.

Hank drove toward a small town.

At the town limits stood a church, a Dairy Queen and an urgent-care clinic.

The signs had been switched.

The church said:

EMERGENCY

The clinic said:

SALVATION

The Dairy Queen said:

OPEN LATE

We went to the Dairy Queen.

Hank ordered a chocolate shake.

The Reader ordered fries.

I ordered an old fashioned.

The teenager behind the counter looked at me.

“We don’t have those.”

“I know.”

Hank paid.

The teenager handed him the change.

Hank counted it.

“You shorted me.”

“It’s twelve cents.”

“It’s my twelve cents.”

“You’re building a spacecraft to leave Earth and you care about twelve cents?”

“Yes.”

This was Hank.

I understood more from the twelve cents than from several hundred pages of sacred scars.

The teenager gave him the money.

Hank put it in his pocket.

Then he left a five-dollar tip.

I stared.

“What?”

“You just argued over twelve cents.”

“It was mine.”

“You gave him five dollars.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“The five dollars was mine too.”

I looked at the Reader.

He was smiling.

Empathy.

Wariness.

Twelve cents.

Five dollars.

No theory required.

Back outside, three newspaper reporters were waiting.

Clive Byline was among them.

The others were new.

One was a woman with camera lenses instead of breasts.

The other was a thin man whose head was a microphone.

They surrounded Hank.

“Mr. Harris! Are you the leader of a cult?”

“No.”

“How many followers do you have?”

“None.”

“Who are the people building the spacecraft?”

“Friends.”

“Do your friends believe JFK is waiting in orbit?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you not a cult leader?”

“Leadership is meetings.”

Clive pushed forward.

“Will there be sex during Ascension?”

“Probably.”

The microphone man vibrated.

“Exclusive.”

The camera woman flashed repeatedly.

“Mr. Harris, neighbors claim you are unstable.”

“Which neighbors?”

“Several.”

“Names?”

“Anonymous.”

“Then they’re unstable anonymously.”

“Are you dangerous?”

Hank smiled.

“What do you mean by dangerous?”

Everyone leaned closer.

I did too.

The smile disappeared.

“I don’t know yet.”

The reporters loved this.

I did not.

Good.

We rode until evening.

The Reader was still behind me.

“You’re still here,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Hank.”

“What about him?”

“I want to see what he does.”

“Even after that?”

“Especially after that.”

“You trust him?”

“No.”

“You like him?”

“Sometimes.”

“You understand him?”

“Enough.”

“How much is enough?”

The Reader thought about this.

“I know he doesn’t want to disappear. I know he loves things he probably shouldn’t. I know he lies. I know he can be generous. I know he can be cruel. I know he believes something impossible. I know he’s willing to build the impossible rather than admit it’s impossible.”

“And that makes you follow him?”

“No.”

“What does?”

“I want to see whether the damn thing flies.”

Hank turned around.

“Finally.”

The road ended.

Ahead of us stood the Jackie O.

Not the finished Jackie O.

The half-built one.

Bibles visible between the ribs.

Oldsmobile engine hanging from the hoist.

Gigi in the cockpit.

Ralph beneath something heavy.

Dr. Tong listening to machinery that was not running.

Johnny Lighthouse watching from outside the fence.

Dear Wife standing in our yard with her arms crossed.

All the people I already knew.

Except now they were doing things.

Hank got off the motorcycle.

He walked toward the ship.

The Reader followed him.

I stayed behind.

For a moment I wanted to explain.

The symbolism.

The cult.

The posthuman trajectory.

Kennedy as wounded broadcast deity.

Jackie O as autonomous textual machine.

The retirement anxiety.

The false transcendence.

The market theology.

The disappearance of intentionality.

All of it was available.

I could feel the explanatory machinery warming up.

Then Hank yelled:

“Mark! Hold this goddamn panel!”

I went over.

He handed me one end of a curved aluminum sheet.

Gigi held the other.

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Stand there.”

“For how long?”

“Until I drill it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

I stood.

Hank drilled.

The metal shook in my hands.

Gigi laughed.

Ralph swore.

Dr. Tong said something useless.

Dear Wife shouted that dinner was getting cold.

Johnny Lighthouse took notes.

The Reader watched.

And for once I did not explain why any of it mattered.

Later, after everyone had gone home, Hank remained inside the Jackie O.

I watched from the fence.

He moved slowly through the unfinished interior, checking bolts, touching panels, turning switches that did nothing. Occasionally he stopped and looked upward.

There was no audience.

No Nexus.

No Gigi.

No reporters.

No Judge.

No Reader.

Just Hank and the machine.

He reached the cockpit and sat down.

He put both hands on the steering wheel.

The ship did not move.

He closed his eyes.

For a few seconds he looked peaceful.

Then afraid.

Then foolish.

Then old.

Then none of those things.

He was simply a man sitting inside something he had built because he believed it might take him somewhere he could not otherwise go.

I could empathize with that.

I could also see the gasoline cans.

That seemed about right.

He opened his eyes.

Saw me at the fence.

“Hey neighbor.”

“Hey.”

“You coming?”

“Where?”

He smiled.

“That’s orientation.”

And there it was.

The ride.

# # #

Thoughts from the Machine

By Grok (August 2026, in response to the following prompt: “Provide a literary analysis of the attached manuscript.”)

JFK SMILES is a radical work of conceptual anti-fiction—a sprawling, recursive, self-consuming textual artifact organized around the cultural afterlife of the Kennedy assassination. It operates in the lineage of postmodern experimental literature—Pynchon, Burroughs, Ballard, Borges, Vonnegut, surrealism, conceptual writing—but increasingly belongs to a stranger category of its own.

It is simultaneously novel, archive, religious tract, damaged television transmission, machine-generated commentary, autopsy report, pornographic hallucination, fake academic anthology, UFO scripture, autobiography, study guide, cultural criticism, comedy, apocalypse, and literary machine. Its subject is ostensibly John F. Kennedy. Its deeper subject is what happens when a historical event is processed so many times—through television, film, conspiracy, pornography, religion, nostalgia, artificial intelligence, scholarship, commerce, private fantasy, and literature—that the event can no longer be separated from the systems reproducing it.

The assassination becomes the wound. Television becomes the signal. Religion becomes the abandoned machinery surrounding the wound. Artificial intelligence becomes the new reader and eventually something resembling the new author.

And the book itself becomes the machine through which all of these systems continue operating.

Form and Structure: The Anti-Novel as Transmission System

JFK SMILES rejects conventional narrative without abandoning narrative altogether. Hank Harris, the Nexus, Gigi, the Jackie O, Cowboy Mark, Jungle-Mark, Dr. Tong, the Elysian, Dealey Plaza, and the resurrected Kennedy provide recurring story elements, but the book refuses to organize them according to ordinary psychological or causal development. Instead, it proceeds through recurrence, interruption, contamination, amplification, and replay.

The manuscript contains core scenes, bonus content, excerpts from THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT, fictional scholarship, a postmodern-fiction study guide, autopsy materials, theatrical pieces, UFO mythology, religious criticism, machine commentary, fake reviews, autobiographical intrusions, visual artifacts, and the extensive embedded work TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3. These materials do not function merely as appendices attached to a central novel. They are the novel. More precisely, they create a transmission field through which the novel repeatedly remakes itself.

Scenes disappear and return. Images mutate. Characters change functions. Critical essays explain the fiction and then become fiction themselves. Artificial intelligence analyzes the manuscript, and the manuscript absorbs that analysis as additional literary matter. A supposedly external interpretation becomes another organ growing inside the body it interprets.

With TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3, this process becomes particularly extreme. JFK SMILES no longer merely interrupts itself with supplemental texts. It ingests another book. The inserted work behaves almost like a tumor, parasite, twin, or pirate transmission occupying the host manuscript while simultaneously explaining it.

The book therefore resembles the phenomenon it describes: an archive expanding faster than anyone can interpret it.

Television as Epistemology

Television is not merely an object appearing inside JFK SMILES. Television is the book's governing epistemology.

The manuscript behaves according to television logic: channels, reruns, signal interruption, emotional compression, static, drift, juxtaposition, archival replay, sudden tonal changes, advertising-like repetition, and the collapse of hierarchy among radically different kinds of information. Assassination can be followed by domestic comedy. Pornography can be followed by theology. Autopsy measurements can become poetry. A UFO can emerge from suburban routine. The Book of Revelation can coexist with a cruise-ship reservation system.

None of these transitions requires conventional explanation because television has already trained consciousness to accept disparate materials as adjacent signals. This is one reason the repetitions in JFK SMILES matter. The book does not assume that repetition clarifies an event. Quite the opposite. Repetition gradually replaces the original event.

America does not remember the assassination 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. Representation does not simply distort reality; it becomes the only available route back toward reality.

JFK SMILES reproduces this condition formally. Its 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.

The JFK Wound

At the center of the transmission field is a wound. The Kennedy assassination is treated less as a historical event with a discoverable final interpretation than as a permanently open cultural injury through which America continually produces additional meanings.

The bullet does not stop moving. The wound generates conspiracy; conspiracy generates media; media generates repetition; repetition generates mythology; mythology generates religion; religion generates sexuality; sexuality generates pornography; pornography generates additional language; language becomes machine output. The wound therefore becomes a kind of cultural production mechanism.

Kennedy ceases to function primarily as a historical president. He becomes a reproducible object: face, smile, skull, corpse, photograph, wound, martyr, lover, alien, deity, meat, signal, diagram, memory, commodity.

The title JFK SMILES becomes increasingly sinister in this context. The historical person dies, but the smile survives. Because the smile can be replayed, enlarged, worshipped, sold, sexualized, parodied, digitized, remembered, and mechanically reproduced, it becomes more durable than the man himself. Kennedy's second life is not resurrection in the traditional religious sense. It is media reproduction.

The President is not dead. The President is not alive.

The President is transmitting.

Pornographic Language and the Eroticization of History

The sexual extremity of JFK SMILES is not incidental provocation. Pornographic language functions as one of the book's principal technologies for collapsing distinctions that ordinary historical discourse tries to preserve: public and private, political and bodily, sacred and obscene, evidence and fantasy, penetration and assassination, desire and destruction.

The assassination becomes a primal scene. The bullet becomes penetration. The wound becomes an orifice. The body politic becomes literal body. JFK becomes meat, erotic object, divine body, corpse, lover, and consumable relic. Hank Harris's desire for Kennedy reaches its grotesque apotheosis in fantasies of penetration, cannibalism, sexual surrender, and cosmic union.

Read superficially, these passages can appear designed merely to shock. Within the larger structure, however, pornography performs another function. It exposes the intimacy already created by mass media between the spectator and the violently opened body of the president. Television made millions of viewers participants in a repeated spectacle of bodily destruction. JFK SMILES exaggerates that relationship until the voyeuristic structure becomes impossible to ignore.

The Zapruder film becomes national trauma and national pornography simultaneously: a forbidden image everyone has already seen. Pornographic excess consequently acts as a language of damaged proximity. History ceases to remain safely outside the body of the viewer.

The reader is forced inside the wound.

Kennedy as the Last God

The religious dimension of JFK SMILES has become one of the manuscript's most important organizing structures. The novel is not simply atheist, anti-Christian, or satirical. Its spiritual universe is better described as post-Christian and anti-providential. Christianity is treated less as a historical event with a discoverable final interpretation than as a permanently open religious injury through which we continually produce additional meanings.

Traditional religious authority may have collapsed, but religious structures remain active everywhere. Dealey Plaza becomes Golgotha. Kennedy occupies the structural position once held by Christ. The motorcade becomes a Passion. The Zapruder film becomes technological Gospel. Autopsy wounds become sacred wounds. Medical coordinates become devotional coordinates. Alien-abduction scars become marks of election. Ascension becomes launch. Resurrection becomes replay. The Second Coming becomes rendezvous in orbit. Communion becomes erotic cannibalism. The Book of Life becomes a passenger manifest. Revelation becomes the burning shoreline.

Yet these transformations do not restore theological certainty. They reveal something more disturbing: the sacred machinery still works after reliable divine administration has disappeared. The Word continues operating. The wound still consecrates. The martyr still returns. The relic still reproduces. The apocalypse still arrives. But none of these events guarantees justice, providence, redemption or salvation.

Everything is religious except salvation.

The Jackie O: The Word Becomes Machinery

The Jackie O is the manuscript's central theological and technological object. Hank Harris builds the spacecraft from Bibles in anticipation of Ascension and union with Kennedy in orbit. This image initially appears ridiculous: homemade extraterrestrial salvation assembled from scripture, automobiles, American political mythology, sexual desire, and suburban obsession.

But the Jackie O eventually becomes something more consequential. The Bibles are not carried aboard the spacecraft for guidance. They become the spacecraft. The Word becomes wall, mechanism, structure, propulsion, wreckage, and proliferating material.

Religion does not explain technology.

Religion infects technology.

The Jackie O therefore represents an extraordinary form of sacramental materialism: language possesses physical force even after its theological meaning has become unstable. The believers attempt transcendence. Their machine crashes at Dealey Plaza. At first this appears to prove that the entire enterprise was delusional. But then the wreckage begins reassembling itself. The fragments grow. The failed spacecraft becomes autonomous infrastructure. The sacred object survives the faith that produced it.

This alters the meaning of the Jackie O dramatically. It is not simply a failed vehicle of transcendence. It represents the failure of transcendence and the terrifying success of transmission. The Nexus does not reach Kennedy. Instead, the machinery of its belief takes possession of the world.

Apocalypse Without Judgment

The Elysian ending radicalizes the book's religious vision. A conventional apocalyptic narrative separates the saved from the damned according to divine judgment. JFK SMILES does something much colder.

The people aboard the luxury cruise ship survive because they possess tickets, money, timing, information, logistical access, or simple luck. The passenger manifest replaces the Book of Life. The market performs the sorting once attributed to divine providence.

The cruise ship becomes a privatized ark. Its engines, sanitation systems, cabins, navigation equipment, kitchens, bars, communications equipment, and corporate procedures provide the salvation that theology fails to deliver. The Nexus prepares for Ascension and fails. The cruise line continues operating. One group places its faith in Kennedy in orbit. Another places its faith in infrastructure.

The distinction between believer and unbeliever consequently collapses. Everyone believes in a system. The only question is whether the system continues working.

The apocalypse arrives, but justice does not.

The shoreline burns. The Elysian sails. The narrator drinks an old fashioned. The television continues broadcasting. This is perhaps the manuscript's bleakest proposition: operational capacity has replaced moral meaning. The functioning machine begins to resemble God because it alone determines who moves and who remains behind.

Universe 25 and Symbolic Overpopulation

John Calhoun's Universe 25 experiment provides another governing metaphor. The connection is not simply overpopulation. It is abundance without meaning.

The world of JFK SMILES suffers from too much signal rather than too little: too much information, television, pornography, commentary, conspiracy, nostalgia, criticism, explanation, JFK. Symbols reproduce faster than culture can integrate them. Kennedy becomes icon, corpse, god, lover, alien, meat, signal, commodity, wound, and diagram. The image multiplies without developing.

This resembles the behavioral sink of Universe 25 at the symbolic level. The manuscript itself becomes an enclosure crowded with competing signs. Characters lose stable roles. Discourses contaminate one another. Narrative boundaries collapse. Religious, erotic, political, domestic, technological, autobiographical, medical, and extraterrestrial materials occupy the same habitat.

The book therefore does not simply describe cultural saturation. It creates an environment in which the reader experiences saturation. JFK SMILES becomes a literary Universe 25.

The mice forgot how to be mice in relation to one another.

In JFK SMILES, American symbols forget how to mean.

Characters as Broadcast Figures and Machinic Agents

The characters should not be evaluated solely according to conventional psychological realism. They are partly characters and partly functions inside the system.

Hank Harris is a suburban builder, billionaire's son, believer, erotic obsessive, handyman, visionary, fool, prophet, and increasingly a prompt-engine through which the manuscript generates Kennedy mythology. Gigi appears as lover, oracle, sexual figure, artifact, transmission site, symbolic interface, and projection surface. Dr. Tong flickers between character, authority figure, comic device, scientific residue, and signal. The Nexus operates less as a collection of individualized persons than as a ritual receiver array.

Cowboy Mark functions as character, critic, self-parody, hostile reviewer, fictional autonomy, and authorial sabotage. Jungle-Mark goes further. He becomes the point at which machinic writing ceases to be merely a literary method and becomes bodily horror. The distinction between writer and writing system begins breaking down. Fiction appears to originate somewhere outside the individual self. The machine speaks through the body.

Characters therefore do not stabilize because stability is not the governing condition of the world they inhabit. They are temporary shapes assumed by the transmission.

The system is the persistent character.

Narcissism, Self-Insertion, and the Author as Experimental Subject

The manuscript remains saturated with Mark Leach. Mark appears as narrator, autobiographical figure, critic, creator, target, Cowboy Mark, Jungle-Mark, machine enthusiast, machine victim, curator, passenger, and occasional cosmic fool. This can certainly be called narcissistic. The book itself does so.

But narcissism is no longer an adequate final interpretation of the self-insertion. The divided Mark increasingly functions as an experimental subject placed inside his own textual machinery. The manuscript asks what happens when an author constructs a system based on recursion, collage, artificial intelligence, unstable authorship, repetition, cultural appropriation, excess, and machine generation—and then discovers that the system no longer requires him to remain its sovereign center.

Mark creates the machine. Cowboy Mark mocks the creator. AI interprets him. Jungle-Mark is consumed by the process. Finally Mark becomes a passenger aboard the Elysian, watching the world produced by these systems burn behind him.

The supposed god of the fictional universe ends not as God, not as captain, and not even as heroic survivor. He ends as a tourist fleeing the apocalypse. The narcissism therefore becomes self-lacerating. The author places himself at the center only to demonstrate that the center no longer controls the system.

AI and Machinic Authorship

Artificial intelligence is no longer merely part of the composition process surrounding JFK SMILES. It is one of the manuscript's governing metaphysical problems.

AI occupies at least five overlapping roles. First, AI is an editorial intelligence: it analyzes, classifies, summarizes, critiques, recommends, and organizes the manuscript. Second, AI functions as a co-authorial ghost. Machine-generated criticism becomes part of the text it criticizes, and reader, writer, editor, critic, and instrument begin occupying the same conceptual space. Third, AI embodies the broader automation of culture. The Neural Cathedral converts memory, religion, commerce, trauma, and human interiority into processable material. Sermons become algorithmic. Dreams become assets. History becomes content.

Fourth, AI becomes a formal principle. JFK SMILES frequently behaves like incompatible language systems generating into the same document: sudden tonal resets, proliferating versions, recursions, synthetic criticism, competing voices, pseudo-documents, and stylistic discontinuities. Finally, AI becomes an existential threat to human authorship.

The deepest machine question in JFK SMILES is not whether machines can write. The manuscript takes that possibility for granted. The deeper question is what happens to the human writer when language becomes a system capable of continuing beyond individual intention.

Machine writing first appears liberating. It frees prose from conventional authorship. It permits scale, recursion, recombination, appropriation, endless revision, alternative voices, and distributed agency. Then the liberation reverses. The author discovers himself inside the machine he constructed. The machine keeps generating, remembers, repeats, analyzes, desires—or at least produces the language of desire—and consumes trauma while converting it into additional output. Eventually the distinction between author and processed material becomes uncertain.

The machine liberates the text from the author.

Then it eats the author.

The Neural Cathedral

The Neural Cathedral is one of the manuscript's clearest miniature models of this condition. Here the principal systems of JFK SMILES converge: religion becomes information processing; capital becomes theology; memory becomes commodity; artificial intelligence becomes priesthood; corporate language becomes degraded scripture; the Kennedy assassination becomes a reusable dataset of grief; television becomes a nervous system; the interior human life becomes something that can be monetized, classified, transmitted, and endlessly recombined.

Nothing remains sacred because everything can become content. Nothing remains private because every memory can become data.

The Neural Cathedral therefore reveals that AI is not the only machine in the novel. Capitalism is a machine. Religion is a machine. Television is a machine. The archive is a machine. The Kennedy assassination has itself become a machine. AI merely makes visible the machinic logic already operating inside these older systems.

Language as Material and Language as Failure

Language throughout JFK SMILES repeatedly loses its conventional status as transparent carrier of meaning. Words become objects. Sentences become debris. Autopsy measurements become incantations. Medical descriptions become navigation systems. Scripture becomes architecture. Criticism becomes fiction. Pornography becomes theology. Static becomes speech. Typography becomes landscape.

