A. E. Robic

I chew a hunk of limestone and drench my body in wasp venom. The journey begins afresh. No time to read the rules, Cupcake. No time to go moisturizing a Seventh-Day Adventist. Just turn and walk through that forest of KFC drinking straws.

A night later, I lie next to a fragrant postman and tell him my dreams. We are deeply attracted to each other, and will soon do what others think impossible.

A three-foot tarantula erupts into our space, but we remain undistracted, coats of cobalt blue sleet blasting our minds into Latvian pudding. This is passion. Next comes a dinosaur skeleton, loud as a kindergarten barbecue disaster. It croaks a raspy shush, and the walls of the sun close in. But we revel undeterred in a bound body of stupidly real persimmon molasses.

I’m happy to serve you. You’re a veteran. You have a thing for plants and Cool Ranch lipstick. You know CPR, and that’s gonna come in handy.

I was there when you tried cauterizing those cows, every artery and sac. A septic disaster. But you were cute. I stood like a deity in the Sporting Goods section, caressing imperial-grade photos of forbidden Volvos. They had names like Bad Violinist and Veal Detonator—names that would sink whole economies.

Now a dance team gathers around you, drunk on falcon feathers. The stadium lights explode in cascades of swollen runes. My pancreas catches fire: a sympathy rupture, they call it. I cough up ancient lambs’ eyes. The radiance blinds me from within. There’s no escape. Every cloud is jackfruit when you look from above.

You are handed what they call The Million Dollar Questionnaire:

• Why do you glisten with golf lubricant?
• Are your tools cut from cold iron or hot lard?
• When did you suddenly wake as an old man, with a long white beard?
• How many times a day do you scream Mother, why was I born like this?
• Where is the stingray?

The teacher collects your paper and sighs at your answers. Her name is Laura Ingalls Wilder and her personal motto is: if you never liked me, don’t go to the funeral.

She feeds me saltines and I eat them. Waiter! These crackers are begging for a cauldron of shark stew! My hips become caterpillars. It’s time for another operation! Take your hands off me, Laura Ingalls Wilder! Why do you undulate squidlike into a pulsing lighthouse of cyberflesh? Not you too!

I reach for the knife. This is going to be great. My thighs melt clean off their femurs. Yogurt is splattered on the ceiling. Nobody knows where the door went. It’s just a gaping nostril in the wall. Echoing in the distance are the ecstatic screams of gorillas conquering a Wal-Mart.

And finally, the mailman and I fall asleep under the gutless night. The dreams are always about lung tissue, rubes in Kansas stockpiling it like 1998. The Beanie Baby craze all over again. Grease up, Jody. We’re hitting Forktown.…

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Welp, someone on Tumblr asked, “What is the honest point of The Bug Report? It’s meaningless wordsalad.”

Let me offer a rare instance of self-explication, since the Bug Report has been once or twice critiqued for alleged nonsense. In fact, Bug Report #5 was written in direct response to such claims, but I fear I erred on the side of subtlety. So for the sake of future smooth sailing, I’m going to unpack some of its rather literal content, 9th-grade English style.

“A mob carrying scissors gathers outside the doctor’s office. Madness and unreason, they cry, and then cut the building from its foundation, jetting it into space.”

That mob? That’s the people who say this writing makes no sense. “Madness and unreason” refers directly to messages like Tumblr’s “What is the honest point of The Bug Report? It’s meaningless wordsalad.”

Anyhow, the proceeding paragraphs then ask the simple question: what sort of world does this mob want? Apparently one where things are meaningful and unsaladlike, where rationality reigns.

So I write, “the mob approves of this world where people are called billionaires because money, in all its pustulant qualia, is a more reliable metric than behavior.”

A desire for rationality is synonymous with a desire for fixed meanings and systemically predictable relations. This is, perhaps non-coincidentally, the mandate of late capitalism. Knowing the dollar value of everything allows it to be translated universally (à la through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, as mentioned later in the piece).

This presents a problem for “meaningless wordsalad.” To be clear, nothing is actually meaningless, but lots of things waver in indeterminacy, and golly, that’s a buzzkill in those board rooms where capitalists and rationalists trade handjobs of joyless affirmation. Over time, by the way, more and more things have been resolved into stable dollar signs: ask any insurance adjustor what the value of a human life is. Despite culture’s soft-focus poetics of ineffability, he’ll give you a cold hard number. This is part of what separates “late” capitalism from previous versions. (System 7 ahoy.)

