Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Well, it's light. She only woke up twice, pretty briefly both times. I waited until she fell back asleep and then... oh, man. I'll just say it's Henna. The crazy thing is, they're not random. They're definitely not random. They're not even natural patterns like crystals or fractals -- it's script, I swear to god. My previous theory isn't covering as much as I hoped it would. I always wondered what I'd do if I ever encountered something I knew there was no ready explanation for, and had to pull on what I'd learned from stories. Well, ancient scripts -- you go to musty old libraries, right? Or short of that, Google. Nothing so far. I wish I didn't keep wanting to bolt back in there. It's subcutaneous, it's absolutely subcutaneous, but it's not an itch. Just... localized pleasure, suddenly yoinked. One of those hardwired organic shocks, like when you take a pacifier out of a baby's mouth, or when you... well. Heh. The question is, what scent goes with my grand new design? The answer is: Antony. And just let them stare. I dare them. Blessed among women maybe I ain't, but this is something else again, and I'm not going to be cowed by it.
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07:16:07 AM,Thursday 27 January 2005
I, uh... I don't think this is coming off.
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06:08:52 AM,Thursday 27 January 2005
Weird night. When I got here, everything was fine; my employer was using her new speech synthesizer to write an email, and the other employee was puttering about happily enough. But after about an hour, I started hearing this scritching and scratching from the radiator in her bedroom. No one else seemed to notice anything, and, I mean, what was I supposed to say? "Hey, I think your 10-room 8th floor 6-doorman swank-as-murder Central Park apartment is paying squat to a nest of social-climbing rats"? And maybe it wasn't; maybe it was just cutlery noises from a midnight snacker downstairs. Or maybe rich people's radiators scritch instead of CLANG-CLANG-CLANG. What do I know? So I sat there and administered the nightly footrub and kept mum. But after she had fallen asleep to Charlie Rose, I snuck over there with a flashlight I'd taken from the utility drawer.
I guess I expected a weird smell and maybe a pair of eyes beating a retreat from the light, and I was just gonna verify my suspicions and relate them in the morning. I'm a friend to rats, by and large; still, I've got a responsibility to oversee the sanitation of the sickroom. But... heh... um. How do I put this? The radiator had, like, desiccated, almost. But that doesn't make any sense. Only moist things desiccate, living things with hard parts. Paint flakes and metal rusts, but this thing was as ultramodern as the rest of this place, until tonight. It's like it turned... chitinous. You know what I mean? Like if you flatten out the nibs of fifty quill pens, and put them in the place of the metal gridwork. It still kept the same structure; pot of orchids on top, knobs under the flip-panel, wall-to-wall carpet flush with the bottom. It was still beige. But it wasn't painted metal, nohow, and it scritched. Not rhythmically, but with purpose, almost. Like an old dog scritching himself in his sleep, or a mad monk with writer's block. Further inside, I could see mats of stuff like cilia -- short little frondy bits, still beige, but rounder and more flexible.
This is the part where I get massively stupid. You know in Amelie where it says she cultivated the small pleasures in life and she sticks her arm up to the elbow in a barrel of raw lentils? I'm such a sucker for that feeling. I can't help it. It's why I like snails and chain mail and sandpaper. So I, uh, flipped up the bit you flip to get to the knobs and stuck my arm in and bent my elbow and put my forearm between two mats of cilia. And GOD it felt good. Not wet at all; each little cilium was dry and raspy, but the cumulative effect was soft as buttermilk. And it was still a radiator, y'know; nice hot heat blasting out of it all the while. And Charlie Rose was finishing up, and my employer was making her regular night-time snorey noises, and part of me wanted to retreat off to the kitchen to get on the internet and blog this, but another part of me wanted to break apart all the delicate little flat quill-nibs of the radiator grille and climb inside this thing. Maybe I wasn't hugged enough as a child. I... um. Actually, I probably shouldn't blog what happened next. It's a little incriminating, and I want the chance to tell my story to the concerned parties in person. Let it be said that I'm fine, that I'm starting to think I know what caused all this, and that I'm going to be wearing long sleeves for a while.