CHAPTER 1 – Amateur radio presenter… master debater.





Set for another journey was the ‘born son of the infinitesimal spirit’. Wounds healing [knitting back together]; there was little, if not no, fear. So the ‘born son of the infinitesimal spirit’ (that is Jensen)… Jensen sits watching the record player’s needle scratch its way to sound waves. It took most of his goddamned energy and concentration to ensure the needle kept up with the grooves.

Regardless…

The thing that upset him more than heartache was that he was trying to steady-walk to the kitchen and couldn’t shake the ambition to tumble. But he was heart-broken. Broken hearted. Oh was he broken hearted! The pictogram went… He(in two)art. Here is how the last journey went…

So the born riser from the born again fire, the boy whose family was born again and again and again Christians, graces the airwaves and the station with an ensemble creation. Somehow he’s doing the ‘see you later’ slot on public radio when he comes to. He’s listening to a hybridization of old age. One that has a few bones to pick at before he’d ever succumb to the ‘matter of fact’ of how right Jensen was to play the wrong song [or not the song he was asked to].

Ignoring him he answers his question.

“So, in theory, to be able to construct electronic computers in the foreseeable, and from this one stage onwards, we would need to ensure that to build is to ‘birth’ and to upgrade ‘to grow’.”

He’s thinking in the melody of the last song, the one he misplayed, when there is a ringing in the Rochester booth. He takes himself off the air, replaced by an earlier recording.

Rochester is one place that works in bundled times, he walks in to the office, slams down on the old sofa and takes the phone off the receiver.

“The officials are shot! The remains is being put through weathered processors to move information, and so-called high-K material, which is the product of The Tribulation Kingdom. Our work is urgent. Our work is as much a struggle as climbing a hill.”

He is as confused as you, but that is what he heard being shouted at him down the line. It wasn’t a tin can next to his ear, he couldn’t find out who it was talking by following the wire, so he asked.

“Who is this?!”

“My name is Dr Krongard. I am responsible for The Wirral Department. For all of its contracts and ensuring that 10-centimetre-tall, erect, dog-mess is cleared before the arrival.”

“What arrival?”

“THE arrival.” *Click* And the voice is gone.

Standing (but only just) Jensen makes his way back to the microphone and takes the old him off air to come on new again.







CHAPTER 2 – Answer the goddamned phone!


[Later that same day the born son of the infinitesimal spirit watches a preacher being grilled on a question and answers show.]

From the TV: "Today, ‘ers’ and featured ‘erms’, are not fledgling terms. They are fully developed evasions from questions.”

From his throat: a swallow.

From the phone: ringing.

Jensen takes the stick of celery out of his mouth and stretches to unhook the phone from the receiver. “Hello Dr.” He says.

“Ah good, you’re up! I have a question.” (there is a pause) “Ok, so… if the quantum can be made smaller, as we have already largely disproved, then can we assume that anything can be accomplished, which is itself something else that is today largely discounted?

“I think that birdsong answers that question.”

“How so?”

“I could never be a bird. That could never be accomplished; some things don’t want to be!”

“Quite right, my boy. And your point?” The Dr asks.

“We are proving the existence of the infinitesimal spirit here! I would answer that we have no business changing the size of atoms and it is stupid to imagine that anything is possible because things want to remain impossible… it is THEIR wish! Things have to be allowed to happen if they want to… without us willing them into fruition, equation, being or formula.”

“I see.” *Click* And the Dr is gone.

Jensen wonders why the Dr wanted to ask that about atoms and if he’s managed to make them smaller.











CHAPTER 3 – The book of Job


10:45am and Cadet Jensen is awake and shaking, jesus is he shaking! He couldn’t shave for all his shaking.

Not apologetic of his night drinking he stumbles into work. His tie is slack around his neck in a big loop. He looks like he might hang himself with it if his headache gets worse. His week is usually as follows…

Mon-Fri. 9:45am til 6:15pm – milk and honey moments, each.

Today his week started badly.

Mon… fired for drinking away his morning hours and thinking he can still collect a pay slip. Fired because they know he moonlights as an amateur radio presenter on Public Radio. Someone must have tuned in while they were looking for Radio 4.

Now he just has his job on the radio… what will he do with his day?










CHAPTER 4 – Push for Rushmore and Rudell.




Regardless…

Jensen is flattered that the Dr still chooses to call him. It must be total infatuation, he thinks, at least in short term. Jensen is a quart through his dad’s port. Soon he’ll be on to Mother’s Ruin, GIN [even saying it brings the deft smile of retribution and reunion. A g[r]in please.]

Jensen is named after a car. He named himself ‘Jensen’ by accident and it stuck. Jensen is brazen and soppy stern… rowdy only when asked politely. Jensen is wide blue eyes and a mop of greasy, ruddy brown hair. Jensen is unshaven.

“Why for this blue light?” He says to himself.

Jensen is asleep. Jensen’s dreams are running behind his eyelids.

