Editorial
                    Pangea II: A Travel Narrative
 
                               D. Harlan Wilson

          II stood on the bald lip of a promontory as the second Pangea locked into place. The landscapes drifted together at an alarming rate, then fitted at the edges, like puzzle pieces. Beyond the spectacle, an ocean surged with amphibians. II felt a sense of hopelessness, of desperation.

[Distant image of a black blot falling off of a cliff into the terminal sky.]

          II remembered Austria. The hills, the spires. A man in suspenders, with a beard that sloped into a sharp white point. For better or worse, he possessed a bona fide soul. It was tangible, the soul. It was almost corporeal…. These fragments aside, memory escaped me.

[According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Pangea (sometimes called Pangaea) is a noun denoting _____________________________________________. Most ordinary robosapiens don’t have access to the OED. One must be a plaquedemic of some nature and have access to a Tall Library. Otherwise one must embezzle the textual goods or discharge nearly $1,000 for the authentic 20-volume set.]

          II killed a moth with my hand on the first try, snatching and squeezing it into a fist. Somehow the insect’s essence flooded into me. II emitted a kind of moth-scream and felt two eye-bags open like wounds in my chest. II saw everything in shades of monochrome. Docufictions unfolded before me, up and down alien escarpments, exploding through boulders and forests and mountains, into the New Void.

          II met a girl. Everybody excepi exceptum the irrigated hordes was dead but II met her. She told me her name was Sasha Crack. Initially her breasts commanded my attention, but II forgot about them immediately, entranced by her calf muscles, those sharp and rigid inflammations. My first instinct—II operated only on first instincts now, one usurping the other at lightning speed—was to pull her towards me, take her in my arms, and wrap eager fingers around the primordial curve of her ass. She struggled, then deflated like a tire. Sex ensued. Particles of dirt and sand invaded our orifices. The anguish of the experience overpowered my will to orgasm, and II threw myself into a bush. Then we read select passages from the Bible.

[Narrative belies the dawn of novel terrain. Scarecrow blown to shit in a cornfield with a shotgun—the image freezeframes as flecks of hay expand from the core of the dummy. How does meaning apply? In what direction does the narrative unfold? The unfolding is the curd. Plot. Backstories and frontstories. Invocations of empathy, sympathy. Gore lingers like a turd in the breeze. II look away. And then II look back.]

          II found myself behind the wheel of a convertible, vintage Cadillac, cherry red, white leather interior, gleaming silver hubcaps capable of inducing hypnosis if stared at inordinately. II heard the lens whir and spin and II felt the camera move in to an extreme closeup on my face. A cold, serious grin threatened to snap like a mousetrap and swallow my head. Vast fighter pilot sunglasses concealed my dead gaze.

          The sky, the surf, the wind in my hair…

[This is the third to the last paragraph.]

          II continued to race across the impossible expanse of Pangea II, doing spinouts, on occasion, and leaping over cracks, gulches and ravines in the earth. Mainly II just drove and listened to the air. Then II hit a hummingbird. It exploded onto the windshield like a bag of slime launched from a remote trebuchet. II lost control of the car. II fishtailed for half a mile, unwilling to remove my heel from the accelerator, and finally hit something, a hunk of deadwood. The car spit me out like a pinch of tobacco. II sailed across the sky, arms and legs flapping behind my pushed-out chest. II came to rest on the spikes of a great cactus. Impaled, II.... Cirrhotic livers, emphysemic lungs, ulcer-speckled stomachs and kidneys exploded out of my flipside in an unadulterated torrent of aggression...

[How the articulation of something destroys it. How the idiot flames are nothing without the senseless embers. That’s the gist of it. Bogus ruins traveling across imaged lines of flight.]