Tag: novel

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

Picture this: inside a meeting room in Irún’s main library, an assortment of office workers, students, and pensioners hunched over their notebooks around a large rectangular table. Coats and bags hung on the backs of their chairs, and at the center of the table lay a box of chocolates. While pens scratched against paper, the writing instructor hovered nearby, often pulling out her smartphone to shoot group photos for her Twitter feed, without consent I might add. Isabel Zubiri. A forty-year-old woman with warm olive skin, hair worn in a casual topknot, dangling earrings, a chainlike necklace, and cat-eye glasses with off-white frames. But nevermind those people. By then, I had deemed the course pointless, and I attended because among us sat an anomaly: Elena. Late twenties, last name unknown. You could feel her presence like a shadowy figure in the corner of your eye. Her almond-blonde hair fell limply around her pale face. Slavic features. A ghost’s beauty. Dare to look into those haunted blues framed by reddened skin, and you may have glimpsed echoes of commissars starving her ancestors’ village. Listen closely and you’d hear a distant wail, that of a newborn child abandoned by her mother. Elena was a quiet bird, born tired and with a heart full of holes. She usually wore a loose gray sweatshirt, likely the same one, in which you could barely make out her tits. I won’t get into how she behaved; that’s coming up. All in all, she was sexy as fuck. Her look and demeanor screamed “fix me.” She would ruin your life. But as the old song says: better to burn out, yeah, yeah, than to fade away.

Isabel, our teacher, her cheer a barricade against life’s harsh truths, adjusted her cat-eyed glasses and tapped her fingers lightly on the wooden table.

“Well then, let’s see what creative adventures you’ve cooked up for me in your time-travel stories! Who wants to be brave and go first? Remember, no wrong way to tell a tale… unless you’re not telling it at all.” She laughed. “And please don’t worry too much if you’ve sent me somewhere outlandish, okay? God knows I could use a vacation, even a fictional one!”

Elena eased the chair back, her slender, underfed figure rising. Her fingers held gently the edges of the printed paper while she focused on the words.

Isabel’s cheer faltered at the volunteer who had once stated that literature’s purpose was “to make the reader cry, scream, and bleed.” She quickly bolted on a professional smile.

“Ah, Elena, always the trailblazer. I must say, your commitment to sharing your work is inspiring. You’re one of the bravest souls in our little circle. Or should I say the boldest? Please, do regale us. Let’s hear where you’re whisking me off to.” Isabel’s gaze swept over the group. “And remember, everyone, we’re looking for those conflicts we’ve discussed: whether it’s a clash of personalities, a moral dilemma, or just the universe throwing some cosmic curveball. We’re all about the drama here.” She gestured at the silent ghost. “The floor is yours, Elena.”

Elena, her tired eyes fixed on the page with the intensity of a cryptologist, sighed, then began to weave her tale. I wish you could hear her voice: soft and creaky as if from disuse, and burdened with the weight of a thousand unsaid things.

“Isabel Zubiri, writer and teacher of writing, clutched the armrests of her time machine as the jostling journey shook the frame. An indicator glowed in the dim cockpit: July 1st, 1497. Florence, Italy. She would stroll through its streets, observe its people. Men in doublets and ruffs, women in gowns flaring out to their ankles like closed flowers. The air would smell of bread and dung and sweat, of herbs and spices from the markets. Amid the clucking of chickens and human chatter in that old Italian dialect, she would hear the bells of Santa Maria del Fiore. Secretly she would photograph the crowds, the palaces, and the churches. In the end, she would vanish without harming anyone nor pushing them off their paths, for fear of snapping the thread of history. The ultimate tourist in this land of the past, a voyeur to the lives of men and women long turned to dust.”

Isabel, seated, had leaned forward slightly, her fingers interlaced on the table as she listened. But she straightened up in relief.

“Well, Elena, that’s quite an evocative opening!” she encouraged. “I can already feel the weight of history in your choice of setting. Renaissance Florence, no less. The period clothing details were a lovely touch.” Some classmates nodded. “And I’m glad you’ve taken the ‘no harm to history’ rule to heart. That’s an interesting conflict right there, the struggle to remain unobtrusive and avoid altering events. It’s like the ultimate challenge for a writer, isn’t it?”

Elena’s eyebrows twitched. Somber and distant, she resumed her reading with the alienated air of the perpetually exhausted.

“Inside the time machine’s cramped cabin, a flash of light flickered. A jolt threw Isabel around, slamming her against the curved wall. She blinked to clear her vision. The indicator’s numbers blurred. While cursing, Isabel groped in the darkness for the control panel. She pressed buttons meant to reset the circuits, but the indicator’s digits kept spinning. The time machine crashed with a metallic crunch, squashing Isabel into the padded chair and rattling her teeth. Then the machine tumbled down, rolling over as Isabel, strapped in place, flipped and spun. The contents of her stomach rammed against her clenched throat in waves. Suddenly the time machine groaned to a halt, rocking Isabel against the seat, and its hatch door popped open, letting in a blast of heat. The indicator displayed dashes instead of numbers. She shuddered. Her head throbbed, her stomach churned. She tapped at the panel, but no sequence of buttons revived it. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Stay calm. The time machine came with a user manual for such emergencies. After unbuckling herself and crawling out of the hatch, she stepped onto cloggy ground. Hot, humid air filled Isabel’s lungs, heavy with the pungent stink of sulphur. Isabel, dizzy and nauseous, kept coughing. She stood wobbly in a vast swamp that stretched out into a brownish haze. On the horizon rose the dark bulk of a volcano, from whose peak climbed a column of ashy smoke lit by flickers of lightning. A ceiling of gray clouds hung heavy, casting the landscape of mud and reeds below into gloom.”

As Isabel listened, her smile had grown rigid, and she had shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Now her fingers drummed a nervous beat on the table.

“Oh dear. This is getting… rather intense, isn’t it?” she said, her voice carrying an edge of unease like a mother who has stumbled upon her teenager’s morbid drawings. “That’s our Elena, though, always taking the path that’s anything but well-traveled. Keeping us on our toes! A vivid departure from the serene Renaissance Florence, I must say. And those sensory details, they’re so… I can practically feel that sulphurous air choking my lungs.” Her eyes darted to her students. “And class, notice how Elena has woven multiple types of conflict into this scenario: person versus technology with the malfunctioning time machine, and person versus environment with that hostile landscape.” She adjusted her glasses and cleared her throat. “Would you like to continue, Elena? We’re all, uh, dying to know what happens next.”

Elena, while fidgeting with the sleeve of her gray sweatshirt, offered a thin smile. Then, gaze locked on the paper, she continued reading with the detached demeanor of a funeral director.

“The time machine, its hatch gaping like a wound, lay half-sunken in the muck. Isabel crouched beside it, coating her sneakers and ankles in mud, and inspected the metallic hull, which reflected the somber sky, for dents or cracks. A low moan rose from somewhere in the swamp, as if the earth itself suffered. Isabel wiped her forehead, her palm coming away slick with sweat. Her clothes clung to her body. The air burned her throat and lungs, forcing her to cough and spit. Isabel tugged her foot free from the clinging mud and nearly lost her sneaker. She trudged through the sludge, her feet sinking ankle-deep, to the time machine’s rear, and pried the storage compartment open. She pulled out the user’s manual, a thick binder of glossy pages, sealed in a waterproof bag. For a couple of hours, she followed the troubleshooting section’s steps. She tinkered with the innards of the contraption, wrestling with tangles of wires, flipping switches. Repeatedly she ducked inside the cockpit to check the control panel, then scrambled back out into the mud. The controls remained lifeless, and the indicator’s dashes glowed like the eyes of a corpse. In the gloom, Isabel, her eyes aching from strain, read the troubleshooting section to the end, and stared at the fine print: ‘In the event of a catastrophic failure, please contact your nearest time travel agent.'”

I chuckled, which earned me a swift glance from our instructor.

“Isabel hurled the binder into the distance.” Elena went on in her soft, creaky voice. “It sailed in an arc, its pages flapping, then landed with a wet plop. She slumped to the mud and wept, her chest heaving with sobs, the tears cutting grimy tracks down her cheeks. The time machine had become a useless sculpture in a world that never knew her name. Stranded. Abandoned. She would die here, her bones mingling with the mud.”

A few students exchanged uneasy looks. Isabel toyed with her necklace as a furrow deepened on her brow.

