Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? Yes, quite. Quite a while. I've got another rough story completed. Feel free to email me with comments, constraints, etc. It's not quite as long as the last one. This one, I think is mostly finished, but there are still a few errors in it, which I notice every time I read it.

She can... Touch me... all over my body. That's not the story, just the violent femmes. Ok, here's the story. Again, much like the last one, paragraphs don't make the transition, and neither do italics, or anything of the kind. Just pretend it's there, I've manually doublespaced the area between paragraphs, but going through and finding everything that should be italicized is beyond even me. It makes for a confusing read, I know, when characters are thinking and it should be in italics, it ends up looking like I just shifted perspective, but you gotta fight through that shit. I still love you guys. Good luck. Here's the story.

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Firmly Disenchanted


And so this story starts, as most self-proclaimed good stories do, with the events leading up to the moment that changed everything, and concerns itself very little with the events transpiring after that same cataclysmic, monumental change.

The night was dark. Of course the night was dark, but it was a darkness that demanded narration in an active fashion. There are few nights in which the darkness is set loose and given such a free reign as the night whereupon this story begins. The darkness behaved like a mastiff relieved of its leash, barking and tramping about in a generally malevolent fashion.

Firmly Proctor sat on the rough, wooden pier and appreciated the night’s darkness. He had high cheekbones and almond shaped brown eyes nestled in an inoffensive face. More interesting things could have been said about him, from his tousled hair with the irreverent cowlick, to his bare feet, which were uncommon in a city as large as New York.

He was elated because he felt as though the mastiff was concerned with him, though he knew it to be untrue. The imaginary dog's job was making everyone feel as though it was angry with them, but it was only really interested in barking and making a bother of itself. Firmly was not elated, on the other end, by the tar and glass stuck to the hewn cedar boards beneath him. He was somewhat annoyed, in fact, as it was a painful experience sitting there.

This particular pier, however, was the only one he had found that was abandoned, so he put up with the tar and the glass shards. He needed a place to sit every night, and contemplate what he commonly referred to as, “Killing my-fucking-self.”

Now, this statement may seem to come somewhat out of the blue–that is, it may be surprising and unexpected–but in a narrative-logic kind of way, it must be known. This is because the behavior spoke volumes of Firmly’s personality. He said the above statement often, using it to answer a variety of questions, including questions that it didn’t seem to exactly relate to. In fact, he had just said it, in a manner of speaking, a few hours ago. To be more specific, he repeated the business about killing himself to Denise Orchards while they were at work. The whole affair happened like this.

Denise Orchards sat down on the floor next to Firmly Proctor and began again her efforts to bed him. He stood behind a register that rested on a counter, and the entire affair of the register and counter blocked her from the view of anyone who might, completely by accident, be in Mary’s Virginal Sex Emporium. One would describe all customers as arriving completely by accident because anyone who happened to be in the store, save the employees, pretended to not know where they were, and these people would frequently seem to just happen to think about making a purchase while they tried to leave. It was the only retail store in New York City that ran an entirely accidental, yet very profitable, business.

Denise said, “What are you doing tonight?”

Firmly kept watching the empty shop, and said, “Thinking about killing my-fucking-self.”

Denise had heard this a lot.

“So you’re busy, then?” she said.

“Yeah, I guess, though that would imply me doing something.”

“I suppose it would.” She paused, “Want some company?”

“Not especially.”

Then she surprised him by breaking their routine. He had expected an uneasy silence following his response, which was standard, but she spoke. This deviation from the status quo annihilated his composure, it stopped the cycle he had found himself in for years, where everybody said what he expected and reacted to him as he thought they would. It may seem like a small thing, an insignificant change, but it rocked Firmly like a stoning in ancient Jerusalem. Her comment went even deeper, resembling a minor on methamphetamines. It initiated a holocaust of composure and composure-resembling-states-of-being within his psyche. By the end of the night, there would be few stately, resigned, composed, or content feelings remaining in his mind. Although he never claimed to be happy, which is unsurprising given his obsession concerning his own death, he found himself in an altogether new and frightening world. Damn woman. She ruined everything he had, as women are wont to do to men when they find one who believes he is in control.

“Where, exactly, do you plan on doing this?”

Firmly said nothing while the world spun at amazing speeds, yet an incomprehensible force somehow kept him attached to the surface of it. For the first time in his life, he could feel the sheer speed at which he was hurtling through space and time.

“Are you deaf, Firmly?”

