Author: Adam Ragg

Side C – don’t mind people grinning in your face…

communique transcript – agent #11255465 smith, a – 31/01/2014
f.a.o. handler ix; re. subject behaviour/possible intervention

dan,
as discussed, I followed the subject on the day in question and have a detailed report of his movements and interactions – find it attached below. however, during the course of my investigation I became concerned the subject was alerted to my presence and had to make additional efforts to blend in with the crowd. at one point I’m pretty sure he looked right at me, but I broke eye contact immediately and circled away.
based on my observations, I think that the presence of an outside threat – as I no doubt would have appeared to him – might cause the subject to react in a potentially unpredictable, possibly dangerous manner. at one point I’m sure he deliberately went into a supermarket, circled the aisles a few times and then left – what would you call that except the actions of a paranoid man on the verge of a psychotic break? what is my authorisation in the event that I get made and the subject confronts me? am I allowed to subdue him – for his own safety as much as my own?
also – and I’m aware that in my position this comes off as paranoid in the extreme – but I’m beginning to think that I myself am being followed. at least twice on my rounds I’ve observed a man with blond hair, a wide-brimmed hat, a white leisure suit and spats tailing me from about a block away. when I likewise tried to lose him in a supermarket – a method that turns out isn’t that efficient – he followed and pretended to shop. keeping my distance, I got the impression he was enjoying himself; he kept humming this really catchy song I couldn’t immediately recognise, but I’ve since realised what it was – “hush” by deep purple. that song has been haunting me ever since the incident.
I like to think I’m not asking for much, dan, but this whole [expletive deleted]-up scenario is really bugging me out. I’m really worried I may be compromised.

axs

p.s. do I have to keep taking these pills? I haven’t slept in two weeks and I swear to [expletive deleted]ing god my laptop has started talking to me. I’m having a bit of a shocker.

interdepartmental memo – dan [expletive deleted], hammerspace corporation
response to 31/01/2014 report – f.a.o. agent smith

okay, hold fire, smithy. this is no time to go squirrelly on us. this may be your first time in the field, but I’ve seen many agents over the years go completely [expletive deleted]ing bug-[expletive deleted] because they started getting too close to the mark and the mark’s bad juju started rubbing off on them. this guy you’re following is in all likelihood a high-level dope fiend, as well as a practitioner of arcane sex magick, so any attempt you make to reason with him will likely result in your death, mutilation and forced skull-rape – in that order, if you’re lucky. so do yourself a favour – follow your directives, keep your distance and don’t get made.
as for the other thing – look, you come from the big city. you’ve never had a creepy guy come onto you before? he’s probably just lonely – guy clearly has an interest in you, no accounting for taste. either that or he’s an interzone agent testing for weaknesses in our operation – either way, it will be dealt with. you’re just feeling paranoid because you’re not taking enough of those pills. do not – repeat not – stop taking the pills. you will only ensure that you end up experiencing more and more intense hallucinations, followed by crippling anxiety, nausea, palpitations, cold sweat, gastric disturbance, nosebleeds, priapism and eventually death. trust me, you’re better off just taking the pills – what’s a little mental confusion between friends after all?
Seriously though, whatever you do, do not stop taking the [expletive deleted]ing pills. if anything, I should requisition more for you. I personally take two every three hours – I’ve not slept since the challenger disaster and I feel [expletive deleted]ing amazing. hammerspace has given us this great bounty and we will show our love for her by doing our job every day of our drug-addled, goat-[expletive deleted]ing, quantum terrorist-fighting lives.

all hail hammerspace!

dan [expletive deleted], section chief, hammerspace corporation

p.s. quit blinking – that’s when they get you.

communique transcript – agent #11255465 smith, a – 07/03/2014
f.a.o. handler ix; re. possible propaganda action by subject

dan,

during a routine sweep of the library, I found subject [redacted] photocopying what appeared to be work-related documents. however by sidling past him I was able to swipe one of the copies. they appear to be photocopies of a crudely made pamphlet – possibly in support of interzone. I’ve reproduced the text of the document below verbatim for your review.

axs

p.s. is it also normal for my teeth to be falling out?