“Okay, Elena. You’re certainly throwing our intrepid writer-protagonist straight into the deep end. A classic case of Murphy’s Law, right? Anything that can go wrong, will. Just my luck! But hey… you’re not planning on stranding our poor heroine in this dreadful swamp forever, are you?”

Elena’s eyes lifted to meet Isabel’s, her gaze as blank and distant as the moon’s. She then resumed her reading.

“Isabel took deep breaths, inhaling the sour, sulphuric air, and her sobs subsided. I won’t die like this. I am a writer. My place is not among ghosts but among the living, men and women who have yet to read my works. She hauled herself upright, her legs trembling, her clothes heavy with mud. Calm down. Stay optimistic. Maybe I’ve landed in a bad spot, but the rest of this world can’t be so bleak. She pulled out her smartphone and turned on the camera to study her stained, wide-eyed face framed by dark, disheveled hair. Wisps of ash clung to her eyelashes; snowlike ash drifted gently in the half-light filtering through the ragged cloud cover. Isabel, her hands shaking, snapped a panoramic shot of the volcanic wasteland, the phone’s flash briefly illuminating the mud and reeds in stark white. Once she returned home, she would share the photo with the caption: ‘Guess who’s on vacation! #SwampLife. #TimelessTravels.'”

A faint smirk tugged at the corners of Elena’s mouth, and vanished as quickly. Isabel leaned forward, her fingers steepled. She opened her mouth to speak, but Elena, her gaze glued to the paper, soldiered on in a flat voice.

“Isabel set out across the swamp toward the volcano, its slopes a smear of black, its summit wreathed in smoke and lightning. The mud sucked at her sneakers with a rhythmic squelch, and the reeds brushed against her thighs. She would keep on trudging until her legs gave out. The swamp stretched out before her, a steaming expanse of mud, reeds, and fetid pools of bubbling water shimmering in the heat. The volcanic horizon flashed with lightning. Isabel walked for hours, treading when she could over narrow banks of earth that crisscrossed the marshes, where clusters of reeds rose with wide, yellowish leaves. Otherwise, her feet sank into the warm mire. The heat pressed down on her, thick and stifling. Her skin glistened with sweat, her hair was matted, her clothes reeked of sulphur, her trousers and sneakers were caked in thick mud. Isabel’s eyes watered and her nose burned from the acrid vapors. The muscles of her thighs and calves ached. Intermittent thunder silenced her labored breathing, the squelching of her steps, and the burps of the mud pools. A loud crack shook the ground, making Isabel lose her balance and fall forward, plunging face-first into sludge that swarmed with tiny, wriggling worms. She scrambled upright and clawed the sludge’s surface. While crawling onto solid ground, Isabel cried out. The echo mingled with the earth’s moans: a low, unsettling rumble. The reeds swayed and the water rippled. The volcano was hurling rocks and ash. Its peak, a jagged black crown against the leaden sky, spewed forth a towering column of smoke. Lightning danced in its depths. Down the sides of the mountain oozed a glowing orange trickle.” Elena, whose gaze was lost in the depths of the page, cleared her throat, then continued reading in a tense voice, as if the text was holding her at knifepoint. “Isabel had exhausted her emergency kit: the fresh water of her canteen, and the pack of vacuum-sealed astronaut meals. She yearned for a drink. Her face was a mask of dried mud, her hair hanged in muddy strands, and her clothes were caked in grime. Her heart pounded, her hands shook, her stomach growled, her tongue swelled from thirst. She found a pool of slightly less brackish water, where she washed her face and hair, her fingertips stopping at knots and tangles. Soon enough the landscape grew darker until the gloom forced Isabel to pull out her phone and switch on its flashlight. The pale light revealed a watery world of tall reeds and gnarled, barren trees rising from the mire. The volcano’s black slopes glowed in the darkness with streaks of red lava, and in the sky, the cloud ceiling swelled and churned like a living thing, flickers of lightning outlining its roiling contours. Isabel lay down on solid ground and slept as thunder rolled overhead and the earth trembled beneath her. She woke up ravenous. The sky had dawned with heavy cloud cover and a dusky glow. The volcano loomed like a titanic boil, and its slopes glistened with molten lava sliding down like charred cheese. Her throat burning, her eyes bloodshot from the volcanic ash and the acrid atmosphere, Isabel roamed for hours through the endless bog until she heard waves crashing. As she staggered toward the sound, the ground grew firmer, and the mud gave way to dry land. Out of the fog emerged a coastline where waves crashed against rocky outcroppings. Following the shore, Isabel came upon a beach. She crawled to the water’s edge, scooped up some in her palms, and drank. The aftertaste clung like rotten eggs. Isabel, spent, collapsed on the sand, and curled into a fetal position. The volcano loomed sideways, bleeding streams of lava. The rolling of the waves lulled Isabel to sleep.”

Isabel’s expression showed barely concealed horror. Her eyes darted around the room as if searching for a fire alarm to pull. When she spoke, she tried to inject a bit of sunshine into the oppressive atmosphere, but it came out strained.

“A frankly terrifying landscape… Endless marshes, being baked by a volcanic environment… I can practically feel the mud and the oppressive heat. Not the most pleasant sensation, of course. A bit too vivid for comfort. I must say, Elena, you have a knack for painting a bleak picture.” As her fingertips tapped on the table, she spoke like a negotiator trying to talk a person down from a ledge. “Do keep in mind that conflict can’t just be a relentless onslaught; it needs moments of reprieve, of hope, or even humor to balance the tension. Readers need a breather now and then, even if the character’s situation remains dire. Otherwise, it can feel a bit, well, hopeless, right? And hope is what keeps us turning the page. You see, our craft is a careful balancing act. Too much tension can wear down the reader.” She turned to the rest of the students as if imploring them to save her. “Take note of the escalating stakes and the sense of isolation that Elena’s crafted here. They aren’t just setting elements; they’re creating psychological pressure on our protagonist. It’s not just about overcoming her immediate situation, but also about the emotional weight of being stranded in time and space. She needs to stay sane in the face of adversity. There’s a hint of existential crisis there, I think. Class, I’d love to hear from you. What conflicts do you recognize in Elena’s piece?”

A hamster-faced college student wearing a pink hoodie raised her hand, then spoke in a chipmunk voice.

“I liked that whole thing with the protagonist taking photos. It added humor in the midst of a very weird scene. Even in this strange, desolate world, she still thinks of posting it on Twitter or Instagram. I would do the same thing.”

“Right. A nice touch of absurdity. I appreciate that.”

Elena’s reddened eyes sought our instructor’s.

“I wish to continue,” she said in a hoarse murmur from a distant planet. “I’m almost done.”

Isabel straightened in her chair. She put on a porcelain doll’s smile.

“Of course, Elena. I think we’re in a good place to take a breather, do a little feedback round. Maybe give our other would-be authors a chance to test-drive their time machines.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “But please continue. Let’s hear the conclusion.”

Elena sighed, then focused on the paper like a diver following a spotlight in the murky depths.

“Isabel dreamed of water. Clear, cold water dripping from a faucet, gushing from a tap. But she awoke to the roar of the sea, the sun a faint smudge behind the cloud cover. No sense of how much time had passed. A thin layer of ash had coated her, ash that drifted down onto the beach and the waves that rolled in from a dark, metallic sea. Isabel’s throat was parched, and hunger twisted her guts. The sand was black and coarse, mixed with fragments of pumice and obsidian. She stumbled along the shoreline, her bare feet leaving footprints that were soon washed away by the waves, their white foam hissing as they receded. At times Isabel dipped her arms into the cold current, searching for fish shapes. When she gave up, she lay exhausted and shivering on the sand and passed out.”

“Elena…”

“She opened her eyes to blackness save for the fiery veins of lava throbbing in the distance. Thunder rumbled in rolling peals. Her swollen tongue clung to her mouth. She felt dry as the dead leaves from last autumn, brittle and ready to crumble. She pulled out her phone, switched on the flashlight, and illuminated the damp, coarse sand. The bubble of light glinted off flakes of ash drifting in swirls. By the water’s edge, she spotted a foot-long silhouette. Isabel dragged herself forward. Her vision blurred and flickered with dark spots, but she distinguished a short-legged, flesh-colored salamander. Its gray eyes looked blind, its slimy skin shimmered sickly. A pang of hunger glazed Isabel’s eyes. She snatched the salamander, that wriggled weakly in her grasp. Her heart pounded. I’m sorry. She dropped the phone onto the sand, clasped the salamander’s head and snapped its neck with a crack. She chomped into its belly and tore out hot, pulsing chunks of viscera. Once the offal sat in her stomach, she picked up the phone and pushed herself upright. Activating the front-faced camera, she took stock of her ash-stained face, her mouth gleaming with blood. She forced a grin and lifted her index and middle fingers in a victory sign. When she snapped the photo, the flash blinded her. No matter; she already imagined the photo caption: ‘Conquering the elements. #KeepOnGoing.’ Isabel vanished. Before the phone plopped onto the the soaked sand, it blinked out of existence. A breaking wave lifted the salamander off the sand, and the undertow swallowed its carcass.”

