Free Four New Messages by Joshua Cohen Page B

resemble a bun—as wars and diseases roil around, bubbling up here and there like effervescing oil. He cannot do it, Ronald Ray, he’s sorry but even wretches must have standards, wretched fictional standards. He could invent a fictional restaurant for you to bite your burger at but any fictional restaurant would be, like Nomenex, a worthless simulant or inconcinne imitation, a placebic generic. Any burger restaurant he invents would obviously be based on a real burger restaurant, a real burger restaurant everyone knows and has been to and that even he’s been to (the writer has also taken the succedaneous drugs on which Nomenex is based). Pity the burger outlet that must go up against a fiction? No, pity the fiction that must go up against a burger outlet! Ronald Ray, is the writer afraid to be seen as being in the pocket of his fake franchise’s competition? but can a chain that doesn’t exist have any competition? To invent one restaurant is to flatulate an entire chain? Yes, Ronald Ray, ridiculous! The writer would have to sit in his apartment unpublished (and lately the water pressure’s been stingy), and create a burger franchise, create a name and even a logo for it and falsely register and trademark and copyright the entire invention from its appearances exterior and interior to its gastronyms, the hammy neonames of its supersynthesized cuisine and why? only because he doesn’t want to be seen as endorsing any actually existing and beloved burger franchise in this crap creatic tale, apologies Ronald Ray, of your girlfriend’s hackneyed murder? Does the writer really think that if he mentions that existing famous burger franchise in his story he might help mayospread its fame—spread it like war and disease? like literary “influences”? Is he convinced he’d only further popularize its (he can’t decide on the one encompassing word) homogenization? is he convinced he’d only further homogenize the utter diversity of its damage? He shouldn’t be, he shouldn’t worry. This story will never be published, it will never survive—unlike plasticbags, unlike styrofoam, which will degrade forever. This story is closer to what’s packaged inside: unhealthy, produced by exploited labor (self-exploited), to be consumed or unconsumed, either way quickly gone, quickly forgotten. Excreted, excreated. Ronald Ray, you must be ravenous. Roll down a window and ponder the polysemy of “draft.”
    RR, this is what your writer did: He stopped writing and began reading, library books and pages printed from the internet, pages on the internet, all about the history of this burger franchise he was thinking of, this burger franchise that cannot be named (but unfortunately cannot not be thought of) (while the job was ignored, while he neglected his word counts, his presence in the office that of a fussy, persnickety, ultimately rejectable caret, him stetting all carelessness by being careless himself)—reading about the brothers who’d founded a restaurant that made burgers and that was very successful, everyone loved their burgers and came to eat them from all over the area where their restaurant was located, this was California and the year was 1954 (information like a conglomerate restructuring imagination: 1954 the birth of color TV, your writer’s parents, desegregation!), and then another man approached these brothers, an entrepreneur with the entrepreneurial spirit, and bought from them their restaurant and along with buying their restaurant did something absolutely incredible—your writer remembers how shocked and incredulous he was when he learned this was possible, he remembers how naive and immature he felt when he learned that not only could this be done but that it was done often and that there were even laws in place to govern such indelible transactions—along with selling this man their restaurant these brothers sold this man their name. The burger restaurant’s founding fraternity sold their surname to