| The Job Zone:
An excerpt from a declassified report from the office of Lyman Kirkpatrick, former Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency, as told to Carl O. Parcelli His spandex colostomy bag
Clogged with 10 weeks of filth
Dragged on the ground
Leaving a grey slime median line
Down the center of the hall
To the Director’s Office.
‘Knock. Knock.’
“You called for me, Sir.”
“Yes, Colonel Muttolo.
How’s your new office?”
“Windowless. Just the way I like it, Sir.”
“And how’s your family?”
“Dead at my own hand, Sir.
Just one of life’s little pleasures.”
“And your comrades in arms?”
“All turned against me and
Picked off one by one.”
“Changed sides?”
“More often than my bag.”
“Any ‘hope’ for you, Mutt?”
“If you’re having some, Sir.”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
And the director pulled a sheer
Paper host from an Osmium chalice.
“Mutt, my dear Mutt.
With this empires are won.”
And placed a wafer on his tongue.
“There. The formula is imbibed.
He could call us to account
And our secret
Would not be compromised.”
“Sir,” said Mutt singeing a fag,
This uprising, this resistance
If you could call it that,”
As he tapped the bladder of his colostomy bag
“Is like the ripples that you see
Confined to the hide of its ontology.
Just a series of quantifiable beliefs that
Can be gamed if the occasion arises
And once gamed reduced to a quantum of assizes.
As Bernays might say
Judgments ingested by the body politic
Are quickly quantified
Into slogans of content
Or justifications for war.
And now that we’ve
Cooked it up in the lab
With the hidden variables precipitated out,
I’ve made a list of all our failures
With specimens in the computer as well as mason jars.
A learning curve of grotesques
That has fueled our great illusion and
Shall impel our encore.”
“So it's revenge then.”
“Pure and simple,
And against everything under Heaven.”
“You’re still stung.”
Smoke from his fag blanching
The director’s gaze.
“Yes. My greatest humiliation
Was being forgiven.”
Cannell, brilliant, bored,
Produced a piece of grey chalk
And limned out a window
On the rose cinder block.
Then bricked it up with burlesques of
The effigies of the cubed fired clay and turning to Grimes,
“It's my escape route.”
“Christ, Cannell.
You won’t get very far.
Maybe through the masonry
But not the phantasmagoria.
At least, this time
You didn’t etch your pocked face
Leering back in.
That entire meeting I was torn between
Nicking your mug
Or the bloke in the chalk panorama.”
Mutt and O’Leery materialize in the door.
“Can’t decide whether to lash out at the world
Or scapegoat young Cannell, Mr. Grimes?"
"Crikey," said Grimes you look like
A dismantled Hoover or
The brotwurst from Hell.
Why don’t you empty that bag?”
And Cannell, “Oh, Lord, Sir! The smell!”
“The Director didn’t notice.
And he’s a man of impeccable taste
With the most acute senses.
And there’s too great an urgency to
Indulge our passions.”
Cannell pulled his rag from his nose
And began scrubbing away the
Cinder block looking glass
Launching a desperate search over its atomic pores.
“Let’s get down to business.
Grimes. How’s the wife?”
“Well Mutt. Under the floorboards in the solarium.
I swear, I loved her more than life.”
“And Cannell. How are the kids?”
“Six up. Six down. Dead of SIDS.”
“Good. Now, perhaps finally
You’ll concentrate on the task at hand.
O’Leery already relayed his shibboleth.
I want you to take a look at these.”
And reaching into a gunny sack
The Doctor retrieved two knees.
Flesh and bone cut so clean
They looked molded like the pads
An inmate would wear
As she burnished the asylum’s floors.
“Men. What do you make of these?”
“Somebody bumped you in the halls?
Went for your bag?”
“Wrong, Cannell. That bugger's
Cutting dice in the crematoria.”
And Mutt projected an image
Out of Grimes window.
“These gentlemen are
For all intents and purposes
The shape of your future.”
“You’re a top man Grimes.
The skipper sees that.”
“What Mutt, Cannell? No.
He’s dotes on you.”
“Nah, he don’t respect me
Since I’ve utterly failed the test.”
“What his epidemiology game?”
“Each time he infected one of my newborns
And each time my diagnosis was incorrect.”
“Still its very diplomatic of you to call it SIDS”
“Yeah. I know. Skip doesn’t like to gloat.”
“Must be a strain
On the marriage nonetheless.
Going through all the trouble of breeding
Knowing that Mutt’s at his game.
Where’d Mutt recruit you, Cannell.”
“The PC labs in Vientiane.”
“At the Pepsi bottling plant?”
“Yeah, that’s right.
He wanted me to torch
Five billion counterfeit yen
And another billion in forged treasury bonds
In my crematoria.”
“East Auschwitz?”
“Yeah, where we toasted all the Cong that we Jimi Hendrixed.”
“So you burned the slag?”
“No, I swapped with Ted Shackley
For 40 kilos of Triangle Gold.”
