The Algorithm of Chaos

Toto pricked her ears up and issued an irritated yelp. Her hind right paw patted slightly, thrice, behind her shaggy ear which action compressed, encrypted, and transmitted the spy message enveloped in a chunk of white noise.

‘I bet,’ thought USC to themselves while in a mincing trot to the door, ‘the glasses sit on the bitch’s nose, yet, patience! She’s a good oldie and I like her’.

* * *

18

They were not singing those morning birds but rather talking to themselves. They needed no audience, no approbation, they just shared their impression of the current moment with no one in particular, like, retired oldies addressing not a single soul around. Black birds sounded somewhat didactically pedant, smaller fry’s chirrup was louder, yet she didn’t care, neither for dove’s tender cooing full of narcissistic love nor for goldfinch’s abrupt utterances. They also didn’t pay much attention to each other neither were in the way of wakening morning, they were part of it. The morning sun squinted sleepily thru the stilled serene foliage in the quiet trees.

She surfaced from her night sleep under the calm introvert gossip of birds out the window. The house stood in a desolate part of a podunk town on the steep slope to a deep creek grown with trees. Once her pet Fluffy, a bantam sand-yellow dog with his tail flaring proudly like the torches in the Italian carabinieri cockade, broke his chain (the neighbors’—few and far between—anticipatory worries about his possible hunting raids after the hens in their yards deprived the poor devil of his freedom) and ran away. Next morning she got up earlier than the birds and found him in one of the unused lots about. The tether of chain had got caught and tied up by the rank mighty grass bushes. Fluffy met her with agitated joyous whins and awakened the first birds. She looked around and felt that she knew what happiness is.

Later, Fluffy passed away and Dad never told where he buried him in the slope. She moved to live in a big city with neither birds nor trees to speak of, however, she knew the moments of poignant happiness might really happen in your life. At least in the past. So she told me…

‘So she told me,’ repeated V to himself, producing no sound, forgetful to switch on the secondhand notebook he craned his head over. ‘Let’s hope,’ added he with a dry smirk and as mutely as before, ‘They’ll never zero in on this my thought’.

They split in a correct and civilized manner, each of them moved to a separate lodging, their mutual account in the social net deleted. For half a year he lived hardly feeling he was alive. Then he little by little emerged from the depth if his listless prostration, made a rule of shaving at least every other day. Started fiddling about computer, a self-styled programmer of no certificate or loyalty to any particular programming language, a freelance loner outside any team, reading tutorials, replicating their applications, hours assiduously typed away rubbing off the keyboard characters. Anything at all to ward off the empty monotonous boredom of his minutely regular existence.

He did come to terms with his way of life and was getting on pretty fine, faith. It’s only that sometimes there happened, like, phantom pains a man can feel in his since long amputated limb. Those nights when he grappled away from wakening, clung at the dissolving shreds of a dream, scrambled back to where he stood upright on his knees, before her, his arms around her hips, face pressed to her womb, eyes dead closed—no! not now please! I will not to wake!

Then he lay on his back in the middle of an endless black night. Wide awake. Calm. Indifferent. Waiting for the morning to take place.

In our lovers we love ourselves… Who said it, again? Some sage asshole…

With a strange short shatter V awoke, looked around and reluctantly raised the black lid. The clicked power button started the hardly audible soothing purr in the notebook’s innards.

A hurried knock on the door made V sit up with a startle. He waited for no visitors and accurately paid the rent, even the ball of kids playing sometimes in the gallery outside along the row of identical apartment doors missed knocking at his one.

He got up and walked to answer. Behind the door stood 2ic, his intent glare directed to V’s eyes, unswerving.

‘May I come in?’

‘What the… how did you find me?’

‘They instructed me how to answer this your question but, first, may I?’

‘Sure! Come on in!’

V cautiously looked out along the empty tier-gallery and the iron railing lit by the diffused cones of yellowish bulb-light pouring into the gloom of night. Then he closed, locked, and latched the door.

* * *

19

…because the most urgent is the here and now; the passing moment and the narrow place we occupy are our eternity and infinity. People inclined to considering things and events met along their progress to the better world in heaven or hotter world in hell would most certainly come to the same conclusion and they, eventually, would present the thought in clearer form for eager seekers of reason and sense in their sublunary existence. They, but not me, would enlighten the mankind by radiance of the like thoughts because, still in possession of my aptitude for subtle contemplations, I’ve ceased confiding them to paper…

Dry and drowsy my inkwell keeps its peace under the dust-sealed lid, the quill abducted for household needs, they are a plenty, by some or other from the garrulous bevy of womenfolk at this abode. To skirt about my possible expostulations to the unwarranted trespass, the skirts did it on the sly. The most surprising thing though is that they somehow knew I wouldn’t make a fuss about the quill pilfered for God knows what application.