Elena marked the end of her tale by sitting down, scooting closer to the edge of the table, and looking down at her paper with a blank face.

Author’s note: today’s song is “I Was Born (A Unicorn)” by The Unicorns.

Hell yeah, new novel! I hadn’t been this antsy to return to my writing since I was immersed in a certain tale about a motocross rider. Could barely sit still at work while rearranging my notes. I hadn’t created anything totally new in months, and I’ve felt a bit rusty. Anyway, I thought this was quite the impactful introduction for our new protagonist, at least when it comes to the first outer layer of such a hopefully intriguing woman.

The next part should conclude this scene. I hope you folks stick around, because this one’s going to be lots of fun.

Life update (01/18/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Well, what do you know. In a week, I’ve translated a whole novella I wrote about ten years ago, mostly thanks to OpenAI’s Orion 1 model, although I’ve needed to edit plenty of parts; regarding some, the original Spanish version wasn’t worded ideally, which becomes obvious when translating. Why would a Spanish old boy like me be writing in English anyway? Well, I’ve never gotten used to reading nor writing in Spanish. It always felt off, unnatural. If you knew I’m also Basque, you could think that I’d rather write in Basque instead. Nope, I can’t stand that language and can’t speak it either. But English has always been my private language; when my mother, who didn’t believe in privacy, read my hidden notebooks every chance she got, I started writing in English, or what passed for English at that age, to keep my intimate thoughts to myself. My mother complained that she could no longer understand them. I don’t want to say any more about my parents at the moment, although there’s plenty to say.

My old tale Smile was cooler than I remembered. Revisiting stuff you wrote many years ago is shocking, because the self that created it no longer exists. These days, I wouldn’t have written that story the same way. Likely I wouldn’t have written it at all, as my subconscious worries about other matters. In my impression, the unnamed narrator comes out very strongly; a solid, memorable character. I was surprised also by how much I liked that vagrant girl who shows up and disappears forever, as well as Cassie, despite only showing up at the tail ends of the story. These people were born from me and were forgotten along the way. It’s strange how that goes. I never quite got rid of the narrator, though; as I mentioned in other posts, he shows up in my daydreams whenever someone from the past needs saving. I also wrote a novel protagonized by him back in 2011, but I doubt it’s good enough to translate. Two of the people who read it shook their heads, and one told me that it was way too violent. Bunch of pussies.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll start writing a new novel. Its backstory is quite interesting (for me at least). From about 2010 to 2012, I was utterly obsessed, autistically so, with a US-based songwriter. I have never in my life been that obsessed with anyone again, thankfully. Along the way, I don’t recall the exact timeline, I wrote a whole novel that was thinly-veiled fanfiction of that songwriter. The impact such an obsession had on me felt interesting to circle upon, so in 2015 I planned a whole novel about an autistic person writing the novel I had written about that songwriter. Very meta, I suppose. Although I planned every single scene of that novel painstakingly, I only ended up writing half of it. By then, my subconscious felt like I had gotten it out of my system. In retrospect, the structure had fatal flaws that couldn’t be solved without a full redo. So I abandoned it. A few years later I produced the six novellas in Spanish contained in my books Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho. If you’ve followed Smile, you’ve already read one of those novellas.

Anyway, it seems my basement girl needs to delve into the notion of being haunted by someone, of secluding oneself and working in such a labor of love/deranged obsession. I’ve gathered about 125000 words of notes. I’ve figured out the proper narrative tone for such a strange piece, as well as how to handle the many, many scenes of the book-within-the-book. This will be such a personal story that I’m not sure if anyone else is going to enjoy it, but for me it’s always about pleasing my subconscious; if anyone else enjoys my work, even better.

So, for those interested, in hopefully a few days I’ll post the first part of my novel The Scrap Colossus, introducing the autistic, reclusive, obsessive, unique protagonist who’s trying her best to honor her muse.

I’ve checked my site visits; in the last hour alone, a single person from Spain has hit every single part of Smile. That kind of shit makes me nervous.

Reread: The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

Five stars.

I first read The Passenger, along with its coda Stella Maris, perhaps a year and a half ago. I loved both, but I wasn’t consciously aware of how they had settled in my subconscious. From time to time, I remembered the most important character in those two books: a beautiful, mentally-ill genius named Alicia Western. Out of nowhere, back in December I dreamed about her, and it spurred a sudden obsession that has yet to pass. It led me to reread both books. Alicia Western feels not only unique but wholly real, as if she had truly existed. The massive weight of grief that pulls the protagonist down on The Passenger, that pulls down the reader for that matter, relates to the knowledge that an irreplaceable (pretty much a perfect person, as one of the characters put it) had been lost. Now that we know quite a bit more about McCarthy’s personal life, mainly about the love of his life, Augusta Britt, it seems to me that both of his final novels, which he had been researching or living since about 1972, render his grief, regret and general sorrow for having loved and lost Britt, whom McCarthy never managed to marry despite repeated attempts up to the end of his life.

Both books develop a forbidden love, that of Alicia Western and her biological brother Bobby. Cormac McCarthy didn’t have to go far to research how it felt to live a forbidden love. If Augusta Britt’s own words are to be believed, she first introduced herself to Cormac McCarthy at a public pool. A blonde, blue-eyed beauty (just like Alicia Western), she had a stolen gun holstered at her hip; she was sick of men in foster homes abusing her. When she approached McCarthy, he asked if she was going to shoot him. She then produced McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, and asked him to sign it. McCarthy was surprised, because just a few thousand copies of that book had been produced for that edition (this and other details bring to question if Britt is making stuff up to protect McCarthy, whom she loved, from further scrutiny). As the YouTuber Write Conscious (who lives in the Catalina foothills “five minutes away” from where Augusta Britt lives now, although he has never met her) spoke at length in this video, Augusta Britt was likely thirteen when she met McCarthy. She was also thirteen when she started receiving amorous letters from him. She was fourteen when, after getting abused again in a foster home, McCarthy asked her if she would escape with him to Mexico. Augusta herself said that they made love shortly after settling there. Regardless of your opinion on the subject of underage sex, it’s probably illegal. The fact remains that Augusta Britt to this day claims that McCarthy saved her life, and they were friends up until his death. As you will see throughout this post, the real-life inspiration seems thinly veiled at times, which possibly makes The Passenger McCarthy’s most personal novel.

This review will contain spoilers, although referring to spoilers in this novel is a bit strange: the most important thing that happens in it, that keeps happening throughout, is Alicia Western’s suicide, the aftermath of which were are presented with right in the opening passage: she walked out of the Stella Maris sanatorium into the woods of Wisconsin and let herself freeze to death. Curiously, although she had talked at length about intending to disappear without a trace, she chose to wear a red sash around her white dress so her corpse would be easily found, which is inexplicable, and has led to plenty of online speculation. Alicia Western, a troubled math genius with a unique mind that baffled every person she came across (as one person put it, when strangers met her, they thought of her as a pretty girl, but a few minutes later they were swimming for their lives), was led into these circumstances because her brother Bobby, the love of Alicia’s life, as well as the person who should have protected her to the last of his days, crashed while racing professionally, and ended up in a coma. Alicia, believing Bobby to be brain-dead regardless of whether he would wake up or not, decided to die. But Bobby did wake up from his coma pretty much unscathed. The Passenger starts with Bobby in 1980, in a world that for him has turned into ashes, the person he loved lost forever.

