The Scorched Head
Black and blue Monday. It was the day when the world's stock markets crashed. The computers convulsed, panicking people.
Michael Tannikis called me just before midnight.
"Do you know what's happening? Breakneck crisis. The money markets are at war. the machines are avid. It's the permanent crisis, man. The world is burning up. But I've got the whole pattern in my head. Are you listening? Time to talk, time to take a walk."
Michael was a student in my night class at York University. He often stayed late to discuss writing, ideas, and media issues with me. but words shook loose in him when the financial markets went into shock. As if his thoughts were crashing too. He left messages on my answering machine. The phone in another part of the house, buzzed, clicked, recorded him. When I played the tape back, I heard through the hiss of a bad connection how his voice mixed desperation, hope, and manic insight.
"I'm trying to get a hold of you. Where are you? What are you doing? Can't you see? We are being shot up and brought down, and they don't understand. I'm talking white noise, I'm talking exposure."
At around two-thirty a.m., unable to sleep, I phoned the number he'd left and got his answering machine. In the morning there were more messages waiting.
"How much longer can any of us stand to be alone? I'm not on drugs, believe me. That's not the name of the game. The machines are telling us things. We're being transformed. We'll be brand new. We're learning how to dream together again."
The tape hummed, spooled ahead, started again.
"Give or take, give or break," he talked on, his face invisible to me. "It's cycles, man. It's all musical. Like you have to listen first. You have to play. It's all in the flowing. The rhythm's in our skin."
I recognized what he was saying. I understood the references, the concerns. It was as if our minds had started to merge and we were sharing obsessions. His words twisted through the wires. Michael T. (so I called him) was living in the blast of the new
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Outage (Excerpt)
Science FictionPart fiction, part memoir, Outage is a journey that brings the reader through the familiar dissonance of our present age--dissonance created by the magnetic, electrical forces of the universe which we absorb daily through television, radio and other...
