Fokker needn’t have bothered though. One nite while he was sleeping on the ward she came back to him, in costume of a nurse and she danced for him again and while she danced he glimpsed his heartbeat on the EEG, the spikes and beats of it slowing, rippling, slowing, like real slow beats, lime green spikes on dark green ground, Miranda dancing and Fokker saw the lines on the EEG go crazy for a moment, spike beat, skip beat and then ripple and then turn into birds, the birds flying over the screen, lime green birds on dark green ground, wings beating slowly slowly and then gone.

FOKKER DEAD ran the headlines next day.

GIRL MISSING.

ENDLAND DREAMING.

Fokker’s album went double platinum and his manager got rich.

Carmen by Bizet

Carmen by Bizet

Many times in the night Carmen is woke up from sleep by the phone ringing but there is no person at the other end with a voice to talk to her, just electronic noise of ‘night’. It goes on for months and months. She cant sleep, cant sleep, the phone rings she answers and when she does get to it there’s just this screeching, white hiss of dreams from hell, all electric.

Anyway. After culture of complaint etc etc the black bloke from the telephone company comes around and sits in her house for a night to decipher. Carmen sleeps a bit but feels funny with him sitting about in the other room. Sleep comes slowly, or not at all; when she gets up in the morning he is still there where she left him – at the table, a pack of nudist cards dealed out in front of him.

He says “some sort of electronic device is trying to communicate with your telephone”. But he offer no more explanation than that. He leaves. Carmen cries.

*

For a while Carmen gives up on answering the phone at all, ignoring all calls, in attempt to banish demons. But this don’t work of cause. She has to start answering agen in the end.

The breakthru comes one mighty nite. She has been drinking. The phone rings and she answers again – her ears meet the same fucked up tune – the white noise of black dreams at 9600 kbs – and this time, for the 1st time, she understands it.

Revelation(s). Like in the religious book. (5 letters, beginning with ‘B’).

Carmen sat transfixed, listening to the screech, squall, chaos of data loony tune – but her ears deciphering it and her ‘bad heart’ © thrilling to the words.

*

Whatever it is at the other end tells Carmen a story. She tinks (Irish slang for thinking) of it like a garbled, unwritable chronicle of Endland (sic) – an error message from history – with no holds barred, no tapes erased, no folders shredded in the basement of it.

*

Voice says:

. . . a cavalcade of lying adulterous politicians and dead princesses, a landscape thru which 24 screen multiplexes multiply unchecked . . .