Crackling Circuits

 

 

Mother wears a complex crown of branching wires and red spheres; vibrating neuronal orbs or dried pomegranate seeds cracked open by time. We sit around her, sharp-faced and praying on our knees. A new geometry has replaced our old language. The cathedral where we are is quiet but the windows leak smoke. One of us, maybe the green one, the one I have never met before, was born within an MRI machine and only speaks in oscillating voltages. Another swears they can smell burnt ozone every time they blink.

Behind us, the cities rot gently. Red towers, blue fog, yellow silence. The past is a velvet couch with a distinct stain of decaying wine and betrayal. The future? A nerve bundle shooting static at my spinal column. All of us have been altered, in one way or another. All of us are half-code, half-sacrifice.

The diagram is labeled. BNC-1. BNC-2. AN-1. Like cousins that got lost in the folds of the brain. What does the diagram do when we sleep? Does it grow into a dream we can’t escape? Does it sprout roots into our bones? I wake up with the impression of a dendrite pressed into my ribs, like a fossil of thought, like a tenuous broadcast from a dead radio station.

My old teacher looks sideways at all this. His nose knows more than his eyes. He’s seen angels broken apart by logic. He’s counted stars with the same fingers that now point towards an imaginary exit… Or is it just the edge of the page where the publisher forgot to bleed the ink all the way through? Philosophy is just a hallucination you probably won’t get arrested for.

Page 23. Three. That’s how many selves you have. The one who dreams, the one who watches, and the one who screams into a live socket in sheer anguish.

I remember: Ricardo told me once that the nervous system is just a very elaborate radio. Pick up the right frequency and you can hear your ancestors whispering in the hiss between channels. Some call that schizophrenia. I call it astral archaeology.

And the family in the first painting that you see in here; they’re not people. They’re the remains of a signal. Cracked forms that used to carry sound; all color-coded to avoid confusion. You might think the triangle face is the mother but no, it’s the transmitter. The true mother is the background; those streaks of black and orange, bursting upward like a transmission from a volcano. Her voice is what births the rest of them. Her voice is what kills them, too.

Somewhere in the back of the museum, there's a room where the paintings blink. The nerves are mapped and projected against the wall. I can see how BNC-2 wraps around BNC-1 like a lover, like a trap, like a rhetorical fallacy. In the corner, a speaker plays my old teacher’s thoughts in Latin, but reversed, like a Satanic record. I hear it if I close my eyes and press my fingers against my teeth.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the diagram got loose; if the neurons spilled out of the paper and rewired the gallery. Visitors might start to convulse in sync. My blood pressure would spike. My spine would vibrate. I would start naming things in languages I don't know.

I try to leave but the door has turned into a waveform. I can only exit if I match its frequency. Most of us can never leave. How can you match a frequency if you don’t know how to shape shift?

My old teacher knew about this. He saw it, a long time ago in Mexico. He saw it in the eyes of young obsessed junkies decoding the Bible one track mark at a time. He knew that the human body is a relay tower, and that most signals are poison. But if you listen closely, really closely, you can hear the true message: EAT THE SKY. BITE THE STARS. BECOME THE STATIC.

One of the figures in the painting—the one on the floor with a long face like a melted mask—she says: “There are secrets buried in the synaptic delay.” I nod because my tongue has fused to my palate and I am no longer able to speak. Still, I nod because my heartbeat is being monitored by a machine in a different time zone.

BNC-1 fires. The ink trembles. AN-1 pulses like a drum. A tribal beat only insects can dance to. The museum lights flicker in Morse code. Someone translates it. It says: “THEY'RE ALREADY INSIDE.”

My teacher's finger keeps pointing. (Is he really here with me?) Now it's pointing at my gut. Now it's pointing at my unborn memories. Now it's pointing at the wall, where a crack has opened and I can see the city outside. The towers are bleeding data. The sky is peeling away to reveal circuits underneath. The birds are twitching in binary spasms.

And I finally understand the diagram. It's a map. Not of the brain. But of a long life in exile, away from everything that made me who I am.

And I am somewhere between BNC-1 and AN-1. A spark traveling a blackened path. A lost child in a neuron forest. Every choice I've made is a synapse. Every regret is a firing pattern. Every time I almost say something true… it lights up red.

I look again at the painting. The figures are moving now. Slowly. The mother-transmitter blinks. The geometry shifts. They’re recalibrating for my newfound presence. They’ve been waiting for me. I am the missing circuit. I am the noise in the system. And now the system is listening.

