1 files changed, 141 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/unseen/Book 4/Claire/Unused/experiment scene.txt b/unseen/Book 4/Claire/Unused/experiment scene.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..449778f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/unseen/Book 4/Claire/Unused/experiment scene.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,141 @@
+
+Stepping out of the car felt moving through an airlock, the door hissed as it opened, the difference in tempature causing an airlock effect that never ceased to amaze her. The even felt l the dry heat of a convection oven whirling in what
+
+, Tucson in the evening, sunset, heat evaporating dry dead grass in the yard, not the perfect catalog house Waiben has imagined, sitting at the kitchen table staring out at the yard.
+	
+She had trouble following his voice. It warbled like a finch fluttering about its cage. The heat was unbearable, the air so dead still and dry you could feel the sweat evaporating before it could even escape your pores. 
+
+
+
+The clacking of Waiben's typing distracted her thoughts. She watched Jimmy tap his foot distractedly on the floor to some unheard beat, his unruly rag of brown hair and thick, black-framed glasses nodding unconsciously. She smiled, this why I come back, not for the world, but for my part of it. And then the guilt shattered her vision. She had wanted. She had wanted to tell him, but he so rarely stopped talking. Though she knew he talked during these comedown session mainly for her benefit, it did make it hard to get a word in edgewise. But she also knew that the longer she waited, the worse the guilt felt. She slowly drew herself up, wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked back and forth. "Jimmy." she said his name shyly as if not wanting to disturb him. "My grandmother died two days ago..." She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but her voice betrayed her.
+
+Jimmy sat stunned silent for a moment. "I'm sorry, Claire why didn't you..."
+
+"Don't be sorry Jimmy, she was old, she was sick." Claire sighed, she could feel tears coming to her eyes, but she lay back down and stared blankly at the ceiling. "Actually she didn't die, she killed herself." The tears came more freely now and she made no effort to hide her face from him. "I don't know why I didn't say anything. I thought maybe it would come up when I was..." She waited to see if he would finish the sentence for her.
+
+He shook his head, but said nothing.
+
+She gathered herself and looked at Jimmy pleadingly. "Well. Will you come to the funeral tomorrow?"
+
+"Of course." Jimmy rolled down the top of the greasy paper bag and rose to his feet. "Let's get out of here. I'll let him know we're leaving," he said and walked quickly from the room. 
+
+She listened to his footsteps padding down the hall, a murmur of voices, she thought of cranes moving slow over the marsh, ungainly long legs tucked behind them, momentarily streamlined as if just an extension of their bodies, gliding low of the reeds an cattails, the musty smell of brackish water at sunset, the first crisp of fall harking in gusts of wind. 
+
+Claire dropped the still burning cigarette in the waste bin and slowly sat up. The chair was exactly as it had been, worn arms gone from taupe to a bruised gray, stirrups pushed to either side. The metal table, the tray of needles and potions, Benzedrine alkaloids encased in syringes, opiate derivatives still lying unneeded, a broken piece of glass tubing with burned ends lay to the side. The waxy black shelves behind the tray were covered in a grotesque ephemera of zoological oddities, reptiles in formaldehyde, a coiled rattlesnake, a horned lizard with its forelegs pressed against the glass, a scaly gila monster in beaded orange and brown faded by the glare of afternoon sun, the stuffed Toucan decaying on a broken palo verde branch, its gnarled scaly feet now held in place by wrapped metal wire. Higher up there were fossilized trilobites propped on plastic stands and the ghost image of a fern embedded in shale. She shuddered at the sight of a blind newt sitting on the top shelf its regressive eye sockets covered by a fine milky fold of proto skin. She grabbed her coat from the rack and turned to leave. She flipped the light and turned to pull the door shut behind her glancing involuntarily at the top shelf where the two-headed cat stared down at her, four accusing eyes reflecting the dusting moonlight.
+
+In the car they didn't speak. Jimmy brought the Falcon up to speed and slid onto the interstate. Claire watched the caustic yellow glow of the city on the clouds in the rearview mirror. She smiled suddenly, "My grandmother told me once that she used to chew sand."