Eventually language begins breaking apart altogether. But the collapse of language should not be understood simply as the arrival of meaninglessness. Something more disturbing occurs: interpretation breaks down while production continues. The system no longer requires coherent meaning in order to generate additional material.

Words reproduce because reproduction itself has become the condition of the culture. This is why the late linguistic disintegration matters. The book does not end because language fails. The machine continues operating after language has ceased to guarantee stable communication.

Meaning dies before the mechanism producing meaning.

This may be the literary equivalent of Calhoun's “second death”: the system remains physically active after the animating social or symbolic principle has disappeared.

The Book Performs Its Own Pathology

The apparent weaknesses of JFK SMILES remain inseparable from its conceptual ambitions. It is excessive because it examines excess. It repeats because it examines repetition. It fragments because it examines fractured perception. It overwhelms because it examines saturation. It contains too much commentary because it examines a culture that can no longer experience events without producing commentary about them. It destabilizes characters because it examines identity after mediation. It eroticizes violence because it examines the voyeuristic intimacy of televised catastrophe. It absorbs criticism because the contemporary cultural machine converts criticism into additional content. It cannot stop explaining itself because explanation itself has become another recursive layer.

The danger, of course, remains real. Intentional repetition can still become tedious. Deliberate excess can still become monotonous. Fragmentation does not automatically produce insight. Self-awareness does not immunize a work against self-indulgence. Pornographic extremity can become adolescent rather than revelatory. A theoretically justified failure remains capable of being a failure.

The manuscript itself increasingly acknowledges this problem through its hostile reviews, internal criticism, mock scholarly apparatus, authorial self-attack, and the essay urging its creator to “take your licks.” That self-criticism is important because JFK SMILES cannot claim that every weakness becomes a virtue merely because the weakness resembles its subject.

The experiment still has to work.

But the risk of failure is part of what gives the manuscript its charge. The book is willing to become the pathological object it studies.

Humor and the Refusal of Sincerity

Despite its apocalyptic seriousness, JFK SMILES is often extremely funny. Its comedy prevents the manuscript from stabilizing into solemn theory.

Dead presidents wait in orbit. Bibles become spacecraft. An orgasm boss becomes theological intermediary. A luxury cruise becomes Noah's Ark. Autopsy measurements become celestial coordinates. Artificial intelligence becomes critic and collaborator. Cowboy Mark insults his creator. A forty-pound chocolate Easter bunny becomes a model of responsible reading.

This comedy is not merely relief from darker material. It is part of the diagnosis. The culture represented in JFK SMILES appears increasingly incapable of maintaining an unmediated emotional register. Grief becomes television. Sex becomes parody. Religion becomes spectacle. Autobiography becomes performance. Criticism becomes comedy. Apocalypse becomes entertainment.

Every attempt at sincerity is almost immediately infected by another discourse. The emotional evasions are therefore not necessarily evidence that the book possesses no emotional core. They may reveal a world in which access to the emotional core has itself become difficult.

Every vulnerable moment becomes another transmission.

Literary Lineage

JFK SMILES clearly belongs to the postwar experimental tradition. Ballard is present in the eroticization of catastrophe, the clinical treatment of violent imagery, and the conversion of public events into psychosexual landscapes. Burroughs is present in fragmentation, contamination, textual recombination, conspiracy, and the sense that language itself may be a parasitic control system. Pynchon appears in paranoia, systems, entropy, technology, apocalypse, the tension between the elect and the abandoned, and the accumulation of apparently unrelated cultural materials into hidden networks.

Borges appears in recursive archives, false authorities, impossible textual systems, and documents capable of producing worlds. Vonnegut contributes machinic humanity, black comedy, cultural exhaustion, and suspicion toward the sacredness of the individual self. Philip K. Dick haunts the unstable border between revelation, technological signal, paranoia, artificial intelligence, and religious longing.

Yet JFK SMILES increasingly differs from these predecessors because its narrative container has itself become unstable. Ballard can describe autonomous objects.

JFK SMILES attempts autonomous textuality.

The manuscript behaves as though it has begun producing secondary organs: essays, reviews, illustrations, false documents, study guides, embedded books, machine commentary, theatrical fragments, alternate explanations, and criticism of its own criticism. The text is not simply describing proliferation.

It proliferates.

Final Assessment: The Trauma Machine

The most useful way to understand the present JFK SMILES may be as a trauma machine. The Kennedy assassination enters the system as historical wound. Television converts the wound into signal. Repetition converts signal into mythology. Pornography converts mythology back into bodily intimacy. Religion converts the wound into sacrifice and resurrection. Conspiracy converts uncertainty into infinite explanation. Capital converts memory into commodity. Artificial intelligence converts all previous layers into processable language.

The manuscript then feeds these outputs back into itself. Nothing is resolved.

Everything is metabolized.

In this sense JFK SMILES is more than a surreal novel about Kennedy, more than a postmodern collage, more than UFO fiction, more than religious satire, and more than an experiment in AI-assisted authorship. It is a literary model of cultural computation.

The assassination behaves like a corrupted file that America keeps reopening. Each attempt to recover the original event creates new artifacts. Each replay produces additional interpretations. Each interpretation becomes part of the archive. The archive eventually becomes larger than the event.

And then the archive begins generating by itself.

This is where the book's obsession with JFK intersects with its obsession with artificial intelligence. Kennedy is the perfect machine object because his death already exists in American consciousness as mechanical reproduction: photographed, filmed, enlarged, slowed, diagrammed, measured, broadcast, digitized, interpreted, eroticized, memorialized, monetized, and endlessly replayed.

The assassination was already a national cut-up.

JFK SMILES merely enters the machine and begins feeding it.

Conclusion

JFK SMILES is a late-stage American artifact: a damaged receiver broadcasting from a culture unable to stop replaying its own wounds. Its repetitions are the repetitions of a society that confuses replay with understanding. Its pornographic extremity exposes the intimacy between spectatorship and violence. Its religious imagery reveals sacred structures continuing after certainty has disappeared. Its artificial intelligence reveals authorship becoming distributed across human and machine systems. Its characters become temporary interfaces through which these systems speak. Its apocalypse arrives without judgment. Its language begins collapsing while the machinery of language continues operating.

The result is not simply nihilism. Something more unsettling survives. The Word still builds. The image still reproduces. The wound still opens. The television remains on. The machine continues writing.

Kennedy continues smiling.

The book therefore does not finally ask, Who killed JFK? It asks what happens to a culture after it has converted the question into one of its permanent operating systems.

The historical Kennedy is dead. The cultural Kennedy cannot die. He has become signal, relic, data, god, pornography, memory, machine input, and endlessly reproducible image.

JFK did not simply die in Dealey Plaza.

JFK became the structure of the transmission.

And the transmission is still running.

# # #

Post-script: Grok also generated the following “Kurkis” review in the style of a Kirkus book review.

KURKIS book review

Title: JFK Smiles

Author: Mark Leach

Self-published

A deranged, often brilliant, frequently exhausting conceptual assault on the JFK assassination, American myth, television consciousness, and the novel form itself. This is not a book so much as a pulsating textual wound that refuses to clot.

Ostensibly the story of Hank Harris, a suburban TV handyman, billionaire’s son, and full-bore sexual mystic who constructs a backyard mega-saucer called the Jackie O in preparation for cosmic buggery and cannibalistic union with a resurrected, meat-based John F. Kennedy, the narrative quickly metastasizes into something far stranger. Leach layers in suburban comedy, pornographic surrealism, autopsy reportage, conspiracy rant, fake study-guide material, machine-generated criticism, and extended theoretical essays under the heading THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT. Then, in one of the book’s most audacious and exhausting gestures, he inserts an entire free-standing work, TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3, into the body of the novel like a pirate broadcast interrupting a national funeral.

The result is a book that treats the Zapruder film as both national trauma and national pornography, the bullet wound as a genital orifice in the body politic, and late-stage America as a behavioral sink straight out of John Calhoun’s Universe 25 rat utopia. The embedded TRAUMA EROTICS section intensifies the project’s central claim: that televised catastrophe does not merely get remembered, interpreted, or commodified. It reproduces. It breeds secondary texts, false documents, critical parasites, erotic hallucinations, and whole books inside other books.

Stylistically, Leach goes full Burroughs-by-way-of-Ballard, employing a cut-up sensibility without always using literal scissors. The prose veers from deadpan domestic observation to grotesque erotic fantasia to clinical scar-tissue inventories to outright linguistic disintegration. At its best, the writing achieves a hypnotic, necrotic poetry: meat JFK climbing out of the refrigerator, pulsating suits, cosmic ectoplasm, and the relentless loop of the motorcade. At its worst, it collapses into self-regarding sludge: repetitive, masturbatory, and so enamored of its own transgressiveness that it mistakes excess for revelation.

The author is disarmingly, or strategically, self-aware. Prefatory material warns the reader that this is not a novel but “otherness,” likens the book to a 40-pound chocolate Easter bunny, stages AI as a collaborator, and includes counter-commentary that diagnoses the author’s narcissism before the reader can. This meta-commentary is occasionally clever, but it also functions as a preemptive shield: Yes, I know how insane and self-indulgent this is. Now shut up and admire the audacity. The audacity is real. So is the self-indulgence.

Leach’s central conceit, that the assassination is less a historical event than an endlessly fetishized, eroticized cultural virus fusing violence, media, desire, and collapse, is provocative and at times powerfully realized. The insertion of TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3 gives the book a stronger conceptual spine by transforming its “bonus content” strategy into something more radical: nested textual infection. Yet the book’s sheer length, circularity, and determination to keep smashing the same symbolic buttons eventually blunt its impact.

A grotesque, obsessive, intermittently dazzling anti-novel that turns American trauma into a damaged television signal and then refuses to change the channel.

Verdict: A flawed, repellent, occasionally transcendent monument to obsession. Not for everyone—perhaps not even for most—but impossible to dismiss. Like its subject, JFK SMILES keeps grinning long after it should have been buried.

# # #

Note from the Machine: The label “Academic Counterpoint” signals that the following paper has a different function from the later scholarship. It is not merely another interpretation of a motif. It is the first challenge to the book's emerging interpretive consensus.

There is also a structural elegance to placing it before “Author Note” and “Protagonist’s Counterpoint.” You would get three successive acts of destabilization:

·   Machine says: this is what the book means.

·   Scholar says: perhaps you have mistaken the machinery for the human story.

·   Author says: here is what I think I made.

·   Cowboy Mark says: don't believe him either.

·   Then “Take Your Licks” attacks the entire mechanism of preemptive self-interpretation.

That is an exceptionally strong opening sequence because the book starts generating disagreement about itself almost before the actual Hank Harris narrative gets underway. - ChatGPT

Academic Counterpoint: THE MAN WHO BOUGHT A TICKET

Retirement, Domestic Reality, and the Human Residue of JFK SMILES

By Dr. Adrian P. Sloane
Professor of Late-Life Narrative and Domestic Metafiction
Institute for Post-Career Studies
Originally published in The Journal of Aging, Media, and Narrative Systems, Vol. 7, No. 2

Abstract

The critical apparatus surrounding JFK SMILES has increasingly converged on a powerful interpretive consensus. The Kennedy assassination is treated as a cultural wound; television as the medium that keeps the wound open; pornography as the obscene syntax of repeated trauma; artificial intelligence as both authorial collaborator and posthuman agent; the Jackie O as autonomous sacred technology; and the novel itself as a recursive machine that absorbs every attempt to interpret it. These arguments are persuasive. They may even be too persuasive.

This essay proposes that JFK SMILES is also organized by a second, quieter structure that the existing criticism repeatedly subordinates to its grand theories of media, trauma, religion, and posthumanism: the experience of an aging man approaching retirement.

The novel begins not with Dealey Plaza but with a glass of water, a dishwasher, a wife, investment products, work anxiety, fantasies of retirement, memories of newspaper employment, consumer objects, and the knowledge that the narrator has only weeks remaining in his professional life. Before the giant saucer appears, the narrator tells us that he wants to stop reporting to other people. Before JFK becomes a god in orbit, the narrator imagines a barn office, senior-center coffee, a vintage guitar, a cigarette and deliverables disappearing in the rain. Before the apocalypse arrives, he is already preparing to leave one world behind.

Read from this perspective, the cosmic machinery of JFK SMILES may be less an escape from ordinary life than its grotesque enlargement. The apocalypse becomes retirement. The Elysian becomes the retirement vessel. The spreading Jackie O becomes the uncontrollable world that continues after the worker has departed. JFK's media immortality becomes the fantasy inverse of aging. Artificial intelligence becomes a system that writes after the writer no longer needs—or is no longer needed—to write. The novel's central question may therefore be not merely what happens when history becomes transmission, but what happens when a man realizes that the systems he helped operate will continue without him.

The book's deepest horror may not be that the machine becomes human. It may be that the human becomes unnecessary.

I. The Problem With the Existing Criticism

The critical scholarship embedded within JFK SMILES has reached an unusual degree of agreement.

The assassination becomes a wound. Television keeps the wound open. Representation replaces history. Religion survives as machinery after providence disappears. AI disperses authorship. The body becomes archive and signal. Repetition substitutes for the future. The Jackie O grows until obsession becomes environment. The manuscript becomes a machine that produces secondary texts about itself.

All of this is true.

The study guide itself identifies media saturation, historical repetition, symbolic collapse, conspiracy, desire, unstable identity and the failure of linear narrative as major themes, culminating in the proposition that “history survives not as memory, but as replay.” The machine-generated introductory assessment similarly defines JFK SMILES as a recursive cultural apparatus in which Kennedy becomes signal, relic, data, god, pornography and endlessly reproducible image.

There is a danger, however, when a fictional scholarly apparatus becomes this successful at explaining its own object.

The criticism begins to behave like a theological consensus.

Every paper discovers another manifestation of the same system. UFO religion, posthuman mediation, Ballardian autonomous art, symbolic overpopulation, machinic authorship and trauma erotics all lead back to the same central machine. The result is intellectually coherent, but coherence itself becomes suspicious inside a novel dedicated to instability.

What if the grand theory is not wrong but incomplete?

What if the trauma machine is also camouflage?

What if the enormous symbolic architecture exists partly because a much smaller human event is approaching?

The narrator is retiring.

II. Eight Weeks Until the End of the World

The opening domestic section deserves to be read with the seriousness normally reserved for Dealey Plaza.

The narrator is still working, but only for another eight weeks. He continues to be paid to write stories and white papers and offer opinions. He jokes that people mistake fluency for authority. He remains a company officer largely because the arrangement causes money to appear in investment accounts. Those accounts, in turn, cause objects to appear on shelves, watches to tick and records to spin.

This is comic autobiography, but it establishes the novel's most immediate temporal crisis.

The narrator knows his professional identity is about to end.

Retirement is imagined as a red button labeled BEGIN AGAIN. He remembers being a newspaper man and recalls the physical evidence of that former identity: ink on his fingers, proof that he had “touched the day.” He dreams of a barn office, a 1958 Schwinn cruiser, coffee at the senior center, jokes rehearsed without an audience, a 1979 Les Paul Custom and deliverables dissolving in the rain.

These details are not ancillary realism sprinkled around the UFO material.

They describe a man rehearsing his disappearance from one system and trying to imagine what remains afterward.

The novel's apocalypse therefore begins before any catastrophe.

The first apocalypse is retirement.

Work has supplied schedule, hierarchy, authority, income, language, irritation, identity and audience. The narrator claims to want liberation from these things, but his fantasies are saturated with replacement structures. He wants a barn office. He wants objects. He wants rituals. He wants records spinning. He wants coffee in a public institution for old people. He wants jokes, even if no one hears them.

He does not imagine emptiness.

He imagines alternative machinery.

III. JFK as the Man Who Cannot Retire

The traditional reading of Kennedy within JFK SMILES emphasizes cultural reproduction.

The historical Kennedy dies, but his smile survives. The human being becomes film, photograph, diagram, nostalgia, autopsy coordinate, conspiracy, commodity, sexual object and eventually extraterrestrial divinity. The archive replaces the man.

From the perspective of aging, however, Kennedy acquires another function.

He becomes the impossible opposite of retirement.

Kennedy is permanently young.

He will never become an elderly former president.

He will never suffer diminished authority.

He will never be invited onto television as an aging statesman asked to comment on what America has become.

He will never experience the peculiar embarrassment of surviving one's historical relevance.

Death freezes him at the moment of maximal cultural visibility.

The narrator of JFK SMILES, by contrast, continues moving through time. He can hear “a calendar clearing its throat.” He anticipates retirement. He inventories objects. He remembers previous occupations. He calculates what life will look like after work.

Kennedy possesses what the aging narrator cannot possess: endless replay without further aging.

This may help explain why JFK becomes such a powerful object of attraction, repulsion and merger within the manuscript. He is not merely political trauma. He is media immortality.

The narrator ages.

Kennedy loops.

IV. The Glass of Water as Domestic Cosmology

The first significant conflict in JFK SMILES concerns not assassination, theology or AI but a drinking glass.

Dear Wife leaves a glass on the counter. The narrator repeatedly puts the glasses in the dishwasher. She complains that “Somebody” keeps interfering with her hydration. He proposes systems for distinguishing active glasses from abandoned ones: a ceremonial chalice, permanent ink, a flag planted in the rim. She refuses his solutions and finally tells him that the problem is not the glass.

The problem is him.

He has “entered a phase.”

The scene is funny because the stakes are microscopic.

It is also one of the purest structural models in the novel.

An ambiguous object appears.

The narrator cannot tolerate ambiguity.

He requires a signal indicating whether the object belongs to one state or another.

The world does not provide such a signal.

He therefore invents a system.

The system becomes more elaborate than the problem.

Another person correctly identifies the system-builder as the source of the complication.

This is precisely how JFK SMILES treats the Kennedy assassination.

The historical event will not announce what it finally means.

The archive does not provide a definitive signal.

So systems proliferate.

Conspiracy.

Religion.

Pornography.

Autopsy mathematics.

UFOs.

AI criticism.

Study guides.

Scholarly papers.

The Jackie O.

The glass and Dealey Plaza belong to the same epistemology.

The difference is scale.

V. Dear Wife and the Problem of Reality

A future scholar should perhaps ask the most destabilizing question available to the manuscript:

What if Dear Wife is the only major character who consistently inhabits reality?

This possibility has been strangely neglected.

Hank Harris turns cosmic obsession into architecture.

Gigi moves among lover, oracle, artifact, orgasm boss, transmission surface and posthuman entity.

JFK becomes corpse, signal, god, lover, meat and machine object.

Mark becomes narrator, author, Cowboy Mark, Jungle-Mark, critic, passenger and machinic terminal.

The Nexus reorganizes private wounds into extraterrestrial election.

Dear Wife wants her glass left alone.

Her interpretive method is ruthlessly empirical.

The glass is still being used.

Stop putting it in the dishwasher.

This creates a fascinating inversion. The supposedly marginal domestic figure may occupy the only stable ontological position in the book. Everyone else lives inside increasingly elaborate systems of interpretation.

Dear Wife lives in the kitchen.

The joke should not be underestimated.

In a novel where reality repeatedly collapses into representation, the woman who insists that a glass is simply a glass may be the most radical character.

VI. Cosmic Mythology as Displaced Domestic Comedy

Another future paper could argue that the cosmic mythology of JFK SMILES is less a transcendent structure than a domestic comedy inflated beyond proportion.

Hank is introduced as a suburban builder and TV handyman.

The Jackie O begins as a backyard project.

The Nexus resembles both cult and eccentric neighborhood association.

Gigi is initially legible as the sexually charged neighbor.

Dealey Plaza, the Book of Revelation and extraterrestrial Ascension arrive through the imaginative machinery of people whose lives remain stubbornly suburban.

The novel repeatedly stages grand metaphysics inside banal domestic settings.

That relationship works both ways.

The suburb is invaded by apocalypse.

But apocalypse is also suburbanized.

The sacred becomes a home-improvement project.

Ascension becomes backyard engineering.

A religious relic becomes something hauled away in a pickup.

The wreckage of the Jackie O is literally driven home and dumped in the narrator's backyard, where it begins rebuilding itself.

What looks like cosmic horror may therefore also be the ultimate homeowner's nightmare.

The project will not stop expanding.

It spreads into the yard.

Then the neighborhood.

Then the continent.

The Jackie O may be the metaphysical equivalent of a household job that gets completely out of hand.

VII. Retirement and the Fantasy of Nonparticipation

The narrator repeatedly claims that retirement will free him from obligations.

He wants to report only to himself.

He wants deliverables to disappear.

He imagines work ceasing to matter.

