Broken: A Plague Journal (23 page)

author: [...] Dela[...]unay].
title: “of His loss, of His ruin.”
publication:
Ein Journal des Instituts für die Erforschung des Heiligenscheineffektes.

[recovery team notes signal shatter; text incomplete.]

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la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-45%]

excerpts:

...] and upon his disappearance in 2005, on the eve of his twenty-seventh birthday, friends and family simply assumed that he was hiding from his long-before prophesied death, perhaps on a beach, perhaps on the road. He’d spoken of it all the time, that ouija board prediction; few knew just how much it had terrified him.

Those of his immediate circle who had actually read his books might have recognized in his disappearance the opening theme of his third speculative fiction novel.* Solipsistic, self-indulgent to the extreme of alienating his potential audience, he’d gone into hiding after its completion. He somehow felt responsible for the deaths of fictional characters, whom he seemed to believe actually existed, actually lived and died in nearby parallel existences.

By 2006, people had stopped looking for him.

By 2010, his books had started to come true.

*refer: Hughes, Paul Evan.
broken
. New York: Silverthought Press, 2010.

broken: Alpha: 1.4.0: 17 December 2002.

He’d disappeared.

They searched, friends, family, the authorities. There was no evidence that he’d been to Panama City or Charleston or the writers’ conference. They waited, but there was no word. No body. In time, many forgot.

He’d disappeared.

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search results: [[
Paul
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Hughes
] + [
criticism
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posthumous
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negative
]]: [translate: standard] :

author: Thara Ruskin.
title: “[re][dundant]: PEH Pap in the Age of Transgressive Interdisciplinarity.”
publication:
NY Times Book Review
, 08 February 2010.

[recovery team notes signal shatter; text incomplete.]

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la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-27%]

excerpts:

...] (Hughes’s) writing grates, indeed,
chafes
at the spirit of modern speculative fiction. Steeped in the post-Delany aesthetic, the author’s latest (and presumably last) offering is a confusing, dissatisfying and ultimately offensive collection of “transgression.”

If we are to assume that P.E. Hughs (sic, henceforth) is in fact dead, then the literary world should rejoice that we will no longer be subjected to such self-indulgent rubbish. It is painfully obvious to even the casual reader that what Delany handled with such skill in
The Mad Man
(1994) and
Savage Bent
(2007), Hughs maims. Is
Broken
truly the gift he had intended for his sf idol? Doubtful. Delany, were he dead, would be screaming invective from his grave.

Essentially a string of space-suited dykeouts intermixed with the post-post-modernist ramblings of a mentally-ill young man from upstate New York,
Broken
is transgressive only in implication... What else would we expect from a self-published author? What he lacks in talent, he makes up for with vivid descriptions of sexual encounters, cannibalism, brutality. In essence, exactly what we don’t need in a novel.

A message to Mr. Hughs, if he is reading this from an island populated by other victims of the age-twenty-seven curse: stay dead. Our slushpiles are already filled with similar pap.

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author: SE Colmey.
title: a response to “[re][dundant].”
publication:
NY Times Book Review
, 14 February 2010
.

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la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-14%]

full text:

To Ms. Ruskin:

I guess I’m partly to blame for the book that so upsets you, Paul Hughes’s
Broken
. I found the manuscript in an old cardboard box he had willed to me should he disappear. Inside the box, there were photographs, letters, cards, things that meant nothing to anyone except him and me. At the bottom, I found a cd-r with the novel on it. Sorry that I disappointed your precious literary world so much. I just thought it was a story that should be told.

What’s your problem with his book? That he wrote things that made people actually
feel
? That he had a following, people who would read everything he wrote just because of the way he had of drawing us in and making us think we were part of the book or his life? Some of us loved him. I understand it’s your job to read books and write reviews, but your commentary wasn’t a review of the novel, it was an attack on someone dear to many of us, someone who had more love to give than he knew what to do with. He knew how to write the things that most of us could never even begin to put into words, and his words were beautiful, magical things. Some of us regret letting him go.

And yes, I’m the Seattle girl in the books. I’m sure that taints your view of me. I’m too involved in this to see things clearly, right?

It’s now been almost eight years since I saw him, five years since anyone else saw him. I just hope he finally found what he was looking for somewhere out there.

In closing, fuck you, Ms. Ruskin. It was a good book, better than anything you ever could have written. “Pap?” Nice word. Do you feel proud that you have a big vocabulary? Get over yourself.

Sincerely,

Mrs. SE Colmey

Chair, Fine Arts Department
Cornish College of the Arts
Seattle, WA

p.s. There’s an “e” in his last name. Use it.

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author: unknown.
title: “An End of Us: An Ontological and Epistemological Discourse on The Forever Dust.”
publication:
Ein Journal des Instituts für die Erforschung des Heiligenscheineffektes.

[recovery team notes signal shatter; text incomplete.]

[
la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-33%]

excerpts:

...] post-Judas anthropological teams from Sol-3 (14.7+) found little to suggest that the agent actually arose from “Black Space,” that area of the AC system most affected by the destruction of Proxima Centauri. Intervention posts listening from the edge of the timeline reported no significant evidence of remaining industrial centers, much less the planetary production system that the creation of silver would have necessitated.

Perhaps it should be noted here that the anthro teams did eventually compile a comp/cont report on the status of the AC system pre- and post-war. That report is fundamental to understanding the conditions in that system that most likely were contributing factors to the madness of subject Maire and the Forever Dust she caused.

...] remember that teams arrived mid-war, and even under the cover of [...

...] major shipping lanes closed, and some evidence suggests that orbiting war platforms enacted a planetary blockade that forced the starvation of over ninety percent of the population. We can only imagine the desperation that the survivors felt while quite literally under the gun of the blockade platforms. Added to the lasting effects of biowar and engineered climate changes, the [...

...] without doubt tortured.

Torture is that most effective of appropriations: the victim in essence becomes the transitional commodity of the process. The information gathered during torture is only secondary in importance to the “owning” of the victim by the perpetrators. The process is one of excision. First, the victim is excised from her normal environment. Second, the victim’s language is excised. Torture enacts a regression within the victim; it takes away the ability to communicate as one always has and instead replaces it with those first forays into verbal communication that we make as infants: cries of pain and fear. Third, the perpetrator restores just enough verbal ability to excise the required information from the victim.

Torture is an insistence. Without the benefit of [...

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author: Thara Ruskin.
title: a response to SE Colmey.
publication:
NY Times Book Review
, 15 February 2010.

[
la biblio[“o]mnithèque universelle
confirms textual probability to statistical significance +/-27%]