+
+"Chew sand?" Jimmy fingered the locking shifter and flicked ash out a cracked window. Wind hissed in the slipstream.
+
+"Her family came west in the dust bowl. My great grandfather was dying of tuberculosis, they brought him out on the back of pickup, seven kids and dying man."
+
+"Sounds like a Faulkner novel."
+
+"Yeah but my great grandfather mysteriously recovered and ran off with a VA nurse, never to be heard from again."
+
+Jimmy chuckled, "sounds even more like Faulkner."
+
+Claire stared out the window at the sagebrush racing by in streaks of pale green lit up by the headlights. "My grandmother said there was so much dust and dirt and grit that it just leeched into your skin, clogged all your pores... and there's her father coughing up blood on the bed of the truck... and Gamma and her brothers and sisters sitting there spitting out dust every few minutes, deaf with wind, no one talking, barely able to even see each other... let alone hear a conversation... and they rode like that for five days, all the way from eastern Kansas to here.... My grandmother told me that at some point she just decided to stop spitting out the sand, she let it collect on the edges of her lips and every now and then she'd run her tongue over her lips, draw the sand in her mouth and try to chew it." Claire laughed softly. "I'll never forget her telling me that, she was laughing when she finished the story and she said it was one of her happiest memories." Claire turned to look at Jimmy. "Imagine that Jimmy, imagine if one of your fondest memories was of chewing sand... I wish she had told me why." She turned back to the window and the tears came again. She watched them in the reflection, they rolled silently down her cheeks as if they, and indeed her own face, belonged to someone else
+
+The streetlights gave way to the dusty darkness of a gravel road, they were enveloped in a dusty cloud, Claire rolled down the window and stuck her head outside, tongue extended laughing and crying at the same time, the wind whipped her tears off her cheeks and carried them out into the parched desert night. The dust and sand stung her cheeks and filled her eyes. She ducked back inside the car coughing and spitting. "Crazy woman," she muttered.  
+
+The bar was packed and sweltering, sticky bodies thronged together, scrunched shoulders and craning necks, trickles of sweat were visible on necks and earlobes as Claire struggled through the crowd trying to follow Jimmy toward the back of the room. Amid little grunts of pain, whispers of apology and finally a margin of cool air from the back door. Jimmy broke through, dragging Claire behind him to fall into a booth next to a half drunk and grinning version of Sil, animated like a cartoon in the dim light of the booth. "Jimmy! Just the man I was looking for, starter died this morning I had to kick start the beast to get here this afternoon..." His voice trailed off as he studied Claire's dusty face, "What happened to you?" Claire groaned and let her purse drop from her shoulder to the cushion beside her. "I was trying to chew sand." She laughed and took the beer that Sil held out to her. He shrugged but said nothing. Sil was probably the only person she knew who never insisted on sussing out some greater explanation, or at least if he ever did so he kept it to himself. She laid her head on his shoulder. He and jimmy begin to talk of motorcycles. Claire listened half heartedly, wishing that the music would begin. It wasn't that she minded so much the talk of carburetors and fuel pumps, she even had a motorcycle herself, a gift from Sil and Jimmy who decided that anyone crazy enough to catapult themselves into the psychedelic realm of elves and aliens ought to have no trouble riding a motorcycle. And the truth was she enjoyed it, she even enjoyed fixing it since between the two of them they seemed able to scrap together only enough money to by some late seventies vintage machine that had hitherto been resting in some junkyard the two of them frequented when they went scrounging for parts. All things considered she would have welcomed a distracting conversation, but she didn't want to talk about bikes, she didn't want to talk about anything that wouldn't matter tomorrow. Beside which it was February and only Sil was insane enough to ride his motorcycle in the freezing cold nights of February in Tucson anyway. She threaded her arm around Sil's working her elbom into the warmth of his belly and thought about his curious, impervious detachment to temperature. She recalled once staying over at his house and watching him step out for a cigarette barefoot in the snow. Claire had once witnessed him dip his fingers in boiling water to retrieve a bobbing potato with apparently no pain whatsoever, just an embarrassed blush when he caught her staring, mouth agape.