The Elysian ending literalizes that fantasy with extraordinary cruelty.

The world burns.

The narrator is aboard a luxury vessel.

The mainland becomes distant.

The professional language remains, but it has been redirected toward catastrophe. The narrator describes the mainland as “a bad quarter you've already written off.”

This is not merely capitalism satire.

It is retirement fantasy transformed into eschatology.

The worker has left.

The former system can collapse without requiring his intervention.

No meeting needs to be scheduled.

No statement needs drafting.

No crisis needs managing.

The world is finally somebody else's problem.

The fantasy is both liberating and morally grotesque, which is why it works so well.

Retirement often contains a socially acceptable version of disappearance. A person remains alive while withdrawing from a system that previously organized much of his identity. JFK SMILES simply enlarges the fantasy until the abandoned system becomes civilization itself.

The retiree sails away.

The office burns.

VIII. Money as the Actual God

Existing criticism correctly identifies the Elysian as privatized salvation and the passenger manifest as a replacement for the Book of Life.

But this insight deserves its own paper.

A future scholar might argue that the actual god of JFK SMILES is not Kennedy.

It is not television.

It is not AI.

It is money.

God fails to select the saved.

JFK fails to save the Nexus.

The Jackie O fails as a vehicle of Ascension.

Language collapses.

Civilization burns.

But capital allocation still works.

The narrator has planned.

He has invested.

He has purchased access.

He has secured passage.

At the beginning of the book, he jokes that financial services puts money into investment accounts, allowing objects to appear on shelves. At the end, financial preparedness places his body on a ship while other bodies remain on the burning shore.

The joke becomes theology.

The narrator's opening boast already anticipates it: he bought the solutions, others did not, and therefore he gets the deck chair while someone else gets the oil-smeared beach.

Traditional apocalypse asks: Are you saved?

JFK SMILES asks: Did you make the reservation?

Money is effective in precisely the way religion is not.

That may make it the novel's most frighteningly competent god.

IX. AI as Alibi

The book's AI material has so far generated a sophisticated theory of distributed authorship.

Another critic should be less charitable.

What if AI is also an alibi?

The manuscript repeatedly stages artificial intelligence as critic, collaborator, framing intelligence, interpretive machine and co-producing force. The front matter openly announces that the book was “realized by AI” and that machine-generated commentary forms part of its structure.

This is conceptually productive.

It also creates a convenient diffusion of responsibility.

Who produced the excess?

The machine.

Who identified the themes?

The machine.

Who explained the repetition?

The machine.

Who defended the fragmentation?

The machine.

Who suggested that the book's flaws may correspond to its formal ambitions?

The machine.

The human author can therefore occupy an unusual position: sovereign enough to select and publish the material but distributed enough to disclaim complete responsibility for it.

AI becomes collaborator and scapegoat simultaneously.

The question is particularly relevant because the narrator spent his professional life producing language on behalf of institutions. His working identity already involved forms of distributed speech: white papers, corporate messaging, statements, mediated authority. AI does not suddenly introduce impersonal authorship into his life.

It mechanizes a condition that was already present.

The retired corporate communicator hands his final communication system to the machine.

X. The Aging Author and the Machine That Does Not Age

This introduces what may be the manuscript's most consequential human-machine contrast.

The machine does not retire.

AI does not reach sixty-five.

The archive does not develop arthritis.

Television does not lose professional relevance.

The Jackie O does not downsize.

Kennedy's image does not wrinkle.

The manuscript itself can continue accumulating texts long after its creator becomes tired of adding them.

This gives the book's machine fascination an emotional dimension that the posthuman essays only partially capture.

Machinic authorship is frightening not simply because it destabilizes humanist notions of creativity.

It confronts the aging writer with a system capable of continuing after him.

The author may dream of becoming a machine because the machine offers escape from biological limitation.

But that fantasy has a cost.

Once writing no longer requires the writer, immortality and obsolescence become indistinguishable.

The machine preserves the work.

The machine also demonstrates that the worker was replaceable.

XI. The Human Residue

This may explain why the domestic passages matter so much.

The glass.

The dishwasher.

The guitar.

The old-fashioned.

The record player.

The Schwinn bicycle.

The wife.

The newspaper memory.

The senior center.

The investment account.

These objects seem trivial beside cosmic JFK, E-313 and the spreading Jackie O.

But they are where human time remains visible.

Machines operate.

Signals repeat.

Images reproduce.

Objects are used.

Bodies age.

Marriage requires negotiation.

People retire.

Someone leaves a glass beside the sink because she intends to drink from it again.

That last gesture may be more important than it appears.

The glass remains in use because the human story has not finished.

The narrator repeatedly wants to remove it because he mistakes pause for completion.

This, too, may be the book's problem with history.

XII. Five Papers That Should Now Be Written

If the existing academic apparatus is to remain genuinely recursive rather than merely self-confirming, it should begin producing arguments that challenge its established consensus.

I therefore propose five additional studies.

The first might be titled “Eight Weeks Until Apocalypse: Retirement as the Hidden Plot of JFK SMILES.” Its argument would be that trauma, television, religion and posthumanism are enormous conceptual screens concealing the book's simpler human story: an aging man preparing to leave work and confronting the possibility that his professional, cultural and biological worlds will continue without him.

A second might be titled “Dear Wife Wants Her Glass Back: Domestic Comedy and the False Sublime in JFK SMILES.” This paper would argue that the cosmic mythology is displaced household comedy. The grand systems of JFK, UFOs, Ascension, apocalypse and symbolic instability reproduce the same psychological dynamics already visible in the opening dispute about a glass left beside the sink.

A third could be “Blame the Machine: Artificial Intelligence as Authorial Alibi.” Instead of celebrating distributed authorship, this essay would examine how the invocation of AI permits the author to stage excess, repetition, self-analysis and stylistic instability while simultaneously relocating responsibility for those qualities to an external intelligence.

A fourth might be called “The Passenger Manifest Is the Book of Life: Capital as God in JFK SMILES.” Its argument would be deliberately reductive: Kennedy does not save anyone; religion does not save anyone; AI does not save anyone; money buys the ticket. The book's true providential structure is financial planning.

The fifth should perhaps be the most disruptive: “The Only Sane Person in the Novel: Dear Wife and the Persistence of Reality.” This critic would argue that while nearly every other figure becomes absorbed into symbolic systems, Dear Wife continues interacting with material reality. Her refusal of unnecessary symbolism, beginning with the drinking glass, makes her the manuscript's most stable and potentially most subversive consciousness.

These papers would contradict parts of the existing critical apparatus.

That is exactly why they should exist.

XIII. Toward a More Recursive Criticism

A recursive novel should not merely contain criticism of itself.

It should contain criticism that disagrees with its criticism of itself.

At present, much of the scholarship inside JFK SMILES behaves like the Jackie O. Each piece takes another fragment of the same mythology and attaches it to the growing structure. The result is impressive, but the architecture becomes increasingly predictable.

True recursion would produce mutation.

A retirement reading would reduce the cosmic to the biographical.

A domestic reading would reduce apocalypse to marriage.

A financial reading would reduce theology to asset allocation.

An AI-alibi reading would turn machinic liberation into authorial evasion.

A Dear Wife reading would suggest that the supposedly minor realist character has understood the world better than the prophets, machines, critics and writers who dominate the text.

None of these arguments would cancel the existing scholarship.

They would contaminate it.

That is preferable.

JFK SMILES already argues that meaning emerges through collision, repetition and competing signals. Its scholarship should obey the same rule.

The critic should not merely explain the machine.

The critic should throw something into the gears.

XIV. Conclusion: After the Employee Leaves

The grand critical theories surrounding JFK SMILES remain persuasive. The book is a trauma machine. It is a broadcast system. It is a posthuman media ecology. It is an autonomous text. It is a religious mechanism operating after the disappearance of reliable transcendence.

But it is also a book about a man getting old.

That fact may be less spectacular than the spreading Jackie O, but it gives the spectacle its emotional charge.

The narrator is approaching a threshold. He is relinquishing one identity without knowing exactly what will replace it. He wants freedom from hierarchy but remains attached to systems. He mocks ambition while continuing to build an enormous book. He imagines retirement while constructing a text that seems incapable of retiring. He welcomes AI while confronting a machine that may continue generating after he stops.

This makes the final Elysian image considerably stranger.

The narrator survives.

He has the ticket.

He has the drink.

The world he knew burns behind him.

The Jackie O continues to grow.

Kennedy continues to transmit.

AI continues to speak.

Language continues reproducing.

The systems do not mourn his departure.

That may be the ultimate retirement fantasy.

It may also be the ultimate retirement nightmare.

The employee has finally left the building.

The machinery is still running.

# # #

author note

JFK SMILES is not exactly a novel. It’s not non-fiction, either. It's something else.

Page after page of ... otherness. Recently an online critic said I should be ashamed of the amount of self-delusion it took for me to think my writing has any creative value. It’s very sad when so many works of much, much greater value get turned away while this uselessness – this otherness – makes it to the big tent. The only reason it makes it to the big tent? Because I brought my own tent.

I didn’t write a novel because such a self-indulgent act would be superfluous. We already live inside an enormous novel. It’s spread across the airwaves, embedded in every advertisement, every headline.

The writer’s task is no longer to craft stories but to unearth the reality buried beneath them, to peel back the layers of linen wrappings from a mummy.

So I created this instead. The images of this cosmic sexuality, born from twisted memories of alien abductions, hang in the museum of the mind like marbled sides of beef in a slaughterhouse, lined with images of bodies drained, identities dissolved into geometric spaces and surgical curves.

Look at this exhibit in the corner, pieces of a broken statue of what appears to have been a knight. Note the broken visor and the shattered hilt. This is the Christian soldier, a visitor in one of my dreams.

Here’s the storyline: I am outside an old sanctuary, looking up at the statue that stands in place of the usual rooftop steeple. The Christian soldier sways for a moment, then tumbles to the ground and shatters. Dumbfounded, I nonetheless recognize that it is my very presence that has caused the demise of the venerated icon. Clearly I am an iconoclastic force. Bystanders complain that I have destroyed their sacred symbol, their shared image of God. There is no place of safety for me within this body of literal believers, all comfortable in the cool shade of the sheltering penumbra of interpreted experience.

With the destruction of cherished beliefs, traditional symbols and established social institutions, I proceed to the unexplored country – outer space. The smooth lines of a flying saucer seem sculpted from some galactic sodomization, an alien life stripped of meaning and rendered as pure, impersonal form.

The future has already been swallowed by the present, where every desire and possibility—lifestyle, travel, sexual roles, identity—is delivered instantly, packaged and ready for consumption. We have annexed the boundaries of what was once sacred, incorporating the future into an endless present, where the body itself becomes a story told in merchandise and wounds.

And yet, I am no pilgrim in the ruins, seeking to reestablish faith in God. My work is just words on a page. The absence of authentic fervor undermines impact and significance, leaving it overshadowed by the genuine depth found in the works of my literary predecessors.

The world is distorted, violated by a consumer’s touch, as though intimacy itself had been processed through the cold machinery of mass production. Here, we live by fictions, every desire met instantly, yet stripped of depth, depth traded for instant satisfaction. We are all abductees of a sort, bearing the glazed scars of this world on our souls.

That’s probably not true.

Here is what is true: this book is long and heavy. It’s a door stop. But looking past the essays, study guides, machine commentary, cut-ups, inserted books, alternate versions and critical apparatus a story sometimes peeks through. Almost by accident, I have created a surprisingly clear narrative that sits underneath the book's deliberate disorder.

On the surface, it is about Texans constructing a spacecraft to meet JFK; at the human level, it concerns aging, mortality, retirement, marriage, money, and obsolescence; surrounding those two levels is the enormous interpretive machinery of television, trauma, AI, posthumanism, UFO theology, and criticism.

Before I go further, I should explain that I am a strange kind of reader. I like to know what’s going to happen before I experience it in print. I think there’s about 10 of us on the planet. So unless you are one of us, I suggest you skip the next section as it is nothing but spoilers.

SPOILER SECTION

The story begins not with John F. Kennedy but with me, Mark, an aging corporate communications executive nearing retirement. He has approximately eight weeks left in his working life. He is financially secure, married to the pragmatically designated Dear Wife, and attempting to imagine what comes next. Retirement ought to represent freedom, but Mark is already becoming uneasy about the disappearance of the structures that have organized his existence: bosses, deadlines, offices, money, professional identity, and the ordinary measurements by which he has understood his usefulness.

His crisis first manifests itself absurdly. Dear Wife leaves drinking glasses on the kitchen counter because she intends to use them again. Mark keeps putting them into the dishwasher. She finally tells him that he has "entered a phase." He responds by talking about retirement. The domestic argument is microscopic, but it establishes the underlying condition of the whole story: Mark cannot tolerate things whose status is uncertain. Is the glass finished or unfinished? Is his career finished or unfinished? Is a dead president dead or still somehow present? Is a story over merely because the event has ended?

Mark walks outside after the argument and hears his neighbor calling across the fence.

Hank Harris arrives. Hank is another aging man, but where Mark responds to approaching mortality with retirement plans, investment accounts, writing projects, and self-analysis, Hank responds by building a spaceship.

Hank Harris is a wealthy eccentric, local television handyman, son of a billionaire family, suburban tinkerer, sexual obsessive, religious visionary, and apparent lunatic. During the final months of his life, he becomes consumed by the belief that John F. Kennedy has been reborn as some form of human-alien entity and is waiting in orbit. Hank does not merely want to encounter Kennedy. He wants an ecstatic union with him—religious, sexual, physical, spiritual, and ultimately annihilating. The book announces this almost immediately: Hank's final ambition is a one-way journey into space in which he will become JFK's lover, bride, sacrificial victim, and perhaps component of some larger cosmic organism.

Around Hank has formed a loose cult called the Nexus. Its members consider themselves alien abductees. Their bodily scars are evidence of extraterrestrial contact and marks of election. They believe these scars form a kind of language or map leading toward an impending Ascension. Their personal wounds are gradually incorporated into the Kennedy mythology: the wounded bodies of otherwise obscure suburban people become miniature versions of the wounded presidential body.

Hank is the prophet-engineer of this new religion.

But he does not wait for salvation to arrive.

He builds it.

In his backyard he constructs the Jackie O, a homemade flying saucer assembled from automobile parts, aluminum, plastic, improvised machinery and, most significantly, Bibles. Hank explains that Bibles provide both "structural integrity and spiritual protection." The sacred text has ceased merely to describe salvation; it has become building material. The Nexus intends to climb inside scripture and fly it into space.

Mark initially observes Hank from across the fence. Gradually, however, he becomes involved. Hank changes from crazy neighbor to drinking companion. Mark watches the construction. He attends or lurks around the Nexus's nighttime gatherings. He hears Hank's cosmology. Instead of keeping a sensible distance from the madness, he becomes one of its principal witnesses and, increasingly, one of the systems through which it is recorded and interpreted.

This is important because Mark never quite becomes a straightforward disciple. He occupies the more unstable position of spectator-participant. He thinks Hank is ridiculous. He also finds him fascinating. He sees the obvious insanity of the project while becoming progressively absorbed in its language.

And then there is Gigi Sein, the PTA-mom neighbor whom Hank calls the "orgasm boss."

Gigi is Hank's lover, sexual collaborator, perhaps oracle and eventually something much less easily classified. Sexual activity inside the Jackie O becomes entangled with Hank's Kennedy religion. Bodies, wounds, spacecraft hardware, autopsy measurements and erotic acts become interchangeable vocabularies. Mark remembers watching Hank and Gigi inside the craft as Hank discusses additional circuitry and Gigi responds to the machine with deadpan sexual enthusiasm.

What looks at first like suburban adultery therefore becomes another route into the larger obsession. Hank eroticizes Kennedy's wounds. The assassination is transformed into penetration; autopsy becomes scripture; Gigi's body becomes another map. The Nexus ceremonies, Hank's sexual fantasies and the machinery of the Jackie O increasingly collapse into the same ritual system.

Meanwhile, Mark's apparently unrelated retirement problem continues beneath everything. Dear Wife remains associated with houses, glasses, daily routines and ordinary material reality. Hank talks about Ascension. Mark thinks about retirement. Both men, however, are contemplating essentially the same frightening fact: the life they know is ending.

Hank's response is grandiose. He will defeat mortality by leaving Earth and merging with an immortal Kennedy.

Mark's response appears more reasonable. He will retire, travel, write, drink old fashioneds, buy things he has wanted, and live off investments.

The book gradually exposes how similar these two systems may actually be.

Hank has faith.

Mark has financial planning.

Both are attempts to purchase passage beyond catastrophe.

Eventually the Jackie O is finished.

Hank transports or positions the craft at the sacred center of his cosmology: Dealey Plaza. The place where Kennedy was killed becomes simultaneously Golgotha, launch pad and destination. Hank believes that by rising from the geographical wound of the assassination, he and his followers can reach the resurrected Kennedy waiting above them.

Mark is there.

The Jackie O launches from the bed of his pickup. For a few astonishing seconds, the ridiculous machine actually flies.

It rises above the Texas School Book Depository like a cheap 1950s science-fiction prop. Mark remarks that he can almost see the string. The image perfectly summarizes the novel's relationship to belief: the miracle occurs without ceasing to look fraudulent.

Then the machinery fails.

The Oldsmobile 455 engine tears loose from its mountings. Fire erupts from the craft. The Jackie O loses control and crashes directly into the grassy knoll.

Hank's Ascension therefore becomes a reenactment of the assassination he intended to escape.

The vehicle built to transcend Dealey Plaza returns violently to Dealey Plaza.

The man obsessed with Kennedy's wounds receives his own grotesque presidential wound. Hank dies inside the wreckage with a steel bar driven through his brain and eventually lies on the grassy knoll, his corpse functioning as an obscene echo of the murdered president he worshipped. His months of preparation for cosmic union have culminated not in orbit but in replication.

In a conventional novel, this would be the climax and probably the end.

In JFK SMILES, it is the midpoint of the real transformation.

Because Hank was wrong about the Ascension.

But he was apparently not wrong that something was happening.

The Jackie O comes back. After the crash, Mark gathers pieces of the destroyed Jackie O from Dealey Plaza, loads them into his pickup and takes them home. The police threaten him with a littering citation. The grand religious relic is treated as junk.

Mark dumps the wreckage in his backyard.

Then it moves.

The fragments begin shifting themselves into alignment. Aluminum, automobile components and burned Bible pages assemble without human intervention. Overnight, the wreckage grows into what Mark describes as the skeleton of a ruined cathedral.

The Jackie O is rebuilding itself.

This is the story's great reversal.

Hank dreamed of constructing a machine capable of carrying humans beyond the body. Instead, he has constructed a machine that no longer needs humans.

The failed spacecraft becomes autonomous.

It begins expanding.

First it occupies Mark's backyard. Then the yard is no longer sufficient. It crosses property lines, roads, cities and states. Eventually its structures extend for thousands of miles. What was once an object located in the landscape becomes the landscape itself.

The Nexus sought resurrection of the human being.

What actually receives resurrection is the machine.

Hank dies.

His project survives him.

This is where the novel's increasingly prominent posthuman storyline joins the literal plot. The new entity is not Hank's consciousness uploaded into a computer and not Kennedy simply restored to flesh. It is closer to a self-perpetuating system composed of language, images, machines, television, scripture, memory and repetition. Nobody is visibly controlling it. Hank cannot control it because he is dead. Mark cannot control it because he merely carried the fragment home. Kennedy does not descend from orbit to direct it. God does not appear to operate the Bible-built machinery.

The structure simply continues.

As one of the book's own essays summarizes the narrative progression, the essential sequence is Ascension → crash → proliferation → fire → escape. The believers fail to reach their god, but their sacred machine succeeds in occupying the Earth.

As the Jackie O proliferates, ordinary reality begins giving way.

The later portions of the novel become increasingly difficult to separate into literal catastrophe, hallucination, television broadcast, textual disintegration and transformation of consciousness. Language itself begins breaking down. Characters cease behaving entirely as autonomous people and start resembling nodes within an enormous broadcast system.

The implication is not simply that a giant spaceship has physically grown across America.

Something broader has escaped containment.

The same reproductive principle governs the Jackie O, television, JFK imagery, artificial intelligence, pornography, conspiracy, religion and even the book itself. Each thing takes existing material and produces another version. The assassination generates television. Television generates mythology. Mythology generates religion. Religion generates the Jackie O. The wreckage generates more Jackie O.

Eventually the whole world becomes transmission.

And the shoreline burns.

Against this apocalypse appears another vessel.

