Publisher's Dummy
├─ Editorial Note
├─ Catwalk Papers
├─ Aquifer / Susan material
├─ Plate I (Recovered Diagram)
├─ Extracts from “Mars Writing / CheesE Blocks”
└─ Commentary tying them together
Pleiade Fishing in America
Segment I: End Matter for a Book That Has Already Gone Under
By the time they understood that the fish were reading them back, the season had closed and the signs came down from the causeway one by one, each with its own peculiar creak, as if the hooks themselves objected to being retired. Nobody in that county ever admitted to surprise. Surprise was for tourists, birdwatchers, and the occasional federal man who arrived with a clipboard after the catastrophe had already entered the folklore and found itself selling bait under glass at the counter beside the pork rinds and sinkers. Our people preferred to call it a correction in the weather, though it was not weather exactly, unless weather includes those showers of luminous tackle, buckshot stars, and silver-eyed mullet that rose at dusk in ranks from the black inland canals and hung over the subdivisions like a second alphabet of scales.
It was the end, then, but not the end they had ordered.
The ordered end had been available for years in pamphlets, revival charts, county emergency plans, missile doctrines, actuarial tables, blood panels, flood insurance maps, and the better sort of late-capitalized sermonette where every symptom was itemized by category and all agency restored to those whose finest achievement was that they had frightened themselves in advance. This other end came piecemeal and comic, with interruptions. A shrimp trawler burned in dry grass forty miles from any salt. A shoal of carp lodged in the drive-through window of a branch bank. Three old women fishing for brim below the power station pulled up not fish but a string of bright medallions stamped with the profiles of the Seven Sisters in hairnets and welding goggles, which they pocketed on the theory that any sky which sank into mud had forfeited jurisdiction.
There were hearings, naturally, because there are always hearings when a thing is too ridiculous to deny and too useful to affirm. Men with necks like pilings sat under flags and asked whether the so-called Pleiade Event had anything to do with foreign interference, modified runoff, fraudulent astronomy, hormone residue, cults of artisanal navigation, social media contagion, imported tilapia, weather derivatives, or the decline in public respect for ordinary freshwater law. Experts of every damp persuasion came forth. One oceanographer insisted the stars had not descended but been mislocalized by a generation that no longer understood verticality. A theologian of low wattage maintained that the fish were only angels seen from beneath. A venture capitalist from Scottsdale, wearing loafers pale as cod belly, announced to laughter and then to silence that scalable opportunity lay precisely in the convergence of celestial protein and immersive heritage branding.
The laughter there is important. Much in this country depends on whether people laugh before or after the sale.
By then the inland marinas had become schools of a kind. It was no longer enough to bait a hook or identify a feeder creek by smell. One had to know which constellations could be cleaned at a station and which required gloves; whether the red gleam under the gill meant radiation, annunciation, or a simple taste for diesel; whether the black ribbon in the flesh was vein, script, or joke. Boys who could not add four numbers in a row could separate a bucket of comet shad from ordinary bait by the angle of the eye and the afterimage left in the palm. The county school board, in a fit of realism rare enough to be considered radical, voted to add Pleiade handling to the agricultural curriculum and was promptly sued by the American League for Secular Distance, which held that no public institution ought to favor one star cluster over another.
This was in the years after the towers of New Philadelphy had gone mostly ceremonial and before the inland casinos finished converting the old fulfillment corridors into climate-neutral canals with names stolen from republics that had never existed. The country, if one insists on calling it that, had become by then a continuous strip of branded bewilderment from the Jersey eelgrass to the burn pits west of the Salt River, all of it threaded by premium roads and secondary rumors. You could still buy peaches from the back of a truck in one county and in the next attend a symposium on amphibious finance. There were women in mud boots quoting derivatives law. There were men in campaign hats comparing bait recipes to the Council of Nicaea. There were churches under overpasses holding night vigils for the missing tackle boxes of the righteous. There were drones, but not always state drones; some were private, some devotional, some merely lonely and trying to follow the old migration routes of heron and debt.
And in all this the fishing held.
People like to think that when the sky comes down into the creeks, ordinary life ceases. They underestimate ordinary life. The fryers still hissed. Couples still quarreled in parking lots with one shoe on. A notary still stamped forms in a booth beside a bait freezer while outside a man swore the moon had laid eggs in his jon boat. That was America at its most indestructible and most absurd: not the republic of marble intentions, but the republic of errands conducted while the categories dissolved.