+
+Somewhere on the far side of the throng that was now backed all the way up to their both such that a row of shapely asses and thighs threatened to impinge on their drinks, a saxophone began to tune, squelching suggestively and then the kick drums thumped once or twice and the show started suddenly out of the chaos of tuning a half disernable melody began to emerge. Claire released Sil and climbed up on the back of the booth, spine arched and craned her neck trying to see over the crowd. All the shoulders and stooped backs turned just so, perfectly aligning the emptiness between Claire and the stage so that her eyes met those of the dancer onstage and cannot avoid but meet them again. A writhing serpentine figure that that spiraled around the man with the metal chest, or rather with the metal attached to his chest. To his face. To his lips. It sounded like Paleolithic cave drawings -- dueling sculptors chipping at the same stone, part horrific cacophony, and part terrifying clarity. The dancer fell to the floor of the stage and then began to rise in slow circling motions, spinning as if to slow the motion of the earth to rob it of some spped that would cause everyone in the room to suddenly sieze upon this moment as fragmentory, fleeting, but not yet gone, to sieze it and hold it and never let go. The trio had been in town for three weeks now, a long pause on a journey into something only dust and angels were really fully aware of, pausing here to pack out the Rattle Bar and Grill which had not seen the likes of such talent in all it's barren days and for which the owner, proprietor and occasional bartender Sil Hawkard had been paying handsomely. And he made sure to ply Claire with plenty of free beverages to entertain and enlarge the ever flexible nature of perception such that a certain dancer of curiously indecipherable ethnic origins who had tendencies toward the affections fay, cherry-haired young women might continue to take residence in the dilapidated guesthouse behind the bar over the increasingly vocal grumblings of the saxophonist and the drummer who understandably did not see a future for avant garde jazz in Tucson Arizona.
+
+Later the patrons couple off in a haze of alcohol and dust from taxis circling in the drive, and the night began to take on a bruised character, like a drunk beginning to sober in a cold lonely jail cell.
+
+Claire excused herself to the bathroom. Jimmy sat up straight and eyed Sil out of the corner of his eye, "You going to the funeral tomorrow?"
+
+Sil nodded and sat silent for a moment as if weighing out the words that both of them knew would be next. "She wanted to tell you Jimmy," He spoke slowly and stared at his empty glass, fiddling with it. "I think she just feels strange because you're there, in the room." He looked up at Jimmy. "She thinks you know things about her that she doesn't know."
+
+"I do." Jimmy spoke matter-of-factly as if it were a thing of no importance.
+
+"Well, I'm just saying, don't take it personally if she doesn't tell you things sometimes, she's just protecting herself."
+
+"You make it sound like we're lovers Sil." 
+
+"What the hell does that have to do with it? If you were lovers she'd have told you already, it's always your friends that really hurt you." Sil smiled ironically.
+
+Jimmy pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the table but didn't light it. "This afternoon she became her grandmother."
+
+Sil's head snapped up to meet Jimmy's gaze, "What do you mean 'became'?"
+
+"It happens quite a bit, she becomes other people, sometimes her family members, sometimes distant relatives I'm pretty sure she never even knew... 
+
+"Are you going to tell her?"
+
+"I can't Sil."
+
+"Fuck what Waiben wants Jimmy, the whole fucking thing is going o get shut down anyway as soon as he publishes this stuff, probably even sooner. He's already skating on thin ice at with the University, once they find out that he's convinced DMT gives you access to spirit worlds or whatever shit he seems convinced it does, he's fucking finished. The scientific element'll finally go out the window and he'll pick up and move on in some other fucking direction. That's what he always does. The man is batshit crazy..."
+
+Claire sat back down next to Jimmy and suddenly glared at Sil. "He is not."
+
+"Claire I've known him longer than you, trust me he's batshit crazy. For the most part in a good way, but you just never know... I've always avoided delving too deep into his craziness. Frankly there's no way of telling what's down there at the bottom. I mean do you know anyone else who's fallen out of an airplane and lived?"