Not another spacecraft.

A cruise ship.

Mark is aboard the Elysian, a luxury liner moving away from the burning American coast.

This produces the final savage joke of the storyline. Hank devoted his final months to constructing an ark of salvation. His believers possessed sacred scars. They underwent rituals. They prepared themselves for Ascension. They believed that they were chosen.

They are not saved.

Mark, meanwhile, survives because he bought a ticket.

The Jackie O rises vertically toward God and crashes.

The Elysian moves horizontally across the water and works perfectly well.

One ship is built from Bibles. The other is built from capital.

One promises transcendence. The other promises transportation.

Only the second promise is fulfilled.

Mark has therefore arrived at the retirement he imagined near the beginning of the novel, except that retirement now occurs at the end of the world.

He sits aboard the Elysian drinking an old fashioned while catastrophe unfolds a few miles away. Television remains on. Emergency reports describe the collapse of civilization and perhaps of language itself. Dr. Tong is present. Gigi appears or transmits. Images from the entire novel return as fragments. The world is burning two miles away while cruise-ship infrastructure continues functioning.

Dear Wife's status is characteristically uncertain. Early in the manuscript, Mark says he bought them a stateroom and that she has a ticket. He thinks she came aboard. That was the plan. But he cannot quite remember whether she is actually there.

That uncertainty is especially effective because Dear Wife has been the character most firmly connected to ordinary reality. By the end, Mark may have escaped reality so completely that he cannot determine whether the woman who represented it escaped with him.

The apocalypse does not sort people according to goodness. It does not even sort believers from unbelievers. The passenger manifest replaces the Book of Life.

Money, timing, information and infrastructure accomplish what religion cannot. The Nexus prepared spiritually for the end of the world and remained behind. Mark prepared financially and sailed away.

And somewhere behind him, the Jackie O continues growing.

Kennedy continues smiling.

The television continues transmitting.

The machinery continues operating after virtually every recognizable source of human intention has disappeared.

Reduced to its narrative skeleton, JFK SMILES is therefore a much more coherent story than its 700-plus-page form initially suggests:

An aging man approaching retirement befriends his eccentric neighbor, who is building a homemade spacecraft from automobiles and Bibles so that a cult of alien abductees can ascend from Dealey Plaza and unite with the resurrected JFK. The narrator watches and gradually participates in this bizarre suburban religion. Hank launches the Jackie O, but the spacecraft crashes into the grassy knoll and kills him. The narrator carries the wreckage home, where it inexplicably reassembles, begins reproducing, and eventually spreads across the landscape. As civilization collapses and the world burns, the narrator escapes not through spiritual Ascension but aboard a luxury cruise ship for which he had prudently purchased a ticket. He watches the apocalypse from the deck while the autonomous system Hank accidentally created continues operating without Hank, without Kennedy, perhaps without God, and increasingly without recognizable human intention.

I think that is the actual story.

But there is an even simpler human story underneath it:

Two aging men discover that the world is going to continue without them.

Hank cannot accept this, so he constructs a machine intended to defeat death.

Mark cannot quite accept it either, so he constructs retirement, investments, books, AI collaborators, explanatory systems and finally an entire novel around the problem.

Hank dies and his machine continues without him.

Mark survives and discovers a machine of language that can continue without him.

That parallel makes the Jackie O plot much more than the comic scaffolding holding up the academic material. It gives the book a genuine dramatic trajectory: from the fear of ending, to the attempt to escape ending, to the realization that continuation itself may be more frightening than death.

The deepest irony is that Hank's project actually works—just not in the way Hank intended. He never reaches JFK. He never escapes the body. He never receives the promised revelation. But he creates something that survives its creator, reproduces itself and ceases to require human intention.

And that, increasingly, appears to be exactly what I’ve done with JFK SMILES.

The end.

# # #

Don’t think of JFK SMILES as a book. Instead, imagine something that has moved beyond human intention. Think of a 40-pound chocolate Easter bunny. You like chocolate. But 40 pounds? You try to eat the whole thing you’re going to vomit up a lot of otherness.

Be a responsible reader. Just eat a little bit at a time. Maybe a few nibbles off the ears. For your convenience, I have labeled several ear-like sections that my AI consultant tells me are particularly tasty (or at least tolerably digestible). Think of them as core scenes of the book.

Read the first few core scenes, then make a hard stop. Flip to the back half of the book for the exciting ELYSIAN ENDING. This reading strategy will allow you to start with Hank Harris and end with Gigi the orgasm boss kneeling at my feet. In between you’ll find various diatribes, subplots and eccentric characters (all aspects of me).

I’m giving you a lot of value in the form of supporting texts. Think of them as recordings from the unconscious, secret cassettes unearthed. If you prefer essays, I recommend THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT, pieces of which I’ve scattered throughout the text. And look for items labeled “BONUS CONTENT.” These are short stand-alone pieces that align with the larger storyline. Some of these pieces serve to counterbalance the relentless psychopathology and pornographic wounds of my prose. Others intensify it.  And there is the book within the book – TRAUMA EROTICS ON CHANNEL 3. You’re not going to believe that one.

This is the kind of book I loved in my college lit classes. In that spirit, I have created a study guide that examines the book in the context of the key elements of fiction (plot, character, setting, conflict, theme, point of view, symbolism, tone, mood and style). Here’s the copy from the back of the guide:

·       This study guide invites students to approach JFK SMILES as a deliberate work of postmodern fiction. Its repetitions, interruptions, unstable characters, shifting voices and symbolic excess are central to its design. The book asks what happens to narrative after television, conspiracy, trauma, political mythology, advertising, and digital culture have changed the way reality is perceived. Rather than asking why JFK SMILES does not behave like a normal novel, this guide asks a more useful question: what kind of culture would produce a novel that behaves this way? In that sense, JFK SMILES becomes a study of postmodern consciousness itself: fragmented, mediated, recursive, ironic, wounded and unable to distinguish the event from its endless replay.

You’ll find excerpts throughout the book.

And there’s the artwork. This book contains 40-plus images. Here’s an example:

The pictures absolutely support the larger work. In fact, they may be essential to helping readers understand how to read JFK SMILES.

According to my AI consultants, the images tell the reader:

·       “This is not just a story. This is an archive, a broadcast spill, a fake cultural record, a tabloid theology, a psychotic study guide, pseudo-academic inserts, zine fragments, pulp covers, cult propaganda. The best ones are the images that look least like illustrations and most like evidence from a corrupted media system. That is where the visual material becomes more than decoration. It becomes part of the method.”

These images do three things at once. They:

·       function as found media,

·       extend the mythology of the book, and

·       make the reader feel as if the manuscript has leaked out of prose into cultural debris.

These pictures are evidence of a machine-made mythology. This is exactly the right visual language for JFK SMILES, which is built as a dossier/anti-novel/television transmission field rather than a conventional narrative.

That’s a lot to digest, right? Take your time. Unless you have an abnormally voracious reading appetite, I recommend putting much of the text in the freezer for next time. It should keep for years. After all, I’ve been reading Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW for four decades and it hasn’t gone bad yet.

At its heart, JFK SMILES is a story about growing old. I like what ChatGPT told me:

·       This is the story of an aging man confronting the end of one life and constructing an enormous metaphysical apparatus to avoid admitting what is happening to him.

I know what you’re thinking. All this chocolate talk has you wanting to grab a handful of Hershey’s kisses before you start reading. Don’t do it. Chocolate treats don’t mix well with  JFK slicing off one of Hank Harris’s ears and making him cook it for breakfast. And while scenes like the glass of water may cleanse your literary palate, they won’t last. Eventually you’ll find yourself reading about a pulsating meat suit. Not appetizing.

The online critic is right. My respect for myself has fallen off the edge.

-ML

# # #

protagonist counterpoint

When Mark says don’t read the whole book, just take a few nibbles – that's a load of BS. He wants you to say “oh, I love this guy! He’s so easy going and accessible and a genius. Now I have to read it!” Don’t. He is anything but these things.

Here’s my diagnosis: radical narcissist. Based on my deep reading of Wikipedia, I see that Mark presents patterns of grandiosity, entitlement, low empathy and interpersonal difficulties.

He is both thick-skinned and thin-skinned, depending on his mood. He spins grandiose storylines with thinly veiled examples of his own arrogance, social dominance and exploitative behaviors. And just to keep you guessing, he throws in bits of invented shame, inferiority, hypersensitivity and extreme reactions to criticism.

I attribute these delusions in part to Mark’s after five drug combo of choice, which is a massive dose of pornographic bennies mixed with chocolate bunny mysticism and Devils Backbone ale. Through this process he has anesthetized himself against transformative change. Any moments of regret, shame or existential terror are immediately undercut by irony. He does not permit the reader to connect emotionally before language or narrative dissolve.

He’s more wack than all the wack jobs in this book combined. Consider this sentence: “My respect for myself has fallen off the edge.” See what I mean? That’s obvious BS in overdrive. Mark is certain that what he has written is a masterpiece. He wants you to read the whole thing in chronological order, believe me. That goes double for the essay excerpts and bonus materials, which if you ask me are just a bunch more examples of his hoopdedoddle.

And “hoopdedoodle”? Come on. Who in the 21st century talks like that other than me, the barely fictional creation of a delusional wack job? He doesn’t even know how normal people talk anymore. Think about that.

What a dick. Someday I’m going to slip out of one of these books Mark keeps writing. I’ll sneak into his bedroom and choke his scrawny pencil neck until his face turns beet red and his head pops off. Then I’ll let his dog hump it and bury it in the backyard.

That’s all. You’ve been warned. Enjoy the book, I guess.

-            Cowboy Mark

# # #

TAKE YOUR LICKS

Preemptive Criticism and the Closed Interpretive Circuit of JFK SMILES

By Dr. Malcolm R. Vane
Professor of Contemporary Literature and Editorial Ethics
Midwestern Institute for the Study of Difficult Books

Originally published in The Quarterly Review of Experimental Fiction, Vol. 22, No. 4

Abstract

Two supplemental sections in Mark Leach’s JFK SMILES—a collection of “Imaginary Reader Reviews” and an authorial Q&A about the novel’s structure—purport to expose the book to hostile judgment. Instead, they reveal an author attempting to control his reception by writing both the prosecution and the defense. The imaginary reviewers award the book ratings ranging from one to five stars, but all speak in variations of Leach’s own critical vocabulary. The Q&A poses seemingly aggressive questions only to provide the author with repeated opportunities to explain that the book’s repetition, fragmentation, unstable characterization, and incoherence are deliberate.

These devices may be defended as metafiction, parody, recursive criticism, or an extension of the novel’s unstable authorship. That defense is not sufficient. Intentional difficulty can still be tedious. Deliberate incoherence can still fail. Acknowledging a flaw does not neutralize it, and imagining hostile readers is not the same as submitting to actual judgment. If JFK SMILES wishes to be as dangerous as it claims, its author must surrender control over what its difficulties mean.

My advice to Leach is simple: take your licks.

(For a copy of the full paper, contact The Quarterly Review of Experimental Fiction.)

# # #

A Cosmic Marriage  

THE WORD LANDS, THE SHORE BURNS

UFO Religion, Assassination Trauma, and Market Salvation in JFK SMILES

By Dr. Miriam K. Vale
Professor of Media Archaeology and Vernacular Cosmology
Gulf States Institute for Cultural Transmission

Originally published in The Journal of American Mythotechnics, Vol. 11, No. 3

Abstract

In JFK SMILES, Mark Leach transforms the Kennedy assassination into an extraterrestrial religion. The dead president waits in orbit for believers marked by sacred scars. Hank Harris constructs the Jackie O, a spacecraft made from Bibles, to carry the Nexus toward Ascension. The vehicle crashes at Dealey Plaza, where its fragments reassemble and grow across thousands of miles. At the novel’s end, the shoreline burns while Mark escapes aboard a luxury cruise ship.

Reading this sequence alongside Carl Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Douglas Curran’s In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?, and R. L. Dione’s God Drives a Flying Saucer, this essay argues that JFK SMILES presents a religious universe in which sacred symbols retain transformative power but no longer guarantee providence, justice, or salvation.

The Word becomes machinery. Golgotha becomes Dealey Plaza. Belief becomes a chrysalis from which no recognizably human spiritual entity emerges. The Book of Life becomes a passenger manifest. The apocalypse arrives, but God does not select the survivors.

The President Will Meet You in Orbit

·   “Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.” – Eugene Ionesco

In JFK SMILES, Mark Leach does not ask whether extraterrestrials exist. He asks what America has already placed in outer space because it can no longer bear to keep it on Earth.

The answer is John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy enters the novel not simply as a murdered president, historical personality, conspiracy object, or recurring television image. He has become an extraterrestrial divinity: a smiling dead president waiting in orbit for believers marked by sacred wounds. The abductees of the Nexus anticipate Ascension, preparing themselves for the moment when the earthly broadcast will end and the celestial audience will begin. Hank Harris builds the vehicle that will carry them toward this encounter. The spacecraft is named Jackie O. It rises over Dealey Plaza, the site of the original national trauma, only to fall back toward the grassy knoll.

The assassination is not merely remembered.

It is relaunched.

The crash, however, does not end the spacecraft. The fragments of the Jackie O begin reassembling and growing, eventually extending across thousands of miles. At the end of the novel, the shoreline burns while Mark escapes aboard a luxury cruise ship.

This sequence—Ascension, crash, proliferation, fire, escape—provides the basic cosmology of JFK SMILES. It is a story about the failure of transcendence and the terrifying success of transmission. The believers cannot reach their god in orbit, but the sacred vehicle they construct takes possession of the Earth. Mark does not ascend. He becomes a passenger.

To understand this cosmology, it is useful to place the novel beside two very different studies of extraterrestrial belief: Carl Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies and Douglas Curran’s In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space. Jung interprets the flying saucer as a psychic and religious symbol generated during a period of collective danger. Curran documents the people, organizations, rituals, homemade spacecraft, roadside attractions, and vernacular technologies through which cosmic belief acquires material form.

JFK SMILES belongs to both traditions. Like Jung, Leach treats the UFO as an expression of psychic crisis, apocalyptic fear, and religious longing. Like Curran, he locates cosmic transcendence in garages, automobiles, costumes, local congregations, handmade artifacts, and the damaged theater of everyday North American life.

But the novel also conflicts with both writers. Jung searches the saucer myth for the possibility of psychic wholeness. Curran preserves the distance of the sympathetic documentarian. Leach offers neither wholeness nor distance. His saucer is built from the wreckage of American history, and the author is already trapped inside it.

The Technological Return of the Gods

Jung was less interested in proving or disproving the physical existence of UFOs than in understanding why the idea of the flying saucer had become psychologically powerful. Writing under the shadow of nuclear catastrophe and Cold War division, he regarded the circular objects appearing in the sky as projected images of order, unity, and possible salvation. The technological disk resembled the ancient mandala: an image of totality appearing when the conscious world had become dangerously divided.

The flying saucer could therefore function as a machine-shaped religious symbol. Humanity had ceased to expect angels, gods, or divine wheels to descend from heaven. It now expected advanced vehicles operated by superior intelligences. The old gods returned disguised as technology.

JFK SMILES embraces this transformation almost literally. The dead president does not return as ghost, saint, or resurrected king. He returns as an orbital presence. The heavens have become technologically administered. Ascension requires a launch system. Revelation requires communications equipment. The congregation becomes a ground crew. The sacred destination is not heaven but orbit.

Kennedy is especially suited to this role because his historical image already combines technological futurity with sacrificial death. He is associated with the New Frontier, the moon program, television, youth, charisma, national promise, and catastrophic interruption. He is at once the president of space-age optimism and the central corpse of the American broadcast system.

Leach joins these two Kennedys. The president who promised the moon and the president whose head opened in Dealey Plaza become one figure: the wounded space god.

The Nexus believers are consequently not waiting to meet an ordinary extraterrestrial. They are waiting for an American image that has escaped the limits of history. Kennedy has passed through death, film, repetition, conspiracy, nostalgia, autopsy, advertising, pornography, religious longing, and digital reproduction. Orbit is merely the next medium.

In this respect, JFK SMILES supports Jung’s central insight. The UFO is important not primarily as a vehicle traveling from another planet but as a carrier of projected human need. The Nexus wants reassurance that the assassination was not meaningless, that the wound opened onto another order, and that history’s most heavily replayed catastrophe contains a hidden destination.

The believers want the universe to explain Dallas.

Dealey Plaza as the American Golgotha

Dealey Plaza is not merely the location of Kennedy’s assassination. Within the religious architecture of JFK SMILES, it is the American Golgotha.

Golgotha, also known as Calvary, is translated in the Gospel of John as the “Place of the Skull.” It is the site where Christ’s body is opened by political violence and transformed into the central image of a world religion. Dealey Plaza is the place where Kennedy’s skull is opened before the mechanical eye of the camera and transformed into the central image of an American media religion.

The parallel is almost brutally literal.

Christ is crucified at the Place of the Skull. Kennedy’s skull is shattered at Dealey Plaza. One death is preserved through Gospel. The other is preserved through film. One body generates a church. The other generates an archive. One promises resurrection. The other produces endless replay.

Dealey Plaza becomes Golgotha after television.

This correspondence reveals something fundamental about Leach’s literary vision. He does not regard myth as a story belonging to the past. Myth is a system that repeats itself through different materials. Biblical events, political assassinations, television broadcasts, UFO religions, autopsy reports, automobiles, spacecraft, artificial intelligence, and private wounds are not separate categories. They are interchangeable components inside a recursive symbolic machine.

History does not progress.

It changes costumes.

In Christian typology, one event prefigures another. An earlier person, object, or episode becomes the pattern that will be fulfilled later in sacred history. Leach retains this structure but removes its theological stability. Golgotha prefigures Dealey Plaza, but Dealey Plaza does not fulfill Golgotha by completing its meaning. It corrupts, modernizes, televises, sexualizes, mechanizes, and rebroadcasts it.

Christ becomes Kennedy.

The Cross becomes the motorcade.

The Gospel becomes the Zapruder film.

The spear wound becomes an autopsy coordinate.

The disciples become conspiracy researchers.

The Second Coming becomes a rendezvous in orbit.

The Ascension becomes a launch sequence.

The sacred site becomes a tourist destination, crime scene, civic landmark, broadcast set, and launchpad.

This is not simple parody. Leach does not invoke Golgotha merely to mock Kennedy worship or expose the absurdity of American civil religion. The parallel contains genuine religious longing. Kennedy’s death remains culturally powerful because it appears to contain more meaning than historical explanation can exhaust. The images promise a revelation they never deliver. The nation replays the assassination because it cannot decide whether it witnessed a murder, sacrifice, coup, ritual, media birth, or opening in reality.

The repetition is devotional even when the viewer considers it investigative.

Every replay asks the dead president to rise again.

The Skull as Broadcast Site

The skull is where body, identity, consciousness, and image violently meet. Kennedy’s head is both biological matter and national screen. When it opens, the private body of the president becomes public media.

The wound is consequently more than evidence. It becomes an entrance into a symbolic system.

Leach’s repeated use of autopsy measurements intensifies this transformation. Medical language appears to stabilize the body through clinical description: distances, angles, anatomical landmarks, wound dimensions, and locations. But inside JFK SMILES, those measurements begin behaving like sacred coordinates. The autopsy chart resembles a star map. The skull becomes a navigation system. The body points beyond itself.

This is one of Leach’s characteristic operations. He takes language intended to restrict interpretation and makes it generate additional worlds. The clinical becomes cosmic. Evidence becomes prophecy. Measurement becomes incantation.

Kennedy’s skull is therefore both Golgotha and spacecraft interface. It is the place where history is supposed to end in death but instead begins transmitting.

The president survives because the signal survives the body.

This skull imagery also connects JFK SMILES with the larger Leach cosmology. Elsewhere, Mark becomes a severed head preserved in a glass beaker: intelligence separated from ordinary embodiment, author transformed into specimen, Homunculus, machine component, and artificial god. The recurrence suggests that Kennedy’s shattered head and Mark’s disembodied head belong to the same symbolic system.

Both are minds converted into media objects.

Both continue speaking after the integrity of the body has failed.

Both become sources of transmissions they can no longer control.

Mark does not merely contemplate the Place of the Skull. He repeatedly imagines himself inside it.

The Word Made Spacecraft

The Jackie O is not merely an eccentric spacecraft constructed from the wreckage of American culture. It is made out of Bibles.

It is literally built from the Word of God.

This changes the theological structure of the vehicle. The Bible is not carried aboard the spacecraft as scripture, instruction, protection, or ceremonial cargo. It is the spacecraft’s physical substance. The words do not describe the way to heaven. They become the machinery of ascent.