“I bet Mutt loved that?”
“Yeah, and that’s what started the feud
And cost Mutt his turf.
But when we got the smack
To the Saigon Bao Dai, it made Skip see
What I meant by
Better living through chemistry.”
“And you became his chef.”
“Yep. Nouvelle cuisine
With my 90 gallon drums
And black budget elan.”
“How about you, Grimes?”
“Oh, Mutt and I go way back. O’Leery too.
Yale ‘40. I slipped strontium 90
Into his jock strap.
We both rowed crew.
I’ve been pruning pieces off him ever since.”
“No wonder you’re close.”
“Yep. I’ve been his projects chief for 40 years---
And his personal surgeon.
Surgery’s like sculpture.
And Mutt? Well, It’s like slicing and dicing down
To the archetypal spook.”
“Mutt de Milo stripped down
Like a C-130 headed for Bolivia!”
“Yeah. Returning with kilos
Spilling through the cockpit door.
No consequences.
Enlightenment streamlining
Shedding the entanglements
Of the alliterative Before.
Sometimes.
Sometimes when I’m whittling away
At his liver
Or snipping out a clot of colon,
It feels like love.
I wrap his biohazard in butcher paper like
Blood sausage, bacon, chitlins.
It’s Mutt. Dear, dear Mutt.
I can’t bear to throw it away.”
So I grind it up for Epidemiology’s rats.”
“That’s gorgeous, Grimes.”
“How much does Muttolo know?”
“Mutt? That sink trap.
He thinks he’s in utter control.”
“Of the Job Zone?” the Secretary smirked.
“Yes, the Job Zone and the time line too.”
“And Grimes?”
“He’s never suspected the placebo
We slipped him at Yale.”
“So Mutt’s team has been in the Job Zone...”
“That’s right.
For nearly 40 fuckin’ years.
And his team is set to emerge in 40 days
Unless we hear from on high.”
“What about Lansdale’s replacement?”
“Cannell? I believe he’s on board.”
“Well, I hear the Job Zone
Doesn’t suit him.
Take a look at this.”
And the Secretary handed the Director
A piece of slate, a shingle
On which was chalked, Goedelian shell...crust
Of myster()...fate...
A capsule swallowed...glass hou...
The team dissolved. End in...
“Bad metaphysics in Cannell’s hand.”
“Bad’s as bad as good.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. There’s a crack in the zone.”
“It’s leaking? No!”
“40 years is a long time for protein structures. And
Once you breach a generation.”
“Cannell for Lansdale.
I’m not liking this.”
“Nor I. Mutt in particular
Has been exposed to nearly every extreme
Of the Job Zone.
Yet still trusts his life’s his own.”
“With that knowledge they’ll turn on us
Since they can’t go after
Donovan, Dulles or Helms.”
“Yeah, the petrie dish becomes a Pandora’s Box.
At least, what controls we have
Will be in place.”
“Controls? Don’t kid yourself.
They’ve been under for 40 years.”
“Except for Cannell.”
“What do you mean?
He’s the one least likely
To question our objectives. At least not like
Muttolo, O’Leery and Grimes.”
“Yes. Our objectives. Even that little cynic, Cannell...”
“You mean?” “Yes. He’ll seize upon the cart of the institution
But not the horse of the institutional in the way
Mutt who’s executed a hundred directives of his own
Would immediately recognize as
Lies that visited perpetual insult upon his system.”
“The Hand of God at work
In the Hand of Man?” “Right.
But young Cannell
Might still be convinced that there’s a God
That works in mysterious ways.” “Outside the system.”
“Right. Outside of our control and our immortality
That demands Mutt and his crew
Stagger around in doubt...”
“Can be perpetuated through Cannell
Who will supplant Mutt, O’Leery, and Grimes.
Under his own directive!”
“And give us another 40 years, another generation
To observe through the one way mirror of experiment
A wilderness beaming from another’s eyes.
Where our intent posing as
The Hand of God,
Strikes them blind.”
“Welcome to the Job Zone.”
“Oh by the way,
Has Mutt changed that bag?”
“Have you stopped culturing human tissue
In the toilets on the 8th floor?”
“Point taken.
Every man needs his metaphor. Did you assign Muttolo
The mystery of the knees?”
“Brought him the relics
Wrapped in the Times this very day.”
“If I know that old ghoul,
He’s gone to work straightaway.”
“An eye for eye. A tooth for a tooth.
I’d miss the garrote
If I gave it up now.
Bless this world for black and white;
Them and us; good and evil; yin and yang;
The zygote segmenting abroad as my fate.
I’m Trevor O’Leery.
I’ve lived in livery all my life.
It’s the only Nature I obey.
I’m here for my dispensation.”
“According to my chart,
Your request has been denied.
They’ve scheduled a formal denouement for you.”
“They? What they?”
“I’m only hear to ‘tune’ your head.
Ask on the 8th floor.”
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