+
+"He didn't fall, he jumped."
+
+"I rest my case -- bat shit crazy." Sil slumped back and swirled the drink. "Jasmine my dear, when you get a sec I need a splash." The girl behind the bar nodded but didn't stop rinsing glasses and stacking them on the shelf behind her. 
+
+Claire continued to glared at Sil, but on the other hand she did half believe him. Waiben, or Scratch as Sil called him -- for reasons no one seemed to be aware of save Sil -- was, at the very least, eccentric. Claire desperately wanted to ask Sil more about Waiben, but had always refused to out of pride. She knew Waiben was Sil had worked together for years, but then he had just left. Dropped the whole thing without so much as a phone call. Bought the bar and hadn't, so far as she knew, spoken to Waiben since. Neither Claire nor anyone else had ever induced either Sil or Waiben to elucidate on the situation, though neither spoke ill of the other, provided bat-shit crazy was not considered ill. 
+
+"You look like you're going to skin me alive," Sil met her definate gaze with what he undoubtedly considered a warm, open sort of smile but which Claire found somehow intruding, as if he were listening to her thoughts.
+
+"Naw. Market's dropped out in pelts." She took a last drag from her bottle of beer and faked a smile back at him. 
+
+Jimmy had become sullen and quiet. He popped a handful of peanuts in his mouth and slid out of the booth. "Time for me to go I guess, you coming Claire?"
+
+"Naw, I'll stay a bit."
+
+"Okay. I'll see ya'll tomorrow." Jimmy walked over shook hands with the bartender and wandered out the front door. Sil and Claire watched him go.
+
+"You finally told him?"
+
+"Did he say something to you?"
+
+"He asked if I was going."
+
+"Oh." She felt a sicking pit open up in her stomach. "Can I stay with you tonight?"
+
+"You'll have to ride on the bike..."
+
+Sil fell asleep the minute he took off his clothes and sunk onto the bed. Claire ran the water, filling the bathtub. She slowly peeled off her clothing and stared at her body in the mirror. Her hair was stringy and dry, her face rimmed in a thin layer of dust. She sighed and walked back into the bedroom to retrieve a candle. She lit the candle and turned off the bathroom light. She turned off the water and sank slowly into the tub. The water enveloped her like an electric blank on a midwest morning, she lowered her body further into the water and slowly let her head go under. Her hair floated up and clung to the surface as the watery silence filled her ears and the rhythm of her own heart filled her ears.
+
+She remembered the last time she had seen her grandmother. They were sitting at the kitchen table the yellow flowered curtains puffed with the first cool breeze of fall. Her grandmother asked Claire for a cigarette. Claire protested at first but her grandmother said it didn't matter anymore, she might as well enjoy what was left. Claire ended up giving her a cigarette and fished out another for herself. Her grandmother struck a match and held it up for Claire who had leaned in to light, meeting her grandmother's eyes as she did, struck at once that though the skin of her face was loose and drawn, her eyes had the same liquid brightness of a baby, the seemed to crackle with life in spite of the dying that surrounded them. Claire sat back in her chair and studied her grandmother's face as she smoked, wondering what how it looked, young and smooth, before eighty years spent in and out of the desert sun. 
+
+Claire remembered thinking that to some people the desert was a hot wind at the gas station, something passing through and to be passed through. Others saw a sunny retreat from cold wind billowing off northern lakes; some saw it as an endless playground of sunshine, golf and hotel pools. Her grandmother simply arrived in it one day, accepted it and tried to swallow it, literally Claire realized now.
+
+"It used to be so beautiful here in the fall," her grandmother was staring out the back door toward the mountains. "Those hills where covered with junipers and in the gullies there were enormous Sycamores and Cottonwoods that turned yellow and orange..."
+
+Claire looked up at the hills now covered in houses. She remembered dimly, as a girl, walking in the canyons with her grandmother and grandfather, gathering leaves and looking for wizards and fairies in the shaded glades of trees, the cool moist air near the water, the dry crunch of leaves under her young feet.