an interzone manifesto

“let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” – douglas adams
“nothing is true, everything is permitted.” hassan-I sabbah
death. life. time. the slow but inexorable crawl towards the long black limousine and the wooden box.
in a closed system, entropy is inevitable and constant growth is unsustainable. fossil fuels will not last forever, our pursuit of cosmetic beauty is futile. prices will always rise, politicians will never be trustworthy, that fad diet will not prevent you from dying, most likely fat, ugly and unloved.
things we are told we have no control over.
we are interzone. we say different.
watch for our sign.

we the undersigned recognise the authority of interzone. long may it live. nothing is real, everything is permitted.

viva interzone!

jack yeovil, peter van houten, kilgore trout, sal paradise, william lee, stephen dedalus

interdepartmental memo – dan [expletive deleted], hammerspace corporation
response to 07/03/2014 report – f.a.o. agent smith

smith you devious little snotrag, stop reproducing enemy material in your free time – the last thing we need is one of our agents – one with an already weak grasp on the rigours of internal security – reproducing interzone propaganda designed specifically with the brainwashing and conversion of hammerspace operatives into interzone sleeper agents in mind. in future just throw the thing away.

and yes, losing your teeth is normal, [expletive deleted]-for-brains. fret not, though. I will happily knock all your remaining teeth out for nothing and give you genuine false ones if I ever find out you get within thirty feet of your target again. triple your dosage, you lizard-[expletive deleted]ing sissy – it’ll keep you sharp. hammerspace has the best drugs, because they love us and we love them. and start smoking – all my assets smoke. I personally smoke at least fifty cigarettes and a dozen cigars before dinner. and dinner is meat. raw meat. the cook serves me an entire live animal and I tear off the bits I want and eat them, and then I have the rest buried. in north hykeham. for hammerspace.

all hail hammerspace!

dan [expletive deleted], section chief, hammerspace corporation

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?”

“Nah I had to go relieve myself.”

After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.”

After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. That’s one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

On the instruction of my handler Dan [expletive deleted], I took an expedition out into the library today. It had been a week or two since my previous jaunt and he had suggested, rightly, that if I was to fully grasp the resonances, facets and character of the building, it might do to actually walk about in it for a while, as the flâneurs of old did along the streets of Paris or Berlin or Tangiers or Amsterdam or whatever, doing and thinking nothing in particular, and, like Lao Tsu’s good traveller, having no fixed destination nor any strong desire to arrive at one.

Leaving Room 111, I stared up at the atrium for a moment, briefly entranced by the merging of the old warehouse brickwork with the smooth taupe plastering of the modern extensions, the long wide glass windows, the clean lines of the balustrade. I tried to picture both buildings at once, old and new, original and rebuilt, out of sync with each other. What might that look like? If you lined the two up next to or on top of each other, would the ghosts of Edwardian stevedores wander through the bookshelves or the computer tables whilst students chat online and stress over their dissertations? Would our students appear to them as bizarre holograms intruding into their world whilst blithely ignorant of the cross-temporal disturbance they were causing those simpler folk of but a century past? Would the people of 1914 have any conception that one day this building would be a library to thousands of eager young minds, any more than we can conceive of it being a former storage warehouse today?

As I reach the end of the computer bays, I see a doorway to my left that I’ve never been through before. Instinct tells me to open it. I pass through one set of double doors, and then another, before entering another stairwell. This is what academics might call a liminal space, a transitional zone where opportunities emerge; entrances and exits, quick escape routes and roads to nowhere. Limbo. I’d only ever seen the charcoal black and eggshell beige stairwell from the outside, encased on the outside by floor-to-rafters glass windows. Looking at it now made me feel like I was halfway-up a stairway to some parallel library dimension, like the stacked-up library universes of Borge’s Library of Babel.

“A day will come,” I thought to myself, “maybe sooner, maybe later, when I climb these stairs. But this is not that day.” I turned and went back the way I’d  come, circling past the Zibby Garnett room, with its detailed description of when and how it was permitted to be accessed by the lowly commoners. I made a mental note to investigate at a later time. Right now I was onto something.