They know even things untold… Ha! Another brilliant thought worth of being passed to posterity slips by and fades in vain. So let posterity cater for themselves. Let’s hope they’ll accomplish the deed before reaching the venerable age when you know answers to any question under the sun as well as under the moon, be it full or waning, or even hid behind the jealous clouds, yet there is not a single soul caring to forward it, the question, to you. For them you’re just a part in the interior surroundings or landscape. Who would ever start a discussion with a crooked tree in the roadside besides an insane poet? So good luck, posterity, find them yourselves, the answers you cannot pass on. Or some idea like that my thought a moment back… hmm… what was it, again?

Aha! About living within the bounds of a split-second construing finely splendid speculations about eternity and stuff…

Yeah… and, speaking of poets, they are a really rare commodity, a couple for a century, at most. Observe the last one if you please, who will you discern there to be named a poet of merit? I and Quevedo, wit of the Golden Age and… And that’s it! Still, in every street of any one-mule village it gives 2,000 poets a-tinkering their jarring clumsy “verse”. O, tempora! O, mores!

Even at my first incarceration, a month in that common cavern of a jail, I met a poet! Though I don’t undertake to judge the quality of his opuses. It was an Englishman with their barbarous parlance. Communicated in a mix of Lingua Franca and broken Spanish words. A nice young man. What was his name, again? Yes, Will Shake… something… shake shaft or bones… Whatever.

Unsparingly he recollected his spouse Ann left to look after their 3 kids, back in the Island. The jail conditions were just godawful, no latrine, the prisoners discharging their bodily refuse into buckets. The stench!

As always, I was lucky, one month of running nose! That’s the fortune’s fave!

And that Biscayan ogre accused of stealing a mangy ass from a local landlord. Some beefy brute, that ass thief was. The folks in the common cell feared to fart in his presence so that catching the whiff his train of thoughts wouldn’t take a turn towards lusty recreation…

Poor devil Will! He suffered more than others from rough mistreat. Still never lost his optimism and used sharing to me, in poet-to-poet way, he didn’t mind this kind of abuse because of being a bisexual and the accumulated penetrating impact will find a sublimed vent in his future sonnets or, maybe, plays. Yet, Mr. Shakesomething learned the hard way, truly and firsthand, what Spanish prison was…

But still, who namely instills us our thoughts? God? Devil?

The second producer enjoys the well-deserved respect for his product never disappoiunts the consumer—the finest evil in the market for any trend in circulation currently or cashback within a business week. While the God made goods are, well, a kind of swaying from excellent to so-so, to put it gently. Depending on your luck and his mood, perhaps. Especially His mood! And then industrial espionage, you know, stealing… ahem!. copy-pasting proprietary know-how from His competitor…

The weather-cock policy in action. Now He creates Eve. O my God! Thank you! Halleluyah! The next day He demolishes Gomorrah which is a genocidal action, to say the least, in relation to stray cats, dogs, sheep herds, innocent, enjoying their night repose. For a lengthier exposure you might want consult the sect of vegans with their perennial chant about sad look in the eyes of Cow and other domesticated hostages to “humans’” gluttony. Moody, moody… Or are there several Gods doing shifts?

O, thank God, I dropped my habit of taking notes and thrice thank you, OMG, that Holy Inquisition can’t read our idle thoughts or else my ass and stuff would feel the heat…

* * *

20

…it’s not a throe, the pain, it is past pangs or cramps, beyond scorching lashes and smarting throbs, it kills with it stillness and constancy, kills yet let me not die, keeps embedded in torture vice, squeezed in mold of no escape for one hair’s width, it does know its trade, the pain…

…yet in spite of executioner's acute deftness by and by it grows duller, the pain, we split, pain an’ me, not one whole already, me and pain, though it stays by me, irredeemably, it hurts no less than before, but it’s not part of me any more…

… some thinnest sheath or shroud, some flimsy membrane of numbness separates us, me and pain, and this sparsest of swaddles in between us keeps me off, keeps me separate, keeps me a-hover above it, gives me some space to grow into I… who am I?

I am what I am what I am… I am what I fell besides and beside the pain, ever-present pain… do I feel? what I feel?..

… it’s darkness, pitch-black darkness around, I feel how thickly viscous it is… dead black darkness… I feel sounds of water, hollow lapping, soft gurgling of water in the dark…

and now I have to do it, I know it hurts but I have to dare a try at one desperate heedless thrust thru the pain whose part I am not, I have to check if what I feel besides thick darkness is there, so… now!! oooooooooo!.

Thru pain and tears in eyes with the lids pulled up, in flows the light, inundates, a sea of light and I see how beautiful it is, this face of Moon craning over me so close, full, high-cheeked, right above my eyes open wide thru the throe…

So saw I how good it was, the mellow light streaming down, shed by her, sad, omniscient, reaching for me, fixed in agony, flowing face-to-face.

So created she me back, by the light off her face nearing ever closer to me lost in pain but found, and my mouth, distorted by pain wailing out for all to hear it possessed me, now moaned in gratitude to the light giver, Moon. And good it was…

* * *

21

‘Who are they?’ Asked V, ‘The federals? Same guys who had arrested you?’