+
+"It still is beautiful, though," Her grandmother turned in her chair and flicked a bit of ash into the kitchen sink. "Claire." She stopped as if gathering something up within her, "I'm dying."
+
+Claire lifted her head out of the rub and drew her legs up, tucking her feet under her and wrapping her arms around her knees.
+
+What is age made of, what shape does death take as it drew nearer? Perhaps it takes no clearer shape, perhaps death remains forever a stranger, perhaps it's life that has sharper shape when death approaches. If life begins in pleasure and ends in pain is it therefore necessarily futile? Is it just an expansive joke, me being the product of endless strangers' pleasure, rooted in their bellies and born through their legs only to end in pain? And what? Along the way move to feel my own pleasure and bear out strangers of my own, slowly plodding toward the pain? She thought of Aldus Huxley and his anesthetized, hallucinatory suicide. Was that cheating? Was the pain necessary? Was it still possible to die with grace, naturally, without the infest of disease, that latter day stranger come to roost itself like so many passenger pigeons returned home? She thought of her grandmother's pain, swept up in the rising river, the boulders, she wondered if it had lasted, if it had passed quickly or never existed at all. She wondered what her grandmother had thought of, sitting there beside the river, soaked through by the rain, watching the water rise, the distant rumble of boulders beginning to move, the faint white noise of the coming flood... and then... what? Claire leaned her head on her knees and watched the candle flickering. She remembered her grandmother's eyes the moist vitality in them, the tiny universes of memory floating in a saline ether with faint but visible stars beginning to glow behind them.
+
+
+
+	
+	The couch is rough on the back of her arm, she steels herself for the needle and it slides in, just under her skin meeting the vein and she can feel the warm rush of liquid, a mild swelling followed by the first sounds, it takes no more than a few seconds and already the room is changing, crystalizing and creaking as though turning to an icy lake and footsteps above creek like children skating out on a winteris day, the coat rack next to the door begins to take on an crystal stuckture the crashing begins slowly like a forest of firs shaking in the wind after an ice storm the great crashing of icecicles sloughing off the dark needles and then the roaring gets loader and she knows. The room is gone, she stands on a forest floor of matted wet sycamore leaves, thin streaks of lightning glow to her left toward the mouth of the canyon She feels it binding in, tightly stitching her in like a cloud eveloping the top of canyon. There is the familiar collapsing, the falling inward, from the warm belly up. The silver-scaled blindfish is caught in the mouth of a watery serpent, thin cocooned body wrapped in sticky, fibrous light, peeling muslin and gauze, with scarlet flakes of skin like milky stars screaming across the night sky. The bending cottonwoods mark the wind crawling out of canyons and rocky stream beds to snag the last autumn leaves, plucked and shivering down into puddles of rainwater spilled from leaf choked gutters, running down to rivers to sea to night to the moss slick depths of winding subterranean swells, the rumble of rising waters, boulders smashing bank and bone, swallowing shoots of sallow and debris, the drowning. Starbursts and flashes in parallax at the edges of the horizon where the sun sinks and a streak of cloud paints waning purple across the western skyline.
+	When
+
+She is tightly stitched in cloud. Returning again, collapsing inward, from the warm belly up. Rising out of the swelter of underworld night, a silver-scaled blindfish in the mouth of a watery serpent, thin cocooned body wrapped in sticky, fibrous light, peeling muslin and gauze, with scarlet flakes of skin like milky stars screaming across the night sky. The bending cottonwoods mark the wind crawling out of canyons and rocky stream beds to snag the last autumn leaves, plucked and shivering down into puddles of rainwater spilled from leaf choked gutters, running down to rivers to sea to night to the moss slick depths of winding subterranean swells, the rumble of rising waters, boulders smashing bank and bone, swallowing shoots of sallow and debris, the drowning. Starbursts and flashes in parallax at the edges of the horizon where the sun sinks and a streak of cloud paints waning purple across the western skyline. Claire stands at the basement window trembling, arms crossed over her chest, a cigarette clenched between her fingers. The color drains out of the day like bleached laundry on the line, an ebb tide of evening light retreated across the gravel parking lot, chased by the shadows of a train descending into a tunnel, plumbing the unknown depth of rock and sand beneath the well-lit fixtures of day. Claire takes a drag and watches a Canyon Wren hopping on the ground in front of the window, its watery black eyes pausing from time to time to take her in, a breath, a shadow, a movement, the dry salt of cheeks pressed together. She can feel the cold stillness descending just beyond the smudged shelter of glass, a tuft of wind ruffles the wren and in a brown streak it disappears into the sky. The day seems to suck in on itself, a collapsing uncertainty, like so many passenger pigeons, broken-winged and exhausted, returning home on foot. The afternoon shrinks into night, pulling in reserve what remains, hunkering down in canyons and valleys, a laughing wind among the willows waiting out the night. Claire's cigarette continues to burn, but she does not smoke it. She turns away from the window and sits down against the wall, opposite Jimmy.
