The sky is streaked red and yellow, the colors of blood and urine. Dirty, gray clouds, the color of broken asphalt, hover silent and somber over endless miles of broken asphalt the color of dirty gray clouds. I scratch at my amygdala with a Popsicle stick, but there’s nothing but numbness. I poke at my hippocampus with a toothpick, and stab at my prefrontal lobes with a yakitori skewer, and find nothing but empty space. Wherever I prod at my brain, like I would a bad tooth with my tongue, I find dead, numbing nothingness. Everything above the brainstem has been truncated, and locked away in packing peanuts for safekeeping. Like the dirty clouds over the miles of broken asphalt, I hover over myself, silent and somber, blinking into the blood- and urine-streaked sky.
Blinking against the wind and the sun and the dust from all the fires since the dawn of time, I amble somnambulantly, leaning against objects when I can, to compensate for my lack of equilibrium. The world sits on a turtle. It wobbles there precariously, tipping first to one side then the other, rolling forward then back, but never quite falling off the turtle’s back. The turtle occasionally shifts its weight or shuffles from side to side, looking for a comfortable position in which to support the weight of the world. Below it, other turtles hold it up in turn, and also shift occasionally in the listless way that turtles have of shifting, first listing left, then listing right in a cosmic, eternal dance of near toppling balance. Below the turtles there are more turtles. "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
Sandpipers run up and down the water’s edge with every swell, but what will the sandpipers do now the oceans have all boiled away? My eyes sting from my own salt water, and also from the sand kicked up from the vast wastelands of the dried up seas. Sandpiper bones skitter and skate across the ground, ringing like wind chimes, building up in mounds in the dark corners of darker alleys. Decaying plutonium quietly sets the rhythm of my inner clock. The darkening sky turns from blood and urine to ink and charcoal. Buildings splinter the sky into jagged black glass, smoky and translucent, absorbing warmth, and reflecting back only ghostly luminosity.
Far away, like in the dark reflection of a distant mirror, it’s time to take the saddle. Astride a bike, vague shapes are still vague, and sharp contrasts stay sharp. There is nothing there that wasn’t there before. The turtles quiver, and the world adjusts accordingly. Nonsensical things stay nonsensical. A platypus and a platitude do not become interchangeable on a bike, “but this is a pleasant place for a ride.” And the endless miles of broken asphalt slowly start to fall away behind the slowly turning wheels. Track marks are the only trace of passage in the inexorable trundle forward through concrete crags and potholed asphalt canyons. Push forward across a minefield of brittle sandpiper bones, and broken beer bottles. The music of plutonium and green bottle flies reverberates off the poison-gas-colored windows along the way.
I see the pedals orbiting like planets, wheels within wheels. They move of their own volition. I see the blur of spokes, made almost invisible by the speed of their motion. The broken asphalt stays broken but continues to fall away. Everywhere I look there are planes and circles and lines, spheres and cylinders, cones and tori, polytopes of every description. But there are no points. Everywhere I look, the world around me is pointless – except for the vanishing point, the convergence of lines on the horizon that stays ever distant no matter how far I pedal across this sea of broken asphalt.
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