I.

(Arm and Neck in a bar; on stools; there's a bartender prop, a red-faced
Teddy Kennedy look-alike w/ a speaker behind his head that plays an
occasional laughing box guffaw; static like the sound of several tv's
and conversational hubub drones in the background and at irregular
intervals cuts out dramatically, then builds again slowly; a window to
the right of the bar is dark, indicating night; behind it is a squiggled
piece of neon tubing that occasionally lights, indicating a storm; when
the conversation and hubub shut off, light tapping sound of falling rain
should be audible, plus an occasional thurderclap. On the other side of
the bar is a blackboard. Arm and Neck are pouring over a dossier of
papers.)

Arm: I'm saying there's no intrinsic limit to a theme, Neck. A theme
is surface.

Neck: Right. And there aren't limits to the surface, is that right Arm?

Arm: Exactly right. So let's see if we can piece this together.

Neck: Yes, let's.

Arm: Suspect, feeling a little randy, decides to cruise the local shopping
mall on a feigned present hunt. Passes out in a Friendly's. We believe
the fainting was faked although the Scooper said the suspect bloodied
his head pretty bad when he whacked the floor.

Neck: That's right, he did.

Arm: He said a tallish, attractive well-dressed woman in a Burberry's
rain coat drinking a Fribble came by and offerred him a xanax and a
kotex for his head. They left together. He seemed dazed. Next day she
takes a flight to San Francisco. He's not listed as being on board, but
she was seen at the airport Toastee with a guy bearing a likeness to
the suspect. Plus we haven't been able to locate a passenger named,
um [reads from a yellow legal sheet], Ziegfried Clavicle. That afternoon
the suspect's wife learns he's cashed in some bonds, emptied the bank
account, sold the car and hasn't been heard from since. Any other
background?

Neck: His wife said he was in the midst of a program to remember
dreams. Hence the randiness. It was hard for him to remember dreams,
she said, because he quote slept like an unplugged robot and woke up like
a discarded placenta unquote.

Arm: I never remember my dreams unless I wake up at 3 a.m. They're
not all that interesting, but I too log what I can remember. Other than
reams of spontaneous autonomic verse this seems like the best way to
smash to unthought realms(X) and the less normative frontier(f). You
know, the proprietary wiring. I believe this is because [goes to the
blackboard and writes as he says:] dp=f(X) dX.

Neck: Mmm. [Arm resumes sitting] Now the wife's name is Donna
Duffy. This is her third marriage.

Arm: That's right. It's weird. She's a very blue collar girl but I know
from reliable gossip that in her previous marriage she practiced S/M
techniques to keep her marriage alive as long as she did. This kind of
surprises me. I think of S/M as a step in a somewhat dubious
intellectualized pursuit of expanding the pleasure simulation domain
through the breakdown of the received categories of pleasure vs. pain.
Which wouldn't account for Donna Duffy. Don't you agree?

Neck: It's not an ego formation. It's Bio-power acting up. And note the
suspect seems to have written reams of spontaneous autonomic verse.
Got me?

Arm: Exactly. And it appears they started up their thing at her 10 year
Valley High class reunion last year. He came as a tag-along with a
friend from work. Guy named Bert Crenca. His first marriage had also
just splattered. Two randy divorce cases. This is full of suspense.

Neck: This is scary. And not too easy to follow.

Arm: Now according to her affadavit he was working on a long concept
piece of musical theater entitled "John Yetman's Nation". He called it a
narcissistic celebration of pure Being, destroyer of dualisms. For
example, subject/object or....

Neck:  I know: pleasure and pain. Right?

Arm: Yes. That's right, Neck.

Neck: Damn. I should have seen that coming.

Arm: I've read the text, actually, though it isn't in here. It's basically a
non-Freudian, non-interpretive, unallusive, post-rational muddle starring
the suspect's free reigning imagination w/in a context of savored pure
boredom. The text is an exerpted result from a related project to smash
his consciousness with Remembered Dreams and autonomic poetry.

Neck: The usual thing.

