Clothes fill the air, spiralling. Woolen makeshift scarves of retribution all the way out. Can you write for the people? Fabric, neon, or washed out completetly under the sun. Letters that got all jumbled up because the simple iron-on patterns were only made to last long enough to be forgotten, but Olive never forgets, but is always forgotten. Folding clothes is another scheme, she's thinking, because they're flying away faster than you can keep track of them and it reminds her of 9/11. She's planes, she explains, she's just plain. She leaves it for another day.
"Can't keep track of time, can you?" she says to the administrator, condescendingly down a set of stairs. "There's no track in time," he says, "Now, if I were at the train tracks I wouldn't want to keep the metal there, would I?"
"I've always thought of my mother as a needingless system repeating itself repeatedly."
The psychoanalyst shivers tactily.
"It's nighttime!" Olive cries, seeping at once an abundance of wealth and prosperity in the cleanest sense of the word. She has to go back to folding clothes but the folds are always opening. One two sheep, three, the only thing she thinks, as a factory-worker in the snow, freezing cold to the most outmost cells of her toes.
The snow has already lost its pride and now it skulks down the streets in a worn-out leather jacket approaching little girls and asking if they want lollipops in the Freudian sense. Slush. Their mothers steer them away. Some kids still play in the browning or graying with bomb dust ice water because it alienates them from the creeks and the seas. (They're tired of living on planet Earth)
Olive's back at the sticker department of the store. Can you store stickers? It's a store for stickers but the people that stick around are stored in the back shelved in trash bags, dead. It just so happens to be a vast conspiracy, but Olive chooses to ignore it because she needs money, money for her clothing, money for her keys.
Once more, Olive is folding clothes. Every fold she makes leads back to something else.
Olive gets a little more distressed and her psychoanalyst reccommends a novel procedure.
"I think I have a method that can help you out," he says.
"Annihilation? Electrocution? Lobotomy?"
"No, nothing like that." the psychoanalyst dismisses schemingly. "Still, I need you to get up on my table and lay flat." Olive does just that because she's been taught from age zero to trust God or the state or school or salvation. She numbingly prances onto the machine.
What is is? Can Olive guess what the machine does? A blue light flickers on and off, producing droning noises and the swing of swings orbits around different dimentions.
Olive in the machine is dreaming... artificial dreams. Paradigms.
The procedure appears cruel from the outside but the psychoanalyst knows. Another doctor asks if he can gleam in on the procedure, to which the psychoanalyst says, "No." The photography-set alters the mechanism of the work.
The machine turns on but it doesn't turn Olive on like it's supposed to. "Huh," says the observing neurologist, observing her brainwaves and mapping them out in real time. He's chewing gum way too loud. "I suppose we could do a procedure to right that reaction. I just need to ask a few questions to know where to stick the knife. How old was she when she made her first memory? That tells me how far back her frontal lobe is so I know how deep to cut." The psychoanalyst dismisses that too. "I don't think of her as a brain, you stupid reductive idiot, I think of her holistically, as a whole. Get it?"
"You think of her as a hole?" says the neurologist, "well that's just plain misogynistic."
Meanwhile, Olive's brainwaves are going crazy from electric signals. They gave her a solution marked "solution" so she thought it was just water, and that would solve all her problems, you know, a solution. Or it would be, if she was just dehydrated. She's beginning to think it was much more than that, LSD dissolved in corrosive fluid or military-grade braincell dissolver solution; it did feel a bit funny on the way down and these scientists are not as foreign to experimentation as she'd like to think they are.
How did that present in Olive? Well, her eyes are closed but it doesn't feel like they are; magnificent structures keep appeared before her, waves and multiplicities falling on top of themselves. She sees the sea in the distance and all kinds of confusing shapes which just keep sending her into different regions, hot and cold, a sensory symposium if there ever was one, all concentrated on her. She hesitates.
In the laboratory Olive's still a specimen still laying still on the table. The psychoanalyst approaches her with a knife as the neurologist looks into the transparent room as though it's an aquarium, tapping at the glass and screeching, trying to get him to stop. But it's noise-isolated, with state-of-the-art technology, and the psychoanalyst merely smirks through the glass. It doesn't matter, because he knows what the neurologist is saying: "Neurosurgery has been proven to work better than your talk therapy like talking works better than talking at a walkie-talkie! We've left you to idiots who think your treatment works and the people who really need help come to us but now you've gone too far! You're cutting up patients, and, well, that's violence, and only we can do that. Stick to your useless meddling which does no good nor harm while we deal with the real stuff."