At the entrance to the atrium, I had a second thought and doubled back to one of the touchscreen computers, ran a search for Burroughs, William and Sinclair, Iain separately. I got two hits back that were what I was interested in:-

• 813.54bur, Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs.
• 914.210486sin, London Orbital, by Iain Sinclair

With renewed purpose I set off to locate my quarry – it seemed like a reasonable thing to do; libraries are, after all, designed with ease of location in mind. I took the stairs up to the second floor passing a girl in a red wool beret and a Parisian woollen overcoat on the stairs. For a moment it was like I was Burroughs or Sinclair, experiencing things out of space and time, like I’d skipped or knocked the needle in the time-track on the record player of the universe. Having located my books exactly where they ought to have been, I wandered upstairs to the third floor, where a shifty looking man was looking out of the small porthole-like window with a phone in his hand. Seeing me, he stopped and shuffled away avoiding eye contact.

On arrival at the third floor, I took the far-right edge of the room, scanning the signs on each column of bookshelves until I reached the column marked “Local History” and noted its relative location in my mental catalogue, but continued onward a few columns more until I randomly stopped next to the one for “Oversized Books”, many of them art books. Turning to the nearest shelf – on my left, at hand level – I instinctively reached for the first book that came to hand, The Artist is Present, by Marina Abramović, a photographic and textual record of her work in experimental performance art. No sooner had I done this but I noticed that next to it on a bare patch of shelf, lying flat and spread out directly in my field of vision, was a book by two performance artists my wife had described to me apropos of nothing less than a week before. It was The Cosmological Pictures by Gilbert and George, and for a moment I felt very strange.

Was it coincidence? Perhaps, but then perhaps not. I’d not sought out the Abramović book either, with its images of her Balkan Erotic Epic or the mound of beef femurs, but I’d picked it up anyway; in that case, though, there was a sense of agency, of exploration – I had chosen to stop just where I had done, and picked that book out with both eyes open. But no, this was different – this was an intervention of a different stripe, like I was being directed by external forces beyond my ken. It was as if the library itself was trying to communicate with me on some level beyond ordinary human consciousness – as if the animus, the soul of the library itself, knew I wanted to find this book, even without me having asked for, thought of or even known about it, and now it was offering it to me, as any good friend might. Of course, I picked it right up and added it to my slowly growing pile of hunting trophies. How could I refuse such a gift, after all?

I didn’t loiter long on the third floor after that. The rustle and rattle of pens and bags was like the rattle of bleached rib-bones and the fluttering of funerary vestments – it hung in the air and made me feel ill at ease. I saw someone I thought might be a Russian student I knew, but then remembered that he was not a student but a man I’d once worked with back in Birmingham, dismantling and shredding computers. I recall his name was Andre, and while we were still there he had returned to Mother Russia briefly to vote. I never found out whether he stayed here after I got let go. My own ghosts where blurring into this version of relatity, the past collapsing into now. I hurried past a poster for the Law Ball and took the lift back to Room 111.

Back in the relative safety and obscurity of the classroom, I dug out the copy of Naked Lunch. I read the first couple of pages and found myself enjoying it in spite of the trouble that The Ticket That Exploded had given me. On a punt, I skipped ahead to page 110, and found that I had come across the famous story of the man who taught his arsehole to talk as a ventriloquist act before it eventually gained sentience and started to usurp control of the man’s body. “It is you who will shut up in the end, not me”, the arsehole told the man, “because we don’t need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit.”

I often use this guided meditation recording to help me sleep and to help me focus my mind. It’s also a recording I’m using as a potential template for my own usage in the project at a later date. Have a listen, and consider the process of breathing…

 

Per Wikipedia…

“Located in the Great Cental Warehouse (“GCW”) building, a renovated former industrial railway goods warehouse, the University Libray was opened in December 2004 on the Brayford campus. In total, the university’s libraies house more than a third of a million items.[26]
The GCW was constructed in 1907 by the Great Cental Railway. It spent the second half of the twentieth century as a builder’s warehouse before falling into disrepair in 1998. It was converted into a libray (designed by the University’s in-house team of architects) and was formally opened in 2004 by the chief executive of the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.
In 2005, the conversion won gold and silver for conservation and regeneration at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Regional Awards in Leicester.[27] It has also gained awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).[28]”

At no time during that period did anyone mention the glaring eror that resulted from the sign-writer’s irational fear of writing words with more than one letter R in them.