+	He stares directly into the gray-green pools of her eyes, noting the saline scales clinging to her cheeks, but he does not see anything he recognizes, instead there lies only a thick absence, sewn like cobwebs choking Juniper boughs. Does this help?
+	Help? Claire turns away from him lies down on the floor to watch the thin gray ribbons of smoke drift up from her cigarette toward the asbestos ceiling where the smoke spreads out, billowing in all directions as if suddenly robbed of purpose, drifting aimlessly now across inverted fields of thread and fiber, plaster and silence, a ghost wandering up out of the building leaving behind a body of ash.
+	Jimmy sat back against the wall, one leg drawn up studying his fingernails, slowly trying to work the packed bearing grease and smoky motor oil from under them. After a while he gives up on his nails and reaches into a greasy paper sack and extracts a boiled peanut which he shells in one smooth motion extracting the flesh and flicking the husk into a metal waste-bin to his right. It's not a question of helping is it?
+	We're going to be shut down aren't we?
+	Probably.
+	Then was it pointless?
+	Probably. Maybe? I don't know. He eyes her suspiciously, unsure of what to say. You should ash, is all he can muster sliding the aluminum can toward Claire with an ear grating screech that echos about the room long after the waste bin come to halt next to her arm. 
+	Ignoring the involuntary shiver down her spine, Claire distractedly flicks her cigarette toward the can, arcing a spray of ash which splashes against the side of the can and dusts down, a trail of unattached white flakes falling like dead skin, floating down from some unseen body already departed but reminders, remembrances still settling on the soft angora fibers of her sweater. The skin you couldn't escape, the dust on the shelves, thin layers of everyone coating the world in a barely discernible varnish.
+	It feels like... Jimmy, I need...
+	He looks at her as if waiting for the thought to be continued, but she does not indulge him. He returned to his peanuts.
+	Claire hooked a bit of her black hair behind her ear and watches Jimmy as he eats. He begins to talk in an abstracted, detached manner that she find tedious, speaking as if the words were merely ideas, had no value themselves but what a listener might attach to them. She was still caught between the two worlds and had trouble understanding why he couldn't see that every word had a meaning, that language was not an abstraction but the very thing that constructed the world he lived in, the world she was slowly returning to, wondering -- is it possible to live mythically?. We sew each vital stitch, but not without doubt; a cell cannot survive without each constituent part, this is why Darwin suffers his thumb. She remembered the colors mainly, in these re-entry moments -- the color removed from light, able to stand and dance on it's own like some synesthesia of sight and motion, vision and touch, such that, like remembering the image of a sleeping loved one long after they are gone, something inside you wanted to burst outward with an indescribable and joyful sadness, a complete and total synthesis of opposites, with none of the bore of happiness, no hackneyed sentiment, without cynicism, without skepticism, where the sun alights your every nerve and you know that for what seems like the first time that you exist, really exist. She thinks suddenly of something her grandmother has once said, once something dies, you can't make it live. But lingering in this boundary land it almost feels like you could raise the dead, like perhaps you have and you simply don't remember it. Here the pieces seem, if not to fit, to at least possess a cohesive integrity that could connect the disparity of the clothes and the body, the ship and the sea, the rain and the flood, wave over wave under, so much movement and still so still, as if the sky filled your skull. A realization of the imagination, as Sil had said. Sil had also once remarked that the danger with tapping into the vast realms of the imagination, which, as he pointed out, bore a more than passing linguistic similarity to the word magic, is that you might suddenly find yourself having called up something you cannot put down, a notion that continued to haunt Claire every time she returned. And yet Sil was so utterly unperturbed by the world around him that Claire found it difficult to imagine him ever truly afraid of anything, though there were whispers of something, something and then one day he simply did not show up. But Claire continued, not in hopes of helping anyone, but because she couldn't let go of the feeling that this was a way back, that the continual projection outward and its commiserate return inward would allow her just once to exist outside herself, to live for one fleeting moment as everyone indivisible.
