Davis Schneiderman

Davis lives and teaches in Lake Forrest, IL, where he's also

fiction editor for _Harpur Palate_, Binghamton University's new lit mag,

and co-founder and editor of the media and cultural studies journal

_to the QUICK_. He can be reached at dschneiderman@lfc.edu.

"Post-America: Last Drop"

The remains of the child Dial-Up Networking are delivered via important

virtual courier by the chief inspector of the subdivision, a wiry man with

muscles on each arm, a thousand centipedes crawling beneath the surface of

his skin, reproducing in a fantastic exponential stream of organic chunks

resembling underground lava so that his entire insides undulate as an

aggregate toward the heart, and everything he touches absorbs a measure of

fluidity and fadeout for the first few seconds of contact, before

reassuming the proper shape. The contents of his ashcan parcel are

earmarked for the food processors and coffee makers in Supply. From there

everything is born just the same as before-legacies live out their pension

time on the golf course, at the Laundromat lost in the whirl of nouveau

Martin-I-zing, gambling on the peripheries of the new reservations-there,

blood type gets you in, and everybody's a native. The sheer physicality of

the clerk is a joy reserved for when the bosses aren't around and the

inspector seems to be one of the regular crew so much that even the CEO

makes only a thousand times more than the lowest paid jizmopper. In such

cases video-watching is used as a backdrop for more uninhibited behavior

such as farting burping and going off into the rafters for the sheer,

competitive hell of it all.

Even the inert supplies are crafted to watch and record. Take the ashes

for instance. Who knows where they came from, whose they were? The clerks

surely don't. Oh sure there's a file card and a punch card and electronic

digital imaging signal and kinesthetic amplifiers and adjuvant

synth-muscles and a aerodynamic cock and thermal shield and coolant matrix

and carpal, metacarpal, and ante-brachial assemblies inside all mixed

together like a cake before it's baked in somebody else's vagina….but who

is to say this ain't all an elaborate games played at the expense of the

clerks? Who is to say that the supply office even serves a purpose in the

traditional sense?

Certainly not the workers…

It may as well be the Great Repression and these guys and dolls are

figuring to be short timers, sure, and they know the nature of things is

more fluid, less solid than it was back in grandpappy's heyday, but still,

it has become routine for them to deny the physical body altogether at the

workplace, no longer a site of labor for the reproduction of goods

essential to the multinational state: clerks do not therefore eat,

defecate, reproduce the human species or distribute the various parcels

with any sense that they *aren't* a part of a vast multinational network.

The inspector spoke with one clerk, the one soon to be in charge of the

ashes, who put it bluntly with four fingers up his ass and a hand on the

kiddy porn web site sponsored by the Blue Jean Chemical Concern: "Yeah,

we're part of a vast tapestry, doing the good work of the holy Feedback

LOOP. We're building the new economy from the ground up with

micro-business applications expandable on the global level."

The sort of drivel one might hear in an insane asylum has overrun the whole

federal medical scheme. Lend your ear. Wait in line for your weekly organ

transplant and grow your own on the back of a lab mouse. Squash da neck.

The inspector and clerk share so much of the common purpose and place, and

everything proceeds with such tantamount permutations of the existing

materials, then what can be made of earlier people's isolationist impulses?

The ashes of dead children spread over the hemispheres in a second or third

big bang, warm and vibrant, expanding and contracting in a regular pattern

which has been gradually picked, created, and coded, sensitive and ready,

at the slightest caress, to cause a frightful damage. The lack of light

and air in the supply room is not stuffy enough for the clerks, who are

both robotic and assuredly human specimens, aware of the purpose, place and

destiny, online and inline, for the duration of the project's drain on

traditional resources and equipment. Everything collapses at the same time

so no one even notices.

The ceremonial is complete and the inspector is satisfied that the ashes of

Dial-Up Networking, so recently and sadly deceased, will be treated with

the proper respect due to her maintenance profile. "Cut this one with

caffeine if you want her to last longer," says the inspector as he salutes

the clerk now in charge, officially, of the ashes. "Everything seems to be

in order here," he says and slurps up a draught of the bitter ash coffee --

Post-America's finest, strangest brew.

Davis Schneiderman