Excerpt from Concentric Macroscope

The computer scientist makes a new trail to the fence through the thick underbrush near the road, drags an old board and some metal scraps over the barbed wire, pulling it down enough to step over—he shows me, we climb over it, and we walk to the bar.

We trace paths through the condensation on our glasses, hear the ice crack.

He tells me about the history of radio, jamming signals.

Interference sounds: playing multiple songs at once, babbling voices, imitations of speech that were so cacophonous, so disturbing, that people would have to turn their radios off.

I tell him about the Gallery, how the man would send me photos of paintings, articles he’d written; they were careful, clear: he’d call a thing what it was.

Without telling me what anything I wanted to know was.

He’d say to me, Listen.

This was a kind of purity.

Empty glass.

We cut through the brush back up to the clearing.

A notebook is not where I left it.

What new information is in this noise?

Listen, he’d say.

What will happen?

I sit outside, I listen.

A problem is the nature of language, communication, actors, context—here there is none.


____
Kelly Krumrie is the author of No Measure and Math Class, from Calamari Archive. Her new novel Concentric Macroscope is available now from Crop Circle Press.