FILE "CUT AND RUN" 11OCT1994 [BENEATH]

 Cut and run, down in the trees where they cannot catch you no more. The mountains wide over you, the backbone of continents colliding, pressure building catastrophically. This is a dry land — burned land. The water is taken hundreds of miles away. Beneath it: a mythic underground, where all the leavings, the trash, the discards, the psyche of Another America are buried, seeping down into a surrealistic aqueduct. A hernia — bursting under pressure. Down there, the ghosts walk, and long forgotten spirits hold council and ruminate on the world above. There is a thin skin over all of it — linger too long and you’re likely to fall through, tip out of the established narrative and into the churn of a million co-opted tunnels, once built for a nuclear war that never game, subsequently made kaleidoscopic by supernatural interference, hidden lives carry on there now. The Land is Deep. It held so many stories that it burst downward, into the soil. The land is dry. Not enough water reaches down into the roots. Spider tunnels are starving out. Where can a ghost get a drink around here? Not here, move along, move along. Above ground, they draw water a little longer, but it is growing short. Time is growing short. The nights are growing long. Mademoiselle Mayonnaise legs is a ghost with legs that go all the way up, she leaves salty footprints the size of patrol cars. The night watch has chased her for days, but she stays always one step ahead. So tall, so fine. A flickering watchtower, the color of a drive-in movie screen, floats out of sight in the trees. Inside is a box. The night watch is primarily an organization of image, constant, meaningless surveillance, and quiet harassment. Anyone labelled an enemy is quietly harassed. The States have SOC units for other kinds of work. In the cities, militias are easily riled up. They are at war with their neighbors, so the borders are strictly guarded. There are walls upon walls. 

This is a lonely place. Maybe one of the loneliest in the States. The desert stretches for a long, long way out there. 

The planes stopped flying a long time ago. Safety hazard, they say. News stopped coming in from outside. Frayed rumors come in sometimes, but the world they describe is terrifying and unreal. The world outside This is mostly bullshit. But it’s hard to know for sure. 

The clouds flow by. New forms. Vapor pressed up by waves of rising air. Pressure. 

“God how I’d like to kiss you right now,” Casey writes on a napkin, and imagines pressing it into Petrov’s pocket. These are the kinds of small gestures you can survive while under investigation. You manage.

Please give me an episode, flashing across the TV screen, the kind of sitcom nonsense you’d expect to see — not just a fragment, unless I can work out fragments that aren’t the same thing over and over again — unless that’s something of the point — not climactic survival but the survival of day after day after day, but even Chekov has looming catastrophe stretched across the back of the canvas — the sale of the estate, usually. Who’s buying tonight?