Bobby, who used to be both a physicist as well as race car driver, now works as a salvage diver who opts for dangerous jobs, quite overtly hoping that one of those jobs may take the agency out of him dying. The plot kicks off when Bobby and a friend of his, while diving to explore a sunken airplane, discover a bizarre situation: even though the plane is intact, the passengers inside are dead in their seats as if they had died before the plane crashed. The plane’s black box is missing, along with one of the passengers. Bobby and his pal realize that the situation is fucked, and they want nothing to do with it. Bobby goes out of his way just once to return to the area alone, and he discovers an inflatable raft that the passenger must have used to escape the plane. Now come the realm of spoilers: this is an anti-plot novel. Bobby doesn’t want to know anything more about this event, but he keeps being hounded about it by mysterious government types, who encroach further and further upon his life for reasons we never find out about (presumably because they believe he had something to do with stealing the plane’s black box, but it seems to me that they’re just trying to get rid of witnesses regarding whatever conspiracy caused the plane crash).

With those plot elements out of the way, which is pretty much all you get in that regard, the rest of the book is an exploration, a prodding if you will, of the fringes of human knowledge and experience: mental illness, hallucinations, conspiracies, living off the grid, working in off-shore platforms, transgenderism, aliens, incest, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, life as an outlaw, death, and plenty more. It felt to me like McCarthy was expanding his mind against those nooks that don’t have solid explanations, as he was about to embark in the final mystery of them all: dying, which deprived us of one of the finest, most unique minds in the world, as well as the writer I respect the most.

Throughout the story, Bobby remains subdued, pinned down by grief and regret, to the extent that we never meet the Bobby that Alicia talks about in Stella Maris, that young man who played the mandolin at honky-tonks as Alicia pretended they were married. In virtually every scene, it feels like Bobby is preventing himself from thinking about Alicia, and whenever some image or memory slips in, it devastates him. Most of the time that any other character brings Alicia up, Bobby is moments away from leaving. Bobby mentions that the sole duty in his life was to take care of her, that he had failed miserably at it, and that he should have killed himself years ago. The rest of the book is a way for him of unburdening himself from everything and everyone he has ever known, so he can spend his remaining life in solitary confinement, paying for the crime of abandoning Alicia Western, his sister and love of his life, when she needed him the most. I can’t hurl complaints at him for his decisions, because he bears the full weight of what he’s done.

I can’t explain, except perhaps by alluding to how McCarthy imbued Alicia with all his yearnings and reverence for Augusta Britt, the fact that whenever she appeared or was mentioned in this book, I perked up and combed through every detail in case I would glean new information about her. She’s a pulsing presence, a constant heartbreak, as alive in those pages as I don’t think I’ve experienced anywhere else in fiction.

In Stella Maris, Alicia tells her therapist that she only kissed Bobby twice, but never went beyond that. However, that book makes a peculiar point: that confessing to some unsavory stuff is a way of keeping hidden details that lie far deeper, and cannot be brought to light. It was a very odd thing to say after Alicia Western confessed to loving her brother, and having told him that she wanted to marry him and bear his child. As I was rereading through The Passenger, I came across this passage:

Certain dreams gave him no peace. A nurse waiting to take the thing away. The doctor watching him.
What do you want to do?
I dont know. I dont know what to do.
The doctor wore a surgical mask. A white cap. His glasses were steamed.
What do you want to do?
Has she seen it?
No.
Tell me what to do.
You’ll have to tell us. We cant advise you.
There were bloodstains on his frock. The mask he wore sucked in and out with his breathing.
Wont she have to see it?
I think that will have to be your decision. Bearing in mind of course that a thing once seen cannot be unseen.
Does it have a brain?
Rudimentary.
Does it have a soul?

None of the other dream sequences were that specific regarding mundane details, nor included such dialogue. That tells me that it wasn’t a dream. And what is depicting is Alicia either having a miscarriage or an abortion. Bobby was the sole person she would have had sex with.

There’s not much else that I want to specify about the contents of the novel; they should be experienced. I will go over the many quotes that I have noted down. First of them, very early on, Alicia’s main “hallucination,” the Thalidomide Kid (whom some people online have suggested is Alicia’s subconscious fear that the child she wants to have with Bobby would be deformed), presents to her a new character, a dusty old man who ultimately only asks for the location of the bathroom. But the Kid’s words about that old man are quite telling, I’d say, now that we know McCarthy’s history with the love of his life:

He was married in that outfit. Little wifey was sixteen. Of course he’d been banging her for a couple of years so that would put her at fourteen. Finally managed to knock her up and hey, here we all are.

The following are quotes. Starting with an amazing sentence about the atomic bomb:

In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.

I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, dont we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world–which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.

The world of amorous adventure these days is hardly for the fainthearted. The very names of the diseases evoke dread. What the hell is chlamydia? And who named it that? Your love is not so likely to resemble a red rose as a red red rash. You find yourself yearning for a nice oldfashioned girl with the clap. Shouldnt these lovelies be required to fly their pestilential knickers from a flagpole? Like the ensign of a plagueship? I cant of course but be curious what an analytic sort such as yourself makes of the fair sex in the first place. The slurred murmurings. The silken paw in your shorts. Beguiling eyes. Creatures soft of touch and sanguinivorous of habit. What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations. That the man knows not how to even name that which slaves him hardly lightens his burden.

In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.

What if the purpose of human charity wasnt to protect the weak–which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway–but to preserve the mad? You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.

To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all.

McCarthy had some things to say about the modern world. It feels to me that he wasn’t talking about the modern world of the novel.

The point, Squire, is that where they used to be confined to State institutions or to the mudrooms and attics of remote country houses they are now abroad everywhere. The government pays them to travel. To procreate, for that matter. I’ve seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy.

Do you know what I find particularly galling? It’s having to share the women with you lot. To listen to you fuckwits holding forth and to see some lissome young thing leaning forward breathlessly with that barely contained frisson with which we are all familiar the better to inhale without stint an absolute plaguebreath of bilge and bullshit as if it were the word of the prophets. It’s painful but still I suppose one has to extend a certain latitude to the little dears. They’ve so little time in which to parlay that pussy into something of substance. But it nettles. That you knucklewalkers should even be allowed to contemplate the sacred grotto as you drool and grunt and wank. Let alone actually reproduce. Well the hell with it. A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine. It only remains for you to hold your cups to my gaping throat and toast one another’s health with my heart’s blood.

Real trouble doesnt begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quietminded people down paths they’d never imagine.

The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It’s sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.

On the darknesses of life:

If I think about things that I just dont want to know about they’re all things that I do know about. And I’ll always know them.

You think that when there’s somethin that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.

We might have very different notions about the nature of the oncoming night. But as darkness descends does it matter?

The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified.

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.

In my experience people who say no matter what seldom know what what might turn out to be. They dont know how bad what might get.

You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life. You may be wrong, but if you dont believe that then you will not have a life.

We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet.

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.

People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.

The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.

I suppose in the end what we have to offer is only what we’ve lost.

The world’s truth constitutes a vision so terrifying as to beggar the prophecies of the bleakest seer who ever walked it. Once you accept that then the idea that all of this will one day be ground to powder and blown into the void becomes not a prophecy but a promise. So allow me in turn to ask you this question: When we and all of our works are gone together with every memory of them and every machine in which such memory could be encoded and stored and the earth is not even a cinder, for whom then will this be a tragedy?

On death:

I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not sure that I want to. Know. If I could plan my life I wouldnt want to live it. I probably dont want to live it anyway. I know that the characters in the story can be either real or imaginary and that after they are all dead it wont make any difference. If imaginary beings die an imaginary death they will be dead nonetheless. You think that you can create a history of what has been. Present artifacts. A clutch of letters. A sachet in a dressingtable drawer. But that’s not what’s at the heart of the tale. The problem is that what drives the tale will not survive the tale. As the room dims and the sound of voices fades you understand that the world and all in it will soon cease to be. You believe that it will begin again. You point to other lives. But their world was never yours.

Do you think most people want to die?
No. Most is a lot. Do you?
I dont know. I think there are times when you’d just like to get it over with. I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didnt have to die.

Several acquaintances have remarked upon my sangfroid at this turn of events but in all truth I cant see what the fuss is about. Wherever you debark was the train’s destination all along. I’ve studied much and learned little. I think that at the least one might reasonably wish for a friendly face. Someone at your bedside who does not wish you in hell. More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place.

About Alicia:

He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.

In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where they would lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw half-sentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?

For all his dedication there were times he thought the fine sweet edge of his grief was thinning. Each memory but a memory of the one before until… What? Host and sorrow to waste as one without distinction until the wretched coagulant is shoveled into the ground at last and the rain primes the stones for fresh tragedies.

What do you know of grief? You know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None.

Some things get better. I doubt this is one of them. People want to be reimbursed for their pain. They seldom are.