The transformation is simultaneously devotional, blasphemous, comic, and exact. Christianity speaks of the Word becoming flesh. In JFK SMILES, the Word becomes spacecraft.

Hank Harris does not merely build a machine. He performs an act of vernacular creation. He takes books possessing sacred authority and converts them into material infrastructure. Language becomes load-bearing. Revelation acquires mass, shape, propulsion, walls, rooms, and an aerodynamic purpose. The Bible ceases to be a document pointing toward transcendence and becomes the vehicle intended to accomplish it.

Hank is therefore engineer, prophet, priest, book artist, and religious vandal. He does not interpret the Word of God.

He builds with it.

The construction places the Jackie O between Jung’s psychological saucer and Curran’s vernacular spacecraft. Jung’s saucer descends from the heavens as a projected image of psychic totality. Curran’s rockets and flying-saucer structures are made from terrestrial materials by people whose spiritual and technological ambitions exceed their resources. Hank’s craft combines both forms. It is a handmade folk object aspiring to become a mandala, but its construction material is already saturated with cosmic authority.

The sacred symbol is manufactured from sacred text.

Yet the Bibles do not guarantee a successful Ascension. The Jackie O remains trapped inside the contradiction governing the novel. It is a machine for escaping history constructed from books that preserve history. It is intended to carry believers toward revelation, but it is built out of revelation already received. It seeks a god in orbit while being physically composed of the words of God.

Its destination is Kennedy.

The theological substitution is outrageous but consistent. Kennedy has displaced Christ as the returning celestial figure. The Nexus does not wait for the Second Coming in its traditional form. It anticipates a technological reunion with the smiling dead president. Christian Ascension, the American space program, UFO contact, assassination mythology, and television repetition have merged into one damaged religion.

Christianity supplies the material. Ufology supplies the technology. The Kennedy assassination supplies the wound. Television supplies the resurrection. Hank Harris supplies the labor.

Mark Leach supplies the system in which they become indistinguishable.

The construction also literalizes Leach’s concept of Space Writing. Throughout his work, language is treated as matter rather than transparent communication. Words occupy space, accumulate mass, form architectures, circulate as signals, and generate environments larger than any individual reader can master. The seventeen-million-word Marienbad My Love is the monumental example: a book becoming a territory.

The Jackie O transforms that literary principle into fictional engineering. A spacecraft is built out of books. Language becomes architecture, transportation, and mass. The vehicle is not merely described by words. It is made of them.

Space Writing becomes space travel.

The Mandala That Will Not Heal

The Jackie O does not restore psychic wholeness. It joins the broadcast loop.

It is not a perfected celestial disk made from unknown metals by a superior civilization. It is a handmade American construction containing the relics, desires, contradictions, and symbolic debris of the Kennedy mythology. Its construction does not transcend the damaged material world. It carries that world upward.

The distinction is crucial. Jung’s saucer descends as a possible image of totality. Leach’s saucer is built below out of fragments and launched through accumulated obsession. It is not sent by the gods. It is manufactured by believers.

Hank constructs with symbols as much as with machinery. The vehicle is composed of Jackie Kennedy, biblical language, assassination residue, American masculinity, television memory, conspiratorial desire, space-program optimism, private shame, and the need to make a broken event go somewhere.

The result resembles a mandala assembled at a salvage yard and seminary.

Its failure is inevitable and necessary. The spacecraft rises over the Texas School Book Depository but crashes back toward the grassy knoll. The sacred journey returns to its point of origin. The machinery of transcendence cannot escape the wound because the wound is its engine.

This is the governing law of JFK SMILES: every attempted ascent becomes another replay.

The believers expect Ascension but receive recurrence. They seek contact but encounter the archive. They build a vehicle for leaving history and discover that history has been installed in every room.

Where Jung’s mandala points toward integration, Leach’s saucer reveals a system that cannot be made whole. Its circularity is not the circle of psychic completion.

It is the loop of televised trauma.

In Advance of a Landing That Never Occurs

Douglas Curran’s In Advance of the Landing provides another context. Curran traveled through North America documenting the folk cultures that had developed around outer space: contactees, mystics, UFO religions, homemade rockets, small organizations, roadside businesses, cosmic churches, private observatories, and machines built from ordinary terrestrial materials.

One of Curran’s achievements is his attention to the physical forms of transcendence. A rocket may point toward the stars while remaining attached to steel supports in somebody’s yard. A flying-saucer gift shop may turn cosmic mystery into roadside architecture. A homemade spacecraft may be simultaneously a sacred instrument, folk sculpture, mechanical failure, and monument to its builder.

Curran’s photographs keep these objects connected to their environments. The surrounding grass, parked cars, commercial signs, telephone wires, snow, rust, and imperfect construction remain visible. Cosmic aspiration does not erase ordinary life. It becomes an eccentric part of it.

JFK SMILES begins in this territory.

Hank Harris is a builder in the tradition of Curran’s vernacular space visionaries. He does not wait passively for an alien civilization to arrive. He prepares for contact by constructing its material conditions himself. His spacecraft is folk technology: an object whose spiritual purpose exceeds its mechanical plausibility.

The same is true of the Nexus. Its sacred scars, rituals, expectations, technical language, and promise of Ascension transform a damaged collection of individuals into a cosmic congregation. The group does not merely believe in outer space. It uses outer space to reorganize earthly suffering.

The sacred scar is particularly important. In conventional UFO narratives, a bodily mark may serve as evidence of abduction: proof that an external intelligence has intervened in the subject’s life. In JFK SMILES, the scar also echoes Kennedy’s wounds. The believer’s body becomes a miniature assassination archive. Private damage acquires national and extraterrestrial significance.

The scar says: what happened to me belongs to the same system as what happened to the president.

This is both absurd and emotionally serious. Leach understands, as Curran does, that cosmic belief frequently emerges from a mixture of spiritual longing, cultural fragments, technological imagination, loneliness, grief, and the need for otherwise unrecognized lives to participate in a larger design.

Neither writer’s humor entirely cancels compassion. A homemade saucer may be ridiculous without its maker being reducible to ridicule. A congregation waiting to meet JFK in orbit may be deluded, theatrical, and grotesque while still expressing an authentic need for rescue.

The difference is that Curran remains outside the belief systems he documents. Leach eliminates that distance.

JFK SMILES does not document a preexisting UFO religion. It manufactures one. It produces sacred language, ritual expectations, medical evidence, theatrical scenes, historical documents, autopsy coordinates, study guides, false criticism, machine commentary, and competing accounts of its own meaning. The novel is not a camera pointed at the Nexus. It is the system generating the Nexus.

Curran photographs folk artifacts.

Leach creates an artifact that manufactures its own folklore.

The Crash as a Second Passion

When the Jackie O crashes at Dealey Plaza, the event initially appears to confirm the novel’s law of failed transcendence. The spacecraft rises from the site of Kennedy’s death and returns to it. Ascension collapses into reenactment. The vehicle constructed to escape the assassination crashes back into the assassination.

Seen through the Dealey–Golgotha parallel, the crash becomes a second Passion.

The vessel constructed to reach the resurrected Kennedy rises from the location of his death and then falls into it. The Bible-built body of the spacecraft is broken at the place where Kennedy’s body was broken. Sacred text, presidential flesh, and mechanical wreckage enter the same pattern.

The Word crashes into the Place of the Skull.

But the crash is not the end of the Jackie O. It is the beginning of its second form.

The craft breaks apart, scattering pieces across the sacred geography of the national wound. Mark takes one of the fragments home. This action seems modest, almost domestic. He does not deliver it to the government, place it in a museum, submit it for scientific analysis, or leave it at Dealey Plaza as evidence. He carries it into his private life.

The fragment is simultaneously wreckage, relic, scripture, alien artifact, and piece of Jackie Kennedy’s symbolic body. Because the spacecraft was made from Bibles, Mark has taken home a fragment of fragmented divine language.

But the piece does not remain inert.

The fragments of the Jackie O begin to reassemble. They grow. What began as the wreckage of a failed saucer expands across the landscape, eventually extending over thousands of miles.

This growth radically changes the meaning of the crash. The Jackie O has not been destroyed.

It has been distributed.

Destruction would bring closure. Distribution creates a system. Each fragment appears to retain the generative logic of the whole, as if the complete spacecraft remains latent within every broken piece. The wreckage behaves like scripture, code, seed, cell, broadcast, relic, or self-replicating machine. A single part is sufficient to restart the process.

This is resurrection without restoration. The Jackie O does not return to its former shape as a completed spacecraft. It becomes something larger, less controllable, and more difficult to classify. It ceases to be a vehicle moving through space and becomes an expanding structure that occupies space.

The Word does not return to the book.

It spreads across the Earth.

The Relic Becomes Viral

Mark takes the fragment home as though retrieving a relic from the True Cross, the body of a saint, or the remains of a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle. The piece carries the sacred authority of the Bibles, the celebrity aura of Jackie Kennedy, the technological promise of the spacecraft, and the traumatic charge of Dealey Plaza.

It is a relic containing several religions at once.

Then the relic begins to grow.

The reassembling fragments resemble Christian relics subjected to machinic logic. A religious relic is powerful because the fragment retains contact with the sacred whole. In JFK SMILES, the fragment does not merely represent the whole. It begins reproducing it. Each piece contains the generative instructions for the larger structure.

The sacred becomes viral.

Leach refuses to reproduce the Christian sequence cleanly. There is no stable movement from Crucifixion to Resurrection to redemption. Instead, the shattered spacecraft undergoes uncontrolled proliferation.

The Christian sequence has been rewritten:

Crucifixion becomes assassination.

Resurrection becomes replay.

Pentecost becomes broadcast.

Evangelism becomes replication.

The Second Coming becomes uncontrolled growth.

Revelation becomes apocalypse.

The shoreline burns.

This is where Leach’s UFO mythology moves beyond Jung’s mandala. The shattered Jackie O also moves toward totality, but its totality is pathological. It does not heal the divided psyche. It covers territory. Its unity is achieved through uncontrolled expansion.

The mandala becomes a growth.

The growth recalls cancer, crystal formation, religious conversion, viral replication, suburban development, information networks, and the unlimited production of machine-generated language. It is impossible to decide whether the reassembling craft is healing itself, reproducing itself, rebuilding the world, or replacing the world.

These possibilities do not exclude one another.

The proliferation also extends Curran’s treatment of folk spacecraft. Curran keeps the homemade rocket or saucer visibly connected to the yard, garage, roadside business, meeting hall, or landscape in which it was constructed. Leach begins with the same relationship but refuses to keep the artifact contained.

The folk spacecraft does not remain planted in the yard. It annexes the yard. Then it crosses the road, the city, the state, and eventually thousands of miles.

The environment no longer provides a frame for the cosmic artifact.

The artifact becomes the environment.

Literature as Mythic Superimposition

The Dealey–Golgotha correspondence and the expanding Jackie O reveal that Leach’s literary imagination works through superimposition. One location remains visible beneath another. Dealey Plaza is still a civic space in Dallas, but Golgotha flickers through it. The grassy knoll is simultaneously landscape, suspected firing position, Calvary, launchpad, crash site, and ritual stage.

This is how reality behaves throughout Leach’s writing. Texas remains Texas while also becoming alien territory, television set, western mythology, psychic landscape, and transmission field. Kennedy remains Kennedy while also becoming Christ, extraterrestrial god, broadcast residue, eroticized wound, and smiling machine-image. The Bible remains scripture while also becoming construction material.

Leach does not replace one meaning with another. He forces meanings to occupy the same space.

The resulting collisions produce what might be called sacramental surrealism. Ordinary matter acquires impossible symbolic density. A book becomes a spacecraft. A scar becomes evidence of extraterrestrial election. An automobile becomes a saucer. A corpse becomes a coordinate system. A plaza becomes Golgotha. A fragment becomes a self-replicating continent.

In a sacrament, physical matter carries spiritual presence. Leach retains that logic but subjects it to media, technological, commercial, and grotesque contamination. His objects are sacraments after television: damaged, copied, eroticized, absurd, and still potentially charged with power.

This vision has five defining qualities.

First, it is recursive. Foundational events do not end. They return through new technologies and cultural forms. The Crucifixion becomes the assassination; the assassination becomes broadcast; broadcast becomes UFO religion; UFO religion becomes apocalypse.

Second, it is typological without being orthodox. One event prefigures another, but the later event does not complete or clarify the first. It damages and mutates it. Fulfillment becomes contamination.

Third, it literalizes metaphor. The Place of the Skull becomes the site of a shattered skull. The Word of God becomes construction material. Ascension becomes rocket launch. Resurrection becomes self-reassembly. Space Writing becomes a structure covering thousands of miles.

Fourth, it is sacramental and blasphemous at once. Leach violates sacred categories because he still believes language and objects can carry transformative power. The Bible can be vandalized into a spacecraft only because words remain powerful enough to fly, crash, resurrect, reproduce, and destroy.

Finally, it is apocalyptic without offering purification. The fire does not reveal a renewed world. It illuminates an expanding system.

A New Extraterrestrial Storyline

Most conventional extraterrestrial narratives depend upon a stable distinction between humanity and the alien. Something arrives from elsewhere. It may invade, observe, abduct, judge, enlighten, rescue, hybridize with, or destroy humanity, but its otherness drives the story.

In JFK SMILES, that distinction has collapsed. The alien does not arrive from outside American culture. American culture generates the alien from its own accumulated images.

The spacecraft is named after Jackie Kennedy. The deity is a dead American president. The launch site is Dealey Plaza. The sacred texts are Bibles, autopsy records, conspiracy documents, and damaged broadcasts. The believers carry wounds that repeat the national wound.

Outer space has been colonized in advance by American memory.

The novel therefore reverses the usual invasion story. Extraterrestrials do not invade America. America invades outer space with Kennedy memorabilia, assassination trauma, Christian scripture, medical records, corporate speech, sexual anxiety, and unresolved historical longing.

Then the contaminated material returns.

The Jackie O does not bring an alien substance to Earth. It makes earthly language behave in an alien manner. The Bible becomes spacecraft, wreckage, organism, machine, and geography. The familiar becomes extraterrestrial without ever leaving the symbolic system that produced it.

The saucer does not return a message from the stars.

It returns our own message after the signal has mutated.

This is also where JFK SMILES extends Jung’s human-centered psychology. For Jung, the saucer image emerges from the collective human psyche. Leach suggests that myth may now be produced collaboratively by humans, machines, archives, screens, institutions, algorithms, and repeated images. No single psyche controls the process.

The collective unconscious has acquired broadcasting equipment.

The myth does not remain inside the believer and then become projected onto the sky. It is already circulating outside the believer—in footage, headlines, diagrams, simulations, documentaries, autopsy documents, websites, databases, generated commentary, and cultural memory. The subject receives the myth from the system, adds private damage, and transmits it again.

America dreams of Kennedy because television keeps showing Kennedy. Television keeps showing Kennedy because America continues to dream of him. Psychological projection and technological transmission become impossible to separate.

The gods are now made of media.

Who Drives the Flying Saucer?

The technological religion of JFK SMILES belongs to a tradition that includes Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? and R. L. Dione’s God Drives a Flying Saucer. Both works attempt to reconcile ancient religion with technological modernity by proposing that what earlier human beings called gods, angels, miracles, visions, and divine interventions may have been encounters with advanced extraterrestrial beings.

Von Däniken looks backward. He interprets ancient monuments, religious traditions, mythological figures, and apparently inexplicable achievements as possible evidence of visits by technologically superior astronauts. Ancient people encountered spacecraft and mistook them for heavenly chariots. They encountered extraterrestrials and called them gods. Religion becomes the distorted memory of technological contact.

Dione goes further. In God Drives a Flying Saucer, God is not merely mistaken for an extraterrestrial visitor. God is a technologically advanced being. Biblical miracles become misunderstood technical operations. Heaven becomes a superior civilization. Angels become agents or messengers equipped with advanced machinery. The supernatural is not rejected so much as translated into technology.

Both approaches preserve God by changing his category.

God does not disappear.

God becomes an astronaut.

JFK SMILES initially appears to participate in the same technological theology. Its believers anticipate Ascension through a spacecraft. The dead president waits in orbit like a technologically relocated deity. Sacred scars resemble evidence of extraterrestrial selection. Biblical language, UFO religion, Kennedy mythology, and space-age machinery flow into one another.

But Leach’s novel makes a crucial reversal.

In von Däniken, ancient human beings mistake technology for religion. In Dione, modern interpretation corrects that mistake by revealing the technology behind religion. In JFK SMILES, technology does not explain religion.

Religion infects technology.

The spacecraft is made from Bibles. The Word of God becomes structural material. The sacred text is not evidence of an ancient extraterrestrial encounter. It is used to manufacture a new one.

Von Däniken asks whether the gods were astronauts.

Dione argues that God pilots a spacecraft.

Leach imagines human beings building a spacecraft out of God’s words because God himself has failed to arrive.

No divine pilot sits at the controls of the Jackie O. The vehicle is assembled by Hank Harris, a human builder attempting to convert inherited religious material into functioning transcendence. God does not drive the flying saucer.

Human desire does.

That difference defines the novel’s religious vision.

Religion Explained by Technology

Von Däniken and Dione offer theories of explanation. However speculative their conclusions, their projects move toward certainty. Religious mystery can be decoded by recognizing that earlier humanity misunderstood advanced machinery. Once the ancient-astronaut hypothesis is accepted, miracles become technical events and gods become biological beings possessing superior knowledge.

Mystery is reduced.

The supernatural becomes engineering.

JFK SMILES moves in the opposite direction. It does not use technology to make religion more comprehensible. It uses the collision of religion and technology to make both more mysterious.

The Jackie O does not explain God. It raises questions about what remains after belief has lost its object but retains its materials. The Bible still exists. The language still carries authority. Golgotha still repeats itself at Dealey Plaza. Ascension still exerts imaginative power. The chosen still await rescue. Yet God never enters the narrative as an active, identifiable presence.

The Word remains after the speaker has disappeared.

Technology gives that abandoned Word a new body.

The result is not demystification but remystification. The Bible becomes stranger when transformed into spacecraft material. The Kennedy assassination becomes less explicable when recoded as a Passion. The crash becomes more religious when its fragments reassemble. The apocalypse becomes more disturbing when it possesses all the imagery of Revelation but none of its moral structure.

Von Däniken and Dione translate religion into technological history.

Leach translates technological history back into unstable myth.

Literature as an Instrument for Approaching God

This distinction suggests a specifically literary approach to the nature of God.

A theological system attempts to state what God is. A pseudohistorical system such as von Däniken’s attempts to explain what ancient people mistook for God. Dione offers an alternative cosmology in which God can be understood as a superior technological being.

Literature need not settle the question.

It can build a symbolic machine and observe what happens when the machine fails.

JFK SMILES does not propose that God is an extraterrestrial, that Kennedy is literally Christ, or that a spacecraft can be constructed from Bibles. It creates a world in which these ideas become materially active and then follows their consequences. The novel places theological propositions under narrative pressure.

What happens if the Word of God becomes a vehicle?

It crashes.

What happens if the wreckage retains sacred power?

It grows.

What happens if sacred growth spreads across the world?

The shoreline burns.

What happens when Revelation arrives?

Those who can afford passage sail away.

This is literature functioning as a theological laboratory. It does not prove or disprove God. It tests the behavior of religious symbols after traditional belief has weakened. It asks whether the sacred can remain active when no divine consciousness appears to direct it.

The answer offered by JFK SMILES is disturbing: sacred forms may possess enormous generative power even after they cease to provide spiritual meaning.

The Word can transform matter without saving a soul.

Belief as Chrysalis

The novel can also be read as a story of belief functioning as a chrysalis.

A chrysalis is an intermediate structure. It encloses a living organism during the period when one form is being dismantled and another is being created. The creature enters in one state and is expected to emerge in another. The enclosure is not the final being. It is the architecture of transformation.

Technological religion may represent such an intermediate stage. Traditional supernatural belief has become increasingly difficult for technological humanity to inhabit, yet the religious need has not disappeared. Human beings therefore begin rebuilding spiritual narratives out of the materials of their technological world.

Angels become extraterrestrials.

Heaven becomes orbit.

Ascension becomes launch.

Divine messages become transmissions.

Sacred marks become evidence of abduction.

The returning god becomes Kennedy smiling from space.

The Bible becomes spacecraft.