The Numbers on the Gate

the streets are cracked sun flares bouncing off the silver car the red one bleeding against the driveway like a wound still fresh the palm trees whisper in some dry electric code above the suburb that thinks it’s safe the mailboxes like tiny black obelisks transmitting coordinates to some god that is not god jehova is real but not the thing you prayed to when you were seven on your knees with the bedroom door shut he’s a parasite on the signal a swollen insect lodged in the skull of the world the quiet cul de sacs are just the holding pens until he calls in the harvest and you can feel it in the sunlight the air’s wrong the sky too clean it hides something sharp and the hills roll away gold and brittle like the skin of an old reptile I keep walking past the road barrier with the spray paint 277 or 2 or maybe it’s a key code from the other side of the membrane and there’s the shadow of me long and insectile stretching down the cracked asphalt like I’ve already been eaten and replaced by something else the paint is flaking off the metal gate and the rust is bleeding out the joints and in my head the heat is telling me that the people in those houses aren’t really people anymore maybe they never were maybe they are shells filled with him with jehova the demon the architect who has been here since before the roads were laid and a group of them found out and they woke up one night with the static roaring in their heads and the dream of an open desert with no sun they met in garages and drained swimming pools whispering in code about his weaknesses about how his body is stitched into the telephone wires and the taste of him in tap water the strategy was to cut him out piece by piece like a tumor so they tagged the gates and the asphalt with numbers the numbers mean where to cut the artery the silver car the red car are just vehicles left as markers this driveway is an altar disguised as middle class safety the palm tree a green knife pointing up into the glare and I can feel the shadow of him over the hills even as the suburbs cluster in the valley like a swarm the chain link fence rattles though there is no wind my own shadow wavers like a bad projection and I keep thinking about the road that curves out of sight maybe it doesn’t go anywhere maybe it just loops back into the same scene with the same cars the same palm tree the same mailbox only every time I pass it something is slightly wrong an extra window on the house a number flipped backward on the curb maybe the grass growing darker because he’s closer the road surface splitting like dried skin and the hills are silent but I swear I see them breathing a ripple passes through the grassless slopes and it’s like a lung under a ribcage made of sky and all the while the demon is feeding and feeding on their prayers because the prayers are contracts binding them to him the group that fights him knows not to pray they burn the words before they leave their mouths they walk these roads under the noon sun so the heat can strip the last signals out of their skin I pass the same barrier again the numbers look different this time black paint dripping like coagulated blood maybe it’s not numbers maybe it’s the face of something in profile the hook of a jaw the coil of an ear but the shadow grows longer even though the sun is straight overhead and I know the cars are watching the silver one with its empty mirror eyes the red one with a door slightly ajar like a mouth that’s been whispering instructions for centuries the garage doors like eyelids that will never close the group hides in plain sight walking among them smiling but never touching the palms of the infected they keep moving from cul de sac to cul de sac from cracked asphalt to cracked asphalt because he can’t catch what doesn’t stop the hills turn gold to white in the glare and the valley tilts as if the whole place is a dish sliding toward a drain and I keep walking I keep walking because to stop is to be seen and to be seen is to be filled and finished

The Quince Tree

The quince tree stood in the distance,

at the edge of the dreaming desert.

It stood illuminated in the moonlight,

And its fruit glowed from within

like tiny candles in the night.

All around the tree

the ground was dry and cracked and cool.

I had become invisible to those that once knew me.

I had disappeared into the hot nothingness long ago,

into the dry wind of blue and yellow.

I was brittle now, but I was also an explorer.

I would hitchhike on the edge of sentences,

and merge distant worlds for a moment in the dark.

No one knew I was there.

On the edge of the dreaming desert,

I remembered a children's song from long ago:

little darling fruit

you make the perfect pie

I wrap you up in sugar

and let out a little cry.

Little darling fruit.

I was alone now,

a lone dreamer within a vast dream.

The silver light lit the desert floor,

alive with tiny creatures of the night.

The dark leaves shook,

the fruit on the quince tree dangled restlessly.

I felt fear hiding in my body,

in the void explored in sleep,

in the places where words hung suspended

like fruit in the moonlight.

I knew that all the secrets were everywhere,

In every direction

around every corner

all around me

all the time.

So I rubbed by naked body against the bark,

and I lay on the ground.

I closed my eyes and

I was still in the nothing.

Then I felt the invitation

and I let a response emerge
from my mouth.

Two ancient species spoke that night,

And they made a connection

at the edge of the silver light.

I would never be alone again.

Into The Nothingness

He disappeared, nearly naked,

Dressed only in a long white garment.

A white cloth

covered in numbers and geometric shapes.

He slipped into the nothingness,

into some place I will never know.

(If I were to follow him,

the me that can know would have left

and I would be left as naked as he was

unable to understand whatever I was seeing.)

He broke with the language of our world,

and left behind only scattered fragments –

A poetic line

A shopping list

An idea for a story

An argument not fully formed.

He left in a succession of slow breaths

Which carried the old melodies we once sang together,

our voices strong and cracking.

He took with him

A thousand stories we will never hear,

food we will never taste,

so many things I wish I learned,

but I didn't.

His face now appears on maps,

The kind I sometimes look at

but mostly I try to avoid them.

His face is quickly losing its shape

even though the map lines tend to converge.

The story ends

and I cannot contain my wailing.

I am left without numbers,

with only a drone of ongoing pink noise

and a few mechanical glitches

now and then

a kind of broken rhythm,

irregular pulsing.