Free Four New Messages by Joshua Cohen Page A

happened to that shawarma stand on 10th?”). Misprints slipped by, slopping my copy. I was warned, I who typically issued the warnings (that’s all my copy was): do this, don’t do that, if you experience nausea or upset stomach, with Ronald Ray dromomaniacal. The dictionary definition for dromomania linked to a thesaurus, which suggested (advised/broached/commended) drapetomania (that quack syndrome that caused slaves to flee captivity). I searched that up, left a page on my screen when I wandered to pee, was reprimanded for my (the subtext was racist) violation of corporate IUP (Internet Usage Policy). At least mine wasn’t “painful or frequent urination,” though with all this stress—though affect is not effect —I was experiencing “unusual weakness,” which once arrived in an Indipak email phrased as “unusual weakedness”—I’d never be capable, no computer would be capable, of writing as beautiful as that, Mom. I’ll never get a raise, or a promotion, and we use what’s called the serial comma. I typed pages I trashed, then feeling anxious a cospirist might find them retrieved them for shredding into piñata entrails, which I bagged in a bag inside a bag to dump to the dumpster of a nonneighboring impasse (if I could’ve, I would’ve shredded the impasse).
    And this was every day, Mom, which is two words when talking about a repeated experience but one word, everyday, when speaking of the boring, the mundane. Anything on my workcomputer I’d email from: to: my personal email, delete. Once home I’d check email on my homecomputer, my nightcomputer, reread the day’s writing, rewrite. I’d skimp on dinner, email myself the night’s skinning and gutting then, tucked between bedsheets lined like obsolesced paper, turn off the light. Every day lived double, everyday duplicity. Nomenex us both, Mom, but read the smallprint first: Nomenex doesn’t exist, it’s an exemplar drug, a composite of composites—inspired by how an amphetamine can be combined with a dextroamphetamine into a single drug that both focuses your attention and helps you lose weight, which gives the attention of others something better to look at, someone slimmer on which to focus their own personal doses—a fictional surrogate for an array of antidepressants that actually do exist and that I would prefer not to mention for fear not only of legal reprisal (in case this is published), but also of being fired. I couldn’t sleep, Mom, but I didn’t need a sleeping aid—I needed a hamburger. I won’t be disingenuous, I needed a specific burger—buns and pattymeat indistinguishable, but the burger distinguished by other criteria. I could taste it, Ronald Ray could taste it—could taste its very ingredients active and inactive—but I could not prescribe him what he wanted, what I wanted even: I couldn’t Nomenex any of us with nonexistent Nomenex, I couldn’t name and by naming bring into being, Mom, I was a wreck.
    Ronald Ray, he will try this in third person. There’s nothing more efficient than third person (omniscience), and a story about fastfood should be nothing but efficient. The writer—J, say, the fictionalizing illeist, regular masturbator, and underemployee—can write but he cannot name, even though he knows what he wants to name, he knows what he wants to say, he knows the Word, he knows the letters that form the Word, he knows the sounds of the letters and the shapes of the letters, Ronald Ray, he knows them like he knows the word uxoricide, like he knows the hard and soft sounds and the shape of the J, but he cannot pronounce them or form them in order, he cannot assemblyline them into the … he can only have you cruise incommoded, making your mileage, your exits and turns, incarnating yourself and the grid, substantiating yourself within the grid as he maps his own failings—at night with his head centered on the white perfection of pillow that needs only a few scattered seeds and a moment’s toasting to