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To send an idea by way of wire he told Burkett was not to give the wire ideas.
 Burkett tongued his broken tooth and continued to read a stolen airline magazine.
Would you, he asked Burkett, gorge on an animal whose flesh might destroy you?
This one the meat killed him.
This one the car wreck.
The other down the flood it was said but he knew better.
Knew a woman once, he said, and I wanted to tell her to have a little clarity. Clarity, it seemed had fallen out of the language at that time.
Burkett styled himself the visionary futurist.
Machines without will Burkett dreamed of yet machines intelligent.
Intelligence without will he knew from some other context.
Was there an in and an out?
How would Burkett understand the phrase what a house was.
Elegance of the machine the elegance of command and execution in perfect merger but elegant as well in construction and function. Obvious from Burkett's description or inference or projection.
Burkett unable to understand a language is only the language.
And what the fuck?
Obligation to be free of it only the beginning. The beginning of the rootless drifter. Though it did not -- could not -- matter.
Rooted, unrooted, drifting or not, a victim in the wake in any case.
Burkett could not invent a way out.
No matter how completely he envisioned the totality of technological solution.
Blinded, they say.
Unable to see, perhaps.
Everything he hated in himself so clear to himself.
Punished with savage conscience or with savage conscience punished.
The only eloquent thought in accusatory mode.
He had to be what he was and what he was not with equal facility and see himself, if at all, in some negative definition or relief.
Burkett claimed he was going blind. Don't you see it, Burkett said, a blind man could see it.
He held up the bottle to Burkett and said, Want some correction fluid?
He passed a guy in a liquor store entryway. A guy he used to drink with. Guy he'd heard had gone to treatment. The guy did not recognize him or the guy was not the guy.
Then he remembered that guy was dead.
All engendered in a moment now gone.
Time went backwards and forwards or the other way around.
This was not true.
Or it was not quite that way.
Burkett accepted and adored storage. Everything would be stored in the future for the future. Nothing would ever disappear.
Nothing.
Like a place where maybe you were high and there was something going on in the back and the light the way it was and you were high and you knew there were some guns in the back.
That would never disappear.
He wanted to move away from life.
All his life he wanted this.
Burkett wanted everything recorded which seemed to mean to make everything more everything than everything already was.
It was said.
For a reason.
Because that was the way it was.
Burkett's cosmology worse than an acceptance, an enthusiasm.
Were any of Burkett's friends dead?
Never heard Burkett mention a person in other than a business or technical context.
People.
Building the structures for the structures' sake.
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