From: nesta@sashimi.wwa.com (Nesta Stubbs)
Subject: Re: The Kid.
Date: 22 Oct 1995 22:39:03 -0500


In article <jlwitwer-2010951545290001@128.200.199.199>,
Julia Witwer <jlwitwer@uci.edu> wrote:
>In the daytime; that's a good time to be in a bar.  Someone peeled the
>duct tape off one of the front windows and this very dusty sunlight
>stripes across the floor, giving all the little prostitutes pre-raphaelite
>haloes.  

A swath of it draped one of the whores and her pimp with a dirty
clarity showing each broken thread, missing button, slack wrinkle and
all awash with faded brown.  Her hands caressing his pockets as lips
distracted eyes.  The girl had the look of old thread-bare velvet
faded under the sun and feathered with dust.

>It's possible the little girl has been in there for days.  Time strobes;
>time is periodic, it's a give and take; measured in drinks and smokes, in
>lines.  Time gets pretty weird for the little girl, but The Kid is so
>punctual, ready in time the way a wisecrack is ready in speech, she
>wonders if maybe she should have some of what he's smoking. She's kicking
>her booted feet against the barstool.   On her request, Ratz has dug out a
>decades-old jar of maraschino cherries and dumped some into her drink. 
>She likes the Christmasy combo of Red no.5 and absinthe, and decides
>she'll get used to the flavor.  It's nice for this little girl to be
>having fun.

"That's perfect."  The Kid said with a smile warping his stubbled
face. 

>> they may well be for subjugation.
>
>The little girl turns this one over.  Then she looks at herself, moonface
>and plastic coat, and she starts to laugh at this new idea.  "Subjugation,
>Mister? Of what? By whom? To what purpose?"   She understands the
>imperative of a conversation, but finds it deeply funny that The Kid, in
>all his years pushing shiny, would find hooks on her lines. After all,
>what does she know?

"What I'm talking about _little girl_," he said with a sardonic grin,
"is the place we're in now, this bar, the void outside littered with
words.  This was founded in the biggest power game yet, and then when
the foe crumbled under the weight of its future, it was given over to
a different process.  We are in little more than the playground of
little schoolboys being transformed into an engine to harvest the
human crop.  Subjagation of me, and you, to them.  This conversation
we're having now may be less tainted, but it certainly isn't free of
it.  But it's the same thing that makes our images different then the
flash-bulb shots of the shiny that makes this conversation distinct
from many that take place in here."

>"All the more precious," the little girl says, "because it all takes place
>via a kind of slip, a contact that you sort of have to trust, all by
>itself, with no guarantees.  Frinstance these words could come from a
>murdered person. Little echoes.  Happens to lots of little girls."  She
>crinkles up her face, and The Kid gives her a little shove on the barstool
>as if to say, Oh little tripping Ophelia, give it a rest.  By giggling,
>she gives it away; after all she is a drinking raincoat girl, not a
>drowned flower on someone's lapel.  

"But you'd still be alive, little princess chaos sitting on her
barroom throne."


>The little girl's drink is starting to smoke from the maraschino/absinthe
>collision. She knows the entire bar could fold up and disappear, after
>all, the mannequins are fond of gentrifying these places, "they're so
>authentic;" and other unforeseen forces could unravel the battered metal
>lip of the bar where her glass stands, spilling mad scientist bubbles. 
>The way the said of the chat watches the unsaid--and the unsaying--always
>at its back.  

There will always be places like this tho, on different wires,
cyberspace is still limitless, even if it is congested in some places. 

>"Subugation?" the little girl asks again.  She lifts one eyebrow up. 
>Hunting birds circle in the windowspace. She must admit, she always got
>confused in those games, like when you were playing on a playground, and
>someone was a Wizard, or a King; so you had to be very nice to them, but
>usually you were ritually dismembered anyway; and so she picks her way
>through rather carefully.  "Those relations prove toxic to the
>desiring-machine, they gum up its function, which is relational.  Dominate
>and submit is a stacking process; you make a connection in order to make a
>collection.  Being dominant _protects_ you; the dream is to touch without
>being touched."  She counts: one, two, three.  She drinks absinthe and
>maraschino and flops around hacking and gasping.  The Kid, for fun, gives
>her stool a twirl, and she falls off.  "Being submissive protects you too;
>nothing is ever your doing."  She grabs Nesta's sleeve and hoists herself
>back onto the stool.  

"Well that's why it's so addicting," The Kid replies smoke pouring
from his mouth with the words. "It's a fun game for a short time, then
you wear it out and it can't go anyplace else."

>   (Sometimes silence in cyberspace means someone's got the little girl
>working for worthy whether she will or no, which is why she gets sort of
>like a Ouija board you have to wait for, sometimes. Julia comes and goes;
>the little girl just keeps drinking her drink; you could think of her
>flimsy form, hunched over the bar, as a receiver, itself made of
>signals.)     

And The Kid keeps pulling on his square, both of them standing-reserve,
non-objects until used to reveal the yet unkown.



-- 
Nesta Stubbs                 "Betsy, can you find the Pentagon for me? 
Cynico Network Consulting     It has five sides and a big parking lot" 
nesta@cynico.com                        -Fred McMurray-