He saw a way out, a glimmer of something promising through the chaos. Were he a bit more careful, or even–one might say, alluding to his earlier, personal holocaust–composed at this juncture, he would’ve realized it was not in fact a way out, but a trap.

He said, “Yes, I am. Stone-fucking-deaf. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

She said, “Liar. That’s what you are. Just a—.”

“Nope, can’t hear you. I don’t know why you keep talking.”

“You can hear me.” She said, “Because you’re responding to what I’m saying.”

He said, “It’s probably just a coincidence.”

After Firmly finished his sentence, Denise Orchards stood up and pulled a six-inch, black rubber dildo from a display on the side of the register. It was a strange thing, that surrogate penis. The weapon was within such easy reach because Mary, the owner of the store, had decided it needed a special place near the register. As was stated, it was black, but to clarify the previous description, only the haft of it was black. A perfect candy apple obscured the portion that should have held a mushroom-shaped tip. The apple on top was perfectly edible, though the product came with a warning, written in many languages, that actual insertion of the device was advised against. Warnings being as they are, unconcerned but stern and multi-lingual, it also warned against eating the black section in as many languages.

In the common manner of frustrated women with no recourse save violence, she thumped Firmly on the head with it.

“Ouch!” he said. Seeing the trap for what it was, he realized the impossibility of convincing someone that he was deaf. The pretense was more difficult than he thought, given his decent hearing and the candy-coated thumping devices within easy reach.

“That’s what you get, you insolent prick. Will you speak like a civilized person now?”

“Fine, just don’t hit me again,” he said.

“Where do you go to think about killing yourself?”

No recourse remained save truth, so he opted for it, sullenly, “Pier 217.”

“I see. I’m expecting that you do, in fact, have a place of residence?”

He hated the way she made multiple statements, yet made them sound like a single question. Firmly hated everything about her, from the enticing way she sold fluffy, cherry gelatin, or stainless steel handcuffs, all the way to how she carried herself around in front of him, not exactly trying to sell him anything, but at the same time trying very hard to make him want to have it.

“Yes, you’d expect correctly, though I’m not sure that’s exactly possible.”

“You’re not sure what’s exactly possible?” she said.

“To expect something correctly,” he said.

She knew from previous experience that arguing finer points like this would get her no closer to her goal. The many ways Denise loved and hated complicated men could fill a warehouse with text, so it must receive only cursory attention, lest one get distracted from the narrative at hand. “Why don’t you just kill yourself at home?” she said.

He looked offended. “Because I’m not going to kill myself. I’m going to think about killing myself.”

“The point still stands, though.” She sighed, continuing. “Fine, then why not think about killing yourself at home?”

Firmly stood his ground, saying nothing.

“Look,” she said, “all I’m saying is that it would be more comfortable to think about killing yourself in your house. It’s cold outside, and more so on the pier, I’d expect.”

He looked at her, finally, and for the first time in recent memory.

“Tell me something else you expect.”

“I expect you’d be an amiable person, if you weren’t such an asshole.” And with that she went to tidy up the butt-plug section, which had been ravaged by a gaggle of drunken businessmen. They had laughed at the impossibility of such items. Of course, over the next week each of the men would come in alone and by accident, and then accidentally, on a whim even, purchase the new wall-mounted number. The one that plugged into an electrical outlet and had a four-inch diameter at its widest point. Denise figured the selling point was the international adapter, and had written a note to Mary communicating this.

Being trapped as he was–that is, within a story–Firmly was forced to revisit his conversation with Denise while it was explained. He was compelled, as it was narrated, to relive each painful moment of his perceptions changing and the events that caused that change. Of course, he had no idea that this flashback of his was not of his own design, but was, rather, a narrative convention employed to explain a bit about him.

Firmly snapped himself out of his reverie with a slap across his own face. He was here to contemplate suicide, not the finer points of Denise Orchards. It was doubtful, in his mind, that she possessed any points he could, even in passing, refer to as “finer.” Coupled with that, he wasn’t sitting here to contemplate selling what everyone in the world pretended not to want.

Except the French, maybe.

I wonder what French sex-stores are like? He thought.

Immediately, Firmly slapped himself again.

Stop thinking about work, he told himself. In fact, fuck work. There’s something very wrong with everything, when a man can’t come to an abandoned pier and regale himself with his own demise. My mind’s all, “think about this”, and “consider that”. Unacceptable, really. It’s all Orchards’s fault. Ever since she changed the way things should go, I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of anything.

As if proving his thought to a congregation of skeptics, he fished a penny out of his pocket and threw it into the water. He found that he could not, in fact, discern which side had landed facing up. Determining this, he nodded, satisfied.

