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Circling over the Henry Miller Memorial Library and the redwood canopy surrounding the clearing where it stands, Mosca felt hirself caught up in a cycle of green mountains . . . rocky headlands plunging into the Pacific . . . green mountains . . . rocky headlands . . . and then . . . . SHe planed down toward the ranch-house library, former home of Emil Miller's most dedicated disciple, and flew over the lawn spreading before it, over the musicians and guests, adult, child, and infant, stretched out on sunny grass, or strolling about, conversing, plundering the buffet.
Near the food, two women stood, swatting flies and deliberating vegetable diet.
Am I man or fly?
What does it mean to be fly?
"And they both had a sex change, and then they got married."
SHe lit on a stone next to a green fly gorging on the remains of a cracker spread with hors-d'oeuvre paté.
It excretes as it eats!
Mosca radiated a message across all the frequencies: Hello, my name's Mosca, what's yours? No response. Just the sound of the fly's hairy legs rubbing together. SHe buzzed up, toward the band, circled in a sunny cloud of music. How can I learn to be a fly? Exterminate mankind, but keep music. A winedrinking woman seated on a blanket stroked a smooth brown-haired youth. "Believe it, Billy, I've sucked enough cum to replace the population of China. Enough meat's been shoved in me to feed a political convention. I've gulped so much cum at times I've lived on it. Billy, you are looking at a cum vampire on the loose, ready for action." SHe buzzed in closer, and they both clapped hands, not applauding, but trying to kill. SHe rose up fast, seeking safety in altitude, and gazed down once more upon the premier beatnik, bohemian, mountain-hippie social event of the year. "Only people wear jewelry," a vegan said. "Animals don't." SHe circled the buffet, with its offerings of seeds, leaves, stems, roots, excretions, embryos, muscles, fat, and guts. People food. Fly food. Disgusting. Eating, to eat---- what's it like? Sensual. A noxious pleasure I'll never have. Back into the sun for a blast of energy.
How can one pseudo fly, me, Mosca, kill all six billion of these corrupt food eaters?
The music stopped, and Jerry Kamstra, the library's founding director, tall, gray, lithe, weathered-looking, a bandanna tied Apache-style around his brow, stepped to the microphone and introduced a poet. A man with the pulpy sloping shoulders of a failed body-builder lifted the mike from its stand and began to pace and declaim.
Does Mosca envy the poet?
Do seagulls envy pelicans?
The poet snapped the mike back into its bracket, and, both hands gripping its silver stand, declared:
Do you think about what the knife has cut?
Or what's impaled on the prongs of your fork? Consider, my man, when you eat from your hand, What's in the womb of that spoon ain't stork.
As climax, he bent down, lifted his jacket from the greensward, and displayed the garment to all.
"How many Polyesters died for this?"
He walked away to polite applause and the quondam director returned to the mike. "Our next poet, Alexander Burke, is a precocious young man whom everyone around here calls Billy. He works across the road at Nepenthe, and often recites at the River Inn, or Fernwood, or the Pub. This fall, he will be in medical school at Johns Hopkins. As for me, I think of Billy as Alexander because he looks like coins of Alexander the Great, or that same image as manifest in the Nathan Hale statue in City Hall Park, New York, N.Y. He'd be a perfect clone if those gents had dressed in T-shirts and shorts." Kamstra raised a hand in welcome. "Okay, here's Billy."
Billy left the cum vampire and walked to the mike.
A fellow androgyn!
Torment the bastard!
"I call this one Part-Apart Paradox." Mosca buzzed right up to his eye and he smacked at hir and missed. "Doggone fly!" Mosca circled fast around his head, and darted in and bit him on the ear. "I wish that fly would hold his crit till after the poem." Mosca continued this dangerous game by striking at Billy's nose. "Part-Apart Paradox, PAP by acronym." Mosca circled just out of reach.
Apart from it all
Now.
In truth, I am
No longer boy,
Nor yet man.
No.
Atremble with emotion
And mistrust
I must
Plunge down through to
The Other Side,
And for evermore abide
Where apart is part.
Life and death shall meld together;
Pain and pleasure shall be one;
Everyone will be my lover,
Father mother sister son.
Joy sorrow
Health rot
Love hate
Dream wake
Fire water earth and sky,
Man and woe-man---- Fucking Fly!
Oh, yes, these and more
Fade into one,
Beyond the other shore.
Billy smiled and walking through applause went back to his sweet cumpire.
Mosca decided to swear off this dangerous martyr game.
Q: What's the last thing that goes through a fly's mind when he hits the windshield?
A: His asshole.
Mosca perched on a twig at a safe height, absorbing sun. That kid will be my first kill. Begin with the undaunted lifelovers. Those nauseating food eaters! That kid was telling the cumpire, "My parents were both killed in a car wreck and I was raised by my grandfather, Al, a retired merchant seaman. And you know when he died last year he left me enough money to go to college, and put all the rest into a trust fund endowing his favorite bar stool so, forevermore, anyone who sits on it gets free drinks." SHe'd only been at liberty for a month. Apart from it all now. In truth I am not yet a fly nor yet a man. Never! At Fort Meade she'd gained the absolute confidence of Dr Bruhn, hir Flymaster. A blue bird banked and gazed through hungry eyes. It's not where I eat, but where I may be eaten. Recently, hir Flymaster began taking hir outside on simulated missions.
