The vacuum was the wakeup call. It must have started by itself in the middle of the night. Classic smart appliance: great with space, recalling its environment perfectly, but awful with time, keeping an inhuman schedule. It woke up and started overworking and slurped me out from under my topsheet like a tablecloth trick. Left the bed perfectly made. I waited for the suction to stall, grasping at the handle. The vacuum cascaded into feedback there in my hands. Crosshatch patterns in the carpet ciliated concentrically with the basest wavelengths, complete with the intake hiss, static rocket launch wall or more accurately column(s) of (nonconcentric but radial, pervasive) sound(s) buckled the walls. Meanwhile any circle you can see, but a circle inside another circle especially, is an optical illusion. Reality is only apparently discrete. Or an audible illusion. No sound is the sound of itself. Sound is a record of its surroundings, decomposable into whatever other sound its negative spaces imply.
I figured I’d ride the wave when it blew itself apart. Heaved handfirst into a hardwater-soiled toilet by this air manifold expanding way out past the schematic potential of its engine, anchored by my elbow like to some faulty vending machine. Layered frequencies send out pincers of resonance asymmetric, opportune as wasps, clamping somehow on the toilet’s handle or rattling it into flagging position, maybe intervening not at all on the handle, instead chancing upon the resonant frequency of the chain or flapper with enough amplitude to activate them, (that’s another pressure effect, drop of a water column) gushing into the underside, extruded like involuntary pilates through the litany of pipes, passing the bulk of me through to the kitchen. One foot’s toes found purchase on a tee joint attached to the dishwasher and dug deeper, firm enough to put some hip behind the back foot and kick it spigot-first from under the counter.
The top rack slid hesitantly ahead and voided itself, sounding I guess like a hasty ball pit exit or burnt popcorn. The bottom rack was more effectively catalyzed by the top rack’s drop onto its far end. Decisively flipped, releasing a chorus of biohazard sharps, metal squeakily masticating glass. Safe passage was guaranteed by the faceplanting chassis. I felt like a perfect squirt of toothpaste ready and willing to break itself off from the tube without risking the bristles’ contamination, so frankly a million bucks. I surfed the dishwasher across the kitchen floor to the garage door and jackknifed through its screen, landing a backflop on the hood of my self-driving mid-size crossover hybrid SUV, my favored category of vehicle due to its name consisting of several simultaneous redundancies, inspiring within me a positively bovine sense of peace and goodwill.
Well, yeehaw. Another self-starter, this one going off between my legs like the ending of Dr. Strangelove. I felt odd, splayed as I was over the windshield, heels scrambling around the headlights, the only two places the eyes of a car ought to be, my position causing no detriment to self-driving business as usual. That would have been when it dawned on me that the car’s real eyes were all over the place, distributed circumbodily, and its perspective was composite, like a bug’s. And it would see me, my face, if it was seeing my face, if it was doing something we would call seeing to something it could call my face, the car would see me like some trashy psychedelic painting, smeared predictably along a mystery axis, mysterious more to me than the car, which has of course (and luckily, I would say, for the car, for my money) never experienced the visual stylings of Alex Grey.
Would have been. 4D-faciality would have dawned on me right that moment except for several higher-priority dawnings, the sun for one, and a din picking up, the streets opening from neighborhood to side roads to expressways, the fact that we were not alone, but joining a flock of vehicles on autonomous warpaths. Genuine revving blended with the synthetic whines of the hybrids. Cars slalomed into lampposts, telephone poles, and each other apparently at random, but adhering to a broader choreography. We joined a phalanx of SUVs cutting off-road, arrayed toward a grid station, accelerating in waves to a pileup one after the other until the transformers could take no more and vaporized everything in a 10-foot radius. I was ejected into the open-air circuit and momentarily flaunted my skeleton, took a bow, and made my exit.
