becoming suicided v

the solution came to him while he was at a party of architects in a downtown loft. sipping acceptable wine, talking with young beautiful professionals as if he were a precision-engineered product manufactured for such purposes, mingling like tofu in a stir-fry in the crowded sloppily perfect room, video projections of abstract apocalypses dripping down the walls, the air light with weed and the ingressings and egressings of humans educated for ingressings and egressings, everything routine and casual and tragically enlightened, post-internet flesh shining like metallic jujubes in the simulated astral light, the concatenated effect like a neopapal rave in an underworld made for creatures from a blakean prophecy, enitharmons and urizens flung manifest and discrete, a boutique budding architect mentioned – how the topic had arisen horgiz had irritatingly forgotten – that the republic of absinthia had a fire lookout tower program, the last remaining on earth, an anachronistic culture of bitumen, silviculture, mutant pick-up trucks, and bear hunting.

pokeus the following week zealously googled. let’s see. a lookout observer murdered, 127 towers, remote wilderness settings, excessive solitude, significant risk of madness, only helicopter access, the closest medical facilities 100km away and this attended by doctors who loathed being in absinthia consequently misdiagnosing patients for amusement and cheap schadenfreude.

he applied immediately, got a phone interview a few weeks later, and in a few months found himself in a world he thought had been obliterated millennia ago, known only by dinosaurs and giant ferns.

the training program and brief stint in fire camp confirmed what he had suspected. he had not been programmed for survival among these peoples. irony had not been exported here. there was no recycling program. the earth was still flat, the sun its obedient satellite. they had access to the internet but thought it was just for shopping for things not found in the local home depot ... not realizing the internet’s true function is reality and death – not of bears and trees, but of ourselves – and so is the only remaining innovation.

everyone intuitively hated him.

there were 50 ways to die. hantavirus, lightning, missing one’s step on the tower ladder, bears, cougars, falling into the outhouse, hitting your head on a rock and having to wait 10 hours for malevolent medical attention, going fucking crazy, rabid groundhogs, aircraft mishaps, heart attacks. the city was a haven of safety and sanity next to this place, he thinks. it’s inevitable – he would become suicided by an absinthian who loathed his guts, some psychopathic freakazoid who suffers days of mosquitoes the size of pterodactyls, bear attacks, muskeg sinkings, deer flies stronger than the american air force … to appear in his window at three in the morning and blow his brains out.

he waited. each night he got into bed knowing his lifelong plan, decades in the hard making, was nearing completion. borgiz is so far north it never gets dark and he wakes in the white night listening for cracks in the forest, watching for luminous masks in the window. only silence. they’re waiting, he thinks. like me. bound by contrapuntal attraction and vocational magnetism. like sex anticipation’s most of the pleasure … it will be in the final weeks of summer. soon, soon.

but after three seasons of this he’s still alive – just that petty abuse and degradation which after all are everywhere, society’s core achievements, built into everything … and he’s had these before, been far better paid. the absinthians despise him but their despising is perfect, expressed through apathy. horgiz gets depressed by his ineffectuality, by the blasé attitude of humanity toward its end, by the lack of cooperation in anything important. he gives up. returns to his tiny flat in new pork.