And suddenly the video and audio smash back in. There is a jumble of flashes and cries just slow enough to follow, each scene shown from infinite angles, the echo of each voice overlapping the next. There is no coherent narrative, no story, no time sequence. There is only an illusion of time. There is a city on fire. There is a boat in the storm. There are protesters lying prone, and cops stomping their heads. There are airborne gas canisters and a masked girl with a baseball bat. There are families on the dinghy and a man at the tiller. She whacks the tear gas back over the lines and it falls through a tank’s hatch. She whacks a cop’s skull and the bloodied teeth hail on a riot shield. He steers the dinghy over a twelve-feet wave, and they don’t capsize. There’s a hobo in a public library. There are children in a stage play. The hobo’s reading Aristotle. The kids are not in school. They’re dressed as princesses and knights and laughing their asses off along with the audience. There is an old lady planting flowers in a pot; her house stands on stilts in the river. There is a girl masturbating in her bed, to nothing in particular. There is a flannel blanket; a golden toad on the window sill. There is a Chinese man in a raincoat letting go of the bicycle his son is riding. There are two blonde girls in shorts shooting photos of each other. There are daisies brushing their waists. There is a lighthouse in the background. There is a girl in hijab sitting in lotus, chatting on her phone, her smile lighting up the room. There’s a parrot saying hola in an empty lobby with celeste wallpaper. There’s a two-hundred-fifty-pound man in a locker room, astraddle a bench. There’s blood on his boxing gloves and his eyebrow. He’s sobbing. There are three corpses sitting in barber chairs. The interrogator is washing his hands. He turns from the basin to fold up his knife roll; there is a blade missing. He turns again, and now there’s a corpse missing (but not for long). There’s somebody in goggles and scarf, not an inch of skin exposed, walking through brutalist ruins to the cheers of citizens in the windows. There is a white-haired Black man slamming a domino on the table, and the onlookers go insane. There is a maid in a golden palace. There is a slob writing code in a hazy basement. There is a battle in a desert village. There is a toddler reaching for the stars above their crib. There is a Taliban firing an RPG from a minaret. There is a tear on the eye of a mannequin. There is a white woman catching the missile in midair. There is a short-haired girl in dungarees drinking beer. The white woman hurls the missile back at the assailants; bodies torn apart, bone shrapnel flies into Foxtrot’s face.
[Excerpt from Foxtrot/November — a sequel to The Supernatural Enhancements (unpublished).]