Originally published in Technoccult.

Difficulty: no giving up.

Hard to write, feet not dextrous, ha. Five senses, five simultaneous inputs. Synthesize three for single output.

Public radio address — pen in hand, now, foot delicate enough for Braille —through the aural inputs. Twelve stranded atop house in flood. Restate. Twelve stranded atop house in flood.

Unfaithful translation of Feynmann to bump-grids now playing underfoot — odd, can spool faster across arch of sole than could under fingers. Inaccurate biographical information; was samba, not bossa nova. Synthesize: Twelve stranded atop samba club in Brazillian flood. Strict accuracy. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club.

Optical dissociation shunted in favor of rapid focus swap. Looped video (35mm archive, poor condition, no blues, missing audio) of child crying in backseat as imposing figure in black pea-coat recedes to vanishing point through rear window. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club, abandoned by rescuers. Offset on repeat. Mode same. Twelve abandoned, would-be rescuers fleeing.

Second focus: novel, thriller, yellow paper, pocket-sized, inappropriate ellipses signifying difficult drama. Cheapens the situation. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club; rescue attempts called off; all the world holds its breath.

The hard two, now. Burnt diesel scent from open vent. Raw seafood from restaurant kitchens two floors down. Nothing discrete, but context fills the role here of isolation. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club; rescue attempts called off; all the world holds its breath. A fishing vessel, chugging powerfully against the flow, making its way to the survivors against the command of—

Collect and synthesize. I shall bend — not break — the scientific methods. A fishing boat is coming [inappropriate ellipsis].

Been up too long and my sinuses are draining down the back of my throat in a hot sheet that tastes of metal, of the tin lip of cheap beer. Twelve stranded atop bossa nova club; rescue attempts called off; all the world holds its breath. The survivors have exhausted their fresh water supply, and are now rationing tins of beer.

Extrapolate, for the threads of story are like shavings of gold, and to procure a true representative sample there must be much to enter in the crucible: We have seen close ups of the faces of the children, and their fear is solid through the wires and waves. All those housewives between their television sets and ironing boards catch the news flash; students have their classroom monitors switched on; the names of the children are more memorable than those of the old man drinking beer, of the mistress of the club in her simple red dress. Weather conditions prohibit airlift. Cameraman with optical zoom unsteady, drops camera when twisted by sobs.

Hop one: sobbing.

Hop two: That time I took a lungful of asbestos dust and lost the will to stand and faced the wall and coughed until my eyes hurt and the poison particles had turned to mud against my cheeks.

Two hops only. Not good.

In an infinite universe, there must be an infinite number of stories that haven’t got a thing to do with me. In a possibly finite universe, there must be a story, a star somewhere the light of which will never touch me, and never come around again.

The thing is, the problem is, I’m shut up in memories. The real sixth sense, used to navigate a house moved out of twenty years before, used to evaluate the vibrancy of a color, to add the relativity, without which we are seeing new things every day, smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling new things every second of the day.

I want to leave this place. I want to be alone, but here there is no alone. Downstairs, the cook shatters a pan of boiled sugar and his children scramble for the flakes. Upstairs, two women scream. On either side of me are people breathing, breathing heavy, phlegmy gulps. I can not be alone. I can not find the story that has none of me. I can make these successive approximations, Riemann sums for solitude, diminishing myself. But not with two hops. That doesn’t even get close to nothing.

I could write myself a story of escape; even I wouldn’t believe it. Null hop.