A Brief Relation of the Copier Room

--for st. exupery and dante

One day I heard the word Mozambique and the copier room dissolved around me, and there I was on a steamy beach in Africa. Tyrannosaurs, enormous bipedal caricatures of men, stalked mindlessly across the sites of future cities and went their slow way down into the dark of geologic time.

With what honour these gentlemen entreated me and how cheerfully they received me together with their ladies, it were a long story to tell. They seemed to belong to a loftier race, and might well have been regarded as the offspring of some divine adultery. They told themselves that history was calling to them for help and that somehow they must prepare a great crusade to liberate the past; swore they’d been imbued with molten matter, and were made of gold and descended straight from the sun.

That night they took me far, far away to the planet of the flowers: 

We come thy guides to the garden of bliss, thy seat prepared.  Let’s cruise.We make a great beauty devastated of everything but form and gait.

You know you want to ride my rocket ship baby, but first you gotta light the fuse. 

I can’t even claim I knew where I was headed when I climbed on board. But from my cradle upwards it has been my business, and almost my pastime, to deal with serpents and dragons.

As indomitable energy flawlessly directed into consummate stagecraft begets complete fruition, prismatic irises crossed and shattered each other in the air.

The magic of their craft opened for me a world in which I would confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when the night had fallen I, delivered, read my course in the stars.
Astonishingly beautiful, technically advanced, and unbelievably rapid, it was a dream come true. I couldn't perceive, I couldn't plan, and I couldn't remember nothing. 


Below us the refinery was jeweled with lights like a Texas oil town. A unicorn, a rainbow-spitting zebra and what looked to be a horse sprouting a third eye were engaged in group sex. Settled on the slope of a mountain, they watched like lighthouse keepers beneath the stars, ever on the lookout to succor men. When they saw our sails, they cried out Aha, ha!  The sails of this travelling island are like clouds in the sky! What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?

This shocked me and completely destroyed my spiritual beliefs. Tell me master, tell me Sir, I asked, did ever any, by his own merit or by others' go out from hence that afterwards was blessed? 

And he to me as one experienced: You're some kind of weird gold that wants to stay melted so you won't have to become coins. As one who sits ashore and longs perchance to visit dolphin coral in deep seas. Here must all distrust be left; all cowardice must here be dead. There's nothing more than this: opal towers and battlements adorned with living sapphire. 

These may seem to the Reader but Golden Dreams, but we all have known flights when of a sudden each for himself, it has seemed to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality--a revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. 

Once it is raised, not only is it difficult to subdue such a world again, but anything that follows it is apt to prove an anticlimax.We both had a fatal power to multiply, the thought flashed on me, and the planet was not large. This is the wounded outcry of the human ego as it fails to discover its dominance among the beasts of the past.

 Their like had never been seen before--and until great starships take colonists by the thousands into the fathomless seas of space, we shall not see their like again. Farewell, I bid. There is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown along a wandering wind.

 They found in the grog shops and whorehouses of Port Royal reward enough for the dangers of their trade.

They saluted to no one and were gone.