Arm: What? Oh, yes, the usual thing. I see what you mean. Well, the
Music he described as "Donna Duffy Rock" or quote "an attempt at an
anti-celebration of Me: unambitious and comfortably bored repetitions
underpinning a pile of highly personalized grating perseverance pop and
the occasional aleatory surprise. You'll probably hate it, d-d-dearest D-
D-Donna D-D-Duffy." unquote.

Neck: That's quite sad, Arm. Despite the suspense.

II

(California - sitting in a 50s looking bar; each with a full martini glass;
Arm drinks both of them, orders two more; Neck eats the olives;)

Arm: This investigation is making me randy.

Neck:  Ego maintenance is a priority out here. so in spite of the civilized
facade people generally have overinflated opinions of their universal
standing, which requires adjustment of some management techniques
at the very least.

Arm:  Neck, I have something to tell you.

Neck: There's little sense of the grace in merely having a job, food on
the table, a roof over one's head. This seems to be considered a
birthright by Californians. Needless to say, the valley boom isn't helping.
May I call you Mike?

Arm:  Neck, I have something to tell you.

Neck: Let me be clearer with respect to the preceding generalization
regarding Californians. Sartre has a concept of "finitude" which I find
useful. It's different than "mortality". Mortality is death, and as a
philosophical matter how that eventuality relates to being alive.
"Finitude" as a concept bears on questions of possibility; As one moves
temporally one asserts in the horror of the present that reality as
against all other possibilities. In an absolute sense. As far as we can
tell. Now Sartre tried to conjure up a kind of ethics of responsibility
from concepts like this. It's kind of the other side of unbounded
freedom maybe. I suppose he failed. Point is most people, Donna Duffy
for example, don't deal with mortality overtly. Some, however, are
aquainted w/in their decisions and non-decisions
moving "ahead" in time. Calfornians seem not to be. I don't know why.
But everything is wide open. Not just the future and the constrictions
of the present, but the past as well. It's a strange vertigo of optimistic ego
insistence. I find this weird. Not from a desirability standpoint, but as a
matter of practice. The ability to avoid your finitiude and its
implications.

Arm:  Neck, I had an affair with Donna Duffy.
[long pause; Arm wipes tears from his eyes]

Arm:  What are you thinking, Neck?

Neck: I'm thinking we're at some kind of business conference. Some
people at my job are here. We're outside taking a break. The place
looks like California, except it's Bosnia. A bunch of us are talking and
suddenly two planes, incredibly low in the sky, attack one another.
There's an explosion and the planes disappear. It's astonishingly vivid
and real. It seems to be understood that we're safely out of harm's
way. A moment later a huge blue fighter plane falls out of the sky
upside down with a horrible shreik and crashes close enough to spray
clumps of dirt at us. I'm stricken with a strange emotional dream
combination of indifference and total terror. Immediately then a white
helicopter appears and lowers itself menacingly to just above street
level. We know it's hostile somehow. Everyone starts running. I can't
find you. I'm naked. I can see the helicopter moving down the street
from across a field. On the field is a school house out of which a bunch
of girls come trooping in a line. They're all dressed in orange and yellow
robes and are being led by their teachers toward a series of orange and
yellow pods that look like port-o-johns. That's all. Why Donna Duffy?

Arm:  I was trying to remember. I've been thinking lately that in some
sense no one is forbidden anything. She gave me a note after an
interrogatory once.
[Arm stands up and goes into a trance]
So I walk up a set of gray steps in a city - a city building - a walkup -
stucco powder blue siding building w/ old bmw out front - i think it's
hers - i have her note - i imagine a piscatory scent on the note - it has the
address - her writing sends me to shivering inside myself w/ a cold desire
like the earth's - i french kissed w/ her once and that was a wet voyage and an
effacement and bled buckets of interior neural obsessive repetition of
that kiss with her fingers casual on my thigh w/ the controlling party's
assured indifference to that touch not of me
[pause]
inside she's home - loose clothes shorts - i'm thinking of the S/M gear as
she pours us a wine white fuck I drink red except this time white for
me which works as eventually we eat and dance and fuck and this is
the clover, the clover, the clover, cancel my appointments. give me the
clover.
[pause]
i'm now over the clover.

THE END