Then another thought came into his mind, unbidden and not precisely welcome, like a strange, bedraggled tomcat sneaking into a tidy living room. In the manner of rowdy felines, this cat invariably advocated–and initiated, one should say–the complete obliteration of any tidiness said room once possessed. If this same cat were to have the word “why” shaved onto it, with a question mark following the last letter, the comparison would be complete.

Why? Firmly thought. Why do I contemplate killing-my-fucking-self?

He had to admit that no answer was presenting itself.

Firmly slapped his face again, when he realized he was not thinking about killing himself in any way. It disturbed him that he was thinking about why he thought about killing himself. He forced his consciousness to be linear, to focus. It complied, after attempting to distract him with other shiny, bauble-ish thoughts.

I could do it, lean forward a bit, fall into the water. I don’t think I’d make it back up here, but even then, hypothermia being the bitch that it is….Maybe I do this because it’s the only way I can imagine anything changing.

He made to slap himself as his mind drifted, but he noticed something moving.

What’s all this, then? he thought in a British accent.

A number of people were approaching the abandoned pier where Firmly Proctor sat. A great number of people, in fact, who had flashlights and glass containers sprinkled amongst them, glittering like salt, as if a restaurant patron had decided they were a dish that looked far too healthy.

Firmly wore a look of studied apprehension, much like a man who’s own doom has just sat down next to him, planning to share a light lunch.

He decided that the best course of action was to ignore the event, whatever it might be coalescing into. Ignoring the raucous crowd approaching him, he studied the sea. He hoped the coalescence would leave him largely unperturbed. Perhaps, he allowed himself to hope, it wouldn’t coalesce into anything at all. These hopes were soon thrown, arm in arm, into the water of the harbor. The damn thing was coalescing into something, something much more definitive than the damned thing that it currently was.

“Yeah, that’s him,” said a familiar voice Firmly had last heard attached to Denise Orchards. He hoped that it had recently become detached, and perhaps belonged to a new owner. That, of course, would mean that Denise Orchards had not used the knowledge she obtained from him earlier, and also not decided to invade his sanctuary. Like the others, these hopes were thrown into the water where they promptly drowned. The time for ignoring was past, and the time for actively discouraging was at hand.

Firmly turned and appraised the flock of pedestrians walking toward him.

“Kickass place for a party, Denise,” a boy said. Firmly would later describe him in a speech, as a boy who was being dragged, kicking and screaming, into adulthood.

Narration being the tricky practice that it is, Firmly did not know he would be giving speeches. In fact, he would be very drunk through most of them, but it is important that it be known right now, that they do occur at some point in this trick-some narrative. The course of events that led to him giving these speeches is what interests the story, not the speeches themselves, or the events following them. Though the speeches and their aftermath will receive cursory attention in the section affectionately called, “The Conclusion.”

Firmly looked at the people, with shock and horror. It was shock and horror’s first audition for Firmly in quite some time, and neither of them wanted to ruin it. Shock almost won the day, until horror pulled Firmly’s lips apart, making him gape. They both reluctantly agreed to a draw. Earlier in the year, shock and awe might have battled at this same set of circumstances. However, the military operation of the same name had forever prevented the simultaneous appearance of those two emotions on Firmly Proctor’s face.

Two people seemed to be carrying an ice chest, which they set down near Firmly, while the rest set down flashlights, gas lanterns, and brown bags containing, he assumed, glass bottles containing, again he assumed, alcohol.

“What’s all this, then?” Firmly said to Denise, more for a lack of anything else to say than for his desire that these people leave.

“This is drinking,” she said, gesturing at the bottles and ice. “And everybody, this is Firmly, the guy who wouldn’t be such a cock if he didn’t try so hard to be a cock.”

Everybody knew their collective name, since they nodded to Firmly after the introduction. Firmly set about being the biggest cock he could imagine, which, considering his place of employment, was simply, staggeringly, very, very large.

“Go away?” He said, knowing he shouldn’t have phrased it as a question. Firmly was simply not at the top of his game.

Denise firmly ignored him. When he said nothing more, she handed a fifth of clear liquid to him.

“This the guy that’s going to kill himself?” one of the everybody said.

Firmly took the bottle and looked at Denise, willing her to explain the whole thing: he wasn’t going to kill himself, but liked the feeling that he could change something about his situation. He didn’t recognize the difference in his outlook, but had he thought about killing himself earlier in the week, his reasoning would have been that he liked to think about it. He knew she would not explain it. She didn’t, and, simultaneously, Firmly lost the will to act like a big dick.