The only thing that was ever asked of me was to care for her. And I let her die. Is there anything that you’d like to add to that Mr Western? No, Your Honor. I should have killed myself years ago.

I dont know what to tell you, he wrote. Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means. There are times when I cant stop crying. I’m sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow. All my love. Your brother, Bobby.
He had gotten out of the habit of talking to her when he was in New Orleans because he’d find himself talking in restaurants or on the streets. Now he was talking to her again. Asking her opinion. Sometimes at night when he would try to tell her about his day he had the feeling that she already knew.
Then slowly it began to fade. He knew what the truth was. The truth was that he was losing her.

When she came to the door of her room in Chicago he knew that she hadnt been out in weeks. In later years that would be the day he would remember. When all her concerns seemed to be for him. He took her to dinner at the German restaurant in Old Town and her hand on his arm at the table drained everything away and it was only later that he understood that this was the day when she was telling him what he could not understand. That she had begun to say goodbye to him.

She wanted to disappear. Well, that’s not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place.

If all that I loved in the world is gone what difference does it make if I’m free to go to the grocery store?

When he got back to the windmill it was still dark and he climbed the stairs and sat at his little table. He sat with his forehead pressed into his hands and he sat for a long time. Finally he got out his notebook and wrote a letter to her. He wanted to tell her what was in his heart but in the end he only wrote a few words about his life on the island. Except for the last line. I miss you more than I can bear. Then he signed his name.

He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be.

Throughout McCarthy’s life, but particularly in the last twenty or so years, he was particularly interested in the workings of the subconscious: its role in the life of creatures, how it did its thing, etc. I believe that the title of this novel, The Passenger, along with how that word is used at times throughout the novel, alludes to the fact that we, as well as every other animal, are driven by the subconscious as much as we’d like to believe we are in charge, and that we’re merely passengers along for the ride. I’ve felt that myself intensely.

I’m certain that McCarthy knew that these two novels would be his last. They feel like goodbyes to the people he knew (many of the characters involved are inspired by actual people from his past). Goodbyes to the woman he loved from her broken youth at thirteen to her senior years at sixty-four. Thank you, Cormac, for every aching truth.

He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 128 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura2 Comments

Here I am, at the threshold of the apocalypse, in this chamber of interrupted dreams where my boss, the vilest of swines, stands between me and the ripper of reality. I’ve been ordered to take a seat, so I shuffle towards the oasis among cables and machinery. A workbench supports a soldering iron, a hot glue gun, and a clutter of transistors, capacitors, and electronic components whose purpose eludes me. Screws and circuit boards surround a dismantled desktop PC. Affixed between cabinets and shelves littered with tools, a long-forgotten whiteboard bears the faded scribbles of equations and diagrams. Beside it, unknown hands have tacked to a corkboard printouts along with photos of men in nineties’ garb, posing in front of the office building, as well as with the spiral device. A yellowed note yells in all-caps, “DON’T GO IN TWICE, YOU WILL DISAPPEAR!” Anyway, that’s all I care to notice about my surroundings. I’m not one for poetic descriptions, perhaps as a result of having my mind stuffed with thoughts of creampies.

I leave my notebook and ballpoint atop a stack of manuals. Then, I slide aside with my foot a metallic trash bin that stands sentry over the dust bunnies, and I plunk my butt down onto a swivel chair. Its plastic, cheap and flimsy, creaks under my weight.

A headache pounds at the inside of my skull as if a tiny prisoner were hammering the bone with a miniature ice pick to escape from confinement, and I have a hard time calming down while sitting in this dungeon, a lair that reeks like raw sewage mixed with rotting flesh and burned dust, a stink that scratches my lungs with every breath. I wish I could fire a laser from my forehead to vaporize this contraption, which emanates a miasma that makes the molecules of oxygen vibrate with hostility. A laser would have a higher energy density than a bullet, and thus it would penetrate that silvery-white shell, incinerating the spirally innards. Instead of a laser, though, my forehead only sweats, and my armpits feel like they’re about to soak.

I need a more realistic plan to rid the world of this machine. Maybe I could set it on fire, or better yet, blow it up. But how? I’m a coder, not a demolitionist. I don’t know where to get my hands on explosives, and even if I did, the police wouldn’t take kindly to a woman carrying around dynamite and detonators. Maybe I could ask my interdimensional harassers for a bomb, or a nuke.

I imagine a fiery cataclysm tearing through my workplace, engulfing every shred of existence, from my boss to the computer that taunts me daily. When the smoke cleared and only cinders remained, I would strut amidst the ashes, the mistress of a barren wasteland, with mommy’s arm snuggly hooked to my elbow. After I’d finished cackling, we would raise our fists triumphantly, and bask in our victory together. We would then move to a farm and raise alpacas.

Ramsés, the man who stands in the way of my alpaca-farming utopia, the man whose mustache is a crime, puffs on the last of his cigarette, then tosses the butt and grinds it with a twist of his heel.

I shake my head.

“Is it an inherent trait of smokers to pollute whatever place they’re in? You’re sucking on concentrated carcinogens and disseminating them, so I guess it’s too much to ask that you have some respect for the environment.”

My boss frowns, revealing weary crow’s feet.

“I’m not a fan of being lectured, especially by someone with your disgusting habits.”

“Wh-what’s with that unfounded accusation?”

Ramsés runs his nicotine-stained fingers through his graying hair, ruffling it. The fluorescent lamps highlight the greasiness of his face, the sallow bags under his eyes, and the sagging of his cheeks, while shadows pool in the wrinkles and folds of his flesh. He’d benefit from a stint at a beauty salon, or an encounter between his face and a sledgehammer.

“You weren’t just hallucinating about the machine, were you…?” my boss asks. “You knew about it.”

“You could say so, because it would be true. Indeed, I knew that this reality-raping contraption was lurking down here, waiting to devour the universe, although I didn’t know where ‘here’ was in relation to this rotten planet of ours.”

“Who blabbered about it? Was it… Jacqueline?”

His piggish lips should never have dared to form mommy’s sacred name. I’m tempted to grab the hot glue gun and squirt molten goo down his throat, but I must prioritize the fate of the world over satisfying my bloodthirst.

“Blabbered? More like blubbered. And not just any blubber, but a blobby blubber of black goo, studded with slimy eyeballs.”

“At least try to make sense, Leire.”

“Alberto, that crotchety prick.”

Ramsés takes a step back. His expression has dropped as if I had announced his bank account’s PIN to a roomful of identity thieves.

“Alberto…?”

“You know, he used to work here, or up at the office anyway, before you hired our intern. I’m not sure if he ever told you about his wife, but she cheated on him and then divorced him, so he became a bitter bastard. I wouldn’t blame you if you forgot about the guy, though, as I’d rather not remember him either.”

“He told you… before quitting?”

I squint as I tilt my head at him.

“Stop bullshitting, sir. Alberto didn’t quit; he vanished without a trace. That greedy bastard walked into the machine a second time, and got yeeted into another dimension. That’s why you looked for a new programmer to replace him. You couldn’t tell anyone the truth, could you? That the previous coder had been swallowed by a spiraling deathtrap. You’d have to admit that you own a machine that fucks up reality, and there probably are laws against that.”

Ramsés’ voice sounds hoarse and dry.

“You’re telling me that Alberto contacted you after he disappeared?”

“That’s right. You wouldn’t have recognized him, though; he got out of shape. In any case, let’s focus on what’s important: this machine is bound to tear apart the universe unless I stop it. That sentient horse pal of mine tried to warn me about it from the beginning, but I refused to listen, because I’m an asshole. I would have been done with all this nonsense long ago if I cared enough about our world. Whatever horrors have been unleashed in the meantime are sadly on me.”

Ramsés massages his temples, his eyes squeezed shut. He’s not taking the revelation of the supernatural well. A shame I’m too busy saving the world to enjoy his distress.

“Leire, you’re mentally ill. You’re delusional.”

“Am I the one who keeps the apocalypse in his basement? What are you planning to do with this thing, anyway?”

“Alright, I’ll tell you, but don’t you dare interrupt me. I’m not in the mood for more of your antics.”

“Sure, I’ll just sit here and pretend that I haven’t been tormented by interdimensional abominations who harassed me until I agreed to save the fucking universe, and that the fate of all existence doesn’t hang on me destroying this spiraling death machine. What is it exactly, other than a reality-eroding piece of junk that I wish to obliterate as soon as possible?”

Author’s note: today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Cowboy Dan.”

