Matthew Ted > Books: genre-sci-fi‎ (53)

Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds.
In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things— mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.

Some of the new people we'd picked up after Aleph used 'tha, ther, thim' instead of 'he, his, him', for the collective pronoun.

When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land.
That was the future. This is now.
The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don't try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.

The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by the green life passing in such high turbulence, too much to see, all clamoring to have its way. Leaves sawtooth, spade-shaped, long and thin, blunt-fingered, downy and veined, oiled and dusty with the day—flowers in bells and clusters, purple and white or yellow as butter, star-shaped ferns in the wet and dark places, millions of green veilings before the bridal secrets in the moss and under the deadfalls, went on by the wheels creaking and struck by rocks in the ruts, sparks visible only in what shadow it might pass over, a busy development of small trailside shapes tumbling in what had to be deliberately arranged precision, herbs the wildcrafters knew the names and market prices of and which the silent women up in the foothills, counterparts whom they most often never got even to meet, knew the magic uses for. They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining even more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the early rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.

In the pentagon around the hole, we plant five parasols upside down in the sand, twist them down into the viscous layers. The last three inches of the shafts sticking out of the sand we grease with after-sun before getting on our knees and letting our arseholes slide slowly down around them.

Then it's night and he pushes me headfirst into the pool in front of the bench in the changing room. Seawater steams orange, comes up to the middle of my thighs. It's thick and living with the jellyfish blobs we've been filling it up with day after day; they've fused with each other and the salt: little, veined whitish eggs bulging in clusters. I'm on all fours in front of Manu, who's on his knees, feeding me the living water, shovelling it into my ass with his hand. The sun is inside me now because the sun sets in the ocean. Then he shows me a transparent, hollow shrimp shell he found on the beach, sticks his hand into his swim trunks and pulls out his long, thin dick. 'Do you want to?' he asks, nodding, and I nod too, and he twists the head off the shell and softens the rest in the living water. It fits snug around his dick except for the legs dangling from its base. I let myself float in the pool with my back arched and my ass in the air, let myself relax inside and feel him slide in: a ribbed and prickling sensation in the slime and cold. Through the hole in the wall, the sun makes a column of light in the water. He moves inside me, my spine turns to jelly. I can feel the eggs inside it: we're throbbing at the base of the spine, wandering slowly through the abdomen. Squirt of thick white juice, first Manu inside me and then me with eggs in the sun lands on the sandy ground. We make the best of what we've got.

To Gaylene—deceased
To Ray—deceased
To Francy—permanent psychosis
To Kathy—permanent brain damage
To Jim—deceased
To Val—massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy—permanent psychosis
To Joanne—permanent brain damage
To Maren—deceased
To Nick—deceased
To Terry—deceased
To Dennis—deceased
To Phil—permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue—permanent vascular damage
To Jerri—permanent psychosis and vascular damage

Some people can tell when they're being watched. A sixth sense. Not paranoia, but a primitive instinct: what a mouse has, any hunted thing. Knows it's being stalked. Feels it. He's doing shit for our benefit, stringing us along. But—you can't be sure. There are shucks on top of shucks. Layers and layers.

'I'm happy; aren't you happy? I get to come home and smoke high-grade hash every night . . . it's my trip. Don't try to change me. Don't ever try to change me. Me or my morals. I am what I am. And I get off on hash. It's my life.'

'At that time I was very unsatisfied with my own job, I worked in an office. So I asked Lea if I could do something about people working for the exhibition. When I began to write I quickly realised that it would be more than four pages, and we ended up doing a book. They were lying around in the exhibition space, with no name, as if the text was a part of the artwork. A month later it was published as a novel.'

'I like to sit with the thought that right now we have thousands of eggs inside of us. Clusters and clusters and clusters of tiny eggs. Also even more bacteria, we have so much bacteria going on. You could almost say we are vessels for these lifeforms. As such, The Employees is about moving away from the singular, as it is a group of people talking, but also viewing your own body not as a central thing but as a home for yeast, bacteria, blood and virus. I’m not making it up, it’s not a metaphor. It’s real life.'