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you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound—the no-sound of the first dark sea . . . (Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat lighting that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against magnesium sky.
     
    Many of the refugees were armed.
     
    Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had maintained in the face of the Coast’s attempted secession.
     
    The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and territories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy.
     
    Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband they had been sent to find.
     
    After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a length of brushwood.
     
    In the jacket’s back, just below her left shoulder blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the shaft of a pencil. The jacket’s lining had been red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood. With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water.
     
    He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in plastic and surgical tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine.
     
    He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle’s wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.
     
    That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the “lawyers” who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
     
    If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/ Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with its promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception?
     
    —Rosebuck and Pierhal,
    Recent American History: A Systems View.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    Fast forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape—
     
    —into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.
     
    Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...
     
    —and the smell of dust.
     
    Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn’t met you yet; you’re hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, the horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle—
     
    —and static takes love’s body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn’t there. And the tape ends.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    The inducer’s light is burning