The first true end, if one wishes to date it, may have been the summer the charter captains began bringing back photographs of clients posing with catches that could not be photographed. In the prints, where the fish should have been, there were only veils, silver burns, or a gap in the emulsion shaped like a handbell. Yet everybody in the picture held the posture of possession. Smiles arched. Knuckles strained. The absent weight bent the wrist. Here was proof enough for the counties that had always relied on posture where evidence failed.
Soon the motels adjusted. Rooms advertised blackout drapes, scale sinks, and northern exposure. Ice machines were refitted with disclaimers. “Management Not Responsible for Celestial Melt.” Roadside restaurants extended their menus to include Seven Sister hash, Nebula strips, and, for a brief regrettable season, Galaxy grits, which turned out to be only ordinary grits sold at a markup to men in field vests. The whole coast-to-interior belt entered one of its periodic frenzies of practical mysticism, which is to say it monetized first and interpreted later.
Not all were pleased. There were protests from the Society for Ethical Angling, whose younger members wore biodegradable waders and argued that no star should be caught during its breeding image. A retired judge in Volusia County wrote six op-eds maintaining that if the heavens had entered navigable state waters, then all precedent since admiralty had to be reconsidered. Three brothers in western Pennsylvania claimed hereditary rights to the first dark run of pleiads on the grounds that an ancestor had once dreamed of them in anthracite. Nobody could prove otherwise. The matter entered probate and there remained for seven months while the fish themselves altered course.
For that too was discovered: they moved when named too often. The more the pundits said Pleiade, the less the shoals appeared in open channels. They preferred culverts, ditches, retention basins, and those half-forgotten strips behind logistics parks where cattails, shopping carts, and revelation mingle without supervision. There were whole neighborhoods where children drew them in chalk not as fish but as women braided together by the eyes. There were elsewhere men who filleted them and found in the flesh tiny barbless hooks of human manufacture long since overgrown, as if the stars had been trying for years to catch us and had only lately succeeded.
This, in time, became the predominant theory in the bars worth entering: that the Event was reciprocal. We did not fish the Pleiades. The Pleiades, finding the old tackle of the republic irresistible, had drifted down in schools to angle for the remains of our attention. It was one thing for a nation to believe it had captured heaven for sport. It was another to suspect heaven had baited a nation with its own reflective appetite.
By then Dave had stopped filing reports in the old sense. The forms could not accommodate what bit. Category A: migratory. Category B: invasive. Category C: litigious. Category D: luminescent in violation of county code. He wrote instead on paper bait wrappers, church bulletins, the backs of marina receipts, and once on a sack that had held blood meal and now held something brighter and more articulate than blood. He never claimed to know the meaning of the thing. He only reported that the thing had happened, was happening, had perhaps happened before under other county names and lesser tackle conditions.
He said the true danger was not that the fish had fallen from the stars but that everybody immediately began to act as if this improved their position.
One saw what he meant. Consultants arose. Festivals multiplied. A governor declared a Week of Celestial Heritage and cut a ribbon over a temporary boardwalk leading nowhere but excellent nowhere with concession booths. A private equity firm purchased sixty-seven bait shops and rebranded them as immersion nodes. The old words—shoreline, catch, season, evidence, grace—grew calluses from overuse. Whole families were ruined by investment in premium lures guaranteed to attract only the higher sisters. There were suicides, conversions, mergers, and one splendid case in which a man from Tulsa patented a line of designer creels woven to resemble antique reliquaries and sold them to women from Marin County who had no intention of touching fish but wished to display seriousness in a den.
All this would have been merely national if not for the weather that followed. The weather took offense, or perhaps offense took weather. Tides entered parking garages inland. Dry lightning stitched over soybean fields in geometric counsels. Frogs came through HVAC systems speaking in clicks no one would transcribe for fear the text might begin to expect readers. Then on the fourth of July of that year—because of course it was the fourth—there was the famous backward fireworks over Lake Okeechobee, when every shell launched downward into the water and detonated under the surface in mute chrysanthemums of green and white, bringing up by the thousands the small blind fish later identified, after acrimonious debate, as juvenile pleiads or else highly marketable frauds.
From then on the end was accepted, though not unanimously. Some took it for judgment, some for art, some for weather with a graduate degree. A practical widow from Cape May put it best while scaling one with poultry shears on television: “Whatever it is, it don’t exempt supper.”
That sentence passed into literature, policy, and kitchen towels.
