Fish

The child wanted the story to turn out right for everybody. She was attracted to flames. She loved gadgets and inventiveness. She wanted to feel safe and to participate in the construction of something powerful. She was gleeful in the face of explosions. Pretending to shoot was a pleasure. The child was building a radio in her garage when she heard a blast from a gun and another child call for help a long way off. She worried about the child she couldn’t see. She believed that we should live in tribes. She wanted to destroy what threatened her. Explosions were part of her memory just as the big bang is part of scientific theory. Indeed, the sensation of explosions and the concept of the big bang were joined in her mind. She also associated the big bang with a tribal life that was obscure to her own way of life but as close as the child could get to solving the world’s problems on her own. The child’s need to answer back was as powerful as the need to experience explosions as a conquest over enemies. There was a connection between the concept of an enemy and the destruction of the earth and a power that connected her to some other thoughts that lurked in the outskirts of her development.

Pelican

But I have always thought of myself as a happy creature.

Fish

Why do you think this story is about you?

Pelican

Now you’ve got it! You’re starting to act like a professional.

Fish

You are starting to let down your guarantees.

Fish exits; thus, identity becomes as fluid as memory.

Pelican

Let me continue where you left off … She wanted to destroy what threatened her: the landlord stirring in his iconic diapers; the obscure tones in adult speech; the little creeping surrogates of loss in display windows she could not own. She could neither own the display nor the window nor any part of the delectable presentation. Her father’s hat collection. She wanted everything immediately to enter a cartoon. Of a child. In a laboratory creating ectoplasm in vials with a lab light shining on the words OBSERVATION. These are the thoughts that lurked in the outskirts of her development …

Reptile

Evolution, erotic, eugenics, enormous, egg, edge, engineer, entire, ebb, elf, Ed, effort, egregious, Eisenhower, electric, empire, endorse, epigraph.

Pelican

Oh friend, you’re backtracking.

Reptile

I’m rehearsing for a job interview.

Pelican

Let me help you.

Reptile

Let me discard my thoughts. They are spotted with chinks of sand. Did you know that in More’s Utopia diamonds had no value? This has been troubling me for a long time, because I remember having had that experience myself, but I can’t remember my place of residence then. It was a time before anyone ever mentioned a word about presence and absence. An echo in the hills would fall through the floor, ignored. There were no records. There was a dampness that was as much sound as other matter. Nothing was conflated with libido and the females prospered without ceremony. In fact, I have a theory: ceremony is invented to fill the void of deceased prosperity.

Pelican

I think that place you’re talking about has a name that we’re all familiar with.

Reptile

I think you are mistaken, but the feeling of its remoteness gives me an erroneous pleasure, a pleasure that lacks credibility I should say.

Instruction

The practice interview session will be over soon.

Reptile imitates Pelican.

Reptile

I think you should go someplace else. I’m still working on these numinous devices. Isn’t there a place where we’re all supposed to be at this time of day? Or is it always so crowded?

Instruction

It depends on what era you’re talking about.

Reptile

This is somehow unnerving.

Instruction

Continue with your project.

Reptile

The evolution of the five star plan was an intentional device to upstage the onslaught of erotic satires that all young girls eventually stir in us in spite of the classes we have taken in eugenics. Our enormous eggs were the first casualties of this repression: each breathing its last under the lilt of a starry-eyed pout. Yes, the stars kept busy for some time, even at the curtains’ edge where normally only engineers took lunch breaks in slackened heaps of bedding. The child was getting lost in language. Entire herds of shellfish announced themselves to her vulnerable ears, and as they trickled out to sea they hoaxed her with aberrant singing, ebbing and webbing without dotting the elf in their oceanic havoc. Ed told us once he had seen her from a distance but we suspect this was only an effort to enlist the egregious and static domination we inhaled along with out father’s bromides in Eisenhower’s last campaign. Have pity on Eisenhower echoes in my head every night before I drift off to sleep, a suggestion placed in my thoughts by a skilled marksman once thought to be memory itself. Still, I am optimistic on behalf of the child: I have every confidence she fought off all the hoaxes, even those I have personally grown fond of over the years, when she discovered electricity. A genius before the time of Edison, before the time of Franklin, her empire did not turn stale. It was endorsed even by those in my semi-literate family who could not read the warranty inside the dominion of her epigraph. The epigraph went like this:

When crawling out of your skin REMEMBER ME.

Of course, the warranty said: life-time guarantee.