Anyhow, the rationalists who bristle at Bug Reports are doing the dirty work of those engineers wishing to streamline all non-productive parts of life. They want to externalize those costs and write them out of the spreadsheet. That’s why I write, “They buzz efficiently without earlobes and appendices.” Those are “useless” body parts. It’s also why the man at the cave later on has no nipples.

For all that it mounts a defense of the arbitrary, the Bug Report is exceedingly intentional. (Have you read actual randomness? This ain’t it.) And again, what I’m doing in the present post is literal explication—not even interpretation. Sheesh.

“The last time anyone said SPASM, a huge pair of scissors neatly beheaded her” means that the rationalist paradise is incapable of admitting any truth known foremost in the body (as opposed to the frontal lobe), and indeed any pleasure. Pleasure is sticky, gooey, and its meaning is subjective and fluxy. Or at least, it’s not allowed in the discourse of certainty.…

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The monstrosity of a sandwich, with your own head as the head meat.

A mob carrying scissors gathers outside the doctor’s office. Madness and unreason, they cry, and then cut the building from its foundation, jetting it into space. A nurse within bellows: The promise of all things lunar! She laughs herself into sudden diphtheria.

Now at last the world is rational, chants the mob below in steady Gregorian unison. Without extraneous body parts, the mob approves of this world where people are called billionaires because money, in all its pustulant qualia, is a more reliable metric than behavior. They buzz efficiently without earlobes and appendices. They also have no words like uncle, hunch, or kiss.

The last time anyone said SPASM, a huge pair of scissors neatly beheaded her and a large neon sign by the empty swimming pool of Ohio’s most abandoned hotel lit up with the phrase A CHOREOGRAPHY OF MATERIAL MALREMEMBRANCE. Centuries of darkness followed.

A man with no nipples stands at the edge of a cave and shouts inward: Clarity and reason are preferable to their opposites! This is not a matter of subjective taste or aesthetics! Indeed I am no subject! My only role is to oversee the entry of all items into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, ensuring and lubricating their conversion formulas!

Silhouetted at the cave edge by a glorious sunset, he begins grunting: Humans reproduce so that rationality itself may spread! We are stewards! The manifest destiny of dollar signs! Do you hear me? Someone is getting pregnant and I don’t care who! I take no pleasure but I must must must have sex with Microsoft Excel! So fertile! So fertile!

He is alone by the caveside, hands at his sides. They have no ringfingers. The camera pans skyward and the cinematographer audibly joins in the chorus: So fertile!

God renames the file ENDGAME.xls and saves it to the desktop of his Macintosh SE/30. The year is 1992, and He has recently installed System 7. One of the neat features, He has discovered, is the Make Alias function in the File menu. He creates a folder, makes an alias of that folder, and drops it into itself. Now you can keep clicking it open forever. This is hilarious, He thinks, and decides to do it for infinity years.

You and I are meanwhile damned, beyond the divine eyeball’s capacity to sniff. This is because we are still in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, floating high above Earth, having been scissored for our sins. We hover, wondering if someone has secretly put us in a zoo, limboing beneath banners that bill us as Impossibilia from the Jungle—my soul anchored like a great goat carcass spanning esoteric disasters: the unspeakable. Spare grief for the truly pious and try ardor toward the merely lewd. Your fiancé wants to buy a motorcycle. This will never happen because you hate him.

The door opens and our appointment time is at last here. Couples counseling. I’m afraid, the doctor says, that anything I tell you will be without semiotic referent.…

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Last night I did a conjuring in the desert and now I have a new heart. Typical cowboy stuff, I say, casually replacing all my ribs. In heaven everyone is dressed as an electroshock burgermeister. Zeus himself paces the parking lot rubbing his temples, saying, my ceiling is falling. 

Everyone here screeches that the world began with a sulfur god who chewed off his own tongue. That was the opening gambit, and we’re just a footnote—just congealed mayonnaise. That new heart of yours doesn’t change a thing, they say. That’s just how it goes, tackyboy. If the cornerstone is upside-down, what does that make the rest of the building? 

I turn around, expecting to see my grandmother, but it’s only an obelisk of ribald mutton. I practice acceptance in this moment. It’s not hard, since a lot of my fanmail comes from nuns. I’m really wholesome these days. I pour oatmeal on anyone who asks. My pants are made of terra cotta.

To me you are the galactic ukulele, skudging and wooving. You vibrate me like twitchmilk in perpetual synchrony with your own inexpressible harmony. More than anything, I want you to report me to the Rancher. Get me in trouble. Pull back strips of gelatinous rabbit bone, and scoop them into my hair. The Rancher knows justice.

In the mirror, both my reflection and I are wearing stickers that say FOR RENT. 