+	Down the hall from where Jimmy and Claire lounged in the dwindling twilight, in a small room lined with bulging bookshelves stuffed to the gills with a collection of scientific volumes from the usual suspects like Freud, Jung, Einstein, Darwin and Bohr as well as more esoteric tomes from the likes of Korzybski, Reich, Tesla, Leibniz and others, Waiben sits in wrinkled slacks with a partly unbuttoned lab coat that reveals a stethoscope and a coffee-stained shirt beneath it. He wears headphones and pounds on a keyboard in bursts and stutters of clacking keys, but he stares straight ahead as if reading his words off an unseen screen over the wall in front of him, perhaps backlit by an unseen projector with glowing unseen Aeolight tubes requisitioned from the Army Air Corp cum Air Force dumping ground not five miles from this very hospital. Eschewing the tendencies of his collegues toward frazzled chaoic hairstyles, Dr Waiben's head is closely shorn which never ceased to amaze those previously familiar with him only through his works, which was admittedly a small, though devoted group. That he was the pre-eminint scholar in his field was unquestioned, however, the exact number of competing scholars was not directly known, but assumed by most to be fairly low, which is not to say his illustrious curriculum vitae was anything to sneeze at. There was a brief residence at the prestigeous Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University which many would have killed to get into, though Waiben's habit of applying rigourusly scientific tests to his collegues' somewhat questionable methodology put him on the outs and eventually he left for a stint in Vienna, and then to PanthŽon-Sorbonne where he took up redience in the Applied Mathematics department until the student protests of the 60s when, making the ill-advised assumption that democratic protest had a strong future in France, he had sided with the students and shortly found himself deported back to the American shores from whence he came. Having then taken up residence at the recently defunded and dispersed Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Wouden College of Parapsychology And Esoteric Electrical Phenomena (P.E.E.P), owing to his groundbreaking work in attempting to test Riech's still controversial orgone-based "cloud busting" theories (a project funded almost entirely by the equally controvserial Montasano seed company, rumored to be seeking yet another means of holding the industrial farming industry over the barrel as it were), he now found himself marroned here in the Arizona desert with the dubious destinction of being the only scientist in the country legally authorized to administer Dimethyltryptamine to a baker's dozen of carefully selected patients on the vague premise that DMT might be useful in rehabilitating certain psychological borderline cases back to what was culturally defined as workably human. How he had convinced not just the FDA, but also the stuffy starched collar suits that oversaw the budgetary constraints of the University of Arizona at Tucson that DMT was a viable research subject was something even Waiben was only dimly aware of and with the rapid approach of his yearly report his mind had lately been trying with considerable effort to recollect the exact wording of his original Q and A with the suits.
+	Waiben rewound the tape and turned the page. The clacking noise took up once more, seeping past the open door, out into the submerged watery darkness of the hall.