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A total of 212 videos so far. Check them out.

Getting through this part took me fucking ages. I feel like I haven’t recovered from a medical episode that sent me to the ER; I have trouble reading, and processing words in general. I’m waiting for a call that will schedule an MRI to confirm if I’ve ended up with brain damage. Such is my life, it seems. Anyway, thanks for reading and all that.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 127 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

After an hiatus of nine months, mostly so I could tell the story of a motocross legend, my ongoing story, as long as a trilogy of novels, has returned. I wouldn’t blame if you if you’ve forgotten all about it. You can read any of its chapters on here, or listen to the existing audiochapters on here. I won’t continue producing audiochapters, though, because I have my fingers in too many pies. Anyway, let’s get rolling.

In the tomblike blackness, as if I were descending into the bowels of the earth, I keep inhaling oxygen to sustain the biological machinery of my aging body, even though every breath fills my throat and lungs with the stench of ammonia and rotten meat, a stink so overwhelming that it could knock out a woolly mammoth.

A click of a switch, followed by a whirring and the faint whooshing of air. With a buzz, fluorescent bulbs flare to life, bathing the subterranean lair in a bright glow.

“Here’s why I’m constantly up to my neck in bills,” my boss says.

At the center of the square-shaped room sits a hulking mass of metal: a shiny aluminum cylinder. No, not a cylinder, because a person-wide opening curves into the device, a path blocked now by an orange gate barrier that may have been pilfered from the streets. From the top of the machine grows a cluster of industrial piping, electrical wiring, and conduits resembling the ruptured guts of a mechanical beast.

A vibration disturbs the air like a low-frequency hum. From the opening of the spiral, through the gate barrier, danger leaks as a tangible yet invisible force; I sense the glare of a cosmic intelligence beyond my understanding.

The sight of Ramsés’ face, this swine in the guise of a man, with his middle-aged features, unkempt mustache, receding hairline, and lack of resemblance to Jacqueline or anyone I’d like to stare at, would have made me want to push him down a flight of stairs. Now, though, I’m glad he was born: he has led me to the one thing I couldn’t be arsed to search for properly.

“Hell yeah,” I say, and rub my palms. “I hate to admit it, boss, but you’ve done a great service for the universe.”

I grasp at the slippery reins of my sanity like a drowning woman clawing at pieces of driftwood. Alright, how can I destroy this reality-shattering device? The engraving of a skull and crossbones flashes in my mind: my trusty revolver, now stored in my work desk. I feel a pang of longing for its wood and steel to remind me of the glory days when I was still the main character and not the slave of others’ whims. Hey, Spike, my deformed, castrated pal, apart from wanting your own head blown into inhuman sludge, is this why you brought your revolver along? But I lack enough bullets to blast this spirally cylinder into nothing. Besides, I can’t forget the feeling of my hand being torn off that one time I relied on gunfire to defeat my foes, back when Alberto oozed from the wall in all his blobby, seething depravity to ruin my evening with apocalyptic tidings.

The stench is burning holes into my sinuses, and the hostility emanating from the machine thrums through my bones, but I approach the silvery-white shell, which reflects my blurry likeness like a liquid mirror. After rubbing my chin, I kick the device to gauge its solidity. Clang.

I was thinking of asking my boss if he had a chainsaw at the ready, when his hand, thick and beefy, wraps around my biceps, gripping tightly. He pulls me backward. Once I wriggle free, I’m tempted to punch Ramsés’ jaw with the force of my pent-up frustration and despair, which would atomize his teeth and ignite the meat of his face and pop his eyes. However, the fiend’s scraggly face, a map of the terrain of the damned, has contorted into a scowl, like a gorilla’s after I punted one of his relatives.

“Leire, what the hell are you doing?! You see an object you don’t understand, and the first thought you have is to break it?! Are you a chimpanzee?!”

My hand clenches around the ballpoint pen as if it were a dagger. The notion of impaling one of Ramsés’ eyeballs seems like a beautiful dream.

“Nah, I wasn’t planning on wrecking your stupid pipe thing, I just wanted to, you know, tap on it? Maybe I detected a kink that would be fixed by a whack on the side. Now seriously: I’ve finally found the cause of my misfortunes, the culprit to this whole ‘shredding reality’ business, and it’s been in the basement of my workplace all along! I should have known, given how this place has sucked up my soul ever since I foolishly allowed myself to be employed here. Anyway, once I find a way to obliterate this heinous contraption, this spiraling gate into insanity, the universe will be safe. Well, relatively safe, until the next asshole erects their own death machine. So let’s figure out how to acquire nitroglycerine.”

“Fuck’s sake, Leire, what are you blathering about?”

I sigh.

“Listen, boss, I can tell you haven’t grown so weary of life that you’ve been fiddling with, perhaps even fondling, an interdimensional end-of-the-world machine fully aware of the lethal stakes. You simply haven’t been notified by otherworldly monstrosities that tolerating this thing’s existence would lead to the irreversible and terminal cancerization of our fucking shithole of a world. Still, I must lay some blame on you, sir, as an accessory to this shitfest, whether through incompetence, naivete, or willful ignorance, if not sheer fucking stupidity, as long as you feel the machine’s malevolent aura attempting to smother our minds with its diabolical power. I shan’t have my newfound family squashed by a collapsing space-time continuum, so I must prevent the end of the universe, the death of everything, the grand finale of reality!”

Ramsés’ brow furrows as his jaw clenches, and I expect a torrent of insults and threats to gush from his mouth. Instead, he strokes the edge of his graying moustache, that unsanitary ornament made out of curly, coarse fibers that I wish to rip off strand by strand. His nostrils flare as he sucks in a breath to speak.

“I should have known you’re so demented that you wouldn’t think twice before assaulting delicate, irreplaceable hardware. Leire, I’m going to tell you a little story.”

“Oh my, is it story time? Can’t we skip it?”

“No, damn it. I need you to understand something about the machine.”

“Isn’t this chimpanzee too dumb to learn?”

My boss scrunches his greasy, perverted mug in annoyance. He pats his jacket, fishes out a cigarette, clamps it between his teeth, and lights it up. Then he takes a drag so deep that the tip glows red.

“Shut your trap and listen. This story starts back in the eighties or early nineties, when the internet was still a network of text terminals for academics. I was a kid then, if you can picture that. We used to visit relatives on my mother’s side, traveling out of province. In that family’s foyer hung a painting that terrified me even before I heard the adults talk about it. As soon as I stepped through the doorway, a malicious glare coming from the painting stabbed me through as if saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house? Get out!’ I only dared to glance at the picture once, but in that brief look, I burned it into my memory.” My boss exhales smoke, then continues. “The painting depicted an elderly, bearded fisherman garbed in a canary-yellow raincoat. He faced the viewer, standing in a wooden dinghy surrounded by choppy seas and a stormy sky. The image seemed hyperrealistic, as if I could reach out and touch that rough water. The family that had chosen such an unsettling painting as the centerpiece of their foyer spoke of strange occurrences attached to it: a stench of rotten fish coming from the entrance, footsteps pacing up and down the hallway at night. I didn’t enjoy staying over. Anyway, one evening, as my brother and I were playing on the SNES in our cousins’ bedroom, the lights shut off. Far faster than it would have been possible, the stench of rotten fish swarmed the room. I heard the adults hurrying to the entrance, where they flipped the circuit breaker. I don’t recall how the rest of the evening transpired, but from that day on, I knew the painting was haunted.”

“Wow. This turned out to be an intriguing tale.”

“Sure. But as I grew older, I learned that the smell of rotten fish can be caused by circuit failure, as can a sudden power outage. Some heat-resistant chemical coatings release such stink before burning up. And strong electromagnetic fields mess with people’s brains, make them feel as if they’re being watched. You see what I’m getting at?”

“That you gaslit yourself into believing that you didn’t experience a paranormal event, just because you couldn’t handle the truth? Maybe the painting was haunted. Have you thought of that?”

Ramsés’ frown deepens.

“I told you I did.”

“It could have been both electricity and a ghost. Poltergeists love fucking with electrical systems. Anyway, I see far weirder stuff on the daily. Cultures across all ages have spoken of ghosts, and depicted them in similar ways. Doesn’t that count as evidence?”

“That may be the case, but it’s irrelevant to my point.”

“What did your tale have to do with this spiraling death machine, then?”

My boss throws his hands up.

“Oh, who knows!”