As for the final disposition of the catch, there are competing records. Some say the last schools returned of their own accord through the storm drains to the upper dark. Some say they remain among us in ornamental ponds behind medical campuses, growing sleek on reflected signage and legal uncertainty. Some say they were all eaten long ago and have entered the bloodstream of the republic, which would explain a good many of our later speeches and the glitter in the eyes of people discussing infrastructure.
I prefer, though preference proves nothing, the account of the old brothers who poled out at the dead end of mulberry season and found the inland cove perfectly still, as if the whole country had paused between errands. There on the surface lay seven floats, ordinary red-and-white bobbers, moving very slowly against the wind. No lines were visible. No rods. No boats. Just the seven patient signs, each dipping once, then again, as if something below had nearly made up its mind.
They did not cast.
That, perhaps, is the true ending: not the catch, not the hearing, not the sale, not even the laugh—but the moment before the hand goes forward, when an entire civilization, tackle in fist, suddenly suspects that whatever is down there has already taken the baited shape of its own desire and is waiting with exquisite stillness for us to call that shape a fish.
And then, because this is still America, someone in the reeds sneezed, somebody else cracked a beer, and the spell, which was never more than communal concentration under pressure, broke in seven glitter rings.
After that the county resumed.
Resumed what is harder to say.
Send me on, and I’ll give you Segment II, working backward into the prior false-end, the hearings, the bait economies, the spurious authorities, the first inland catches, and the opening manufacture of sources.
Good — then we pivot the current back-to-front structure so that Susan becomes the gravitational center, and everything else (Pied Cow, Pleiades fishing, hearings, scholars, markets) circles her recursively.
If we are moving crabwise, the ending we just wrote becomes the outer shell, but as we move backward the narrative begins to reveal that Susan was always there underneath the whole system — the rumor, the appetite, the body politic, the comic monster.
Below is Segment II, still working backward, but now Susan keeps surfacing from the bottom of the narrative.
Pleiade Fishing in America
Segment II — Susan Beneath the Waterline
Before the counties discovered the Pleiades in their drainage canals, there had already been Susan.
Nobody agrees exactly when she entered the record. The official position—held for years by the Inland Fisheries Authority and later by the Bureau of Cultural Hydrology—was that Susan was merely a colloquial exaggeration attached to a series of unexplained growth events in the river towns. The first reports were small: women claiming that the water level in certain ornamental ponds rose whenever Susan passed through town; children insisting that the carp at the municipal docks turned toward the bank as if acknowledging her; a bait clerk in Flagler County swearing that every minnow in his tank suddenly aligned head-north when Susan leaned over the counter and asked for nightcrawlers.
No one believed the bait clerk because bait clerks are famous for their exaggerations. They are the first to see things and therefore the last to be believed.
Still, the reports accumulated.
Susan had no fixed biography. She appeared in different counties with slightly different ages and occupations. Sometimes she was a waitress who could clean a redfish faster than the county fair judge could blink. Sometimes she worked the cashier desk at a marina where fishermen claimed their receipts smelled faintly of ozone afterward. Once she was said to have served on a zoning board where every map slowly tilted until the creeks began pointing toward the sky.
Yet the descriptions shared a common feature: wherever Susan went, the categories loosened.
Fish behaved oddly.
Maps contradicted themselves.
Men who had spent forty years distinguishing bass from trout began arguing about constellations.
At first the authorities blamed social media.
The Susan Principle
Long before the Pleiades were fished, the locals had a saying:
“If Susan is in the county, the water will remember something.”
No one knew what that meant. The saying persisted because sayings do not require verification.
The phrase appears in at least four municipal transcripts and one ill-advised doctoral dissertation from the University of South Florida titled Hydrological Memory and Feminine Recursion in Coastal Myth Systems. The dissertation was later withdrawn after the candidate insisted on citing a bait freezer as a primary source.
Yet even the skeptics noticed that when Susan entered a bar or dockside café the conversations changed tone. Men stopped speaking in the language of competition—pounds, length, bait type—and began speaking in speculation.
Someone would mention stars.
Someone else would say the stars had always been fish.
Someone would swear he had once pulled a silver shape from the canal that hummed like a transformer until Susan told him to throw it back.
These stories would then circulate through the counties until they reached the first scholars.
The Scholars Arrive
It is one of the tragedies of American intellectual life that scholars rarely arrive until the jokes have already begun.