***

COMMERCIAL

CAMERA PANS ACROSS DESERT MESAS AT NIGHT. MAN’S VOICE:

The more my stomach rumbles, the more hot ketchup I want to drink. Let’s fall in love with a beehive and become circus friends. 

WOMAN SINGING:

It’s a very confusing horse

A very confusing horse

I can’t get into details of how or why

But it’s a very confusing horse

***

The horse tune grows more popular by the hour. Soon everyone sings it. Disgusted, I ravage the television with a medieval saber. My hunger is great. It is dog-dog hunger. My dog-dog brain commands: Hunt bad man. Chew bad man. Dog-dog love blood. Be a pirate!

And I am in good company. My twin sister has entered dog-dog headspace too. She proclaims triumphant to the moon: I am a beeeeef, a BEEF! The crowd goes wild with rabies. Her stage name is Baby Sensation.

Later we are seen riding an expensive flamingo and the crossing guard cries Terrorist!  Accordingly I howl a purifying scent, sinew dripping on snow, animals blurring in desperate contortion. Eleven braided wildcats gnash across the kitchen floor. Ironsmiths beg for pine sap from the jade god, scultping goose heads from vulcanized fur and stabbing their apprentices with empty Fanta bottles. The purple yam grows even more purple. We have entered the Reptilicon. Lunch ladies with goat legs stand guard. They all wore jalapeño tunics as children. You can tell. Welcome to first grade: there is a bomb.

Here’s what I really meant to say to you that evening. Climb the astral staircase long enough and you’ll find a different world. Not the dirty copy of USA Today you wipe your babies with, but instead a crisp, clean Microsoft Word file of your life.…

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We are at the secret farm. This is pure leprechaun meat, I say. The federal stuff. You can’t get this through any legal or ethical means. Nice and waxy.

Everyone at this Christmas dinner needs a rest. They could be at home with cauldrons of beige minestrone, but instead they risk public ridicule and German measles by coming here. Out back, you cram milkbones into a deflated beach ball. The plan is to fill it up until it becomes a real boy. That’s what success means in America.

You giggle and don the beast’s gaping jaw like a helm. Waving your hands you squeal, Jack in the Box!

It surprises nobody when a rabbit suddenly drops in front of you. Your mouth gurgles in preparation for the silken chomp. Canned peaches shrivel up in their cans. Junk food and expensive wine spill onto your bed, erasing astronaut memories. This smells bad, so it must be good.

I will soon join you with a bottle of enzyme cleaner, ready to spray your holy ground. You may be asked to replace the damaged lungs, but you can afford it. You are wealthy. You have cult money. That is why people always ask you for favors.

Jeanine hands you a PTA pamphlet titled Help Fund the Camel Prom. She fidgets while you read:

Of course, the Camel Prom won’t be complete without the screaming. It won’t be complete without the phoenix crying. We need your help to make our dreams come true. Do it for the children. 

Become lost at sea, the only glimmer in a sprawling void. Watch the moon rise from the black ocean like a god. It is bleeding and the people of Earth stand for a long time gazing—except you, lone swimmer. Poor sap. The lunar canyons soften and diminish. Keep your eyes on the prize.

Lemme tell you the philosophy of this world, scumbag. Postwar life is an arduous hazing process. The sex dreams are terrible and unsolvable. There is no such thing as a winning move.

Please donate to the Camel Prom fund.

You hand Jeanine one million Deutschmarks in cash.

Somewhere they are celebrating, pouring milk on themselves, injecting Lysol into their armpits. The desert winds blow as they chew hashbrowns and marbles. Life takes the shape of a ram’s horn, we all agree.

The Dutch government knocks at our door. Here’s what they want: sovereignty for Quebec, a single acorn, and a Maersk tanker loaded with hot ravioli. We have twenty minutes. We are bulging with eagerness to comply—digitally.

So I kneel in a puddle of rosemary and breathe deep. All those nutrients go into my follicles, and thence to my joints. I learned this trick in the back rooms of The Empathy Bar.

The endocrinologist arrives on a mighty steed. Strangers call her Mommy because she smells like flower petals. She reveals all our secrets and then abandons us to the flotsam. Now you know what love is.

One day I will return to the valleys, the fields, the sapphire maze.…

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I spent lifetimes shoving boiled acorns between my gums. All is for the scavenger, the gorgon. Last time she was here, everything stopped: the backyard stream, the gauze of northern lights, my nylon hopelessness, tawdry with sheeplike malfeasance. Did she leave? I stare into the Wisconsin horizon full of gushing platitudes and ruby sadness. When the pale sun melts into blackness and the sky vanishes into the shatterlight, I am born. From the head of a horse, I am born. There is no territory: only a map.