“Sure, we can waste time with anecdotes. After all, there’s no hurry to destroy that thing, not when the universe is about to be torn apart. Why don’t we find the painting, burn it with gasoline, then piss on its ashes? Not that we’d need to bother, because the world will be ending soon.”

Ramsés flicks his cigarette, sending a clump of ash to the floor.

“I suppose I must spell it out for you: the machine’s electromagnetic field messes with your already screwed-up head. You’re hypersensitive to it. Don’t bother me with this nonsense about the end of the world. Take a seat and calm down.”

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, and “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead. I keep a playlist with the myriad songs I’ve mentioned throughout this series. Check it out.

I’ve missed you, Leire, you fucking nutcase. I hope I can get back in the groove of this story soon.

By the way, Ramsés’ story is straight out of my childhood. The original experience is even wilder when it comes to what my relatives told about how the painting changed.

Speaking of spirals, the anime adaptation of Junji Ito’s masterpiece about obsession and spirals premieres tomorrow. Check out the clip below:

I’ve fed this chapter to the Google AI thing that generates podcasts out of any material. Check out the result:

We’re Fucked, Pt. 126: AI-generated audiochapter

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

A cosmic cockroach. This audiochapter covers chapter 126 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.

Cast

  • Leire: sassy thief who hangs out with rats in the east of Skyrim
  • Ramsés: a Roman general in a fantasy setting

I produced audiochapters for the entire three previous sequences, and I intend to continue until the novel ends or I end up sacrificed to some Lovecraftian knock-off. A total of six hours, fourteen minutes, and forty-three seconds. Check them out.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 126 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

Ramsés swings the door open, revealing a concrete staircase that descends into darkness. He reaches to flick a switch. With a faint buzz, a bulb sputters to life in a rusty cage, casting a sickly yellow hue tainted by grime and dust. A lattice of pipes, ductwork, and wire mesh panels snakes across the ceiling in an organized fashion, save for a few rogue wires hanging loose. The pipes’ smoothness contrasts with the concrete’s pitted and scuffed surfaces. Deeper within, a chaotic collection of debris, including cardboard boxes, construction material, and old electronics, lies in haphazard heaps like rats’ nests.

My boss steps aside and sweeps his hand, motioning for me to enter.

“After you.”

As I stand at the threshold, dizziness engulfs my senses in a sudden wave. I clutch my notebook and pen as if they could anchor me.

“Have you lost your mind? This isn’t a conference room!”

“I never suggested we were heading to a conference room,” he replies in an untroubled voice.

“Do you intend to hold a meeting in a dungeon?”

Ramsés sighs. He aims his pointing finger at a doorless metal cabinet standing close to the base of the stairs, juxtaposed against a bundle of ribbed conduits. The cabinet houses network switches mounted on racks. Arrays of LED indicators blink yellow within an entangled mass of black cables resembling the veins of a cybernetic organism.

“You’re a programmer,” Ramsés says, “not a computer technician, but you should know what I’m pointing at.”

“That’s a network rack. I think.”

“Correct. Would a dungeon have a network rack?”

Ramsés’ belittling tone irks me.

“It would, if its owner required an internet connection.”

“Leire, I’ve just brought you to the basement level. Not a place for guests, but Jacqueline accompanied me here. Jordi as well. Afterwards, they both continued with their lives, and in the case of your woman, she even decided to quit on her own accord. So please, let’s proceed further. In the end you’ll be glad that you agreed to follow me.”

“Whatever. I warn you, though: if I see any cockroaches scuttling about, I’m out of here.”

“I don’t recall ever spotting a cockroach in the building, but just in case, don’t stare at the floor.”

I step onto the topmost stair, and then the one beneath it. Ramsés follows me in. As his keyring jingles, the door thumps behind me, followed by a click as it locks.

Down the concrete stairs I slog, while my boss plods after me. Our footsteps echo off the walls in a chorus of hollow thuds. I’m inhaling warm air heavy with the scent of neglect: the mustiness of decaying cardboard and the acrid tang of deteriorating electronic parts.

After I step off the final stair, I lumber toward the closest heap of junk, past the network rack and its array of blinking LEDs, as chunks of white styrofoam crunch and shift underfoot. Dust cloaks an overturned air conditioning unit, its casing cracked and its internal components exposed. Two dead flies and a paper cup rest nearby as if someone had nudged debris aside instead of cleaning up. What atrocity has Ramsés lured me into?

As my boss strides past me, the refuse warps the echoes of his footfalls.

“After me.”

We navigate along the perimeter of a junk pile made out of disassembled cabinetry and discarded light fixtures. My foot catches on a random brick, causing me to stumble.

A shimmer of movement on the wall to my left jerks my attention upwards. Near the ceiling, tubes and pipes running parallel, along with a tangle of electrical wires, delve into the pitch-black void of a gaping hole. Perched on its threshold, a blob of cosmic matter pulses with twinkling stars and nebulae, the purples, blues, and oranges ebbing and flowing like a living fragment of the night sky. As the amorphous form shimmies, the edges of the hole warp around this creature, bending inward.

My neck muscles tense up. I whip my gaze from the cosmic critter to my boss’ broad back.

We maneuver through a channel between two heaps of scrap that loom over me. I pick my way gingerly, hoping to dodge any sharp edges that could scrape my legs. My eyes itch from the particles floating in the stagnant air, and the soles of my sneakers stick to the grimy concrete. The ocher light casts jagged shadows through the masses of junk, but ahead, beyond the range of the bulb, only murky darkness awaits. My mind escapes to picturesque havens: a café overlooking a glittering lake, a gazebo in a lush garden surrounded by hedgerows, a rustic cabin with a crackling hearth.

“I can’t stress enough,” I rasp, “how much I’d rather hold this meeting of yours in a proper venue.”

“Noted. Just down this corridor.”

A sour, moist stench, like the aftermath of a urinary tract infection, seeps into my nasal passages and lingers on my tongue. My stomach roils. With each step, the stench grows stronger. I’m about to complain when I notice that the corridor ends in a plank, from a bookshelf or a storage cupboard, leaning against the wall like a makeshift barrier.

I narrow my eyes, and my words escape in a hiss.

“Hey, am I not supposed to notice that you’ve led me to a dead end?”

My boss’ silhouette, which takes up much of the cramped space, marches ahead undaunted.

“It looks like a dead end. That’s the point.”

Either he’s oblivious to my rising dread, or he’s feeding off it like a vampire.

“Sir, I demand to know what we’re doing here. What sane reason could you have for bringing me into this hellhole? Did you intend to take me down? Tell me why, then go ahead and make your move!”

Ramsés glances back, his face a shadowed outline.

“Leire, you’re getting on my nerves.” He grips the sides of his plank. “Give me a hand with this.”

I cross my arms.

“Sure, as soon as I build some muscle.”

Ramsés shakes his head.

“Well, aren’t you the comedian. Anyway, you’re right: you wouldn’t be of much help.”

With a grunt, he heaves the plank aside, and tilts it so it rests against a junk pile. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I glimpse a door. Its layer of paint has peeled and flaked off in patches, revealing the metal beneath.

The stench comes from behind that door, as if an ammoniac marsh were seeping from the crevices. What new horrors lurk in this mausoleum of rubbish and ruin?

I envision my boss as the leader of a cult, one that orchestrates human sacrifices in a chamber that gleams with tools for torture: knives, cattle prods, bone saws, nipple clamps. Robed worshippers, their garbs adorned with profane runes and eldritch symbols, chant in tongues while they chain me to an altar. Flickering torches cast a golden hue over their twisted faces, revealing patchwork scars and soulless eyes. As the acolytes’ chant crescendos, one by one they lunge at me. Their fingernails, curved into talons, rip through my clothing, tearing into my muscles and viscera. They gnaw on my flesh like ghouls. Ramsés, the high priest of this unholy congregation, emerges from the shadows and approaches with a whirring drill in hand, about to offer my brain as tribute to the Outer Gods.

My boss reaches into a pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a keycard. He swipes it across the door’s handle, and a beep sounds as two green LEDs blink in sync. The lock clicks.

Within me, a primal force screams in warning: we have reached the threshold of Hades. I’m tempted to turn tail, bolt down the corridor of junk, and scramble up the concrete stairs. Instead, risking the loss of dignity and self-respect, I reach out and grab my boss’ shoulder.

“I can feel it…” I whisper, my throat closing up, “something evil behind that door, staring at us.”

Ramsés snaps his head back, then faces me in the gloom.

