Then, in the final sentence of the book, Deleuze & Guattari’s thesis ignites like gunpowder: “War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture and domination.”
To adequately process this data, one requires an expansive knowledge of D&G’s entire oeuvre, at which point the theoretical duo’s enigmatic deployment of word-bombs becomes utterly ordinary, if not banal.
More compelling, perhaps, is a disembowelment of this material from the gutsack of everyday life. For instance, I get this text from my wife:
“Please go to the Dollar Store and pick up some buttwipes for the baby.”
But my phone has turned against me.
Also, as I remind my wife in an encrypted font: “I’m not home. I’m at school.”
45
I say, “Did Mama Cass really choke to death on a hamburger?”
The grad student looks at the Professor. The Professor looks at the Dean. The Dean looks at another Dean. The other Dean looks at another Dean. That Dean looks at the Provost. The Provost looks at the President. The President looks at his mom.
His mom shrugs.
I say, “Well what good are you people? What good is any of this?” I gesticulate at the University.
46
My wife and I have an open relationship. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
I fall in love with my eschatology professor.
The swell of her bust cuts me deeper than the curve of her hips.
We make love beneath the moon.
Afterwards we lie naked on our backs in the grass and discuss the probability of the moon derailing from orbit and slamming into the earth like a great ball of scrimshaw, craters revealing themselves as open bear traps and vagina dentata etched into the ivory.
She ends her thoughts on the matter with a soft, awkward explosion from her lips. But not quite an explosion. More like a pop. And yet more violent than a pop.
“What lies between an explosion and a pop?” I ask her.
“Discourse,” she whispers. “Rhetoric.”
I take her breast in my hand and massage it. She tells me it doesn’t feel good. I massage it differently. She says that feels worse.
I look at my hand.
The fingers, I realize.
The knuckles, I wonder.
My eschatology professor rolls on top of me. We set aside the pretense of language and gaze into each other’s eyes. Our pupils have swallowed our irises. I can see the starlight reflecting off of my dark matter onto hers.
Later, we have sex in every public bathroom on campus, just to say we did it.
I do something she doesn’t like. I say something she doesn’t like. She tells me she doesn’t like what I’m thinking.
She orders me to temper my metabolism.
I breathe in and out, in and out, in and out until I accomplish a fluid synesthesia, all of the extensions and vicissitudes of my sensorium called to stiff attention.
“I can hear your breathing,” she remarks.
“Well I have to breathe. Don’t I?”
“Not that way. You don’t hear me breathing that way.”
I release a cataleptic sigh. “I don’t know what you want. I have tried to involve all of the senses. I have tried to account for the full breadth of human experience and potentially the experience of the moon. I am not the moon. I don’t know what the moon thinks or what the moon desires or what the moon intends to do. You can’t hold that against me.”
She brushes a sandbug from her nipple. “I can hold anything against anyone. Your existential crisis is hardly my affair. Pull up your trousers and pretend you’re a man. Better: pretend you’re the moon. This is not a sitcom. We are all going to die and be forgotten someday.”
There’s nothing I can do to counter the argument. Once the certainty of oblivion is invoked, disavowal shotguns into plainclothesed entropy.
47
“That’s my father.”
The librarian points at something behind me. I glance over my shoulder.
There’s a big poster. It occupies most of the wall.
On it is a rooster.
The rooster has a red mane and a red beard and cold eyes and a sharp beak and matted feathers and weird feet.
I eyeball the librarian. “Is that a photograph or an illustration? It looks real.”
The librarian squints at the poster, makes a frog face, and shakes his head.
I say, “Rooster is slang for male chicken, you know. And slang for rooster is cockerel, but that’s a Britishism. Rooster, on the other hand, is an Americanism. I don’t see any balls on that cock either. Must be a capon. That’s a slang term for castrated rooster, which is to say, castrated cockerel, by which I mean, male chicken who has had his privates yanked off.”
The librarian taps his desk, tentatively, pensively, with a finger. “Are you calling my father a rooster?”
“Rooster?” I think about it. “Do you mean that rooster?”
Confused, the librarian has a nervous breakdown.
He tears off all of his clothes and runs through the stacks and up the stairs and down the stairs and he finds an ax somewhere and knocks over some bookcases and chops up some tables in a Quiet Area and then he gets tired and just kind of curls up and moans for awhile and the police come and leap upon him and put him in a straightjacket and drag him kicking and screaming out of the library.
On Monday, he punches in at 7:59 a.m.
48
I open the laptop.
I log onto a social network and find one of my professors. I friend him.
I wait.
A few seconds later the professor accepts my friendship.
I send the professor a message. It reads:
“What the fuck are you doing, asshole? Don’t you think it’s inappropriate for professors to be friends with their students like this? What the fuck? Pervert.”
A few seconds later the professor unfriends me.
I close the laptop.
49
I mentioned something earlier about having only one active memory. That’s not altogether true. Nothing ever is.
We are informed by history.
Subjective history, objective history.
Objectivity is a myth.
Here’s another memory:
We were saving pennies to go to Disneyland. We put the pennies in a tall stained-glass container.