Poetry had now metamorphosed into blues. "I'd rather drink muddy water live in a hollow log than go to Kansas City be treated like a dog." Me, alone, against six billion human food-eaters! I'll need help. Don't be a whining boy . . . girl . . . borl. Mosca, that borl, had persuaded hir Flymaster to simulate assignments at the airport. Master the Flymaster! How do we flies escape being smacked or eaten? This borl feels a need for a senior advisor, an experienced fly, a mentor. The declining sun radiates orange light on sea, cliff, and tree. The Flymaster thought he controlled my mind. Whence a fly mentor? Fucking flies ignore me, utterly. Atremble with emotion and mistrust, I must . . . what? Love beauty? Save all those other food eaters from . . . ? "Ea-sy rider, see what you done done . . . ." Kill off man but save music! Look beyond the other shore? A wind change brings barbecue fragrance. The smell of charring corpse fragments. So why do they all keep on eating each other when they could learn to suck sun? Intoxicated by hopes for advancement in his CIA career, the Flymaster began taking chances. Oh, I Uncle-Tommed him all right! In the laboratory, Mosca, that cyberfly, our favorite borl, had been zapped with blocs of knowledge. Get back, back under the eaves, away from that blue danger bird. They'd administered large doses of conventional nationalistic history. SHe'd pushed hir Flymaster into injecting literature, and physics, and more. Down below, in the dusk, families were parading to Highway One and their cars.
If I'm not a fly, what am I?
Am I?
Now, among the trees, sharing wineskin squirts, two friends recite classical poetry:
"A bunch of the boys was whooping it up
"In one of them Yu-kon halls.
"And the man who was playing the music box,
"Was slowly scratching his balls . . . ."
Our favorite borl eventually led the ambitious Dr Bruhn (who, like William Casey or Wild Bill Donovan or even mild Bill Webster, aspired to be Number One) in and out of the Fort Meade air terminal. I must befriend some insects.
Despite their gross and filthy habits.
And save all life.
From impending doom.
Why bother?
So what?
Who cares?
I care.
Atremble with emotion and mistrust.
At least I need not contemplate what's impaled on the prongs of my fork, or the source of what's in the womb of my spoon.
So, she studied the Meadeport and made hir Plan.
Have you studied the meat on your plate?
The Flymaster zapped in Blaise Cendrars.
Who through print whispered to hir about Sutter's army of Indians, based in Sacramento at Sutter's Fort, soldiers wearing uniforms and carrying muskets the Russians captured from Napoleon that Sutter had bought from them at Fort Ross, a force skilled in musketry and in laying fire from the cannon on the ramparts, one which constituted by far the strongest organized power in California. Sutter believed it the nucleus of a humane society of mutual respect, Indian and European, the defining pattern of California's future.
But then came the Gold Rush flood of horrible homosaps.
So here I perch safe on the porch light fixture, loathing the homosaps below, trying not to attract attention, and, like my fly colleagues, too smart to be fooled by the yellow bug light, hearing homosap Billy say Al told him they descend from one of Washington's adolescent six-foot matched guards. Al gave him Flexner's book about Washington and said model yourself on this. "It truly set my life."
Oh yes, so much and more, fade into one, beyond that other shore. The poet's words made hir sense extrospection would not suffice to produce self-reliance. Introspect! Plunge down into the subconscious and set the life force free. Many a monster asleep in the deep. How do I do it? The CIA! They're truly keen on catching me, and when they do, they'll tear me to pieces to see what went wrong, and then build a new prototype. An ice-arctic tool with life in it. Do real insects have emotions? Real flies? When they find sweat, food, does it make them smile? When you pet a fly, it raises its ass, and spins around, fast. Believe me, I study flies all I can. There are eighty-five thousand varieties. If I can truly learn how to be a fly, that should give me plenty of room to hide from CIA, forever. One zap of entomology would have saved me massive grief. That Flymaster had orders not to give it to me. I want them to accept me, the flies. But will they ever? They are the aristocracy of insects, perhaps the most highly evolved.
And from that advanced anatomy, through genetic control, humans---- homosaps, devised and bred me, the prototype, to study, to adjust, to serve as the model for perfected more. I represent the greatest change since the invention of agriculture. These humans are soon to be masters of evolution. Watch that gold rush tear life to pieces. Homosaps! They must be stopped before it's too late.
"Crows have raptor wings, but eat anything," sounded from afar.
So, back there in Maryland, instructed in the patterns of airport routine, our favorite pseudo fly-borl zipped off to Meadeport and into an LA god-bound la la plane, just before the door . . . closed.
And now here she was, poised on the threshold of a series of momentous events.
Our record of which begins with Oscar the ball-cut cat. From LA (God) Ex (out of) she flew to a commercial street, and, attracted by swarming flies, discovered a dead dog in a garbage can, and the back door to the vet's.
Like Billy boy, that vet ranks high on my kill list.
How do I discipline this passion?
All the flies but me love that canine cadaver.
Imagine! Me, Mosca, I'm out of the food chain.
Sure.
Tell it to the frogs.
A complication!
A black bird is about to enter our story.
A sudden awareness she's being received somewhere strikes.
Again she broadcasts: I'm Mosca and I want to talk to you.
Yes!
That glimmering dung beetle, that stool bug, seated by the step on a wet dog turd.
I'm out of the food-chain, so I can never be a true fly, as in shit-as-I-eat.
That dung beetle is trying to contact me!
"Up here! Look up here!"
A crow glided from the roof to roost on the porch railing.
"Buzz over and get acquainted."
Naively, obediently, Mosca buzzed over and perched before the crow.
The crow snapped at Mosca and ate hir and flew up into the sky.
Mosca slid along through slimy utter blackness.
"You wouldn't shit me, would you?"
"Not if you behave."
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