Allan's walk (d.)

More electronic bleeps are heard. Allan can see wires and for a moment it looks like how his father sometimes configures his basement, with wires from all over the West Bluff snaking down to a bolted door in the sub ground level of Casa McReynolds with Warren chain smoking, guzzling infinite pots of java and devising things and solving mathematical quandaries that have stumped aging Aristotles for centuries past.

 

He treads past more bleeps, femur thick tangles of wire arranged in stalks akin to thin bouquets of bamboo. Perhaps this is the semi-nuclear facilitator room Allan overheard Patrick talking about filling with fireworks and then watching the whole of CLS rise over the horizon like a grainy Mario shroom levitating above the bluff.

 

There is what looks like a scoreboard in a giant arena hanging overhead with more extensions than medusa blinking pixilated cycloptic screens, about fifty or sixty or so on each side, each in black and white and each screen appears to be broadcasting a different image. What fascinates Allan about the screens is that every square seems to have a picture of his brother on it, or at least someone who looks like him. The screen’s fizz and bleep like early morning cable. On one screen Allan’s brother appears to be wearing a baseball cap with some sort of Mickey’s Ice Hornet attached to the front of it and he is in some remote villa in either Spain or perhaps France or somewhere like that and it is evening and Patrick is sweating plops of perspiration the size of rosary beads and he is breathing into some tanned, slightly Olive-skinnned girls’ lips, the girl, appears to be unconscious and it is apparently Patrick’s duty to awaken her into the onset of what reality really is. The girl’s limps flail up and down in a limp backstroke motion , wailing something up and down, screaming silence into her face. A giant MUTE bubble is flashing in the lower corner of each of the screens, occluding Alan from hearing anything. Another box shows the same character holding something in his hand, dandling it so to speak, smiling back at it.  There is another electronic box which shows what he is almost definitely sure is his brother sitting in Doctor Kennedy Marshal’s classroom, looking into a separate overhead screen. Another box shows Patrick seated at the table with people who look very much like Marcellus Buck and Aron Bowman and Allan cannot possibly discern why his brother would ever considering doing that in the first place.

 

Perhaps this is all reality really is, Allan thinks. Maybe this is all reality really is.