It was not so impossible seeing your body filter its way first down the tube before your own eyes, then de-materialize itself entirely. Hairs eyes ears sounds bones memories all, carried away by words. The lot, thrown into the air. The pain was not physical. It was viewing the eternal which caused a stir. You were peeling yourself away from the rest of the universe in a way that separated you from your mother, the Earth and everything else you held dear. It was a little less natural than death. The body was stolen away from this realm and in the hands of others.

The Factory was behind this maneuver. Tubes, of sorts, would receive the Materialized body sent from another station in another State to our island that was known as Halemé, a northern alpine island overlooking Champagne Lake: a pepper corn of an island in the Summer-States. What had once been a bulk continent had been superficially sliced apart and terraformed into teeny-tiny, isolated island-states: each with their own flag (which changed its colours more often than the mind of a mind). The seas, rivers and lakes had too been gathered into gargantuan vats, carbonated with bubbles and then poured back out into the enormous dry gorges that were bored into the bedrock, geographically separating each state. The younger workers working on what we called The Line (those responsible for maintenance and hardware) still experimented with sea water at the Factory stirring up different hues of water for peoples’ condo-pools, salted and unsalted.

The process of materialization started with the Performer, who would stand on the peak of the Factory’s tallest, slimmest tower, dressed in gala, during the hour of a Materialization — said to be moments after the moon appeared above the palm trees which sat atop the highest inland hill known as Éstacion. At this hour the Performer would begin to chant the spell into the skies above prompting all the corresponding particles of the body of the traveler to hail down, as luminescent pollen itself transports from one place to another:

“Kacalb atnav, Kacalb atnav, wolley selpaN, nrubua, xalf, rebma, muelortep…”

“knip, knip yrehtael, eruza, eruza, eruza, llits rekrad eruza, peed eniw der gnoma sehctap fo neerg fo a nacsuT yteirav!”

Particle by particle out would appear the body of the materialized — each colour a perfect description of the minutest detail of the materialized being. Parts of the body would gather at the bottom end of the tube at the foundation of the tower of the Factory. Though I’d never seen it myself, I’d heard from The Line that bodies could clump up in the bottom of the tube like a crowd of firm brown onions sagging in a beige stocking suspended from a ladder.

It would be the job of the Performer to not only chant these spells with the conviction of seer, but learn them by heart. More and more materializations expected from the Performers. A materialization could only be expected to be successful through learning a great deal about the individual being materialized. This meant endless digitalized rendezvous between Performer and the person-2b-materialized (we called them p2bmz). The person being Materialized was located in another of the summer-states, and occasionally further afield, far by any measure from where the Factory lay. In the Performer’s handbook, this part of the process is described as telepathic calibration. There is no other means of appearing within our state, or any other for that matter, than by Materialization. The waters are too high, the skies are feverishly unpredictable, and those who occupied some of the islands were volatile. To get here from somewhere else was achievable only via Materialization.

The lead up to a Materialization meant liasing with other individuals along the way to understand your workings for your proposed spell. Something you’d have checked and authorized at a later stage by a Gaffa. Along the way I’d also be seeing one of The Butchers, a fella at the Factory who read spells (and human bodies) expertly. As crass a term it was, it was essentially the role of Butchers to formulate effective means using words to prime the meat of people to be Materialized. Early on in my career as a Performer I’d been paired with a Butcher called Mick. He’d talk to me in palindromes throughout the day commenting on things the customers would be frightened to imagine:

-“epac rieht erow ev’yeht yaw eht evresbo uoy dluow woN”

However profound the idea of skating on the mind of another human being may have sounded to me, even back then, I’d seen Materializations were getting sloppy. Alarmingly, an increasing number of stations were now opening all across the Summer-States. And yet, Performers were losing interest.

One botched colour in the spell of a Performer could mean a missing tooth, organ, or finger for the Materialized. What went wrong at my last Materialization is not yet determined. I’ve already turned over the experience of my own Materialization too many times. I can recall touching my hands, feeling as though they had switched sides. I was terribly paranoid about finding that a part of my tongue had peeled away even hours later.

I turned the pillow again and disturbed the cat of the condo, Doctor: found now snaking between the bookshelves, chairs, and mounting forbidden tops on soft paws where I eat, read, call and talk to the wall.

Through the window to the sky, I saw the moon had split in half. My innards were muddled, following the event of having seen one Materialization go horrifically wrong just a few nights before. My spell could have been off. Tossin’ my head again and rolling my body across the taut linen. The lights shut down. I closed my eyes reading the book of poems with the sparkling cover by Arnold B. Tolkas titled What Else Did…

“I am as old as the

Apples

I’d rather eat under

Bluer skies…”

— — — — — — — — सपना — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

There was a thunderstorm. To this day I’ve never felt rain quite like that or heard the clouds mumble and shout like that since. The black of night was entrancing. No stars just the enormous ink, well-poured out across horizon. In the morning the beach was strewn with dead jellyfish, beached as a cause of being spooked by the night. They had used up all their electricity in the panic. The sand smelled metallic, every grain had been rolled over in the storm.

