I tune into the vault where I deposited daddy's cenotaph. Amidst the dead march's trills is suffused a tasteful air of Juliet's tomb. I pay the monthly renewal; the votives incense the air anew with a fine metallic tang like the stoic aeruginous locks on the Pont des Arts. Through the shaded screen of night mode the blue flames quiver yellow, pulsing yolks.
His stone suffers some miscellaneous testimonies of life. I ballast my restive hands to wave my obsequies with appropriate weight. I slide up the sponsoring company's crest of two keys in saltire with a flick, revealing ranks of windows that each bear a video retrieved from ditty archives. Scrolling through deathbed, seabed, fatherbed, groombed, lovebed, boybed, and birthbed, I open a video of my sixth birthday. He stands beside me in blue. A smilet adorns his face. My doll eyes regard his sphingine face as he bids me blow out the candles. How like Alonso he looked when he was slung limp like a cheap novel onto the stretcher!
I exit via other tabs of history. Tomorrow I'll sell the data from today's visit and receive spare change on a salver to tide me another day. Grave man. Fee-fi-fo-fum.
Abed the cold and drowsy humour of sleep runs through my veins. Through the chequered noise of night a dove-down mattress wafts into view, buoyed on a myrtle sea, escorted by twin doves. The brand ambassador, sharp on the mattress like on a burnished throne, brandishes a golden bough imploring my full attention. She tells me to forget all dolours, for sleep has just gotten better with the Amor Mattress. Then insists on it. It bears me up not very motherly. A melodious lay she calls it. I think of Ophelia. I press her on the price; she instructs me to relax. Whiskey: water of life, a wine-dark sea. I see Ulysses on the shore cradled by the nymph. Towards the shaded trace of Ithaca he sends his suitor gaze. If in her cave grew a lotus— The price? She relents. I perform consideration but eventually turn her down. She sighs and with a histrionic flourish takes her leave through a door of ivory. Somehow, I feel cheated.
In what matutinal activity did he partake upon waking?
The ritual ablution of his countenance through the supernumerary transfer of desalinated Adam's ale from the tap to regions primarily ocular or auricular via a basin resembling a calyx formed by adjoined cupped palms, and twice punctuated by consultations of his self-image in the wall-mounted smart mirror ($11.60, frame exhibits patches of verdigris).
What were his respective reactions on the two occasions?
During the first: prolonged expirations succeeded by the effacement of his self-image via a dextrosinistral swiping of the default window then displayed on said smart mirror to a secure PayPal webpage through which he transacted the data of the day prior and, thereupon, via another dextrosinistral swipe of like magnitude, to an end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp channel with his sometime inamorata through which he transmitted a text message requesting to meet at twelve noon on the eleventh virtual reality channel, ere returning via two sinistrodextral swipes to the default window. During the second: a realisation of the imminent expiry of certain victuals expressed via ejaculation of the plural noun ‘eggs'.
What actions did he pursue in the furtherance of this epiphany?
The mechanical preparation of an unspiced omelette on an induction stove ($113.00, two-year-warranty) in strict accordance to a two-person recipe prescribed in Saturn's Guide to Cooking for Kids (hardback, first printing), deviating only in the boustrophedontic threading of Heinz tomato ketchup; the sequent consumption of said omelette through the anterior orifice without mastication.
Let prior responses be premises. Through supplying implicit premises to all enthymemes, for what products do opportunities for commercial promotion necessarily arise as conclusions from the premises aforestated?
An inhaler; a new smart mirror; an AI text message completion service; lab-grown forever-fresh eggs; flash-frozen omelettes; Saturn's Guide to Cooking 4+1 Kids (deluxe e-edition with interactive video tutorials); a new set of teeth (perchance also gums).
During her lunch break, we meet as arranged on channel eleven. She is the eldest of nine and ten years my senior but the air is tepid and before I can think of thinking we are absorbed into the peristaltic crowd. We make meek waves at Meta, Madame Tussauds, Shaw Theatres, and a caffeinated Ronald McDonald who impregnates the air with the doctrine of love and a whiff of Coca-Cola. She asks if I've published anything new. I tell her to find a publisher who'll still pay a human. She guides her hair over the arch of her ear; the sable shows off a cygnet ring of beaten gold. Pretty pricey. She gives me her hand in an offhand manner, her ring finger humped like a bridge. I tell her it's nice that's all, suits her well I guess. Practised grin.
An acned girl, a child of Marx and Mattel, waits with studied indifference before a shopfront mannequin. A mortified shade, poor Tom of Bedlam, phasing in and out, jitters his voice to transpontine songs. A teller crumpling a spoilt racing tissue vaults up her heart in the inflamed smile of a consumptive. A cantering spirits sandwich man chants iambic dithyrambs. A real estate agent to her calibrated gait sways her red-lined hair, a metronome's rust-encrusted needle. A stripling calls the billboards servile ministers. A man with a misjudged combover parades his rented Galatea. We pass by a display of cots and I pretend not to notice.
She asks about yesterday. I say it went great. She asks what I did. I say nothing. I ask how the language model's coming along. She says the final tests ran smoothly yesterday; the public demonstration is tomorrow. I ask what the demonstration will be. She prevaricates but, as we approach the blind end, says they'll have it write Bottom's Dream. She gestures to go back, turns on her heel, looks at me with a tight-lipped smile. A taut silence throbs between us. I hear clipped wings parting air from air. Let us go and contemplate the weather.
By the pier, the line breaks up. Snow gathers in the shadows, excises the reflections, chokes out the skies, and obliterates the faces of those now abstracted figures who limp in frozen motion. The disembodied sounds of her words gap the static noise then dissolve to join the tundral world. I think of Ophelia beneath the liquid veil chanting snatches of old tunes as the shivering spangles of day discandy, flake by sparkling flake. Then a pop-up tells me the line is restored.
That night I sell all data from my many walks with her and buy the Amor Mattress on instalment. Abed a cold and drowsy humour runs through my veins and in my hidden cave of a full five fathoms to the echoes of siren song, I shall await Circe who, with another gilded bough now in motley-flowered bloom, will arrive through thin mist like the shade of Anticlea from the vast reaches of the dead.