Tag: stories

Smile, Pt. 7 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

1313 Main Street turned out to be a record store. I parked the car and got out. I walked past the neighboring shops in case I’d misread the address. Trees with white trunks and thick crowns, pruned where they touched walls and windows, were spaced out along the sidewalks. Their foliage obscured half the facades of the two-story buildings. Amid the sparse traffic, men and women rode by on bicycles. None of those shops hinted at housing a photo studio, nor did it seem likely that Richard Alcala could have convinced an aspiring model that they did.

I went back to the record store. Half the store window was papered over with posters announcing past concerts by Graham Nash, Neil Young, Roy Harper, Hendrix, Morrison. Behind that pane of glass, the rows of boxes must have held about a hundred records.

When I grabbed the door handle, I noticed a wanted poster stuck to the glass. In the headshot, Richard Alcala was smiling as if he’d foreseen I would show up.

I opened the door. A rippling, electrified Hendrix solo greeted me. Behind the record rack that split the store, a man perched on a stool was practicing the intro to “All Along the Watchtower.” A cable dangled from the body of his Stratocaster and plugged into a pedal, and after a small tangle of more cables and pedals, another cord climbed into the input of a Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier. Though he’d turned the volume so low that from outside I barely noticed him playing, the notes still resonated through my bones. He glanced up while he played.

A door beside the counter led to the back room. I flipped through a crate of albums and came across a Karen Dalton record I wanted to buy.

The man kept tripping over a phrase; on his fourth try, he stopped. He sighed as the notes died away.

“Looking for any album in particular?” he asked.

I pointed at the pedals.

“A Vox Wah, the bulky Arbiter Fuzz Face with germanium transistors, and a Uni-Vibe. The same rig that went to Woodstock.”

He swayed on the stool and smiled.

“I guess I don’t need to sell you any of his albums.”

I kept an eye on the back-room door. How would I bring it up? Should I even bring it up? I’d turned toward the rows of records when I spoke.

“Have you noticed anything strange?”

He twisted the first tuning peg while plucking that string.

“Strange like what?”

“I was wondering if you keep a photography studio in the back, with lights and a king-size bed. Something somebody’s using for questionable purposes.”

He scratched at his stubble and set his pick on top of the amp.

“You know, something did strike me as off. You heard of that guy they call the Prowler?”

I straightened.

“I’m here because of him.”

He ran a hand down one pant leg and took stock of my clothes.

“As a friend?”

“More like the police would be after him.”

He nodded. He thumbed the low E string, and the amplifier dispersed the note.

“I used to see him, or maybe his twin, meeting up with girls across the street. I remember him ‘cause he always had gorgeous girls on his arm, and never the same one.”

“Any minors?”

He flinched.

“No, not that I ever saw. I figured he had money or maybe he could play guitar like Jimi. Then again, that blonde hair might’ve been enough.”

“You don’t know where they used to go?”

“Sorry. When I recognized the guy’s face on the wanted posters, I called the cops, but they must get dozens of calls like that. Are you a cop?”

“No. I won’t let him live. Thanks for telling me.”

As I turned to leave, the man struck a chord that swept through the store.

“Plenty of albums worth your while, buddy.”

“I noticed. I’ll be back another day.”

* * *

I recognized the aspiring model by her ass. She was walking under an archway on her way to Venice Beach.

My heart raced as though finding her guaranteed I’d also run into Richard Alcala. I pulled over across the street and got out as she rounded a corner. I followed the sway of her hips from about thirty feet back. I kept an eye on the people approaching from ahead and behind on my side of the sidewalk, and I alternated glances at the woman, who could’ve passed for an actress straight off a film set, wearing full makeup and somehow lost. Compared to that, yesterday she’d looked like she’d just rolled out of bed.

If the killer had forgotten that he’d mentioned the record store address in front of me and showed up to see his own wanted poster plastered on that door, both the aspiring model and I would be walking right into him.

