63: Fluoro

It’s been 7 weeks now. And I’m still on the run. Still a fugitive. Evading the pursuit of gangs, police, vigilantes, lawyers, journalists, spies, evangelists, …. Social workers, youth workers, croupiers, barbers, orthodontists, nail technicians, tattooists, hells angels, blacksmiths, and the entire Comparative Literature Department at The Ripplestone Institute of Social Sciences. It all started during my inaugural lecture at The Institute. The lecture was titled ‘Fear Flattens Complexity: Spinoza and The Unrolling of the Godtongue’. And I was just about to conclude the second section on the historical contingencies of Spinoza’s immanent transcendentalism, when a man in the audience emitted a short snorted little scoffing sound, as if he’d taken umbrage with the previous passage. This interjection caught me rather off guard, and disrupted the flow of my rhetoric to the point that the words passing through my lips began to feel inflated, hot and unpalatable, and the conjunctives supposed to bind them into meaningful sequences seemed to evaporate in my throat, and the consonants of the words seemed to swap around on my tongue, which started to spasm and twitch, puckering and clucking at the of my mouth, which had became brittle and dry, and at the same time saliva excessively ebbed up in the recesses of my gums and the rapid movements of my tongue sent spittle scattering over the first row as if from a malfunctioning lawn sprinkler as my lips rasped and spluttered, my eyes started to stream, and my nose started to bleed. It was at this point that the chair suggested we take a moment’s recess and went to fetch me a fresh bottle of water. But there was no water. All the spring water ordered in for the conference had been destroyed in a controlled explosion the previous afternoon. And so I was sent out by the chair with with £10 petty cash to the Mini Repast to procure a dozen potable waters. Leaving the Mini Repast with two shrink-wrapped six-packs of Glenhalyn Still under each arm, I was disturbed by the signage advertising the latest range of crisps. I began to flush with rage, blood pounding through my temples, synaptic shortcircuits flashflooding my retinas, because they hadn’t put the H after the C in crisps. I turned to three hooded youths who were debating by the vegetables, sniffing at the parsley. “They’ve missed out the aitch!”, I hissed with a shiver, pointing feverishly at the fluoro-green star with my whole body, incensed and stammering, the world becoming a dizzying blur. “No H in crisps, champion”, said one of the youths. “Yeah, contestant,” said another, lightly rapping her cheeks with alternating blows from flattened palms, “the word is spelled without calling upon the H”. “Matador!”, hawked the last, “are you quite sane with the words, then?”, blowing a balloon of peach Hubba Bubba until it eclipsed his head and burst, all three fading with the scent, sight and sound. Somewhat revived by the chemical peach aroma and somehow still brandishing my cache of 2 half dozen potable waters in a hen-clutch, I stepped back in to the Mini Repast to lodge my complaint. “Come back for your receipt, Aqua-Dad?”, said the __ young wisp behind the counter. “No”, I said, “I have a complaint about the signage”. “Separate queue”, wheezed the wisp, pointing to a line of mostly leather-clad men in their thirties, snaking around and around the pet food aisle, holding clipboards, tablets, scrolls. Taking my place at the rear, I began to run through my list of K-sounding C & CH words, which I have memorised since birth in a unique alternating mnemonic order: Crisps Christ Crisis Chrysalis Crystal Chrysanthemum Crust Chris Crest Crossant? But did the series start with a CH or a C? I began to experience doubt. Was it worth waiting in this queue to take my complaint to the Mini Repast’s in-house Grammaticist? Did they even have a Grammaticist? Was there even such a thing as a Grammaticist? I tapped the frilled leather biker-shoulder of the gentleman in front of me. “Excuse me”, “Is there a grammaticist?” Slowly a granite face like the last remaining wall in a bombed out tank shelter turns towards me, dead eyes humming with grey light, “Don’t ask me, buddy, I’m just here to f*** a human jello”. The counter wisp and his entourage erupt in a violent blossoming of slashing, stabbing laughter, and the shoppers, though momentarily stayed by the sudden change in atmosphere, gradually set about burying their perplexity in the comforting soil of aggressive conformity: as Mini Repast dissolves into a shrill aria of chimpage, I step backwards out into the street … And nearly trip over the prong of something splayed out at the foot of the sombrero stack: The handlebar of a BMX bike. One of the best I’ve ever seen. A shimmering golden frame, rubber.. hand.. grasps, proper.. black pedals that look like they really spin.. and a.. tiny seat, screwed really low down. The BMX of my dreams, just nestling there, unsupervised on a sparse jumbled bed of parsley and coriander leaves. In. A flash I hurl the Glenhalyns back into the shop, smack! Chimp down, Smack! Another chimp down! I grab the bike and looping my shoulder strap briefcase over my head like a lasso, I launch my leather grenade of papers, books and conference program like a zookeeper’s wrecking ball into the squealing choir and hit the road. I knew I could never really return to the faculty or my house, or even the lobby of Lofties, after calling in that series of fraudulent tip offs about the dirty bomb in the spring water from my office phone, then my home phone, and then the payphone in the lobby of the Gran Hotel Lofties. But I decide to stake out the service hatch of Lofties basement, where we used to do bladder practice til frog-dawn. At the rear here now, which can only be seen if you crank your neck about 120 degrees eastward, is an animated holographic display of all the amusing times students had fallen out of the building.. though I found it in bad taste, Lofty himself explained how there were never any fatalities among the participants - For every holographic memo mainlined into the faculty’s micromanaged mirror portal, some lucky student would have all their fees waived.