I.
Went to visit the old Prod. He has a place off-grid in the Far North. There are pigs in a muddy pen and the whole property teams with mutts and foul. Seven daughters all tall and blonde came out to wave and went back inside their cult of silence. When the sun went down through the pines, he took me to a shackled barn and showed me his invention. It hung from the ceiling by a chain, this spinning chair, with steely gauges and pins. ‘I call it The Hangover,’ he said, and stood there with his hands on hips, alight with admiration. ‘Makes you feel hungover?’ I asked. It was darkening quickly, and so did his face when I asked the question. ‘Doesn’t feel like a hangover!’ he snarled at me, his look like a kind of iron maiden. ‘it is a hangover!’ I tried to apologise, but it was so dark that rats were moving in the ashes and the hay scattered across the dirt floor. That’s when I saw Jessup. ‘The Hangover killed him,’ the old Prod declared. ‘It’s killing him again,’ he said, and he pointed at the contraption as it started to spin, like a wheel that turns to eclipse a star. All the winding clockwork spheres of the heavens seemed to be whirring wildly. From the black hole of Jessup’s head, a bright bile began to ooze, and he stopped turning round and round. Now, my All Father has arrived, you can feel his fiery presence just outside the barn, like a burning owl the size of constellations.
II.
My ex is a swimsuit model named Sara who got her big break selling her essence at Erina, Westfields. They’ve set up a shrine to her on the jetty near my house. It is wreathed by a fire that never goes out, and at night the whole lake shines like the shield of some gargantuan deity. To please her, I stay in the tent city by the water’s edge, praying with beads in a tongue only dead men apprehend. She is so sweet to me, with her tarot pack and her damper ash. ‘Is there anyone you want me to pray for?’ she asks, while we lie on wolf furs and her eyes are green and flecked with gold. ‘Well, no,’ I admit, but I confess to Googling her past, her Goth website with its indelicate implications was a wild encounter. Just then Sorensen bursts through the tent flaps, naked as a painted saint, mascara running like spider’s limbs down her pale jaw. She tosses a talisman onto my bare crotch and black magic hisses out like steam. ‘This is an invention,’ she says. ‘Like the engines of Ancient Antioch!’ Sara has been eaten alive by the black smoke Sorensen has summoned. ‘You service me now,’ she says, with a slight smile under her empty eyes.
III.
The professor has adopted a child with a potentially lethal form of autism. ‘It can unravel spinal formations at a hundred paces,’ he tells me, patting the child’s head as though it were some form of supercomputer. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to help,’ I pledge at once, concerned my own young children might fall afoul of this psychic warfare. A small helicopter appears just outside the professor’s window. ‘Is the child in charge of that?’ I ask. ‘Is he turning the propellors?’ I look too closely at the whirling blades. They are turning too quickly, a blurring takes place, so that all matter is impurified and reconstituted very abstractly and then the world opens up to the vast chasms of an intergalactic airport. A crowd of passengers is moving around me in suits and ties, handcuffed to briefcases with bumper stickers on them reading things like ‘Major Tom is Minor Stuff’, and ‘Three Cheers for King Crab’. Russell Crowe taps me on the shoulder, shakes my hand and says, ‘We all saw you on that viral clip being called whitey.’ His speech is slurred, and there’s a faint red wetness to his lips that makes a man nervous. ‘You ever meet me mate, Barnsey?’ he asks, and his eyes go wide. ‘Fuck me, look who it is!’ he laughs, and I turn to see Cara Delevigne, topless on a baggage carousel. ‘I have a plane to catch,’ I say by way of escape, and there we are, strapped into our seats and ready for take-off. Someone is counting down to launch. Crowe has his hands all over Cara in the seats beside me, pulling off her spacesuit, his red tongue hanging out of his mouth like a drunken thunderlizard. He’s not listening, but I tell him, ‘I’ve heard great things about Pan African Air.’ Over the speakers, the captain comes on to announce that he feels like coming back there to slap me. ‘I’d love to slap the shit out of you,’ he says. Crowe turns to me and says, ‘That’s your captain speaking, mate,’ and both he and Cara laugh so loud the wings of the shuttle begin to flap. Great wounds open up in the heart of the world, while we blast off into the furthest reaches of an empty universe, no earthly hope of ever coming home.
Typo in the first sentence! What a hack!