+	There had been a time when Waiben was quite certain that his work was worthwhile, worthy even. He like to style himself as a garbage collector of scientific theory moving slowly through long disregarded tomes to empiraically demonstrate them false, one by one. But it was this  negative hypothesis which put him at odds with not only those others working in the "fringe" fields of science, who naturally disliked his sharply critical repukes of their theories, but also the more mainstream scientists who either dismissed him outright, or couldn't understand why he wasted his time with theories he inevitably proved false. Lately Waiben had started to sway toward this later argument and was seriously considering retirement at the relavitely ripe old age of sixty eight, "just about a Christie's worthy vintage" his erstwhile collegue and friend from his days at the Sorbonne, Vandamire Scott quipped. "What you ought to do my boy," Scott suggested, "is get out on the lecture circuit. Quite a lot of these up and coming American Unies are only too eager to lay their hands on someone like us, *studied in Europe* they always put on the flyers." Vandameer chuckled, "You might end up in a nearly empty lecture hall down the the Humanities ghetto (perish the thought), but you'd be surpirsed who turns up... quite a number of impressionable young women who turn to 'kooky' scientific tomes to spice up their otherwise dull poetry. And you'd be amazed how the May-November romance seems to sparkle for them, at least for a night or two." Waiben dismissed the later notion as predatory ("evolutionarily necessary," Vandameer retorted) and so he sat late in the evening on a Friday typing up notes while Scott shagged his way through Conneticutt having stopped over for an extended dalliance in Watertown the details of which he was only too eager to relay during a recent phone call -- nipples like summer fruit my boy... Do you remember when your skin was taught? Good lord! -- Waiben hung up mid sentence. Which isn't to say Waiben was above the occaissional abridged affaire de coeurs himself. Lately he found himself unable to concentrate when a certain subject, Claire Bierce, was in the chair, an ever-present scent of peaches seemed to accompany her into the room, a delusion which Waiben was pretty sure arose solely from him discovering via her background forms that she orginated from the state of Georgia. Nevertheless Claire possessed an undeniable precessence, a musicality in her very movement hinted not just at a willful inclination toward the sort of deparity that men find similatneously appealing and horrifying, but also a depth of character that made you want to sink into her thoughts as if collapsing onto a feather bed to disappear into the relaxed ease of sleep. But having already lost his longtime research assistant, who protested an "inability to maintain scientific integrity when Claire is in the room," Dr Waiben was wary of his owning growing inability to do likewise, but, or perhaps, as he was only now began to appreciate, *because of* this lack of scientific objectification, Claire had unquestionably become the most valuable subject in his experiement. Hippy enthusiasm not withstanding, it was surprisingly difficult to find people willing to subject themselves to the rigors of Dimethyltryptamine. Of the forty or so volunteers who showed up at the initital public cattle call, only seventeen had passed the prescreening and of those only a dozen had returned after their first dose, which was in hindsight rather large. In the course of the next six months he had lost another to possession charges and another to Ohio, which Waiben freely admitted was the most humilating thing that had yet happened in his research career. However Claire made up for it, not just in her lucid descriptions and remarkable ability to retain organized thoughts where even the most skeptical of the others turned to jellied, raving idiots, but because she made everyone around her want to continue in spite of the increasing sense of futility that pervaded everyone involved, including Waiben. So it was irritating when tonight Vandameer's skin comment had unwillingly crept into Waiben's mind as he watched Claire's face, the billowing softness of it, the slight hints of a laugh line, a crease of time only recently realized on the vast pallet of youth, and it began to consume him in a way that no skin had since that afternoon in the sun-drenched Parisian apartment when, for one strange moment, while inside a young exchange student who, one foot on the ground, one foot raised on a kitchen stool as Waiben entered her from the front, in a moment of glaze-eyed lust breathed, "you make me want to be a whore," an Arabian Nights-like celebration of decandance and depravity which might well have been the only thing that pulled Waiben's mind back from the diaphaneitous realms of feminality, where he was encountering for the first time the full force of his own soul, in the momentary and then sustained contact with her skin, so incredably hushed and enveloping, the nerves of his own skin, by comparison callous, dumb and uncouth, relayed back a sensation that hinted at the falacy of the seemingly indelable seperation of one body from the next and rather implied that there might be elastic mingling of bodies, a slipping, AEther-like permeability between everyone, as if by a passage through the core fires of sun, he had suddenly emerged in some parallel universe where the word soul had not yet been worn out.
+
+
+