Work In Progress-Start

"So what's it like? Being a schizophrenic?" Her eyes bulged naturally from the peach freckled skin of her face, from the vaginal opening of her eyelids, like twin pregnancies with blue and black targets painted on them, to tell him where to focus his ragged attention. She wore a thick white sweater with heavy braided patterns he found reassuring, like the loaves I B Singer always included in his descriptions of the Sabbath. And beneath the leavened white wool snow pure was the topography of her chest shape--so generous--she was one of those coed girls must be who would take their bra off the first night of college for their dorm neighbor lives down the hall, giggling, first to join the sorority, and her hair, framed around her doll's face, was the color of Cindy Lauper's or Bonnie Parker's, a shield to buffer some of the emotions that reverberated from her brain (thalamus, hypothalamus, pulsing pituitary gland) so rapidly, 7,000,000 Hz, flickering on her generous plum lips, glossed of course, in another century she would have been a nun in a convent where rules didn't apply, where the youngest of nuns were set to work immediately to collect a darker, more sinister type of tithe. Scales. He knew it. Underneath her wool sweater with its penumbra of blank lint, underneath it were the scales of a mermaid. He could smell it from her flesh, her pores, all of which were in direct communication with her pituitary glands; it smelled not of fish, you'll be interested to know, but simply of sea salt and cucumber. Now she must be aiming for a career in show business, the fate of all mermaids, that or whoredom or if their lucky posing in uniforms of lingerie, bikinis, leather and latex. Ineradicable innocence. He doubted her virginity. If she were to be a Pierce sister, it would be the blonde one of course, Catherine (I've got something to tell you but, you have to promise not to tell.) who took home pretty things that she liked. Thumbs had read somewhere that she had died in an accident on a winding road somewhere out in the country, beyond civilization, a Dracula night, her sister Allison inconsolable...but he had a feeling, as well, that he had once been on that road, had gazed out the car window and wondered about the stars, didn't there have to be a collection, if not controlled by the constellations then by the fact that we choose to make and name constellations. Perhaps it was nothing but a constellation seated beside him on the warm couch, radiating emotions from her cortex, the skin of her brain, a constellation of cells, of molecules, curlicue molecules, bolus shaped molecules, layers of mechanical protein smeared across one another and inter-splicing like coats of paint laid on wet on wet, bleeding into one another electrolyte secrets, and now she was breathing into the cave of his ear, down canals lined with wax, saying she thought he had beautiful eyes and a shy smile, asking if her would autographed one of his drawings for her, make it out to Sara. Her lips moist on his cheek, blowing into his eye (he was wearing contact lenses. Her warm wet breath made them suddenly apparent to his nerves, dry plastic shields). Now there was no illusion of modernity. They were shot in grainy black-and-white, a movie older now than anybody currently living on the planet, and his furry, spindle-fingered hand reached up under her wintertime sweater to feel her peach belly, her generous breasts like, yes, scoops of ice cream, and the lock of hair closest her cheeks, and she fluttered her lashes, and with the other knuckly hand Thumbs reached down inside her jeans, beneath her panties.
"Oh no, no, no," she said, her hand seizing his wrist. Her cosmic expansion eyes getting bigger all the time. "We're in public!" Mmmm. Yes they were. A party. Party for somebody called Kalindi Duncan, a fashion model who lived in the Art District. And this peach snowflake girl Thumbs was cuddling with on the couch was a friend of Duncan's? Don't know. The noise of the party now crystallized in his ear canals. Before he had thought it was the chatter of television in a nearby room. He looked around himself, head moving like a periscope on his long, black-stubbled neck. How many of these people did he know? Were the lights really this weird, pulsing, fluttering, dimming, guttering, shimmering, glistening, wavering, quavering, enthralling? Uncle Thumbsucker held his head in both hands.
"It's like having two or three radios on inside my head a lot of the time. Giving me hints and suggestions. Or sometimes just talking about things that don't seem to interest me. It's when I figured out how to tune in and out that things changed for me. I can choose which station to listen to. I can change the volume, make it quieter when it starts to scare me."
"Scare you? What do you hear? Do voices tell you to hurt people? To kill them?"
"Sometimes, yeah. Hasn't been for a long time though. Like I said, I've learned to manage it somewhat. I shouldn't be at this party. I've very introverted right now. Very fragile."
"Do you want to come upstairs with me?"
Her peach skin all close up now, pores everywhere, light caking of foundation, that cosmetic smell, musky and greasy.
"No. I don't feel like it anymore. I'm sorry. Who...who are you?"
"Sara Anne Jones. That's my name. You'll see me again, sweetie. You sweet old man."
The effect was as though she had disappeared, simply been plucked out of reality, but Thumbsucker knew that what it really meant is that he had gone catatonic, or into some altered state, probably for about ten to fifteen minutes, and in the interim she had gone away, maybe left the party altogether.