The first academic delegation appeared during what later became known as the Preliminary Susan Phase. They carried notebooks, recording equipment, and a grant titled Semiotic Instability in Littoral Economies. Their questions were precise.
“Is Susan a person?”
“Is Susan a metaphor?”
“Is Susan an emergent hydrological phenomenon?”
The fishermen answered carefully.
“She’s Susan.”
The delegation returned to the university and produced three articles arguing that Susan represented the collective subconscious of coastal communities negotiating late-capitalist aquatic labor structures.
Within a month Susan was spotted cleaning a catfish behind the ice machine of a gas station that sold fireworks year-round.
Susan and the Fish
Only later did anyone notice that the fish themselves seemed to recognize her.
The first confirmed event occurred on a municipal pier near Titusville. Witnesses reported that Susan leaned over the railing and tapped the water twice with a beer bottle. Immediately the entire surface erupted with small silver flashes, as if the canal had been briefly replaced with a mirror broken into a thousand obedient pieces.
A local television station attempted to interview her about the phenomenon.
Susan declined to comment.
When pressed she reportedly said:
“You boys think you’re fishing the sky.
But the sky’s been fishing you a long time.”
The clip circulated briefly online before disappearing into the great inland archive where all inconvenient footage eventually settles.
The Body of Susan
The later controversies about Susan’s size, shape, and physiological plausibility should not distract from the original observations.
In the earliest accounts Susan is not described as monstrous. She is simply present in too many categories at once.
She eats like a longshoreman.
She laughs like a revival choir.
She moves through counties the way a weather system moves across the Gulf.
The grotesque exaggerations came later, when the scholars began measuring her.
The first measurement claimed that Susan’s appetite exceeded the caloric intake of a mid-size cattle herd.
The second measurement insisted her shadow sometimes appeared before she entered the room.
The third suggested that the Pleiades themselves might be a metabolic by-product of Susan’s presence in freshwater systems.
This third theory gained traction for several weeks because it came with a graph.
Dave’s Note
Dave, who kept records when records had stopped behaving, wrote the following line in a spiral notebook found years later under a tackle box:
“Susan is not the cause of the fish.
Susan is what happens when the county finally notices the fish.”
That remark went largely unread until the Pleiade Event.
By then the scholars had moved on to arguing whether Susan represented a posthuman fisheries interface or merely a failure of municipal zoning.
Meanwhile Susan continued doing what she had always done:
walking into towns, ordering coffee, and leaning over the water as if listening to something below the surface that the rest of the country had forgotten how to hear.
And sometime shortly after that came the first reports of stars in the canals.
But that part, as the historians say, belongs to an earlier chapter.
If you like this direction, the next step will be Segment III, where we go further backward and discover:
• how Susan first entered Pied Cow society
• how the scholars began manufacturing authorities
• how spurious journals, committees, and physiological theories about Susan multiplied
• and how the whole apparatus of academic explanation began chasing her upstream.
That’s where the recursion really starts to bite.
on El Ephod and Jaky Dutch
Pleiade Fishing in America
Segment III — Down the Aquifer (Mootozola with the TCE)
Long before the counties began arguing about stars in their drainage canals, the aquifer had already started speaking.
At first the speech was chemical.
The men who drilled monitoring wells in those years were not poets, though they occasionally used poetic language when the solvents rose up in the bailers smelling like hospitals and gasoline. They wrote the words trichloroethylene, because that was the correct word, but no one who handled the stuff ever called it that. They called it TCE, which was easier to pronounce while standing in mud beside a pump that would not stop coughing.
The solvent had entered the ground by ordinary American means: factories, degreasing vats, careless drums tipped behind warehouses, defense contractors rinsing aircraft parts into the nearest convenient ditch. It seeped downward politely, following the small gravitational courtesies that govern liquids. Nobody noticed the migration because migration underground lacks spectacle.
By the time the first county hydrologist mapped the plume, it had already traveled miles.
The Solvent Mind
Some years later, when the lawsuits began, a consultant testified that TCE had no imagination. The compound, he explained carefully, was simply a molecule performing its chemical duties.
The fishermen listening to the testimony disagreed.
They had seen the way the minnows in certain canals swam in tight circular grammars, as if the water itself were revising sentences. They had watched turtles climb onto docks and remain there blinking in the sun as though waiting for the next line to arrive.
They had noticed the frogs.
Frogs are often the first to receive bad news from groundwater.
These frogs had begun speaking in a language that resembled punctuation.