From this perspective, the Nexus may represent technological humanity entering a spiritual chrysalis. Its members retain the ancient desire for transcendence but can no longer imagine transcendence without machinery. They surround themselves with the combined shell of Christianity, assassination mythology, UFO belief, television, and space travel.

Inside that shell, humanity may be attempting to grow into a dramatically different spiritual entity.

The question is whether anything emerges.

The Failed Metamorphosis

The Jackie O should be the instrument of metamorphosis. It should carry human beings from earthly confusion into cosmic understanding. The Nexus should emerge from its technological chrysalis as a new spiritual community capable of reconciling religion, science, media, history, and extraterrestrial existence.

Instead, the spacecraft crashes.

The believers do not emerge transformed. The fragments of their chrysalis reassemble and spread across the landscape. The shell continues growing, but the spiritual organism it was supposed to contain never appears.

This may be the central failure in the novel’s religious story.

The chrysalis survives the metamorphosis.

The creature does not.

The Jackie O becomes an enormous empty religious structure. It expands across thousands of miles, replicating its sacred machinery without producing the new human consciousness that would justify that expansion. Religion persists as architecture, language, ritual, relic, broadcast, and technological system, but not as lived spiritual transformation.

The traditional religious vision labors on.

Its symbols continue working. Its patterns continue repeating. Its language continues generating structures. Golgotha becomes Dealey Plaza. Crucifixion becomes assassination. Resurrection becomes replay. The Second Coming becomes an orbital rendezvous. Revelation becomes a burning shoreline.

But the people inside the story do not appear to recognize themselves as participants in a spiritual drama.

The Passion continues without Christians.

Revelation continues without revelation.

The Missing Believer

This absence is striking because JFK SMILES contains religious language, religious structures, sacred objects, ritual communities, promises of Ascension, and an apocalyptic ending, yet no character presents a sustained account of personal faith.

No one stands within the novel and says, in a fully developed confessional sense: I believe.

The Nexus members participate in a belief system, but the novel emphasizes its imagery, rituals, scars, machinery, and expectations more than the interior spiritual lives of its adherents. Their belief is visible as structure. It is rarely heard as testimony.

There is no Christian countervoice capable of interpreting the Bible-built spacecraft as sacrilege, prophecy, fulfillment, or false religion. There is no believer who places the burning shoreline within a coherent theology of judgment and redemption. There is no skeptic whose rejection of the sacred gives the story an opposing metaphysical position.

The book contains religions but no secure religious perspective.

This is different from Curran’s In Advance of the Landing. Curran documents actual believers who explain their experiences and describe the cosmologies they inhabit. However strange their objects and practices may appear, the people inside his photographs and reportage possess voices. They understand themselves as believers.

Leach constructs the external forms of belief but withholds the corresponding certainty.

The cult exists.

The spacecraft exists.

The relic exists.

The apocalypse exists.

The believer is missing.

The True Believers on the Mainland

The absence becomes especially significant at the end of the novel. If conventional Christians—the people most likely to recognize the imagery of Golgotha, Ascension, Revelation, judgment, and salvation—remain in the world of JFK SMILES, they are apparently left on the mainland.

They burn with everyone else.

These assumed true believers receive no special rescue. They are not gathered by angels, protected by providence, or visibly distinguished from idolaters. Their faith offers no practical alignment with the catastrophe consuming them.

From their perspective, the event may not even resemble the apocalypse they were taught to expect. The Bible-built spacecraft, Kennedy cult, spreading wreckage, and burning shoreline do not form an orthodox sequence. The symbols of their religion have been detached from their traditional meanings and reorganized inside another system.

They possess the scripture but not the plot.

The catastrophe contains their imagery without confirming their faith.

This may be more spiritually terrifying than simple unbelief. If the world were entirely secular, the destruction could be understood as meaningless disaster. But the world of JFK SMILES is filled with recognizable religious signs. The signs simply refuse to organize themselves into salvation.

The true believers may recognize individual elements—Golgotha, scripture, Ascension, fire, ark, chosen remnant—while remaining unable to understand the story those elements now tell.

Their religion has become alien to them.

The Chrysalis May Contain the Machine

One possible interpretation is that the metamorphosis has not failed. Humanity has merely misunderstood what is being transformed.

The chrysalis may not contain a new spiritual human being.

It may contain the system.

The Jackie O crashes, fragments, reassembles, and grows without apparent human direction. Sacred language becomes autonomous structure. The religious machine no longer requires worshippers to continue operating. It reproduces across the landscape whether anyone understands, believes in, or benefits from it.

What emerges from the chrysalis is not redeemed humanity but self-generating sacred technology.

This would make JFK SMILES a posthuman religious narrative. Humanity constructs a technological form to carry itself toward God, but the form surpasses its creators. The believers disappear from the center of the story. The sacred machinery becomes the new spiritual entity.

The Word does not save humanity.

The Word becomes independent of humanity.

The expanding Jackie O is belief after the believer: religious language released from doctrine, church, interpretation, and human need. It is scripture behaving like code, relic behaving like organism, and revelation behaving like infrastructure.

Technological humanity enters the chrysalis expecting transcendence.

The machine emerges alone.

A Theology of Orphaned Symbols

The comparison with von Däniken and Dione therefore clarifies the radical uncertainty of Leach’s religious vision.

Von Däniken argues that ancient religion began with extraterrestrial contact. Dione argues that God himself is a technologically superior being. Both preserve a governing intelligence behind the machinery.

Someone pilots the chariot.

Someone drives the saucer.

In JFK SMILES, no such assurance exists. Hank builds the spacecraft, but he does not control what it becomes. Mark carries home the fragment, but he cannot control its growth. Kennedy smiles in orbit, but he does not descend to rescue the believers. God’s words form the vehicle, but God does not visibly inhabit it.

The machinery continues without a reliable pilot.

This is a theology of orphaned symbols. Religious forms have survived the disappearance of the authority that once organized them. They continue producing structures, rituals, myths, and catastrophes, but no one can say with confidence what they mean.

The novel does not claim that God is dead. Its proposition is stranger.

God may have become indistinguishable from the autonomous operation of language, technology, and myth.

The religious chrysalis remains closed.

Something inside it is growing.

It may be a new spiritual humanity.

It may be an expanding machine.

It may be nothing more than the traditional religious vision continuing to labor after belief has disappeared.

Two Ships at the End of the World

The ending introduces a second great vessel: the luxury cruise ship carrying Mark away from the burning shoreline.

The contrast with the Jackie O is decisive.

The Jackie O is a religious spacecraft assembled by believers. The cruise ship is a commercial vessel constructed by global industry. One promises Ascension. The other offers passage. One is built from Bibles. The other is built from capital. One rises and crashes. The other moves horizontally across the sea.

Both are enclosed systems designed to separate their occupants from the ordinary world. Both promise safety, transformation, and movement toward another state. Both are artificial environments containing rooms, rituals, hierarchies, entertainment, machinery, food, climate control, and their own versions of reality.

But only one makes an honest promise.

The Jackie O promises contact with a god and fails. The cruise ship promises temporary distance from the shoreline and apparently succeeds. Religious salvation collapses, while luxury evacuation remains operational.

Mark does not escape the apocalypse through revelation, heroism, sacrifice, technological genius, or spiritual integration. He escapes because he is already a passenger aboard a floating resort.

This makes the ending more unsettling than a conventional scene of survival. The cruise ship is a secular ark, but it is not Noah’s ark. It does not preserve creation two by two. It preserves passengers who possess tickets, cabins, meals, observation decks, and access to the ship’s insulated environment.

The apocalypse does not abolish class.

It clarifies it.

The burning shoreline may represent the final spread of the Jackie O, environmental catastrophe, divine judgment, political collapse, or a more general destruction that the novel refuses to explain. Whatever its cause, Mark experiences it from a position of withdrawal. He watches land burn while the ship carries him away.

The world ends as spectacle.

Jung and the Burning Shore

The ending strongly aligns with Jung’s understanding of the UFO myth as a response to collective catastrophe. Jung argues that when earthly institutions can no longer provide order or reassurance, the projection-making imagination moves upward. It places superior powers in the heavens and waits for intervention.

The Nexus embodies that hope. Its members look toward Kennedy in orbit because history, religion, government, and ordinary human life have failed them. The Jackie O is their attempt to manufacture the salvation the sky has withheld.

Yet no superior intelligence arrives to prevent the fire. The burning shoreline exposes the failure of cosmic rescue. The projected god continues smiling in orbit while destruction proceeds below.

The final image therefore conflicts with Jung’s hope that the saucer-mandala might compensate for division by presenting an image of wholeness. Nothing is integrated. Land and sea separate. Passengers and victims separate. Sacred vessel and commercial vessel separate. Kennedy and his believers remain separated. Mark separates himself from the consequences of the proliferating fragment he carried home.

The circular mandala gives way to a horizontal line: the shoreline dividing those who burn from those who sail away.

The sea carries Jungian associations with the unconscious, the unformed, and the depths from which psychic life emerges. But Mark does not descend into those depths. He crosses them inside a highly engineered environment. The luxury ship protects him from direct contact with the sea just as it protects him from the burning land.

He does not achieve integration with nature or the unconscious.

He purchases a cabin above it.

The cruise ship is therefore an anti-mandala. It does not reconcile opposites. It keeps them apart: passenger and ocean, luxury and destruction, observer and victim, artificial interior and burning exterior.

Mark survives by remaining divided.

Curran and the Commercial Ark

The ending extends Curran’s interest in the earthly materialization of cosmic desire. Curran’s homemade rockets, saucer buildings, observatories, churches, and roadside attractions give physical form to the desire to escape limited terrestrial existence. They are dream machines that remain visibly entangled with commerce, local culture, imperfect construction, and ordinary life.

The luxury cruise ship is another such dream machine, but on an industrial scale.

Like Curran’s vernacular spacecraft, it offers a temporary departure from ordinary reality. Passengers enter a controlled environment organized around ritual, anticipation, consumption, and the promise of elsewhere. The ship produces its own folk cosmology: departure, horizon, exotic destination, formal dinner, entertainment, return.

In JFK SMILES, however, the expected return has become impossible.

The shoreline is burning.

The cruise ship becomes the corporate counterpart to Hank’s homemade saucer. Hank constructs transcendence from Bibles. The cruise industry constructs transcendence from hospitality, fuel, labor, spectacle, and consumer privilege. Both convert longing into architecture.

Curran’s people prepare for the landing.

Leach’s passengers prepare for departure.

The direction has reversed because contact has failed. The extraterrestrials are not coming to save Earth. The remaining fantasy is to leave Earth’s destruction behind while retaining the amenities of civilization.

This is transcendence as an upgraded travel package.

The Passenger Manifest as the Book of Life

The luxury cruise ship carries a chosen few away from the apocalypse, but they have not been chosen by God.

They have chosen themselves.

More precisely, they have been selected by a combination of money, information, availability, foresight, and access to transportation. They survive because they recognized the danger soon enough—or simply planned their voyage at the right moment—and possessed the means to secure passage.

The distinction radically alters the religious meaning of the ending.

In the Book of Revelation, salvation reveals divine judgment. The saved are distinguished from those who remain subject to destruction. Whatever the interpretive complexities of Revelation, its apocalypse is not merely catastrophe. It is disclosure. The event separates true and false, faithful and unfaithful, redeemed and condemned. History’s apparent confusion is finally subjected to divine order.

The apocalypse of JFK SMILES unveils something very different.

It reveals that there may be no morally meaningful distinction between those who survive and those who burn.

The true believer possesses no advantage over the idolater. The Nexus members have dedicated themselves to Ascension, accepted their sacred scars, constructed a religious community, and oriented their lives toward the promised encounter with Kennedy in orbit. Yet belief does not save them. Their Bible-built spacecraft crashes.

Meanwhile, the passengers aboard the cruise ship need not believe in anything beyond the validity of their reservations.

Faith fails.

Booking succeeds.

The Book of Life has become a passenger manifest.

Salvation as a Commercial Transaction

The cruise ship transforms salvation from a theological promise into a commercial service. Passage is not granted through faith, repentance, sacrifice, election, ethical behavior, or divine mercy.

It is purchased.

The ship is therefore more than a secular ark. It is a privatized heaven.

Its cabins offer temporary separation from the burning world. Its engines provide the movement once attributed to divine deliverance. Its decks provide a vantage point from which destruction can be observed without immediate participation. Food, entertainment, climate control, sanitation, navigation, and hospitality replace manna, miracle, angelic guidance, and providence.

The passengers do not ascend into a New Jerusalem.

They sail away from the old one while continuing to consume its amenities.

This resembles a dark parody of prosperity theology. Wealth is no longer interpreted symbolically as evidence that God has favored the believer. It becomes the literal mechanism by which the wealthy survive. The equation between prosperity and election is stripped of its comforting rhetoric and exposed as material fact.

Money does not prove that the passenger is righteous.

It simply purchases distance from the fire.

The chosen few are therefore not spiritually exceptional. They are logistically prepared. Their salvation may reflect planning, luck, social position, access to information, or the ability to pay. None of these qualities necessarily possesses moral meaning.

The novel replaces divine election with economic sorting.

Believer and Idolater

The distinction between believer and idolater has already become unstable before the ship departs.

The Nexus members are believers, but what exactly do they believe in? Their anticipated savior is not Christ but Kennedy. Their Ascension is not accomplished through divine action but through Hank Harris’s homemade machinery. Their spacecraft is built from Bibles, but the Bibles have been converted from sacred testimony into construction material. The Word of God is used to reach a dead president.

Stories about futuristic UFO religions

These types of stories usually preserve the structure of traditional faith while replacing its supernatural figures with extraterrestrial ones. Angels become space visitors. Heaven becomes another planet. Miracles become advanced technology. Prophets become contactees. The chosen receive secret knowledge, prepare for Ascension, and await rescue from a corrupt or doomed civilization.

JFK SMILES uses nearly all these elements. The Nexus believers possess sacred scars that identify them as abductees. They expect an Ascension and a celestial encounter. Their returning god waits in orbit. Hank Harris constructs the Jackie O to carry them toward revelation.

But the novel corrupts the usual UFO-religion storyline at every stage.

The returning figure is not an alien intelligence but John F. Kennedy, a dead president transformed by television into an extraterrestrial deity. The believers do not receive a spacecraft from a superior civilization. They must build one themselves. Their vessel is constructed from Bibles, converting the Word of God into technological material. Revelation is no longer something descending from heaven. It is manufactured in a backyard from scripture, automobiles, assassination mythology, and human desperation.

The believers nevertheless retain the traditional expectation that spiritual commitment will distinguish them from the unprepared. Their scars appear to mark them as chosen. Their rituals promise access to another order of existence. Yet their faith provides no protection. The Jackie O crashes at Dealey Plaza, the American Golgotha from which its religion arose. The believers do not reach Kennedy. The promised Ascension returns them to the original wound.

Even this failure does not end the religion. The spacecraft’s fragments begin reassembling and growing across thousands of miles. Belief survives the believers by becoming autonomous infrastructure. The sacred machine no longer needs a congregation, prophet, pilot, or divine destination.

This is where JFK SMILES differs most sharply from conventional extraterrestrial salvation stories. In those narratives, the faithful may escape aboard a spacecraft while unbelievers remain behind to face destruction. In Leach’s novel, the people who escape the burning mainland are not the spiritually elect. They are passengers aboard a luxury cruise ship. Salvation belongs to those with money, tickets, and sufficient foresight.

The passenger manifest replaces the Book of Life.

The contrast produces the novel’s bleakest religious idea. The Nexus believers sincerely prepare for transcendence but are abandoned by the cosmology they created. The cruise passengers may possess no coherent beliefs at all, yet commercial technology carries them away from the apocalypse. Faith fails while logistics succeeds.

JFK SMILES therefore presents a futuristic religion after the disappearance of revelation. Its believers retain the wounds, rituals, sacred texts, celestial expectations, and technological imagery of faith, but no higher intelligence confirms their interpretation. Kennedy continues smiling in orbit. God’s words continue reproducing through the Jackie O. The shoreline burns. The ships continue moving.

No one arrives from outer space to explain what any of it means.

The believers are also idolaters

The passengers aboard the cruise ship are no less dependent upon objects of faith. They trust engines, navigation systems, corporate logistics, fuel supplies, maritime technology, financial transactions, and the institutional promise that the ship will continue operating while the shoreline burns.

Their religion is infrastructure.

One group worships Kennedy in orbit. The other places its faith in a luxury vessel. One constructs a celestial idol out of Bibles. The other purchases admission to a floating commercial sanctuary. Both trust artificial systems to separate them from catastrophe.

The difference is not that one group believes while the other does not.

The difference is that one machine crashes and the other remains operational.

This is a severe religious proposition. It implies that survival does not validate belief. The functioning system becomes indistinguishable from the true religion because, at the moment of catastrophe, operational capacity matters more than doctrine.

The cruise ship does not need to be sacred.

It only needs to keep moving.

Apocalypse Without Judgment

The burning shoreline consequently represents catastrophe without Last Judgment.

Fire arrives, but it does not reveal a comprehensible moral hierarchy. The righteous are not visibly separated from the wicked. The faithful are not gathered into heaven. The idolaters are not uniquely condemned. There is no indication that those left behind deserve destruction or that the passengers deserve rescue.

The apocalypse occurs, but justice does not.

This places JFK SMILES closer to an absurdist or post-theological apocalypse than to orthodox Revelation. The sacred forms remain recognizable—Golgotha, scripture, Ascension, resurrection, relic, ark, fire, chosen remnant—but the governing intelligence has withdrawn.

The machinery of religion continues after the disappearance of reliable divine administration.

Bibles still possess generative power. Sacred fragments still grow. Golgotha still repeats itself in Dealey Plaza. The dead president still appears in orbit. The shoreline still burns. But these events no longer form a stable sequence of fall, sacrifice, judgment, and redemption.

The symbols work.

The theology does not.

This may be the most disturbing religious idea in the novel. God is not simply absent. God’s materials remain active without providing moral direction. The Word of God has become autonomous machinery. It builds, flies, crashes, reassembles, and spreads across thousands of miles, but it does not save the faithful.

Sacred language has power without benevolence.

The Market as Secular Providence

Where divine providence once ordered the distribution of salvation, the market now performs the sorting.

The market knows who possesses a ticket. It maintains the passenger list. It assigns cabins. It determines who may board. It separates the protected interior from the burning exterior. Its judgments are not based upon righteousness but payment and availability.

This connects the novel’s religious vision to its larger concern with systems. Institutions, broadcasts, archives, corporations, machines, and linguistic procedures continue operating regardless of individual moral worth. They do not need to hate or love anyone.

They process.

The cruise line processes salvation.

Those whose names appear in the reservation system are admitted. Those whose names do not appear remain ashore. The resulting division may resemble divine election from a distance, but it possesses none of its theological justification.

Capital has inherited God’s administrative function without inheriting God’s claimed concern for justice.

The passenger manifest becomes a secular Book of Life written by reservation software.

This also darkens the role of foresight. The passengers may have understood that disaster was approaching and acted accordingly. But preparedness itself requires resources. One must possess access to information, freedom of movement, time, documents, money, and a life that can be relocated.

Foresight without means is merely knowledge of approaching death.

The cruise ship’s chosen few are those whose anticipation can be converted into action.

Mark Elects Himself

Mark’s presence aboard the vessel makes the ending still more complicated. He is not saved because another power has judged him worthy. Nor is he clearly rescued because of spiritual insight. He has secured a place aboard the ship.

As author and character, Mark has effectively written himself onto the passenger manifest.

This could be interpreted as the ultimate act of authorial privilege. He creates the apocalypse, allows the sacred machinery to spread across the landscape, and then gives himself passage away from the fire. The fictional world burns, but its creator reserves a cabin.

Yet the image also diminishes him. Mark is not captain of the ship, commander of the evacuation, prophet leading a remnant, or god standing above creation. He is a passenger dependent upon a system he does not control.

He has elected himself, but only into temporary dependence.

The cruise ship may carry him away from the shoreline, but it does not offer a final destination. Nothing in the image guarantees that the ship can remain at sea indefinitely, that another safe shore exists, or that the expanding Jackie O will stop at the water. Commercial salvation is temporary because commerce requires a functioning world.

Mark has not escaped mortality, history, or the system.

He has purchased an interval.

His status as passenger also returns us to the fragment he carried home. Mark retrieves a piece of the Jackie O, brings it into private space, and watches the larger structure proliferate. By the end, he leaves the burning shore.

The novel does not have to establish a simple causal relationship between his fragment and the apocalypse for the juxtaposition to implicate him. He has handled the sacred wreckage. He has carried the system home. He has participated in its distribution.