It was his pituitary gland. Of that much he was certain. It was in the news a lot these days, if you knew where to look. Fundamental underpinnings of schizophrenia/formal thought disorder lay in the pituitary gland, abnormal proteins derived from glands triggered by that pink, berry-shaped master switchboard of the endocrine system. But Bill Thumbsucker didn't need to read it in the news: he had the Word directly from God.
East Berlin, when he was rooming with a sociopathic hypnotist who called himself Oddmento Statix, Thumbs had found somebody on a nearby park bench selling acid out of an envelope salvaged from the desks of some WWII Nazi bureaucrat, eagle holding a swastika in its talons stamped in black ink over the postage stamp. Thumbs bought seven tabs, guaranteeing a philosophical quarrel over how they should be divided, solved only when Statix's girlfriend, a Hungarian named Sophie with paprika-red hair, arrived and agreed to take the final hit. Her first trip.
Sophie was asleep on the bed, face down, skirt lifted up and panties pulled down. Oddmento had fucked her while she was unconscious on a blend of ketamine and chocolate milk. While Thumbsucker watched from the comfy chair. Now the morning sun came in and glinted off the reflective designs emblazoned across the dome of Thumbsucker's Frisbee. It created an ethereal reflection on his Statix's wall, a nimbus conglomeration of cream and sky blue.
"Hey," said Oddmento, "It's God."
Thumbs squinted his eyes. "You're right."
"Get him to talk."
Careful not to upset the universe at the core, Thumbsucker took the Frisbee in both hands and wiggled it. The cream-and-blue nebula disengaged, and a voice emerged, deep and hearty, from Thumbsucker's chest (but also from the wall, get it? Also from the wall!). And the Lord sang:
Yeah
My, my, such a sweet thing
I wanna do everything
What a beautiful feeling
Crimson and clover
Over and over
Crimson and clover
Over and over
"Man, see," said Oddmento. "God doesn't care if we worship him or even believe in him. All he wants is to sing Crimson and Clover. And to drink coffee. Here, I'm going to give him some coffee!" And Oddy lifted his clear glass mug of black coffee into the sunbeam so that it cast a red-brown blob against the wall, which God drank lustily. After which he began to jiggle madly, bounding off the edges of the walls, sometime dissolving completely. When he settled down a little, God began reciting very rapidly the mysteries of the universe. Thumbsucker still hated Oddmento for not writing it down or recording it somehow. Several times God indicated that the pituitary gland had special significance. He had originally intended it for something more, something greater than it turned out to be in the end.
And then years later, inside his own mind, Thumbsucker had met a traveling scholar, an orange-skinned man wearing a mortarboard cap, black robes and a monocle. He had a grotesquely long and crooked nose. His name was Klyne, and he was sort of an idea and sort of an as-yet-unknown neurotransmitter. Klyne had been born inside a feudal village within Thumbsucker's own limbic system. Later, the budding scholar had migrated out to the Broca's area, where he studied many foreign languages. It was thanks to orange Klyne that Thumbsucker had his almost eidetic abilities to adapt to foreign tongues.
Now Klyne was one of a band of heroes drawn from all across the brain to participate in a tournament of sorts, or rather a reality show called Mazeopoly, where they had to cooperate together against the venomous consciousness known as GridEye.
At some point, within the context of the game, Klyne had ascended to an overgrown ruin at the edge of the meadowlands. There he discovered a three-legged stool, on which he sat and waited. He achieved a state of great serenity, communing with the blades of grass, the mist that saturated the morning air. Only after the sun had broken away from the horizon did Klyne realize he was not alone. Hopping up and down in the grass, no more than two apples high was a conical purple creature with tiny arms and uneven, bulbous feet. It was Rawford, the spirit of perpetual anger, who had come from the right limbic system, whereas Klyne had come from the left. Klyne had never seen Rawford so tiny. Usually he hulked over you. Klyne had no love for the little fascist, and was tempted to destroy it now he had the chance, but he also recognized that he was here on a sort of Buddhist endeavor, trying to achieve perfect stillness and ultimate serenity.

A howling rose from the sky. A spinning shape descended toward him. A giant Tinker Toy, its central staff torn in two by GridEye's henchman, the trashcan-headed Disposo. The Tinker Toy creature, who had once been called Sandclock and was now split into two beings, a benign, compassionate one named Halfclock, and an enigmatic, sinister one named Dark Clock.
Halfclock hovered in the air before Klyne and began to spin, creating a breeze, which began to peel away in little tendrils and then in great swaths all the blackness from Klyne's robes and mortarboard. Beneath them was a varicolored Jackson Pollack chaos of colors, predominantly red. It was after being bestowed by these new robes, and filled up with amazing new knowledge, that Klyne had come to Thumbsucker with the news about the pituitary gland.
"It's a civil war inside the brain," Klyne explained. "The pituitary gland was originally the tyrant, in command of a more chemical consciousness than the one we enjoy. But the hegemony was tenuous, and one dark day the thalamus struck out, poisoned the pituitary, and a state of all-out war began. The Wastelands of the War was the hippocampus. Before the war there was consciousness without memory, you understand? Liberated from memory!"