“Yeah,” Firmly said, taking a slug of liquid character-growth from the bottle in his hands. Now, that may seem to be an obtuse description of alcohol, but the inebriation alcohol could afford happened to be exactly what the story ordered.

“There you go. Lighten up, Firmly,” Denise said.

“I can’t lighten up,” he said. He took another drink. The fire assailing his esophagus was happy, bouncing around like a child in a playground made of sparkling candy. It wasn’t a sensation he was acclimated to.

“Why?” she said, referring not to the narration, but to his statement. She felt that progress towards bedding this befuddled, enigmatic man was finally being made, and had no idea how the alcohol meandering towards his stomach was acting.

There was a lengthy ceasefire in the conversation. Bottles were opened, imbibed, and set on the pier only to be picked up again so that the process of drinking them, setting them down, and opening new ones could be repeated. To illustrate exactly what kind of pause in dialogue this was, one could continue describing what occurred. Instead, let’s just assume the pause very closely resembled a cease-fire between two battling armies so things can get moving again. It should be noted that after this period Firmly was well down the road called intoxication, and didn’t know where it ended.

“Like what?” he mused aloud. He realized he hadn’t mused aloud in a long while, but pushed that thought aside. The impression that these people were only here to watch Denise talk to him would not go away, until he threw alcohol at it. Then it did leave, sulking at the concept of social lubricants.

Denise thought he had forgotten, and said, “Yeah, like what, specifically, won’t let you lighten up?”

“Change, mostly change. ” he said. He didn’t know where that whole change thing came from, though a tomcat was batting around the thoughts of an immaculate living room and it wouldn’t leave. Unlike his previous thought, it did not leave when he threw alcohol at it, but looked at him with an expression that said, “Oh yes, there you are. Now what was I on about? Ah, that bit of houseplant. Quite.” It seemed to look at him in order to properly ignore his presence.

“And?” she said.

Firmly said nothing, and unknowingly allowed his narrator further wordplay involving his name.

Denise was confused as to his meaning. “What kind of change do you mean? Change for a dollar, or change as opposed to static-ness. Oh, there has to be a better word for not change.”

Nobody could think of it, however.

Firmly said, “I’m not sure which one I mean. Pocket change never bothers me, until someone asks me for ‘spare change,’ and then I get all broken up. Well, that only started happening today, but it seemed that everyone wanted spare change today. I think, ‘I can’t change anything and this asshole wants me to give him what little change I have?’ How can you even have change? Just a silly notion, change is something that happens, right? Except it never does, nothing changes. Did you know that every single, real social revolution has eventually reverted to old policies?”

“What’s a social revolution?” she said.

“Hmm,” he said, “a social revolution is one of two kinds of revolutions. In a social revolution, the social class in power changes. Like, from the rich to the poor, for instance. The other kind is a political revolution, where nothing really changes, the people in power shift around, but the same kind of people are still in control.”

“Uh-huh.” She said, uninterested. Something seemed to be getting preachy, or resembling preaching.

“So all I’m saying is when people ask me for spare change, I wish there was some change for anyone. The thing is, though, everything that changes, I mean actually changes, changes back.”

“It’s funny that those two words are the same, but mean different things,” she said.

“It’s not funny, it’s fucking tragic.” He said.

“How is it tragic? They’re just words, we would’ve run out of them if some weren’t spelled the same.”

He said, “Because something should change.”

“Jesus, Firmly, lighten up,” Denise, who was a militant atheist, said. It was a measure of her frustration that she used the name of someone who many consider to be their lord and savior. Had she been near a rack of apple-topped sex-toys, she would have grabbed one and brandished it under his nose, threatening him.

He spoke before she found something to hit him with. “I will say that the main thing that bothers me is that I don’t understand how the whole thing works. You know, I went to college, just to ‘get’ it. The whole interaction of humans shouldn’t be so fucking complicated. And you know what else? I don’t think anyone gets it, I mean, really knows how the whole system works.”

“You’re not making any damn sense,” she said.

“I’m drinking. I’ll consider it a privilege granted to me, temporarily, by the great deity ‘Ethanol’.”

“That,” she said, “makes sense.”

And so the conversation continued, in a sparring match sort of way, with silent observers, who did occasionally whisper between themselves, long into the morning. Firmly asserted his viewpoint that things are unintelligible in the world, and that they should not be this way. It was decided at some point, that he should run for public office. The campaign slogan would be, “Fuck, I don’t know,” which was a phrase that saw much use throughout the night. And thus began the Firmly political movement.