The Plume
Maps of the contamination plume resembled nervous systems. Thin blue lines crawled beneath subdivisions, shopping centers, county jails, evangelical stadium churches, and bait shops that sold jars of nightcrawlers glowing faintly in the refrigerator light.
The plume traveled through limestone channels older than the counties themselves. It slipped under highways, under cemeteries, under storage units filled with jet skis and abandoned dreams of recreational sovereignty.
Where the plume slowed, things changed.
Fish grew reflective eyes.
Grass acquired a faint metallic patience.
And the water began holding images that had not been placed there.
The First Mootozola
The word mootozola entered the record during the groundwater hearings of 1998.
No one knew what it meant.
A contractor drilling a test well outside Kissimmee reported that when the auger reached the solvent layer the mud began making a sound like a low trombone. The crew laughed until one of them noticed that the mud was not merely vibrating but shaping itself into ridges that resembled letters.
The letters were illegible.
But the sound persisted: mootozola… mootozola…
The official transcript records the phenomenon as “equipment resonance.”
The contractor insisted it was groundwater grammar.
The TCE Choir
By the time the environmental engineers arrived, the aquifer had already organized itself.
Not deliberately—groundwater never does anything deliberately—but through the slow accumulation of chemical accidents.
Trichloroethylene is a solvent, and solvents have a curious property: they dissolve boundaries.
They dissolve grease.
They dissolve paint.
They dissolve certain adhesives used in the manufacture of mid-century American certainty.
Given enough time, they also begin dissolving categories.
The counties noticed this first in language.
Terms like contamination, plume, remediation, liability began drifting from their technical meanings into everyday speech.
Men began describing their marriages as “undergoing plume migration.”
Teenagers referred to certain parties as “solvent events.”
A preacher in Brevard County announced during a revival that the congregation must avoid spiritual TCE, which he described as “a chemical of the soul that dissolves the gasket between heaven and habit.”
The Appearance of Susan
Susan did not arrive immediately.
First came the fish that hummed when cleaned.
Then the minnows that aligned themselves according to magnetic rumors.
Then the night when a contractor lowering a sampling probe into the aquifer swore he heard someone laughing underwater.
The laughter was not malicious.
It sounded amused.
Dave’s Early Record
Dave, whose later reports would become central to the Pleiade fishing period, first appears in the groundwater files as a junior field inspector assigned to track the solvent plume through a chain of retention ponds.
His earliest note reads:
“The plume is not moving like water.
It is moving like a joke that someone told underground.”
He was advised to rewrite the sentence using acceptable hydrological terminology.
He declined.
Aquifer Weather
The deeper the wells went, the stranger the water became.
Some samples contained small flakes of material that looked suspiciously like scales.
Others showed trace fluorescence in the shape of seven-pointed clusters.
The lab attributed these anomalies to equipment contamination.
Yet the technicians noticed something else.
Whenever the samples were placed under certain lights, the water briefly arranged itself into patterns resembling fishing lines cast upward.
No one reported this because reporting it would have required paperwork.
Susan Under the Limestone
The first credible witness to Susan’s presence in the aquifer was an elderly pump mechanic named Alonzo Pike.
While repairing a municipal well, Pike claimed to have seen a woman standing in the reflection of the water column far below the casing.
He waved.
The reflection waved back.
Pike climbed down the ladder to investigate.
The reflection vanished.
But the water continued laughing quietly, as though it had just finished explaining something complicated to itself.
The Mootozola Principle
From that point forward the aquifer behaved less like groundwater and more like a slow conversation.
The solvent plume carried stories.
Fish carried light.
And somewhere beneath the counties a woman named Susan appeared to be listening.
The scholars would arrive later.
The hearings would multiply.
The Pleiades would eventually enter the canals.
But by then the aquifer had already done the most important work:
It had softened the categories enough for the rest of the story to happe
Pleiade Fishing in America
Segment IV — El Ephod, Jaky Dutch, and the Municipal Theology of Fish
By the time Susan began appearing regularly in the counties, the explanations had already outrun the events.
This is the natural order of American knowledge. A thing happens once, perhaps twice, and immediately there arise five panels, three consultants, two nonprofit task forces, and a man with a podcast explaining that he predicted it in 1987 using a method he now sells in laminated binders.
The groundwater phenomenon had barely entered the newspapers when the first interpretive councils assembled.