Her hand, much larger than mine yet slim and long held my hand tight. The skin was a thin veil over muscle groups I am unsure how to name. The hand was smooth and a little warmer than cold. Wrinkles draped over the bank of the hand, but the thinly skinned palm young and firm. We shared this walk along the coastline. We were close to the cliff edge, walking at pace along the darkly grounded manmade rock path. She was wearing a cotton turquoise pastel pea coat, with white cabling along the modernly curved seams. It fit her well. It always smelled the same too, like a dry fresh shammy leather mixed with the moisture of a forget-me-knot imitation perfume. I remember the rain feeling heavy on my skin. The hand tightly glued to my right hand. Away from the cliff edge. We were approaching a burned out car, the fire long since doused by the storm whispered smoke from the charred dashboard. An emerald blue Cherry.

The disruption of the skies above unwound parts inside of my self, which she couldn’t possibly have been aware of. Each gurgle produced by the clouds rubbing against one another was sparking something inside my body.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Another botched Materialization over at the Factory shook me out of mashing my feet into my subconscious longer. When this happened we all had to go, even the Line workers. I was awake, I could tell by the curtains. What first sounded like hardboiled sweets being lobbed at the window turned out to be the ratatating of a drummer boy’s pencil drumming: rapid fire. Tinny and percussive. Seagulls on the roof again? I had received the alert and the alarm bells wouldn’t stop ringing until I’d reach the Factory. Unlike the kind of sirens sounded by police choppers, A & E, and other rescue vehicles, this alarm had an equine quality and was pitched at a frequency which could be heard only by my ears, in my head. Like a large spider on the wall, it is un-ignorable. Anything to shut that whinnying off!

The slimy sickly-green electrified digits flashed on my bed-side clock indicating a new sun was upon us. My feet raced down the stairs out of the apartment as I zipped up and lashed a scent of aluminium mist across my chest. I’d been asleep in the clothes I’d fallen asleep in. The streets were still dirty.

I could hear sirens tending to some other catastrophe screaming as I sprinted, the klaxon from the factory still reaming into my skull. Running my hand through my hair as I ran, the reflections saw myself in the shop fronts. I was still hoping somehow to find a way of discussing my Materialisation with a Gaffa (the brass of the Factory). Running down North Field Bridge with my shirt un-buttoned the employee at Lillywhite’s Casino, already opening up for early-bird wagers, was laboring to remove a sticker of a well-known dog which somebody had placed on the photo of the muzzled VR-racing-dog. A squat tired-looking man walked by the Yellow Wall carrying a tiger in ivory white garbs. Already chickens were being cooked alive — flame-throwed — held at the neck by the assailing cook.

Now Materializations were flying regularly, the noise was unbearable. Swooshes and wooshes like the recordings I’d heard of vintage traffic on wet black asphalt. The chanting of now multiples of Performers from towers across the city and the particles of bodies, miniscule though they were, fired across the sky like droplets of mercury tearing through the bodies of birds daring to still fly, asunder. On occasion, a beautiful melody could be heard as the spells being sung overlapped. You could go on with your day but it did drone on, especially now with the croaking of birds painted polka-dot.

The advertising board flashed in LED amber-lit letters across the bridge under which I now jogged lighter. Flashing across my cornea a rogue unchecked cookie popped-up: THIS IS SENDING AND RECEIVING MONEY HERE THIS IS SENDING AND RECEIVING MONEY HERE THIS IS SENDING AND RECEIVING MONEY HERE…swipe left! Fragments of flesh-brisket fell like hail. I’d heard from a Ja7in, a Line worker on the tower, that everybody now drunk their gunpowder tea with at least one particle of at least a hair in it. Nothing could be done about any of that now, it was good for Materialization.

It was true, the world had melted away a little. Gravity was having its problems too keeping the orange, red and browning leaves on the ground. They too swam freely about the air in all directions: this point unnerved the older generations in particular knowing full well the spells had to do with it. They still put their names up for being Materialized just once in their lifetime.

Arriving at the Factory the Gaffaz, above us all, paraded the grounds making a terrifying show about it. All about the entrance gates, large enough for a horse-drawn cart several berths wide, they each stuck to their spot like battle ships dressed dashingly, as per usual, mostly chewing on something or other. They spent enormous amounts of time in costume being prepared to just stand there on the grounds. They would walk like police, feet pointing outwards like penguins along the wet cobblestones in outlandishly sharp military dress which cut across millennia of costume history. They’d trowel dark eyeshadow on like warpaint, dyeing the skin hoods above their eyes and piercing their cheeks with precious gemstones. Hoop earrings, flowy blouses, and ankle length skin jackets. Abruptly, it was now commonplace for them to slap you. They sometimes held lances, spoke little, and imposed their order of opinions upon Factory workers with occasional forceful blows to the head. Performers were not exempt to this terror. Concussive blows and the head-storm that would follow — they’d been trained to pinpoint pain to very particular parts of the brain on the inside with a rhythmic martial art which mucked about with vibrational patterns in the air. It could happen at any time and you couldn’t do or even say much about that, not now not ever.

I took off from the ground, and went up the hard cream marble stairwell. I willed my eyes down. All of Grayam’s meetings, the Gaffa to which I’d been assigned according to my birth-placement, were handled in one of the function rooms. At the receptionist desk, Sharon had an orange face and green hair making noises on a keyboard pointed to Biðstofu Buðs, one of the main playing halls. Her voice, charred from cigarettes, exhumed “Straight through on the right, table 5,” “Do you need chalk, lovey?”

My legs were sweating in my dog-tooth slacks. As I stepped in, I saw that he’d already stepped up to the green felt gaming-table prodding his cue into the red ball and breaking the cluster. He twitched at the corner of his mouth as he watched the white then clank into the red, then rebound back inside the D. He blew a clean, thin column of opaque lilac smoke up through his pursed lips then stood back from the table. Grayam was altogether pleased with how the ball had parked itself against the cushion and was now eyeing his adversary. Such games were the peacock feathers of the Gaffaz and, particularly in-season, could manifest utterly ruthless actions between the contenders. The whinnying of that dreadful ringing in my ears now stopped — so many times I’d infected my ear during these alarm-calls prodding and poking it hoping to scrape out the miniature pigmy-horse that was ostensibly causing all the racket in my ear.

I could appreciate the subtle sounds of my surroundings: the musicality of the cues so clearly — clattering against the tables along with a chorus of coughs (and the humming spell of materialization underway far in the distance?). A thick single-window-pane the size of several elephants opened up on to a pallid view of the factory grounds. A confused sky rested on slate slanted roof tops and brown brick walls, imperfectly dented like frozen chocolate. Warm bulbs floodlit each table. Shadowy gulleys cut between the pastures of play atop mahogany tables. The perfectly spherical balls differently coloured, crawling with diagrams of the history of the Factory etched into the surface, lay on each of the felted tables. A sway in consciousness would have you believe the spheres were fruits and this game these two-legged forms were interacting with was about placing the correct fruits in the correct holes for money.

The room had been disturbed. I spotted a man either sleeping or bleeding out curled beside the leg of a snooker table in the distance. One of the red balls had been cracked in half, rested on the floor. Pinkish crystals had formed inside, so it couldn’t have been long ago.

A citadel of towers of cigarette smoke billowed from out of the workers’ mouths, each breathing intermittently causing, however coincidentally, a light show that played against the warm light. A man wearing white overalls had already been set to work restoring a gash now left in the wallpaper which depicted flowers and black bears on the back wall. They shot me a rare glance which indicated it wise that I took my leave.

Slapping his oily lips Grayam stood holding the matt carbon-black cue in one hand and munching on something battered he’d taken from a greasy-now-transparent white paper-bag in the other. Their adversary moved divinely. Her voice trailed behind her as each footstep sponged its way along the grey ribbed carpet floor allowing him to survey the game: “Nothing much to it, just press it forward on to his noggin’…”.

B.O.B., fearfully attractive, was practicing something with her long nails in the air between shots. She wore dark glossy hair which overlaid a dalmatian-plaid shawl, which extended all the way down to the small of her back. Her skin which had become marbled: the cause of many Materialisations, churning in real-time painterly tones of olive cream, porcelain and buttercup.

On the table just a few meters to the side were two of the blokes from the Factory in grey overalls completely oblivious to what was going on, exchanging words sweetly about where the balls were positioned and specialist terms like ‘side’, ‘cush’, and ‘plant’:

“I’m on the cush Aidey”

“Would that ‘av gon?”

With the body of a leopard, she moved her feet toward greeting me. Her eyes were not quite still, and she screamed

- “You’re only alive when you talk!”

It was as though a dinner plate had spewed vomit into my face.

I could feel the other Gaffazs’ eyes barely holding their focus in the back of my head. A pair of Line Workers sat tightly packed together were wearing faces swollen after tears. They had been witnesses to something usaguine that had left at least one man motionless on the floor. I thought I noticed one or two of them actually. Perhaps ‘Aide’ and the other worker over there had been long enough there to take no notice.

Another one from The Line piped up

- “Naa it’s not bolser wood you’re playing with!”

- “Don’t be a tart, Paul”

Dogs barking out on the Factory grounds could be heard through the fire-doors. The clacking of red against ivory, blue on pink and the falling of the different colours all at once from off the felt surface and into the fish-net pockets was calming, even if there was the body of a man to the right of me.

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