The Bad Magician In "The Aborted Quest"

First practice a condition. Then:

Cord, lots of it. Wriggling lengths of nerves, coiled for the descent, the myelin sheath of electrical bursts along the War Hawk. The Bad Magician sticks a claw hammer in the air and flesh is torn in dream tones. Pushing off the mucous, he falls above the angel depths--next he climbs down the jingle jangly of the white whale and into the heaviest smoke of sorrow. The Bad Magician does not want to be here. Nevertheless, the Bad Magician descends. Into limbo, into Limbaugh.

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A strand of hair is grabbed, the Bad Magician swings, and into the ear he flies. Deaf. Deaf. Deaf. The walls of the ear swollen, pink, sticky. Journey to the brain, empty bottles of dopamine line the streets, and wild children turn chiclets into the bump and grind. A pill is ingested and rabbits eat a little girl, then to the center we wander, and then to clouds, ether. Rush chortles into the mic and the Bad Magician dives between the cells. Down, across the mordant bellows, swinging, falling, to essence, the essence.

The Bad Magician came to attack. With instructions for gordian knots and a schematic of Limbaugh's nervous system, an Indian Rope Trick was to be performed beginning at the basal ganglia. But on the free dive, a horrible scream, and then arrival in a white room, empty. The secretaries (there were 12 of them, 6 male and six not-male) perfected their nails and yawned. Where is Rush? "That doesn't matter. Would you like a magazine?"

The Bad Magician sat, sinking in a fluffy bean bag chair--a white bean bag chair--and waited. A television screen showed a fat man pretending his body was suffering from spasmodic nerve activity, twitching and jerking. It played over and over. His face was bent like cheap metal. A thousand years passed. Still the room hummed, then cricket-burned tinnitus chased the silence. Nothing is here. Nothing will ever be here. Crickets rubbed elbows with the insect armies, and the Great White Room began to drift.

Forget it, said the Bad Magician. The secretaries already had. They were gone. The room was where anyone who could be entangled in neurons and synapses might invent a dance. But it was empty. It always was empty. Rush Limbaugh was an empty room where dancers smoked cigars and microscopic babies crawled liked tiny Jesus into hell. Forget it, said the Bad Magician.

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An extension cord, a battery, three short fuses and soon a hole was blown in the western bewailing wall. The Bad Magician whistled softly, and walked out of the project. Limbaugh was not the question. Limbaugh was an empty room. An empty room cannot be cured. We are occupied by the absence.

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Image from here.

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