I followed her for several blocks. A group of men whistled at her and told her to stop; she dipped her head politely, maybe faking shyness. She’d once said the positive vibes she emitted protected her, but getting hassled daily by random men must have worn her thin.

As I crossed a crosswalk to keep her in sight, I remembered that Richard Alcala knew who I was. I’d gotten used to, and even become an expert at, stalking killers and terrorists who didn’t know of my existence—or that someone could travel through time. If they saw my face, they rarely got to see another. But if Richard Alcala intended to kill this woman, he’d be tailing her, a skill he was trained in.

The sun hammered my forehead, frying my brain. My arms and legs tingled. I pulled the wanted poster from the inside pocket of my jacket and studied it, burning the photos into my mind. I spied on every reflection in windshields, car windows, and storefronts to keep tabs on anyone walking by. When a blond guy popped up, and there were a lot of them, I held my breath until I could rule out the Prowler.

I lost sight of the model. I hurried another thirty feet in case she had started running, but she wouldn’t have had time to reach the end of the block. I backtracked while scanning the buildings, the traffic, and the parked cars. If she’d hopped into a vehicle, whether Alcala’s or a stranger’s, she would be gone.

Then I spotted her Hollywood-starlet shape standing by a fenced area covered with identical posters advertising some concert. The entrance led to a wide asphalt lot around a building under construction. Through a gap in the fence, I made out piles of plastic tubing and a cement mixer. She was talking to someone.

I moved along my side of the street until the angle revealed her companion: a white man with a shaved head, aviator sunglasses, and a chestnut-brown mustache. He was wearing a promotional California T-shirt—white, with a black print of palm trees and a sun perched over a horizon—and flared navy-blue pants. His right arm was in a sling. He was smiling like a president who relies on such a charming grin to make people swallow whatever he says. He could have bought that mustache at a costume shop.

They walked deeper into the asphalt lot and stopped by a van. Richard Alcala rubbed his right bicep, the one in the sling, as he chatted through that permanent smile. He pointed at a record player abandoned on the ground.

I touched the outline of my Smith & Wesson under my jacket and darted across the road between two cars. My heart was pounding like a row of drummers awaiting an oncoming army. I hid behind the fence, peeking through an opening to watch the van.

The woman was climbing into the cargo area with the record player, whose weight made her tanned legs quiver. Alcala glanced around. He slipped his right arm out of the sling. He climbed in after her and shut the door.

I started in across the pavement. My right hand slid under my jacket and gripped the Smith & Wesson. The van’s body swayed up and down, side to side, testing the suspension. Music seeped out—“Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground—like the soundtrack of a late-night bar. Anyone passing the fence opening would see the van rocking; if someone looked out a window, they might notice, but they’d chalk it up to a spur-of-the-moment hook-up. In a few minutes, the van would settle, the music would fade, and it would drive off into some desert or wooded area.

I inched closer, the chassis dancing, the music growing louder. The van’s shape glowed like heated metal. My breath came in ragged bursts through flared nostrils, my blood rushing to my arms and legs. I wanted to retreat to a hotel room and curl under a steaming shower. I could look away and act like none of this concerned me, the way everyone else did. Let another woman die among so many, then go on living my life. But I had to acknowledge and snuff out evil without excuses, without mercy, saving myself from a future in which I’d regret turning away from that abyss. I’d face it like a legionary wall braced for a frontal assault. I’d guard the frontier of the light, holding back the inky tide even if it devoured my body and mind until I was reduced to a mass of scars. If I abandoned my post, that churning, smoking darkness would flood every corner of the world until it blackened entirely.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix, and “Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground.

This story is a translation of the novella named “Sonríe” contained in my collection Los reinos de brea, self-published about ten years ago. In case you can’t tell, I was heavily into playing the electric guitar, a Gibson Les Paul concretely, annoying the hell out of my neighbors.

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: