learn to be less scrupulous when you are working for us.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to any prospective employment.”
“It’s a simple either/or, Mr. Ring. The ‘either’ is: Go back to university. Complete your course. Get your qualification. Keep the computer. Keep the fracter programs. You have the passwords: keep them. We will give you a job in European Public Relations, pay you, protect you, keep you safe. In return for this, use the fracters for us when we need them. It will not be often. It may be never.
“The ‘or’ is: Take your chances with the White Americans, the Pacific Rimmers, Pan-Islam. Frankly, I can’t see them taking time to have this discussion with you. Tell me, how long do you think you could bear to watch your girlfriend—what’s she called, Luka Casipriadin—what is that, Armenian, Georgian?—how long could you watch her being raped by dogs? Two hours? Four hours? Eight, even? And once they had what they wanted I think you’d find they’d forget about any gentleman’s agreements they might have made. A bullet in the left eye is current mode d’emploi of the PRCPS Security corporations.”
“You’re not frightening me,” he said, which is only ever said by those who are very, very afraid.
The blind woman set a black cellphone on the desk beside the Sefirah disk.
“Call her. Luka Casipriadin. It should be breakfast time; she always was a late riser. I don’t see how she stomachs that bran mush muck every day when they do excellent croissants in the Ècole refectory. I suppose the Californian raisins help. The code from Ghent for Paris is 00 33 1.”
“Fuck you, you bitch. Fuck you to hell.”
“You’re welcome to try, Mr. Ring. Do you want to accept now or think about it?”
“Is there any point?”
“Should I take that to be an affirmative?”
“You should.”
“I’m glad, Mr. Ring. You see, there is a small button on the arm of my chair that I really didn’t want to have to press. I was a little… economical with the truth. We couldn’t really have let you take the ‘or’ option and gone to the Yankees, or the Islamics. The side of the desk facing you conceals a compressed-gas-powered guillotine—most sharp.” She left her seat, came around the desk. Her fingers brushed Ethan Ring’s thigh, spidered up two steps above his navel. “It would have cut you cleanly in two”—her fingers tapped black denim shirt still smelling of beer, smokes, and spray-crazy—“just about here.”
Tappy tap.
I F IT WERE ETHAN Ring making this pilgrimage, he would observe that life is a circular pilgrimage from nothingness to nothingness, the Temple Zero of nonexistence, up the steep ascents of circumstance and Murphy’s Law to mountaintops of self-realization, down long easy descents when sore spirits can relax from pushing the intractable mechanism of living on through history, from dark sea caverns of acedia, filled with the ocean-sound of mortality to six-lane highways crammed with rushing, prehistoric behemoths.
Strange: the more I re-create of the life of Ethan Ring, the less there is of him that I can recognize in me. Some grace of Kobo Daishi, that I can no longer draw absolutes from particulars as he once would have in self-justification. My homily would be that the Buddha-head rests as comfortably in the Shinamo gear-train of a twenty-four-speed MTB as in the face of Kokuzo carved into the flesh of a living tree and that the temples of true, real, burning living are so few and far between that we must hold hard to our sacred moments.
Long hard haul down the south coast of Muroto. Only four temples between the West Temple and Kochi City; there would be much room for the contemplation of the Buddha of the gear-train were it not that our way lies along the main provincial highway. A fifty-meter cloudbase discharges a steady, penitential drizzle; thundering truck/trailer combos spray us with a viscous film of oily grit. At a bangai incorporated into a
“I don’t remember agreeing to any prospective employment.”
“It’s a simple either/or, Mr. Ring. The ‘either’ is: Go back to university. Complete your course. Get your qualification. Keep the computer. Keep the fracter programs. You have the passwords: keep them. We will give you a job in European Public Relations, pay you, protect you, keep you safe. In return for this, use the fracters for us when we need them. It will not be often. It may be never.
“The ‘or’ is: Take your chances with the White Americans, the Pacific Rimmers, Pan-Islam. Frankly, I can’t see them taking time to have this discussion with you. Tell me, how long do you think you could bear to watch your girlfriend—what’s she called, Luka Casipriadin—what is that, Armenian, Georgian?—how long could you watch her being raped by dogs? Two hours? Four hours? Eight, even? And once they had what they wanted I think you’d find they’d forget about any gentleman’s agreements they might have made. A bullet in the left eye is current mode d’emploi of the PRCPS Security corporations.”
“You’re not frightening me,” he said, which is only ever said by those who are very, very afraid.
The blind woman set a black cellphone on the desk beside the Sefirah disk.
“Call her. Luka Casipriadin. It should be breakfast time; she always was a late riser. I don’t see how she stomachs that bran mush muck every day when they do excellent croissants in the Ècole refectory. I suppose the Californian raisins help. The code from Ghent for Paris is 00 33 1.”
“Fuck you, you bitch. Fuck you to hell.”
“You’re welcome to try, Mr. Ring. Do you want to accept now or think about it?”
“Is there any point?”
“Should I take that to be an affirmative?”
“You should.”
“I’m glad, Mr. Ring. You see, there is a small button on the arm of my chair that I really didn’t want to have to press. I was a little… economical with the truth. We couldn’t really have let you take the ‘or’ option and gone to the Yankees, or the Islamics. The side of the desk facing you conceals a compressed-gas-powered guillotine—most sharp.” She left her seat, came around the desk. Her fingers brushed Ethan Ring’s thigh, spidered up two steps above his navel. “It would have cut you cleanly in two”—her fingers tapped black denim shirt still smelling of beer, smokes, and spray-crazy—“just about here.”
Tappy tap.
I F IT WERE ETHAN Ring making this pilgrimage, he would observe that life is a circular pilgrimage from nothingness to nothingness, the Temple Zero of nonexistence, up the steep ascents of circumstance and Murphy’s Law to mountaintops of self-realization, down long easy descents when sore spirits can relax from pushing the intractable mechanism of living on through history, from dark sea caverns of acedia, filled with the ocean-sound of mortality to six-lane highways crammed with rushing, prehistoric behemoths.
Strange: the more I re-create of the life of Ethan Ring, the less there is of him that I can recognize in me. Some grace of Kobo Daishi, that I can no longer draw absolutes from particulars as he once would have in self-justification. My homily would be that the Buddha-head rests as comfortably in the Shinamo gear-train of a twenty-four-speed MTB as in the face of Kokuzo carved into the flesh of a living tree and that the temples of true, real, burning living are so few and far between that we must hold hard to our sacred moments.
Long hard haul down the south coast of Muroto. Only four temples between the West Temple and Kochi City; there would be much room for the contemplation of the Buddha of the gear-train were it not that our way lies along the main provincial highway. A fifty-meter cloudbase discharges a steady, penitential drizzle; thundering truck/trailer combos spray us with a viscous film of oily grit. At a bangai incorporated into a
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