“Man, the weirdest thing happened to me this afternoon,” Ruod says as we pull weeds.

“Weird in a good way?” I ask, wiping sweat from my brow with my sleeve.

“Strangely enough, I think so. But tell me what you think,” he says, then launches into his recount of this thing.

“So I was walking down the street by the water treatment facility,” he begins. “When out of nowhere this lady suddenly confronts me. She’s masked with a bandana and wearing something like ski goggles, demanding in a low, assertive voice that I open my mind. ‘Open it, now,’ she was practically hissing at me. Continue reading →

My cousin comes to visit me during her mandatory vacation this season. I pick her up from the local train station after her overnight train ride through the vast expanses of prairies and forests between where we grew up and where I live now. Carrying her luggage, I walk beside her at a pace that matches hers, one noticeably slower than those of the passersby on this bustling urban street; her strides are unhurried by the fatigue of travel and the flow of life where she’s come from, this gait fitting for the cool air and warm sun about us.

“Wow, it’s really spacious here,” she says as we enter my apartment.

“Yeah, you’ll even have your own bedroom while you’re here,” I tell her, leading the way down the short hallway to the music/guest room.

“Fantastic! I thought I’d be sleeping on a sofa,” she says as we enter the room. “Nice, there’s a zonkoriaphone too,” she observes, pointing to the instrument sitting on its stand. “I can practice.”

“Yeah, I had to have mine shipped over. They cost a modest fortune here,” I tell her placing her luggage by the door, then suggest, “So, shall we eat something?”

“Sure. I slept through the breakfast service on the train.”

“Okay, I’ll get something ready.”

I head to the kitchen to prepare a simple brunch, and she goes into the artroom to freshen up.

As I’m slicing bread, she asks from down the hallway, “Why is the poetry pressure so low in this place?” Continue reading →

“So if someone is about to do something destructive or hurtful to you or someone around you or even to his or her self,” I explain, holding up the little spritzing bottle. “You spray this empathy dispersion on that person. In particulate form, the empathy readily permeates the psyche, inducing a change of heart. The person you’ve just sprayed will then readily relate to whoever was going to get hurt and reconsider. Even if some malice has already been inflicted, the spray can still be effective because once sprayed, the wrongdoer will identify with the wronged party, and thus, the wrongdoer will be moved to change his or her behavior.”

Jozine smiles and says jovially, “Great! So when can we put this into production?”

“That’s the problem. You can’t produce empathy. Not with existing technology. You can only cultivate it.” Continue reading →

“Man, go easy on the self-loathing,” I tell Jozine as she swills the potent stuff.

We’re sitting on the stools by her little kitchen counter. Before I knew it, she busted out some of her intense, home-brewed stuff. I know she can stomach it, but it’s still tough on the psyche.

“Force of habit,” she says once she’s gulped down a heavy dose. “An easy answer to my problems.”

“Yeah, if by ‘answer’ you mean explanation and not solution.”

“Solutions can start with explanations,” she rebuts all too blithely. Continue reading →

When I return to my desk after lunch, I find a message from Jozine asking me to meet with her in the afternoon, at her lab. That can only mean I’m about to have a lot more work on my hands.

As I head to her lab deep in the Self Destruction division, the facilities and personnel I pass once again engender a keen, awkward alienation. All the equipment I glimpse through open doors and wide windows or see sitting in the long, metallic corridors, I know what their functions are (I have to for my work) but have operated very few of them directly. Many are precisely and devastatingly powerful. Continue reading →

“Dude,” I exclaim the moment I see him walk into the warmup area. “You’re looking all febrile.”

Concerned by his flushed appearance, I start to wonder if Ruod is in any condition to be exercising.

“Yeah, it’s all the love I’ve been handling,” he says nonchalantly, setting down his bag of workout gear on the studio floor, by the wall closest to us.

“Oh, okay. Nothing like that particular emotion to make you feverish,” I remark, relieved.

“Definitely.”

“So what’s with all the exposure to love?” I ask, knowing that he hasn’t exactly been drowning in the powerful stuff for a while now. Continue reading →

These days, it greatly behooves one to be an expert player of the blame game because it is so often played, no longer exclusively by pros, but by novices, amateurs and aficionados alike who engage in the often high-stakes dodging of responsibility for fault and pinning it on others. Whenever the assignment of accountability for wrongdoing or failure comes into question, no matter how slightly, you’d better be ready to play a match or a set or a tournament—whatever it takes to win. And by win I of course mean come out bearing as little liability as possible. Continue reading →

V.

After completing my next shift at the mill, I casually amble over to that spout, and once I’ve made sure there’s no one around, I pull a small gob of deposited crude freedom off the spout. I quickly pocket it and hastily head out. I bicycle to a region of the riverbank seldom frequented by my fellow townsfolk. Being close by, the place doesn’t take long to reach. I unmount my bicycle, and standing there in solitude by the languid currents, beneath an overcast sky, I remove the small clump of crude freedom from my pocket. I take a deep breath. Continue reading →

I.

Overindulging in the exhilaration it affords, Jozine becomes addicted to crude freedom, the raw, unrefined stuff of individual independence containing a concentrated overabundance of freedoms-to—in some cases even the freedom to impose on other people’s freedom. Coarse and untempered, this kind of freedom is intoxicating with the sheer intensity of emancipation it renders and toxic with its suppression of empathy. With her, I have tried this liberty-altering substance on a few occasions (in limited extents) and all too rapidly became enthralled in heady moments of utter disinhibition, stunning unrestriction and startlingly amplified agency. My perceptions of causation were transmogrified radically, and exciting possibilities abounded; it was as if I could see and, if desired, act upon a range of choices previously indiscernible—those that had seemed ordinarily hidden in the interstices of readily apparent choices but were suddenly all at once billowing out into the forefront of my awareness. Essentially, my volition was dramatically expanded. The episodes of empowerment were immediately so engrossing and intuitively familiar but retrospectively frightening and completely alien.

Unlike me, Jozine quickly lost any vestige of the fear and inquietude crude freedom initially left her with and rapidly began to crave the substance. Continue reading →