It was morning, and it was the season of morning all day. Summer, Santa Cruz, sun — synonymous with sadness, sallowness, and silence. Jasper needed to be observed and needed to hide. To be both shown and told, you are alive.
A sense of long-range purpose had been the lightning-to-sand glass Jasper looked through, a gasping kind of breathing in and out the mission. The mission was stolen from prophets. Prophets as mediums, not prophets as messengers. Jasper would become that medium, become hell and high water — would in the sense of desire, not in the sense of prophecy.
Dialogue had slowed. Jasper’s roommate and colleagues only heard “sounds good”; a lie. Sound itself was symptomatic of this wasting dis-ease. Jasper’s ease was dashed to the point of disease, according to common practice. No habit remained beyond the horizontal habit, where the laptop was the only creature in the room that could bear to sit up straight. In that way, entertainment became the source of uprightness.
But this is a degenerative condition to one obsessed with accelerating generation. It’s a power plant in hot neutral, still boiling, not turning the turbine. There are two paths for such a plant: going critical or going into the control room and deliberately, appropriately switching off each correct switch, to find cool neutrality, and become inoperable and examinable.
It wasn’t the first day Jasper wondered if six stories might be high enough. But it was when that question started to feel answerable that the first off switch was flipped. A mechanic would be let in the turbine room. The absurdity and dire propensities of prophets found the tip of Jasper’s tongue.
Roman Ryan 