Helpless, the neurologist resigns himself to observing brainwaves. Just another lost subject. In this time in science, humans are like mice and Project MKUltra is just another day for the U-S-C-I-A. It's illegal but who cares? The neurologist has hypnotized about a hundred people himself, and deprived them of their senses for hours until they lost their sense, just to see how they'd react.
The psychoanalyst opens Olive up and takes out her organs, laying them out on the table. The neurologist stares in astonishment, as the only one he doesn't remove is her brain. Then, he goes to the table and triangulates every organ one by one. When it's all done he puts them back in and she lights up and the system starts working again, just this time it's in threes.
The psychoanalyst struts out of the room, apparently quite pleased with himself, to have a quick chat with the neurologist, whose got his hair all rustled up with excitement. "So what on Earth is that supposed to do?" the neurologist skepticizes. "No!," replies the psychoanalist, "It's nothing on Earth at all. I learned it on Mercury, where the rocks are closer to God. I found that I felt perfect there, that's how I want all my patients to feel. Why did I feel perfect? Well, the only thing that was different, really, was that instead of the smooth circular organs and suns and planets we have here on earth, everything's triangular. There are twenty months on mercury because the sun, upon closer inspection, was found by me to be a giant icosahedron, a shape with 20 faces, each an equilateral triangle. The length of an edge of the sun is 3 triggles, and that measurement is then divided by threes or multiplied by threes how ever small or large you want the measurement to be. The sun rotates at the center of the solar system and each time it presents a new fact to us a different month appears, with different weather of remarkable variety."
"Is there summer over there?" inquires the neurologist, seemingly toned down in tone with shock at this revelation. "Unfortunately, there's not, although there are many other seasons to make up for it. Let's see, my favorites are 3, 6, and 9, designated by numbers because the meteorologist I brought along turned out to be very creative, just not in the naming sense, as he thought names weren't all that important. Season 3 has these marvelous breezes. On just one day in the middle of the season the sun doesn't rise and it seemed scary at first but over time it's become a magnificent festival. Later that same day if you're still outside observing you can feast your eyes on the leaves of the tuffton trees as they shed their fur and start to iridesce in the light. Season 6 is a bit like summer, just hotter, and solar storms whip the leaves off the trees and dry out all the sparkling liquid in the craters. You can't go in the craters, we learned that quickly. We lost our only only engineer when he went for a dip on a hot day in season 4 and melted completely as soon as he jumped in. Season 9 has eruptions of all sorts, we have "sky-quakes" here on earth but on Merucry there are volcanos in the sky, massive solar cloud formations that explode and shower us with lava.
Olive walks home barefoot which isn't a problem at all because the stones are warm and almost soft in the summer light. She dips her feet in the water.
Olive opens the door and walks inside. It's dark in her house, or it would be if not for lines of cool blue moonlight cast by the splits in the window. Her cat walks in, her paws making a gray sound like pitter patter on the cold concrete floor until she finds a spot on a laptop and curls down in a pile. The cat starts purring and the computer blows air louder trying desperately to cool itself down, until it gives up and turns off. The cat cools herself against the metal as she falls asleep. The fan in the corner of the room blows through Olive's hair and through her cat's fur, making a constant calming noise.
Olive thinks she wants some dinner so she walks over to the refrigerator. The light blinds her and she closes her eyes and lets the cool air wash over her. She takes out some olives, green and smooth and suspended in a cold salt water solution. She takes out seven and sits on the ground to eat them with a toothpick.
She stands up, feeling a little better.
"My computer!" Olive cries, running over to her laptop and snatching it, pressing it to her chest just to feel its weight like a nonplussed cat after a long day. The cat on the computer meows, awoken suddenly, and pounces onto the ground into a pile of clothes. Olive opens the computer and doesn't turn it on, first she needs to turn it on, sexually. She strokes the keys, not hard enough to press them, just so they can feel it. When it's enough she presses the power button in a circular motion until it lights up and the screen illuminates her face.
It asks for her log-in information
The government says not to go to school or work today because there's been some disaster.
Olive's bored so she goes to her backyard for a walk. There are horrifying eucalyptus trees swaying around making a swirling sound as she walks down paths she can't count. Cicadias twice her size tied to the trees with a hundred meters of string, perfectly still, though Olive suspects they might constantly be struggling to fly away. Their bodies are orange and rotting but their wings glitter brilliantly in the sunlight, if it's even sun. She runs into dozens of dead ends before finally proclaiming herself lost, and she looks up at the sky in desperation only to see that it, too, is rotting, in all shades of orange and purple, a massive void she doesn't dare stare into too long.