Regardless. He is thinking about drink. Jensen has little regard for anything less.










CHAPTER 6 – Am I missing a chapter?



His family history is lovely. His mother’s life rests on a prescription slip. His father, an IBM manager, a success story. Jensen ate the page that had the last chapter on it. They call him 'brimful of uselessness.'










CHAPTER 7 – ‘Flawless’, even the birthmarks!


“Let me be clear! Clear as a VS1 diamond! Very slightly included, but more or less flawless. Let me be clear with you old man!” Pleads the Dr to Jensen along copper wires that run the miles between them. “Let me be clear! Your Father has divorced your Mother and married a 15 year old girl from Abergaveny. She has a lazy eye and a birthmark on her shin.”

“And?”

“The birthmark, old man – it is the shape of a ‘Cup’!”

“And?”

“You say that a lot… The shape of a ‘Cup’ MAN!!!! Imagine!!!!”

Jensen’s parents have finally [and formally] divorced.


*Click* And Jensen is gone.











CHAPTER 8 – Mother’s Ruin.



Jensen’s mother is a wonderful women. Or she was… before the pills took over motor function and made her shake uncontrollably; small price to pay for sanity, allegedly.










CHAPTER 9 – Retardation.



The Dr again…

“She seeks to pin me to her wall, or chalk me on her chalkboard as some strange feral child, rather than a real boy… ‘wooden’ she called me! and I’m an experiment to her – nothing more than a sunglasses wearing, ass-pinching, ‘hey’-shouting senior specimen.”

“Sometimes we have to play to our strengths. Remember that the mystery of wood isn’t that it burns, but that it floats!”

“Good point…”

*Click* And the Dr is gone.

Our Jens is now in a shirt spattered with paint and long jeans. His name is Sunshine for this day only.

Jensen Wilder no more.

Sunshine is kept together by staples, loud background music, and vodka.

“It don’t matter where you bury me. I’ll be home, I’ll be free. It don’t matter where I lay. All my tears be washed away.” He sings as he [at last] makes a success of his walk to the kitchen. So, being sober enough to get there, he takes a bottle of Vodka out of the freezer drawer.

He brings it with him on the trip back to the living room sofa.

Jensen hasn’t seen another human being [not one not pixilated anyway] for two days. He’s beginning to miss them too much to express.

Looking down at his shin he notices, as if for the first time, a birthmark in the shape of a kettle.











CHAPTER 10 – Heartbeats are for milk and honey highway rides.



Slapping itself, wet, against the inside walls of his rib cage – Jensen’s blood-pumper is looking for escape. After staying up all night and missing people he got into his car. [Bottle of Vodka, as a passenger, propped up in the seat with a belt around it.]

His eyes keep misting over, but he wants to get to the mall for a mocha.

He’s popping omega 3 in pill form and blinking away each ray of sunshine that makes it to his iris.

He is no longer Sunshine.

Jensen gets to the mall and goes to the café.

Taking his mug to the nearest empty table, Jensen has a mind for puzzles.









CHAPTER 11 – My favourite number.



Minidisc player screaming in his ear, Jensen is overdue a call from the Dr.

The phone rings.

Jensen takes the stick of celery out of his mouth and stretches to unhook the phone from the receiver. “Hello Dr.” He says.

“It is time for the arrival!”

“Where do I need to be?”

“Boston. 30 minuets.”

“I’m already in Boston, where precisely do I need to stand?”

“On the corner of a street named New England Road.”

*Click* And Jensen is gone.








CHAPTER 12 – New England Road.


With a celery stick poking out of his mouth he looks like a loiterer. One foot is sole to the brick the other set to the earth. He stands like he’s cool. [He is wearing his dirty black boots and an attitude.]









CHAPTER 13 – Old England Road.


The television runs the story. Tells us that while Jensen was on that corner a young girl was run down in front of him. Tells us that the girl was crossing the road and the car never slowed on seeing her. Tells us that she was a young girl with so much promise. The scoop is that the driver kept going. The story is that he is still out there, somewhere still driving. The story’s lead character is a joy rider with blood on his bonnet.

What it doesn’t tell you is the full story; the tragedy was deep as a taproot.










CHAPTER 14 – Another part of the full story. Gift and Gory.



Even after she lay dying he still thought he was awaiting the arrival of someone else… but we often think we know better than the Doctors.

Standing, where he was told to by the Dr, Jensen watched the traffic break but for a moment. He watched a girl come to the kerb and then drop off to cross the road. Her hair was the colour of the ‘on air’ light in the radio room. There was joy spreading its wings inside him. His lips went dry and he took the celery out of his mouth to lick them slick again. Held in slow motion, like a rom-com film’s first sighting of the buxom rarity that the geek adores, he just watched her cross the road. Nobody’s, before or since, done it better. Nobody’s, before or since, managed to make failure more beautiful. And love has never been shorter.


Prescription please.