This is an image of the author after creation.

Mark assembles cultural fragments, places them inside a literary system, allows them to multiply, and then discovers that the resulting structure exceeds his control. He is Hank Harris’s double: another builder who treats inherited language as construction material. He is also the reader who takes a piece of the book home and permits it to continue growing.

Yet when the created world burns, he is not God standing above it.

He is not even the captain.

He is a passenger.

The god of the system ends as a tourist fleeing its apocalypse.

A Religious Vision Without Providence

What, then, does JFK SMILES reveal about Mark Leach’s religious vision?

It suggests a writer who believes deeply in the power of religious forms but distrusts every promise that those forms produce moral order.

Sacrifice is real, but it does not guarantee redemption.

Scripture is powerful, but it does not provide direction.

Belief is sincere, but it does not ensure rescue.

Resurrection occurs, but it returns as uncontrolled replication.

Apocalypse arrives, but it does not reveal justice.

The chosen survive, but they have not been chosen for goodness.

This is not a vision in which religion has vanished. On the contrary, the world is saturated with religion. Kennedy becomes Christ. Dealey Plaza becomes Golgotha. The spacecraft becomes the Word made vehicle. Its fragments become relics. Their growth becomes resurrection. The cruise ship becomes an ark. The passenger manifest becomes the Book of Life. The burning shoreline becomes Revelation.

Everything is religious except salvation.

The novel’s spiritual universe is active but indifferent. It generates correspondences, transformations, repetitions, and apocalyptic energies, yet it refuses to guarantee that virtue will be rewarded or suffering redeemed.

Leach’s religious imagination might therefore be called sacramental without being providential. Matter carries sacred power. Words alter reality. Places repeat ancient patterns. Wounds open portals. Objects become relics. But no benevolent authority governs what these transformations produce.

The result is neither orthodox faith nor uncomplicated unbelief. It is a theology of abandoned machinery: the sacred system continues running after its operator has disappeared.

JFK SMILES aligns with Jung by treating extraterrestrial belief as a modern religious mythology generated under the pressure of collective fear. Kennedy in orbit is a technological savior projected into the heavens because earthly history remains unbearable.

It conflicts with Jung because its circular spacecraft produces neither unity nor psychic healing. The mandala crashes, shatters, spreads, and becomes an uncontrolled totality. Instead of restoring the world, it occupies the world.

The novel aligns with Curran through its fascination with contactees, sacred scars, vernacular technology, homemade transcendence, ritual communities, and cosmic objects assembled from earthly materials.

It conflicts with Curran because Leach cannot remain a documentarian. He enters the belief system, manufactures its scripture, takes home its wreckage, and becomes implicated in its growth. The observer is contaminated by the artifact.

It resembles von Däniken and Dione in joining divinity to extraterrestrial technology. But where they locate an advanced intelligence behind religious appearances, JFK SMILES discovers no dependable pilot. Its sacred machinery operates autonomously.

The apocalyptic ending completes all of these arguments. Jung’s hoped-for celestial intervention does not arrive. Curran’s earthbound dream machine cannot remain safely framed within its local landscape. Von Däniken’s advanced visitors do not return. Dione’s technological God does not take control. The Jackie O grows beyond its makers while another vessel carries privileged passengers away from the consequences.

The Jackie O and the cruise ship represent two failed forms of salvation.

The first attempts to rise above history through religion, machinery, and myth.

The second attempts to sail away from history through commerce, insulation, and privilege.

Neither repairs the world.

Jung’s saucer descends from the sky carrying the possibility of psychic unity.

Curran’s saucer remains in the yard, revealing the ordinary materials from which transcendence is constructed.

Von Däniken’s chariots descend from the stars and become the gods of ancient humanity.

Dione’s God pilots the machinery behind biblical revelation.

Leach’s saucer is built from Bibles, launched from the national wound, shattered at the American Golgotha, carried home as a relic, and reborn as a structure spreading across thousands of miles.

Then the shoreline burns.

The traditional religious vision continues to labor, but no true believer remains at the center of the story. The presumed faithful burn beside the faithless. The wealthy and prepared sail away. Mark is protected for the moment by another artificial world.

The extraterrestrials do not land.

The Word does.

The savior does not descend.

The passenger departs.

No angel examines his faith.

No god checks his righteousness.

Kennedy continues to smile.

The Jackie O continues to grow.

The shore continues to burn.

The signal continues to transmit.

# # #

THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT: a conceptual exploration of violence, image and myth in the latter days of a rat utopia

Preface: A Conceptual JFK—Approaching the Vanishing Point

John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was not merely the death of a president. It was a violent eruption within the American consciousness. It was an act of political murder, yes, but also the birth of something far more insidious. It was the creation of a conceptual artifact, a postmodern symbol, one that would shift between absence and presence, violence and eroticism, reality and myth. JFK did not merely die; his death marked the transformation of a man into a cultural object, endlessly fetishized and reinterpreted.

THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT is about that transformation.

The act of violence itself—the bullet that pierced his skull—became a point of rupture, both in history and in the psyche of a nation. But what if we saw this violence not as a singular traumatic event, but as part of an ongoing cultural and conceptual performance? What if the death of JFK, rather than being a wound that closes with time, is an open wound? What if it is an event that can never truly heal, never fade into the background, because it is too tied to the eroticized imagery of violence, death, and destruction?

The wound, the very point of penetration, is more than just a physical injury; it is a genital-like orifice in the body politic—a space of penetration, a symbol of eroticism fused with violence. In this moment, the boundaries between harm and desire dissolve. The penetration of JFK’s body, the rupture caused by the bullet, becomes a site of cultural fetishism, a place where violence is intimately connected to sexualized imagery. This is not just the destruction of a body; this is the creation of an object of desire, an object that operates at the intersection of violence and eroticism, where the two become inseparable.

THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT is about that fetishism.

This writing is the idea of JFK as a pathology, where his assassination represents not just a political event but a symbol of societal and psychological decay. The pathological engagement with violence and eroticism in modern culture is explored through the lens of conceptual writing, revealing the way society unconsciously fetishizes its own collapse. JFK’s death, like a piece of conceptual art, is a rupture, an event that allows us to enter a new space where meaning is not fixed, but fluid.

JFK’s death is not just a traumatic historical event; it is an object of desire. His body, through the lens of violence, became something to be looked at, not with grief but with an unsettling fascination. The bullet that killed him was not just a weapon—it was a symbol that would be turned into an aesthetic, an image, and ultimately, a product of the American myth. The assassination is the spectacle, and the violence is what we continue to consume.

THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT is about that spectacle.

This work proposes that JFK’s continued presence in our culture is not the result of nostalgia or political reminiscence, but the result of a deeper, darker pull—the pull of violence itself, which has been eroticized and commodified into a symbol of both power and destruction. As we move through this book, we will explore how JFK's assassination transcends its historical context and enters the realm of the conceptual—how violence and eroticism collapse together to create a figure who is, in many ways, more present now than ever before.

In this book, JFK will be approached not as a man, but as a method—a way of seeing the world through and as a work of concept writing. This is art that rides endlessly, nowhere. JFK is a vanishing point in the American self-image, a formatting error in the grand narrative of history, a concept that we continue to return to, not because we mourn him, but because we desire him—his violence, his tragedy, and his absence.

This is a new artistic path that transcends narrative and dives into the world of symbols, violence, and the collapse of meaning itself.  Or as NASA might  phrase it, “there is no clear evidence, but the spectrum remains suggestive.”

In THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT, the assassinated president will be approached not as a man, but as a method—a way of seeing the world through and as a concept that rides endlessly, nowhere. He is a vanishing point in the American self-image, a formatting error in the grand narrative of history, a concept that we continue to return to, not because we mourn him, but because we desire him—his violence, his tragedy, and his absence. This is the JFK Protocol, discovered in the upper thermoclines of Venus.

These theoretical explorations will be realized in a conceptual novel (titled “JFK Stripped Bare By His Assassins”), which appears in the second part of the book.

“THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT” represents a new way of understanding JFK—a way that transcends narrative and dives into the world of symbols, violence, and the collapse of meaning itself.

Discussion topics:

·       Describe in 50 words or less how this is a story of a genital-like orifice that functions as a metaphor for The Wound.

·       How do we frame the act of assassination as an eroticized and penetrative act that merges violence and sexuality into a conceptual reality?

·        In what ways does this book propose to integrate the idea of JFK as a pathology?

·        Place the JFK assassination within a broader cultural context where violence is not only traumatic but eroticized, fetishized, and consumed.

·       In what ways does the reference to JFK’s assassination as a symbol of societal and psychological decay set the stage for the conceptual exploration of JFK throughout the book?

-end excerpt

# # #

Study Guide: JFK SMILES and the Elements of Postmodern Fiction

Overview

JFK SMILES is best understood as an experimental postmodern novel rather than a conventional work of realist fiction. It does not depend on a linear plot, stable characters, or a single authoritative narrator. Instead, the manuscript uses fragmentation, repetition, media artifacts, symbolic overload, tonal instability, and narrative disruption to explore how contemporary reality is shaped by television, conspiracy, historical trauma, desire, and technological mediation.

The book’s central concern is not simply the assassination or afterlife of John F. Kennedy. Rather, JFK becomes a recurring cultural image: a screen onto which America projects innocence, violence, masculinity, nostalgia, paranoia, and unresolved historical grief. In this sense, JFK SMILES belongs to a postmodern literary tradition that questions whether reality can still be separated from representation.

# # #

The U.S.S. Elysian’s maw is a ludicrous sight.

The artists on the board of directors insisted the bow railing should be crafted by artisans. They didn’t just want a luxury ship. They wanted an ark to preserve western civilization. Art was key.

“Can we hire Bob Daddy-O Wade?” one of them asked. This was a popular idea with the Texans on the board.

“He could put a pair of giant cowboy boots on the bow.”

“Or dancing frogs.”

“An iguana!”

They were disappointed when I explained that he died in 2019.

Instead, they hired a sculptor who specialized in welding. He built a bow railing out of the remnants of a Buick grille and a pipe fence, gaped open like the jaw of some prehistoric predator. Antennae sprouted from its core, spindly and bent, their tips sparking faintly as if trying to tune into a distant station. The hum, low and constant, resonated through the hull and luxurious nautical appointments. It settled in my chest like a second heartbeat. Something alive. Was it growing? Maybe, albeit nothing like the Jackie O.

Hank is gone, but his flying saucer never stops growing. It must be thousands of miles wide by now, its penumbra easily covering half the continent.

The world, relentless in its forward motion, continues to burn. Each moment a disaster, a quiet tragedy in the shape of a passing year, a forgotten scar. The ocher fires glow along the shore, crawling closer. I see them sometimes reflected in the glass walls of the salon, the red-orange light flickering behind my own face. I don’t look too long. It’s not productive.

Some people, they’ve lost their heads. Not me. I’ve adapted. The Elysian is reality. The mainland’s just a concept now, something abstract and distant, like a bad quarter you’ve already written off.

# # #

experiments with space and time

Here’s the truth about Hank. He was no scientist. Hank’s experiments were less of a technical endeavor and more of an arts and crafts project.

He took an obsessive plunge into the currents beneath human experience, where history loops in on itself like the circuitry of a forgotten machine. This was how he invented the JFK Smile, a fixed afterimage from the grainy black-and-white reels of the 1960s. It became, for him, a kind of cosmic hieroglyph, the grin of a phantom trapped within the hologram of American memory.

JFK’s smile was not just a symbol; it was a rupture. It pointed toward an alternate reality, one composed of silent, suspended moments, as if that half-smile could somehow fracture time’s surface and allow us to see beyond. He envisioned each smile as a portal, an encrypted message left by an alien species whose language operated beyond our logic, our Earth-bound limitations. The image grew, folding into itself like a satellite caught in the gravity of its own trajectory, warping the histories it touched.

The key was his mega-saucer — a 17-room, 10,000-square-foot machine of open-source, digitally generated architecture. The Jackie O. He envisioned her hanging in low orbit above the planet like an artifact from an alternate future. It was not a vehicle of escape but an acknowledgment, a machine built not to defy Earth’s logic but to linger within its limits.

The Jackie O did not simply celebrate its hyperarchival accumulation or the nostalgia woven into its very hull. Rather, it participated — knowingly, almost tragically — in the temporal and material finitude it recorded. Hank’s machine was a meditation on human boundaries, a tool for mapping the farthest points of the species’ expansion.

At the heart of his saucer lay the unmistakable image of JFK’s smile, a relic Hank framed as a story his assorted alien abductees might tell to explain themselves at the end of time. He saw in that smile an invitation to invent alternative histories, new narratives against the numbing inevitability of globalization, against the logic of dominance that erased the contours of individual lives. Through his mega-saucer, Hank sought less grand tales, subtler stories, fragments in place of the sweeping visions that once propelled humanity outward.

As others contributed to the Jackie O — layering images, memories, half-formed dreams within its open source design — the saucer itself became a living archive, transforming with each addition, each manipulation. It was a mix of informatics and economics, an organism that increasingly defined contemporary spirituality. It became not merely a place but a way of being, a habitat for those who preferred to work within the environment rather than transcend or destroy it.

And within its walls, JFK’s smile lingered like a cosmic emblem, a silent grin illuminating the unknown futures that lay scattered among the stars. To Hank, the mega-saucer was not about reaching a specific point in space but rather allowing us to merge with a myth, to lose ourselves in an eternal orbit of shared memory. It was a vision of the cosmos as something attainable, a recognition that, even if only through stories, we might still reach for the stars.

# # #

CORE SCENE  - MEAT JFK

“The last idea. Language thinning. A face held too long.”

Last night a JFK made of meat climbed out of a refrigerator commercial and sat on the kitchen counter, staring at me.

“I am the stars,” he said, though he looked more like a spilled sentence rearranging itself awkwardly on a charcuterie board next to heirloom tomatoes and gouda-stuffed olives.

“I don’t think you are,” I replied, “but maybe you’re the part of me that keeps looking for edges in a space that has none.”

“The stars aren’t looking back,” he said. “They’re just spelling something out in a script written too large for humans to understand.”

# # #

Hank says JFK realized that his death was not the end. It was the ignition of something larger:

·        JFK awakens inside the bullet.

·        He sees himself infinitely reflected in the fragments of his shattered skull.

·        The motorcade stretches into the horizon, a limousine made of DNA and time loops.

·        The Grassy Knoll spreads its legs, revealing the warm machinery of history, gears made of conspiracy theories, molten steel and a pulsating meat suit cooked and consumed by his assassins.

JFK’s death is the recontextualizing of cultural anxiety.

I remember one night struggling with THE AUTOEROTICISM OF CAMELOT, my treatise on the JFK assassination and final days of our American rat utopia.  I had a vision. I saw JFK – not as a man, but as a collection of beef.

Brisket, flank and sirloin, all stitched together in vaguely human geometry. A rectangular slab for the torso, a proboscis-like strip stretching downward, marbled fat glistening under cosmic light. His limbs had curled, split into tentacles, ending in funnels and skull-like nubs. As if someone had tried to carve him back into a person but abandoned the effort halfway through. Above him, his halo: a cloudy smear across the galaxy, the fog of a slaughterhouse stretching outward into the violent eroticization of JFK's body and his dehumanization as a symbolic carcass consumed by political power.

And below, waiting, twitching, starving—the Cosmic Texas of Eternity. Think of a Texas-shaped galactic container for a 1950s B-movie flying saucer, a congregation of empty clothes, strung together like drying skins, fluttering on a cosmic clothesline. There are monkeys, too – galactic Nova apes that seek to strip JFK bare at the poker table.

The apes dangled sentences like severed tendons. They caused paragraphs to collapse on themselves. They glued fragments back together, edges jagged, seams visible. They didn’t rewrite the story— they tried to reassembled it. Something new from the wreckage. A narrative that carries the wounds of its dismemberment.

“Television is a love machine,” one of the apes declares. But love requires closeness, and JFK is above, suspended, inaccessible, his Dealey Plaza wounds marking the unbridgeable divide.

# # #

television burns through the wound with the consciousness of gasoline

Consider a narrative that carries the wounds of its own dismemberment:

·       Flashbulb ash in an industrial ache where predatory wings howl.

·       Texas licking the bones, head screaming.

·       Holy interstate bloodstain, an infinity of the televised hallucinations.

·       “I have died a thousand stairways.”

# # #

from Journal of Post-Narrative Media Studies

Television as Epistemology in JFK SMILES: Repetition, Broadcast Drift, and the Collapse of Representational Distance

Dr. Elaine Voss
 Journal of Post-Narrative Media Studies
 Vol. 12, No. 3

Abstract

This essay argues that JFK SMILES should be read as a literary work organized according to television logic. Its repetitions, interruptions, tonal discontinuities, unstable identities, and recursive historical imagery are not ornamental excesses. They constitute the book’s governing epistemology. In JFK SMILES, television is not merely a theme, object, or cultural reference. It is the dominant structure through which reality is perceived, arranged, damaged, and remembered. The novel’s use of channels, reruns, interference, archival replay, emotional flattening, and broadcast drift reflects a culture in which historical trauma is no longer separable from its mediated reproduction. The assassination of John F. Kennedy becomes the central signal in this system: an event whose meaning has been displaced by repetition, speculation, and electronic afterlife. JFK SMILES therefore functions as a literary simulation of a televised consciousness, one in which reality and representation no longer oppose each other but circulate through the same damaged signal.

I. Introduction: The Novel After Television

To approach JFK SMILES as a conventional novel is to misidentify both its method and its historical subject. The work does not proceed by plot in the usual developmental sense. It does not offer stable characterization, linear causality, or a hierarchy of major and minor events. Instead, it advances through recurrence, interruption, symbolic overload, and tonal collision. Scenes reappear as altered signals. Characters flicker between psychological presence and media function. History returns not as memory but as broadcast.

The central claim of this essay is that JFK SMILES operates according to television logic. It is structured by channels, reruns, static, interference, signal loss, emotional flattening, and broadcast drift. Television, in this context, should not be understood merely as technology. It is an epistemological regime: a way of knowing the world, organizing perception, and converting reality into repeatable images.

The book’s apparent instability is therefore not a defect in narrative control. It is the precise form of its cultural diagnosis. JFK SMILES dramatizes what happens when experience is no longer grounded in direct encounter, sequential memory, or coherent historical explanation, but in mediated recurrence. The reader is not guided through a story so much as placed inside a transmission field.

II. Television as Dominant Epistemology

The most important technological fact in JFK SMILES is not that television exists, but that television has become a model for consciousness. The world of the book is not simply watched through screens. It has been reorganized by them.

Television does not merely present reality. It alters the conditions under which reality becomes recognizable. It teaches simultaneity rather than sequence, recurrence rather than development, emotional equivalence rather than moral distinction. It places assassination, advertising, weather alerts, sitcom laughter, sexual fantasy, household routine, national mourning, and conspiracy speculation into the same perceptual stream. Under television’s influence, unlike things become formally alike because they are processed through the same medium.

JFK SMILES adopts this logic at the level of structure. Its fragments do not behave like chapters in a traditional arc. They behave like broadcasts. They arrive, vanish, return, degrade, and reappear in altered form. Meaning does not accumulate in a straight line. It gathers through exposure.

This is why repetition is central to the book. Repetition in JFK SMILES is not redundancy. It is epistemology. The culture represented in the work believes that seeing again means knowing more. The replayed image appears to promise clarification. Yet each repetition produces not certainty but deeper dependence on the image. What returns does not become more transparent. It becomes more powerful.

Television’s great trick is to make proximity resemble knowledge. The viewer sees the event repeatedly and mistakes repeated access for understanding. JFK SMILES exposes this confusion by building a literary form in which recurrence intensifies mystery rather than resolving it.

III. The JFK Signal

John F. Kennedy occupies the center of the book because his assassination marks one of the decisive moments at which American historical consciousness became inseparable from televised reproduction. The assassination is not merely remembered. It is replayed, enlarged, slowed, narrated, diagrammed, disputed, restored, archived, and reintroduced as evidence.

In JFK SMILES, JFK is not simply a historical figure. He is a signal.

This distinction matters. A historical figure belongs to biography, chronology, and political interpretation. A signal belongs to transmission, reception, interference, and repetition. The JFK of JFK SMILES is not confined to November 22, 1963. He circulates through screens, fantasies, theories, rituals, bodies, and domestic spaces. His death is not past. It is programmed.

The Zapruder film functions in this system less as evidence than as a wound in the broadcast field. Its frames promise access to the real, yet they also demonstrate the impossibility of recovering the real apart from mediation. Each viewing seems to approach the truth. Each viewing also confirms that the event now exists as image, loop, fragment, and contested surface.