“Interesting. You may be hypersensitive to electromagnetic fields. Don’t worry: nothing awaits us inside, other than a miracle.”

The door’s hinges groan as Ramsés swings it open, unleashing a fetid reek that singes the membranes of my nostrils, that crawls into the deepest recesses of my lungs, that brings to mind a mound of rat corpses teeming with millions of mucky maggots. Apart from a novel hint of burned dust that could belong to an overheated computer, I inhaled this cocktail of putrefaction before, whenever Spike visited; when professor Bunnyman intruded on my peace through the toilet where I was peeing; when Alberto, transformed into a slimy blob studded with eyeballs, came to warn me about the forthcoming collapse of the universe. Although I’ve covered my nose and mouth with the crook of my elbow, a wave of nausea ripples through my gut.

Ramsés ushers me into his underground realm. The hairs on my nape bristle. When the door shuts behind us with a resonant thump, the blackness wraps around me like a shroud of primordial night.

Author’s note: today’s song is “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel. I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout the novel so far. A total of two hundred and nine videos. Check them out.

Fun fact: the depicted setting is based on a network “closet” located under the psychiatric ward of the hospital where I work. Anyway, check out the audiochapter.

The novel is going on hiatus for about a week or so; my subconscious has spent the last week weaving a short narrative that I’m eager to render into a free verse poem. Since I started this novel in October of 2021, it will be the first break I take to work on a different story.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 125: AI-generated audiochapter

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

They don’t crawl, they stride. This audiochapter covers chapter 125 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.

Cast

  • Leire: tough thief who offers you jobs down in the sewers of Riften
  • Ramsés: an Imperial general stationed away from Cyrodiil

I produced audiochapters for the entire three previous sequences, and I intend to continue until the novel ends or they put me in antipsychotic meds that turn me into a zombie. A total of six hours, four minutes, and forty-eight seconds. Check them out.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 125 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

I trudge through the hallway, past the vending machines and the bathrooms, and down a flight of stairs into uncharted territory, following a bear of a man. The fluorescent lamps spill their milky light over the shoulders of my boss’ navy-blue suit as he leads me with a self-assured strut. He’s trailed by the stench of cigarette smoke mixed with a musky cologne; yet, even if he were clean and carrying a bouquet of roses, it wouldn’t mask his inherent stink. The fabric of his slacks fits tightly over his rump, straining the vertical seam at its center. I feel like I’m stuck on the highway behind a truck, but instead of an effluvium of exhaust fumes, I risk a miasma of farts billowing in my face.

The pockets of muted conversations, the rhythmic tapping of keyboards, and the ringing of phones die down, replaced by my boss’ heavy footsteps squeaking on the linoleum of a cramped corridor, barren but for an encased fire extinguisher. If Ramsés were about a head taller, his hair would brush the ceiling. Streaks of grime have marred the yellowed wallpaper, as if a janitorial cart had grazed it in passing.

Ramsés turns to speak over his shoulder.

“Jacqueline is stretching out that sick leave of hers, isn’t she?”

What’s with the resentful tone? I have betrayed myself to tail after this pig, and now I’m subjected to his rotten moods? If mommy could shapeshift into a wolf, I’d ask her to take a chunk out of his flabby ass.

“She must have her reasons,” I retort, bristling at the insinuation.

“And what are they?”

“Wouldn’t you know? You’re her boss, after all.”

“She’s been dodging my emails and phone calls. Besides, you’d know her reasons better than anyone, given how close you are.”

“Wh-what kind of relationship do you think I have with her?”

“You know, I have wondered that, how would it even work between you two. But I suppose that the term ‘girlfriend’ suffices.”

When did I let my guard down? To random strangers on the street, I might gush that my lascivious paramour and I indulge in sex rituals that would make any swinger blanch, but I have never wished to reveal such matters to my boss. Though Jordi’s in the know, I can’t picture him sharing the secret. I feel as if the pristine glass of my relationship with Jacqueline has been sullied by a greasy handprint.

Seizing my silence as an opportunity, Ramsés continues.

“So, is she expecting me to fire her?”

“No, she has realized that one must live for better things than filling Excel cells, or however the hell she spent her work hours. She’ll inform you in her own time, I’m sure.”

My boss tsks and shakes his head.

“What a mess,” he says, sounding disappointed. “I’ll have to endure the hassle of hiring and training a new secretary, when Jacqueline was managing just fine. It goes to show that loyalty has an expiration date, no matter how exceptional the circumstances. Take that as a lesson, Leire.”

A presence appears at the corridor’s end. At first glance, my mind conjures mundane imagery: a custodian, a technician. But as I focus, I realize that I’m staring at a figure unlike any other before: a ghost-white creature standing as tall as me. Its form is dominated by two backward-bending stilt-like legs, wrapped in a gauzy membrane that flows like silk. The limbs taper into blade-like talons reminiscent of sleek prosthetics. Atop the convergence of its legs perches a bean-shaped, faceless head, that gazes through a centered eye glossy and black as polished onyx.

The light from the fluorescent lamps, cut into sharp-edged rectangles, glistens on the linoleum through the creature. It’s striding with a fluid grace, as if subjected to a moon-like gravity, in a collision course towards Ramsés. When they should bump into each other, the creature phases through my boss and carries on its march.

A shiver of dread writhes down my spine and coils around my ribcage. I flatten against the wallpaper, yielding passage to this phantom. It glides silently past me. If I were a dog, my hackles would have risen.

A second alien, smaller by a third, scuttles unsteadily after its kin. As the smaller creature passes by, it pauses mid-stride to fix its onyx eye on me. In that glossy blackness, I expect to glimpse my reflection, but instead see a tangle of reeds. The creature glances at its towering companion, then scurries onward to catch up.

“Leire, what’s wrong with you?” Ramsés asks impatiently.

My heartbeat thuds against my sternum, my hands and feet have gone cold, and my brain buzzes from the rush of adrenaline. My boss has halted before a nondescript door at the side of the corridor. His keychain dangles from the keyhole.

“You saw something, didn’t you?” he insists.

I tear myself off the wallpaper. As I shuffle to join Ramsés, I manage to speak in a feeble voice.

“I was just… lost in thought.”

He squints at me, scrutinizing my features.

“I may have brought it up in the past, or at least wanted to do so, but there’s a good chance you’re schizophrenic, Leire.”

“Excuse me?”

“You match most of the diagnostic criteria: you tend to withdraw into yourself, your thinking can become incomprehensible, your grooming and hygiene have been found wanting at times, you experience hallucinations… And you’re not faking: the color has drained from your face.”

I’m tempted to confess that I was fixated on the phantasmal aliens stalking the corridor, and that I won’t dare a glance over my shoulder in case they’re standing behind me. However, while decent people might use such an opportunity to exercise their empathy, this swine’s expression suggests that my mental illness inconveniences him.

I steady myself. I can’t afford to look crazier.

“If I had a brain disorder that glaring, the therapists who listened to me prattle would have spotted it. Even if they had diagnosed me with schizophrenia, though, I’d need to keep a job, wouldn’t I?”

Ramsés shrugs with an indifference as conspicuous as the cigarette stench clinging to his suit.

“I suppose so. I wouldn’t expect any favors from the state; at the most, they’d put you at the end of the line. So, therapy sessions, huh? They must have cooked up some theories about you.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. When I open them, I force myself to meet Ramsés’ gaze, although I’d find more comfort in a gorilla’s pupils.

“Sir, respectfully,” I utter, biting back the sharp words itching at my tongue, “I want to get through this meeting, finish my work, and go home. The day has been long enough already.”

He twists the key, unlocking the door.

“Good. We’re almost there, after all.”

Author’s note: today’s song is “Sloop John B” by The Beach Boys.

I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout the novel so far. A total of two hundred and eight videos. Check them out.

I’m sick with the flu, yet I produced this audiochapter just for you.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 124: AI-generated audiochapter

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Your boss can’t lead you to a meeting if his heart no longer beats. This audiochapter covers chapter 124 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.

Cast

  • Leire: thief infiltrator that infiltrates your heart once you meet her down at the Ragged Flagon
  • Ramsés: an Imperial general who wants to be done with this rebellion bullshit as soon as possible

I produced audiochapters for the entire three previous sequences, and I intend to continue until the novel ends or I receive a visit from Truck-kun after someone throws scalding coffee in my eyes. A total of five hours, fifty-seven minutes, and thirty-three seconds. Check them out.