Giant tarantuals make their way through the trees, their furry legs like a hundred cats glued together, and she doesn't know whether to be threatened or comforted. All Olive knows is that she feels very small and the tarantuals are massive. Their long trisected limbs hover over the mulch and prop up proportionately small bodies with dozens of eyes. Bugs fly through the air, as big as birds, swooping through the eucalyptus leaves and rustling them, producing a lovely noise.
She's overwhelmed by the symphony of falling leaves falling apart and buzzing and high screams and running water.
It's all still except for the spiderwebs disintegrating from above making dew-drops as they fall in the twigs and glisten in the moonlight and on Olive's hair. They fall into cracks and form brittle tetrahedral gemstones.
A dull brown bird is chirping aggressively at Olive. If she were not a mature birdwatcher, she might've discarded it, but she is, so she knows that the bird is an Indicator indicator, known as the greater honeyguide, in the family Indicatoridae, of birds that indicate. This bird has a mutualism with humans and indicates the location of honey. Olive seems to forget her horror as she follows the bird through the eucalyptus trees. The bird hovers over a spot and flies upward. Olive looks around for a beehive but there's nothing there, only a faint buzzing. It might just be an illusion of the stream. The bird tilts its head and Olive feels its warmth, as it's the only thing that's communicated with her in the hours that she's been wandering through her backyard, completely lost, like a chicken that's had its head chopped off. So she jumps up and grabs onto a branch, to the apparent delight of the bird which chirps her a song. Thankfully, Olive is deft from her years of evading the government and she quickly climbs up until she sees a bee, and then twelve, and then a hundred, and then the hive.
Olive doesn't know what to do at this point, and she doesn't really know what she was thinking, looking for honey in her backyard. The bird is looking expectantly, and Olive realizes it's mutualistic, and she needs to do her part as well. Reluctantly, she takes a flat stick off the tree and drags it through the thick honey in a circular motion, collecting as much as she can. It's all looks fine until the last second, when her slowness is broken by a hiccup, and the bees get angry all at once. The bird glances at her and looks away, apparently trying to assume a lack of liability.
Olive's back at home now, it's been a long day for her, but in the name of authenticity, she jumped from the beehive to her house, because Olive got so mixed up she doesn't remember how she got home, so we don't either. Olive's overwhelmed by the sound of a vacuum cleaner when she enters her house because she doesn't remember vacuuming but she quickly realizes it's just her cat. The cat got so riled up while Olive was gone that she just kept purring louder and louder and now she's going haywire. She might destroy the whole building with her vibrations, it's like the earthquake that wrecked San Francisco, except instead of tectonic plates it's a cat sending electrical battery light bulb rays into the walls and if Olive had half a mind she'd have grabbed that cat and tossed it into the engine of her car because with that kind of energy the cat as a motor could run forever and she'd never have to buy any more gas.
But Olive's not like that so she sprints over to the cat in a bewildered way and very carefully strokes her with her finger. That seems to calm the cat down a bit so she keeps doing it until she has her whole arm resting in her fur. Any normal person would've stopped there and dejected the cat but Olive's too far into it now. She keeps on going, stroking behind the cat's ears and imagining if she were a cat where she'd want to be petted.
She gets so into it she feels like she's not there at all, the only thing she knows is how they're moving together and Olive feels like she might just start purring herself, if she isn't already.
Olive goes to work on her computer while her cat dances around the room looking for something to do. Olive keeps getting distracted, wondering if it's boring for a cat to be stuck in a person's home all day. Little does she know that the cat is thinking the same thing, wondering if Olive ever gets bored just inhabiting her artificial habitat.
Olive has a lot of things to do so she resigns herself to staring at numerals on the screen, they just keep running 1s and 0s. She never goes running because she doesn't have time, the lactic acid gets all up in her muscles. Olive wants to cook some dinner but she doesn't have the thyme.
Her cat is falling over her own feet and Olive's a bit (or rather a lot) concerned. "What's wrong?" she says over and over but the cat doesn't respond, not because she doesn't speak human (although that is a problem in itself) but because she's gone all loopy. "Oh, shoot!" Olive realizes. The CIA gave her LSD just to test it out but the cat thought it was some kind of toy or a treat so she licked it all up. Now Olive's covered in LSD too from petting her and it absorbed through her skin (and she might've kissed or even licked the cat back once or twice and that's how it was absorbed sublingually).
"Oh gosh," says Olive, "My poor cat is melting. Is it super hot in here? Wait. It responded, did you hear that?" Meanwhile the cat is just feeling great walking half-unbalanced across the stone cold floor, halfway falling down because a speck of dust is hovering above her like a snowflake and it gets caught on the furthest whisker on the right side of her face. She's glaring at the dust with her super-sensitive cat eyes looking as though she's just about ready to pounce on her own whisker and get all viscious with it. But her trance is broken when she finds herself upside down