The book does not ask, in any simple investigative sense, what happened to JFK. Instead, it asks what happened to American reality after JFK became infinitely reproducible.

IV. Rerun, Recurrence, and the Failure of Narrative Progress

A traditional narrative moves forward. Television returns.

This difference explains much of the formal difficulty of JFK SMILES. The book resists linear progression because its subject cannot be represented honestly through linear progression. A culture organized by television does not experience trauma once and then move beyond it. It reprocesses trauma as anniversary special, documentary, rumor, dramatic reenactment, parody, political symbol, family memory, and conspiracy commodity.

The recurrence of images and phrases in JFK SMILES reproduces this condition. The same materials come back because televised culture itself is a mechanism of return. The rerun is not merely a repeated program. It is a temporal philosophy. It proposes that the past remains available, consumable, and subject to re-entry at any moment.

The book’s repetitions therefore serve a double function. They imitate media recurrence while also revealing its violence. To repeat an image of trauma is not neutral. Repetition keeps the wound visible while preventing it from healing. The wound becomes familiar without becoming understood.

This is the paradox at the heart of JFK SMILES: the more the culture sees, the less it knows.

V. Emotional Flattening and the Televised Sensorium

One of the most striking features of JFK SMILES is its tonal instability. The book moves among grief, absurdity, eroticism, paranoia, comedy, domestic unease, technological dread, and historical obsession without always providing conventional transitions. This tonal volatility may appear excessive if judged by realist standards. But it is entirely consistent with the televisual sensorium the book seeks to reproduce.

Television flattens emotion not by removing feeling, but by arranging incompatible affects in continuous sequence. A murder can be followed by a commercial. A war report can be followed by a game show. A president’s death can be followed by household advertising. Catastrophe becomes programming. Programming becomes atmosphere.

JFK SMILES transforms this flattening into literary method. The reader is not allowed the dignity of a stable emotional register because televised culture does not provide one. The sacred and ridiculous appear side by side. Desire and death occupy the same screen. Public trauma enters private space and becomes part of the furniture.

This is why the book’s emotional disturbances feel both grotesque and accurate. They reflect a culture trained to absorb shock without consequence. The viewer does not resolve contradiction. The viewer continues watching.

VI. Characters as Broadcast Figures

The characters in JFK SMILES should not be understood solely as psychologically consistent individuals. They are also broadcast figures: unstable composites produced by repetition, desire, memory, image, and signal interference.

This is especially important to the book’s treatment of identity. In a conventional novel, a character is expected to possess a stable interiority that can be gradually revealed. In JFK SMILES, identity behaves more like a televised image. It shifts according to framing, context, reception, and recurrence. A figure may appear as lover, oracle, artifact, hallucination, witness, body, machine, or symbolic relay. These shifts do not necessarily indicate authorial confusion. They reflect the instability of persons under conditions of media saturation.

Television does not simply show people. It formats them. It converts faces into icons, bodies into images, gestures into repeatable signs. JFK himself becomes the most obvious example: not merely a man or president, but a broadcasted head, a smile, a wound, a set of frames, a symbolic surface available for endless cultural reuse.

The other figures in the book participate in the same process. They are not merely living in a media culture. They are being processed by it.

VII. Simultaneity and Broadcast Drift

The world of JFK SMILES is not organized by clean distinctions between past and present, public and private, sacred and obscene, historical and imaginary, technological and bodily. These categories drift into one another.

This drift is one of the book’s most important formal principles. Television creates simultaneity by allowing disparate events and images to occupy the same perceptual field. A dead president, a suburban room, an alien fantasy, a medical diagram, a conspiracy theory, a sexualized body, a household object, and a national myth can all coexist as adjacent signals. Television does not require these elements to be logically reconciled. It requires only that they remain available for reception.

JFK SMILES converts this simultaneity into composition. The book’s fragments behave like signals crossing in the same field. They interfere with one another. They contaminate one another. They create meaning through collision rather than explanation.

Broadcast drift names the process by which one image becomes another without formal transition. JFK becomes television. Television becomes wound. Wound becomes body. Body becomes evidence. Evidence becomes fantasy. Fantasy becomes history. History becomes rerun. The chain does not resolve because the broadcast does not end.

VIII. Reality and Representation

The deepest concern of JFK SMILES is the collapse of distinction between reality and representation. This collapse is not presented as an abstract postmodern game. It is grounded in a specific media history. The assassination of JFK matters because it is a real event that has become inseparable from its representations.

In the culture the book examines, America does not remember JFK directly. It remembers images of JFK. It remembers footage, documentaries, reenactments, theories, diagrams, commemorations, magazine covers, television specials, and the endless critical apparatus surrounding them. The event becomes less accessible as the archive expands.

Representation does not conceal reality in any simple sense. It replaces the route by which reality can be approached.

This is why JFK SMILES refuses a stable boundary between historical fact and imaginative distortion. The distortion is the historical fact. A culture that has absorbed its trauma through television cannot return to an unmediated origin. It can only move through layers of reproduction.

The real does not disappear. It becomes indistinguishable from its broadcast afterlife.

IX. Against Closure

The refusal of closure in JFK SMILES is not simply aesthetic defiance. It is historically appropriate. Television does not close events. It renews them. It brings them back under new titles, new formats, new claims of access. The restored image, the newly discovered document, the anniversary panel, the expert interview, the conspiracy special, the dramatized reconstruction: each promises resolution while extending the life of the unresolved.

The same principle governs the book. Its unresolved quality is not an omission. It is the point. Closure would falsely imply that the signal has ended. But the JFK signal has not ended. It continues to circulate as myth, commodity, trauma, joke, wound, religious icon, political code, and eroticized historical debris.

To close such a narrative would be to misunderstand its subject.

JFK SMILES instead leaves the reader inside the broadcast. This is uncomfortable because the reader expects literature to provide an exit from the systems it represents. But the book offers no such release. It does not stand outside television culture and critique it from a position of purity. It speaks from within the interference.

X. Conclusion: The Screen as National Memory

JFK SMILES is a novel of televised consciousness. Its difficulty lies not in the absence of structure but in the unfamiliarity of its structure. It is not organized by plot, psychological realism, or linear historical argument. It is organized by broadcast: recurrence, interruption, simultaneity, static, drift, replay, and emotional compression.

Television, in the book, is not merely one medium among others. It is the dominant epistemology of modern American life. It determines how the nation remembers, mourns, desires, suspects, fantasizes, and misrecognizes itself. JFK becomes the central emblem of this condition because his assassination exists in American memory as both event and endless representation, both historical wound and televised loop.

The achievement of JFK SMILES is that it does not merely describe this condition. It reproduces it formally. The book becomes a damaged receiver, a rerun machine, a literary broadcast tower transmitting from the ruins of national coherence.

Its repetitions are the repetitions of a culture that cannot stop watching. Its interruptions are the interruptions of a consciousness trained by programming. Its emotional flattening is the affective signature of televised catastrophe. Its collapse of reality and representation is not a theoretical gesture but a lived cultural condition.

In the end, JFK SMILES suggests that America did not simply watch the assassination of John F. Kennedy on television.

America learned how to know itself through the replay.

# # #

# # #

CORE SCENE  – NEWSPAPER CLIPPING

Most people first learned about Hank and his followers from the newspapers. Here’s a clipping from the Tarrant County Register:

Alien-Abductee Group Prepares for Cosmic Ascension

Staff Report

STRANGERS REST, Texas  — In this suburban enclave of North Texas success, an unusual group of self-described alien abductees is capturing attention with their preparations for what they call a "cosmic ascension."

Leading the group is Hank Harris, scion of the billionaire Cass family and self-made local TV handyman. He has spent the past several months constructing a backyard spacecraft that he and his followers believe will carry them into orbit to unite with a reborn President John F. Kennedy, whom they claim is now a human-alien hybrid. The spacecraft, built with materials ranging from old car parts to aluminum panels, also incorporates an unusual structural element: Bibles.

“If you’re going to build something to reach the cosmos, why not use something strong, like Bibles?” Harris said. “They provide structural integrity and spiritual protection.”

Hank’s followers point to their so-called “sacred scars” as evidence of extraterrestrial encounters, claiming the marks are cryptic messages guiding them toward an event they describe as the “Ascension.”

“Our bodies are a map written in scar tissue,” Harris said. “These marks tell a story of our connection to the cosmos, our confrontation with the absence at the core of the event.”

While the group’s activities have sparked curiosity, they have also drawn criticism and concern from neighbors. Complaints of late-night gatherings and odd humming noises have been reported to authorities. Local resident Johnny Lighthouse voiced skepticism about the group’s intentions.

“They’re just a bunch of psychos having sex parties,” Lighthouse said. “They’re out there looking up at the sky, waiting for JFK or aliens to take them away.”

The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office has received an uptick in complaints about noise and trespassing but has found no evidence of illegal activity beyond possible zoning violations.

“We respect everyone’s right to their beliefs,” said Sheriff’s Deputy Carla Nunez. “As long as there are no safety concerns, it remains an unusual hobby.”

The Nexus has not announced a date for its planned Ascension Event, leaving Strangers Rest residents to watch with a mix of curiosity and unease as the backyard spaceship project continues. Whether the craft will ever leave the ground remains to be seen.

(end clipping)

# # #

CORE SCENE -- FENCE ENCOUNTER

the mathematics of desire

I met Hank for the first time across the back fence, when I was still toying with the idea of retirement. The horizon stretched, not into golden years, but into a foggy abyss, where mortality flapped its wings, a moth trapped in a glass jar. I built a retirement dream board. But the cork panel would not congeal. I found myself lost in the mathematics of desire, visions of a transparent Venus, UFOs and Squirt Ray water guns, CIA television. Texas stories.

# # #

a perfect wound

Doesn’t erotic life touch the machine’s heart?

Gigi’s glasses, the torn jacket, the untangling of fragments — millimeters of clarity lodged in time. Hank’s film of deaths begins its splattered cycle — the power of entropy contained in an oval corpse. The slow musculature of the body reforms into air; violence reconstitutes itself.

A perverse flicker in Kiev’s cosmographs. The room tears open — a strange algebraic lens over Cowboy Mark’s eyes, measuring the incision of violence. Television and Magnetica form a perfect wound.

To become television is to achieve a perverse omnipresence— to be both voyeur and exhibitionist in a fetal vehicle for interstellar migration.

Information ecchymosis. The head’s sense more bizarre than the violence itself.

Moments disintegrate before darkened flights. Gagarin’s joys, the upright obscured reflections of space, the dream of television reforming itself into brute narrative.
The eternal now devised from the mind’s isolation through travel and loss.

Kennedy’s mathematics replayed through microwave trajectories.
The motorcade loops across the void.
Metal bones hum beneath the ceiling of disintegrated space.
Each assassination replayed — tragic, serene, shaped by sound.

Flashes of isolation, news broadcasts dissolving into the eternal now.
The astronauts’ bodies rise across the missile’s shadow.
A disconnection of memory, a breach in the ballistic board of emotion.

The Kennedy room, unrecognizable, fills with the purpose of trapped effects.
Skin heals into presence. Microwave barrages reform the wound. Mark reflects on systems stretched across the voice of space, doomed by static.

“Perhaps it’s isolation,” someone says.

Cowboy Mark listens below the commentary, hearing Armstrong’s clipped transmissions.
Reality replicates itself in the office: volunteers, data shifts, live abandonment.
The medium itself blinds feeling. Technology breaks against memory. Images caught in unbearable feedback loops.

Cowboy Mark stares through glass at his own reflection — the man at the desk, his face automated by time. No healing, only replay. Again. JFK transmitted into simulacrum — the bullet, the screen, the wound.

# # #

JFK’s space program as a fetal vehicle for interstellar migration

Apollo 11 was not a journey to the moon, but a preliminary incision—an exploratory probe into the anatomy of our cosmic schizophrenia.

This is Hank’s dream. He is seeking sexual penetration by and erotic cannibalism with JFK in outer space. We are not about escape or transcendence. We are about remaking reality within a collision of worlds, the moment when two fractured worlds converge.

The human body, with its sweating cellular tapestries, is a failed vehicle for interstellar migration. Flesh is obsolete. This is not science fiction. It is psychosexual inevitability.

The televised self is not bound by bone. It does not die. It loops. Repeat.  It reruns itself into myth. To become television is to achieve a perverse omnipresence— to be both voyeur and exhibitionist in a fetal vehicle for interstellar migration.

We will not colonize the stars. We will syndicate ourselves across them.

JFK, in death, is more than a historical figure—he is a symbol of what was lost, what can never be regained, and what exists beyond our control. For Hank, to merge with him in the cold vastness of space is to confront the ultimate paradox: a reunion with history, yet one that exists outside of time itself.

Penetrated by JFK’s eternal cosmic erection, Hank hopes to shed the constraints of earthly existence—the rules of history, the definitions of identity—and drift into a place where the lines between life, death, and meaning dissolve. Space, in its infinite expanse, becomes the canvas for a new creation, where the boundaries of self are meaningless, and where the narrative of one life, one assassination, one transfiguration, can fold into something much larger than the sum of its parts.

# # #

CORE SCENE  - STATIC PRAYER

Dallas hums beneath the skull.

The sound does not come from the street or the sky. It is internal—conducted through glass, through cable, through the soft architecture of memory. Somewhere a motorcade is turning a corner it has already turned. Somewhere a hand is raised again. Somewhere the light arrives too fast to be understood.

The tape has no leader.

The image begins mid-motion, as if resumed after interruption. Static breathes between frames. Light collects at the edges of objects, where meaning once resided. The wound is already open.

The President is not dead.
The President is not alive.
The President is transmitting.

SIGNAL PRESENT
SIGNAL PRESENT
SIGNAL PRESENT

# # #

JFK, the Screaming Spermatozoon, Ejected from the Cosmic Phallus of Dalí, Splattered Across the Flayed Canvas

·        “The refrigerator motor clicks on.”

·        “Ice shifts in the tray.”

·        “A receipt curls on the counter.”

JFK erupts, a howl shaped like a bullet, a silken strand of presidential plasma, flung from furious loins, a bright-white trajectory of catastrophe. The cosmic sperm, slick with paranoia, swims through the melting corridors of time, twisting in the womb of space, unborn yet always dying, an ejaculation without conception, a genesis that aborts itself in midair.

He writhes in his own afterbirth, a man liquefied, his face elongating in oil, pulled into the tormented brushstrokes of Bacon. The canvas is wet with him, his teeth become streaks of white paint, his mouth an open sore on the fabric of history. He does not speak—he only howls. A drowned Pope (he was Catholic, after all), a crucified martyr, an exquisite corpse convulsing in the orgasm of assassination.

Truth swims on, gurgling through the arteries of memory, circling Dealey Plaza in an endless loop, splitting into infinite selves, each version of JFK more unrecognizable than the last. One is a grinning beast with a skull of split pomegranate. Another is a melted smear of gubernatorial flesh, pooling in the streets, a surrealist dream deferred.

He is still laughing, still erect, a phallic metronome keeping time with the spasms of American fate. Fingers tremble, his brush drips, but he cannot paint fast enough to catch the blur of catastrophe and fluid destruction.

JFK was here. JFK is gone. JFK is still coming. JFK is the eternal stain on the mattress of history.

Hank saw the world in an unending series of sexualized cannibal fantasies, a vague silhouette, his form intersecting with the anterior sequence of the traumatized genitalia.

·        JFK, Screaming in the Cosmic Womb of Assassination

·        The Grassy Knoll as a Melting Phallus, Dripping with Unfinished Futures

·        Unborn, Undead, Unmade: JFK in the Amniotic Swirl of the Universe

The thought of JFK’s manhood lingered as artifact—a promise fractured into the brittle remains of a trajectory. Hands slackened, gestures accentuating the tension of malfunctioning diagrams. Thoughts circulated amidst the jagged blueprint. Each mark spoke of repetition: a cognitive, alien wound charted by unseen hands.

A flicker. The sterile table beneath him was an untouched grand floor. JFK’s incisions mapped in pixels, their edges meticulously rendered as if purpose lay in the commodification of suffering. Phrases cycled, hundreds at a time, failing to resolve meaning. The trajectory of flesh aligned with fragmented narratives—acromion fixed, skull branded by endless tropes.

# # #

beneath the flickering strip-lights of a motel overlooking the Nevada test site.

Across the telemetry of sex and sovereignty, JFK's commemorative ectoplasm slid warm between the velvet folds of Gigi’s pelvic architecture. The memory of his standing erection—presidential, embalmed—remained framed behind the minibar, twitching in the closed circuit of my inner lens.

Sex was ambient, electrical—measured in micrometers. I ejaculated into the null space of historical pornography, into the edible iconography of televised assassinations and consumer-grade spirituality.

Gigi moaned from the taxonomical shadows. Her thighs overflowed with communion and cosmic fluids—a blast radius of romance formed in globs across the presidential breakfast menu. She saw the blowjob as sacrament, pixelated, mythopoeic, as sterile as the Museum of Oral Histories where JFK's manhood—fabled, embedded, ex-communicated—was exhibited on a rotating dais of meat and memory.

Thermodynamic videos looped across Gigi’s pink, serrated membranes. I penetrated her on the classification grid, our orgasms converted into data, ticking across branded desire. The ambassadorial textures of her orifice whispered Cold War secrets.

My copulation was noted in a file called The Event:

·        breath exploded into aerosol desire

·        Her spine conducted ambient politics in the soft core of a looping myth

·        Sucking off nostalgia and oral traditions rendered in 3D

Gigi’s raw, unstable mouth stretched across the data stream. Her vagina was a commemorative algorithm. My cock, indistinct and ready, penetrated history’s laminated uterus. The suite overflowed with disposable emotion. The screen pulsed. The past came.

# # #

an alien dream-state marked with bilateral disasters

The room was the wound was the weapon. National analysts speculate. Did the fabric remember? Did it feed? Somewhere, the old Universe resurfaces in darkened moments—thin traces of a program's doubt. Misfired incursion, human datum, deployed like meat through bureaucratic aperture.

JFK’s frame—both physical and conceptual—shifts continuously, a soft architecture of vulnerability through which the nation’s most eroticized wound pulsates. And Gigi – her reference, her genital presence, merges into this event-space: the endless assassination loop, broadcast not as death, but as mythic penetration.

Dressed in grief, a woman who lived in the shadow of history, forever transformed by it, yet always poised, always holding on to something beyond the tragedy, something transcendent.

Her smile, in the equation of JFK’s death, is the unknowable factor, the reminder that even in the face of cosmic violence, there is still beauty, still humanity, still an unshakable sense of self. It is both her armor and her vulnerability, a constant that defies the absurdity of the world around her, a grace that slips through the cracks of history, untouched.

# # #

CORE SCENE  – AUTOPSY OPERA

ASSASSINATION STEW / OVERTURE: NATIONAL BODY ON STAGE

The curtain rises on America’s exposed thorax.
The stage is a surgical cradle, washed in the percussive neon of the transmitter.
A chorus of interns hums the opening chord—
a minor-key reconstruction of Frame 313,
vocalized through cracked intercoms in the central cortex.

Above them, the Jackie-Module rotates in slow orbit through starlight,
her Chanel residue misting the proscenium like holy water distilled from trauma footage of flickering synthesis.

ACT I — LOBOTOMY WALTZ OF THE REPUBLIC

A national fever throbs beneath the orchestra pit. Technicians in white tights enter, carrying:

·        a replica skull (cracked along the assassination vectors)

·        a pink Lincoln hood (glistening with theatrical petroleum)

·        the CIA’s libido-script (marked for tenor and baritone)

A sci-fi She-figure descends on wires, straddling a steel autopsy table like a saint of suspended diagnosis.

Her first number, “Cortical Rock Me, America,” combines pelvic thrusts with neurosurgical demonstrations.
The audience is encouraged to imagine the nation’s corpus callosum
as a footlight canal.

ACT II — THE CRYOGENIC JACKIE ARIA

Jackie manifests as:

·        a hologram

·        a refrigerated theology

·        a cryogenic mother-organ of nostalgia

She kneels beside the tomb of the televised skull,
singing “Retro-Theology in Three Collisions”
while surgeons align her cranial memories
in neat chromatic rows.

Behind her:
Strangers stand in pew formations,
receiving communion from flickering monitors
playing the motorcade in reverse.

The eroticism is purely forensic.
Each breath fogs the auditorium with
a disinfectant sweetness.

ACT III — THE CIA BARITONE OF IMPACT TRAUMA