This whole turn of events may seem strange, given the unassailable fact that drunken decisions rarely amount to more than hours at work undertaken with hangovers, but suspended disbelief is a much-overused convention for a reason. It works. Just keep going, and nobody’s the wiser. That said, it was an important night, one that decided the political structure of the United States for generations to come.
Of course, it would not be right, given the structure of a story like this, to end here, so rest assured, things have not ground to a stop. This horse is not yet glue. It is merely in the process of becoming glue, in the way that all things are progressing toward their end result. The end result of all things, it is worth remembering, is not glue, mostly just the end of horses.
Then, realizing this is not finished or over, someone must explain the political climate of the country this narrative takes place in, so that this grandiose change can be understood.

Volatile is a very good word to describe the politics in the United States of America at present. Another good word would be unstable, if one were writing about this in a political journal, which is not the case at the moment, so scratch that. Good words to describe it are in particular abundance, but one could become easily distracted attempting to describe this complex situation in one word.

Using many words, one could sum up the current state of things, like this:

The political stratum in the United States of America resembles the unrest felt at many corners of the globe. The Great Leader has firm control of the institutions governing the people, yet only a tenuous grip of the people themselves. A mind swath poll–that is, a poll conducted by scanning the thought-sensor installed in everyone’s brain–conducted a month before Firmly Proctor got drunk after work indicated that 0.0002% of Americans approved of the Great Leader’s performance. This statistic included the leader himself, who hadn’t sufficiently prepared for the brain probe, and was queried during a period of self-doubt. The feeling that things were vastly wrong with the structure organizing and overseeing human affairs was palpable, much like the day Martin Luther said to the Catholic Church, “Fuck off, you bastards.”

As fortune would have it, and fortune would have it, because fortune is a lusty glutton and will have anything it can get its grubby hands on, Firmly was a great public speaker. He wasn’t just charismatic with a public address system. He knew crowds, knew how they think, act, re-act, and generally crowd around in places. Firmly worked their prejudices, passions, and all the other things that humans base their decisions on. Denise was usually around. When asked about what office he was running for, and about her, the answer was, “Fuck, I don’t know. Vote Firmly!”

Firmly gave speeches and more speeches. He spoke to crowds of people that wandered into his political rallies the way they had wandered into his previous place of employment, completely by accident. Camera crews showed up at pier 217 at some point along the line, where most of his speeches took place, and filmed it, hoping to run a short story about insane people who were both local and political. Halfway through his speech, the news team decided they would Vote Firmly.

That was how it happened. Everyone voted Firmly, including the Great Leader, who forgot that he had abolished elections 12 years earlier. Voting for Firmly Proctor just made so much damn sense. He didn’t know how to fix anything, but now everybody knew that nobody knew how to fix anything. They knew that nobody could fix everything, and that anybody could ruin everything. That’s what the American people voted for.

His first day in political office, he–that is Firmly–abolished the United States government.

He said, on national television, “My fellow Americans, you’ve all voted for me because things are so unintelligible in this damn place, when they really shouldn’t be that way. I was once asked if I had any spare change. Today I have change, so I say this to every American: Don’t go to work, don’t go to school, and don’t pay for anything. It is my belief that if we do this, something will change. My first declaration as Great Leader is to fire, outsource, lay-off, downsize, and generally get rid of everyone working for anyone. Senators, judges, all you guys, go home. I would expect resignations on my desk, if I had a desk anymore. I’m fired. Hey, you news guys, get out of here. Turn that thing off.”

Nobody at home knew whom he was talking to. Perhaps he was just messing around, giving a speech in his bathroom, and some mischievous news team filmed it. Firmly, however, was talking to the camera crews. Disappointed, they turned their cameras off. Broadcasting stations followed suit. At that moment, televisions in all parts of the former great nation, which the former great leader once controlled, performed that great, cinematic ending. The ending where the picture gets very thin and horizontal, then sucks itself into the center of the television. Right after that, it rebounds on itself, just before disappearing entirely. As every television in the country winked out, the people of what had once been a nation started figuring things out for themselves. They walked out of buildings that ranged from architectural brilliance to carefully applied mediocrity. The people walked outside, and blinked at the sun. It was bright, and hurt their eyes.

And to hell with the expectation that Firmly Proctor and Denise Orchards become entangled in a web of mutual affection, because that’s another story entirely.

***end***