This is where you show up, the cosmic Wal-Mart greeter, holding some kind of previously unknown appetizer. The moths are spinning this way and that.

Vibrating in milky ripples, you tell me: Be thankful, American child, for I am taking you to the State Fair, a mirthful place with flesh-piercing electricity. We see a sprawl of spicy mechanical revelry. Entire families sport matching mustard-stained skullcaps. Something is very wrong.

And Alice opens her eyes. The first thing she sees is a pink balloon. A hefty purple bird hovers here too, bestowing blessings. Nobody is ever sad in this hospital.

We’ve been here a long while. My ecto-limb, wrapped up in celery stalks, ekes out some last will to sustain itself. Beetles swarm on our shoes, locking eyes with desire. They have dreams and social routines. Contemplation is a lie.

The leaves on the trees shake in eerie unison, an immoral flapping. My bones are forfeit and my heart thumps in the paws of Anubis. Every breath is broken glass. My eyes are the old eyes of Venus. My lips, the rose lips of Earth. My hair in a Peloponnesian braid. Death finally sees himself in the food court. Scythe is ready. Destiny is ready. The smell of grease.

Pineapples overflow the garbage bin. Black-frilled hornets lapse into silence till the only word remaining in English is “eject.” I am meanwhile still in fourth grade, learning my multiplication tables. Their secret subject is the crystalline dryad fertilizing heaven’s glaze. Somewhere deep in my cerebellum, a twig snaps and I shout the name JOAN without understanding what it means.

Naturally, you appear—just inches from me and yelling with wordless drool. Reality returns hot. Needing a victim, I return to the circus. Now I am older and brawny as an airbag.

Listen up, clown, I say, grabbing your collar. Have you seen my car? That Buick is so shiny it’s like Napoleon washed it himself. This ain’t the clown car you’ve been driving all your life. It’ll make you jealous. So how about punching yourself in the face, clown? Yeah. That’s pretty good. Go on.

You beat your red nose with a gloved fist. Dust billows because some vital part of your outfit is made of woven flour. I can tell you lost it all, and fell off the map. People didn’t know what to do with you. They looked at you all sad, like a gingerbread seashell.

In pajamas and a full face of makeup, I become aware of the Korean film crew behind me.…

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I got a cousin who died drowning in ranch dressing. It happens more than you’d think. Everything is a punchline. Everything is marinating in hot sauce. I myself am caked in something red.

There is a place where you are the only human, and all you can hear is the movement of your blood and the faint scratching of rats on the rafters. Down here is an entire country. Down here is an entire planet. The lowest branches are full of moles and spiders and thieves. The waves spray your face and the sting of saltwater runs down your throat. Everything here is a basic root, a foundation for other roots. You can plant yourself anywhere. Climb the trees. Is this tree love? Yes, it is. It is everything.

Love is that man on the corner with the Batman tattoo. He sells shrink-wrapped lettuce, and he smokes one cigarette after another. Somehow he is perfectly healthy.

Love is a dog. Dogs are in fact the only thing that love truly resembles. They’ve got loyalty and a funny smell.

This is how love goes. A dustcloud in your eyes, or a smear of opaque beige fluid across the motel room mirror. Filth and thickness rule the day, you bloody armadillo. Love is sweat and fungus. The bursting of a puffball mushroom, choking a kindergartener who thought it was lunch. Love is an elevator shaft filled with human phlegm and chopped up lamb hooves. It is a soft memory of someone else, running through your mind because the body remembered a moment of pleasure.

The feeling of love is unendurable, hungry for something that will never be released from within. It is the oil and the frog eggs. Love is the moment when you pick up a can of paint thinner, the fine, burning itch you felt long after the last splinter was removed.

Love is being shot in cartoon pig pajamas. I read the news, but I forget to be mad. The old woman with hair made of ants is more alive than we think. I’m not bragging.

Love is a cloud passing over you when you need another lung. It’s official. Three days to go. These are my last words. It is weeping as your father jumps into an ocean. Love is the song of a brand new, unbroken sun. It is a trash can, a billion flies, and a magic island. Love is your neighbors burning brightly on the moon, the blood in your gut, and its eruption amid the rain. It’s when you kiss me and taste like rum.

Love is palm trees and salty mornings. A bowl of fog. A train you missed. A motionless gazelle with purple eyes. Love is a harpoon misfired through your damned shoulder. You are a sheep.

You relax in the back of a pickup truck, arms spread wide. Your long hair billows in the breeze. The truck is loaded with butter, warm and strong-smelling. Your teeth are cracked and your face is softened.…

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