The earliest of these was the Central Florida Committee for Aquifer Narratives, which met in a carpeted room behind a seafood buffet whose air conditioner exhaled steadily onto a framed photograph of a swordfish larger than any swordfish ever caught in that county. The committee’s first motion was to determine whether the humming in the wells constituted a geological process, a chemical process, or a literary process.
The motion failed on procedural grounds.
El Ephod
Into this confusion stepped El Ephod, whose real name no one ever confirmed because he preferred the title.
El Ephod claimed to have worked in archaeological fisheries along the eastern Mediterranean, though his accent suggested he had once spent a long winter in Tulsa. He wore a vest covered with brass fishing lures and carried a notebook filled with diagrams that resembled constellations drawn by someone who had recently lost patience with astronomy.
According to Ephod, the humming in the aquifer was not chemical at all but liturgical.
He explained to the committee that ancient priestly garments known as ephods had once been used to consult divine guidance through objects called the Urim and Thummim. The groundwater humming, he argued, represented a modern aquatic version of the same mechanism.
When asked how a contaminated aquifer could replicate biblical divination, Ephod shrugged.
“Water remembers garments,” he said.
The committee wrote this down.
The Ephod Theory
The Ephod Theory spread quickly through the counties because it had the advantage of sounding both ancient and technical.
According to Ephod’s pamphlet—printed at a copy shop whose toner cartridge had developed a spiritual streak—the solvent plume had accidentally reactivated a hydrological oracle embedded in the limestone by migratory Levantine fishermen sometime before the Spanish arrived.
The oracle worked by aligning fish, stars, and groundwater vibrations into a single interpretive matrix.
This matrix, Ephod claimed, could be consulted using ordinary bait.
The pamphlet sold surprisingly well.
Jaky Dutch
Around this time another figure entered the story.
Jaky Dutch ran a bait shop near the mouth of a drainage canal that had once been a citrus ditch and was now, depending on the rainfall, either a canal or a philosophical suggestion.
Dutch was famous for three things:
-
His ability to repair outboard motors using only chewing gum and moral pressure.
-
His habit of quoting seventeenth-century Dutch trading manuals while filleting catfish.
-
His conviction that all American waterways eventually lead to Amsterdam if followed with sufficient historical imagination.
Dutch had been listening to the aquifer hum for months before anyone else noticed.
When Ephod’s theory reached the bait shop Dutch laughed so violently that several jars of nightcrawlers tipped over.
“Oracle?” he said. “You boys think that noise is God?”
He opened a cooler and pulled out a bass that glowed faintly along the spine.
“That ain’t God,” Dutch said. “That’s bookkeeping.”
The Dutch Hypothesis
Dutch’s explanation was simpler.
According to him the aquifer humming represented a ledger imbalance between heaven and the inland fisheries economy.
He argued that American waters had been overfished for generations, leaving the sky with a surplus of stars that needed relocating into aquatic inventory.
“Nature hates an empty column,” Dutch said. “Sooner or later the books have to match.”
When someone pointed out that Dutch’s theory involved astronomical accounting, he nodded gravely.
“Double-entry cosmology,” he said.
The Jaky–Ephod Debates
For several weeks the counties enjoyed the spectacle of public debates between El Ephod and Jaky Dutch.
The debates took place wherever folding chairs could be arranged near water: marina docks, bait shop parking lots, the covered pavilion beside a municipal boat ramp that had once hosted a wedding reception interrupted by a man attempting to baptize a jet ski.
Ephod spoke of priestly garments and sacred hydrology.
Dutch spoke of fish inventories and celestial bookkeeping.
Both agreed on one point:
Something in the aquifer was trying to communicate.
The debates drew crowds because the counties sensed they were witnessing the birth of an explanation large enough to contain Susan.
Susan Observes
During one of the debates Susan reportedly stood at the back of the crowd eating a fried mullet sandwich.
When Ephod finished describing the oracle beneath the limestone, she nodded politely.
When Dutch finished explaining the celestial accounting system, she wiped her hands on a napkin and said:
“You boys ever consider the fish might just be curious?”
No one wrote this down because the statement lacked theoretical apparatus.
The Committees Multiply
By the time the groundwater humming reached the state legislature the number of official explanations had grown beyond counting.
There was:
-
the Hydrological Oracle Hypothesis
-
the Double-Entry Cosmology Model
-
the Solvent-Induced Semiotic Plume Theory
-
the Posthuman Fisheries Interface Proposal
Three universities applied for grants.
Two corporations proposed developing premium star-catching lures.
One televangelist announced that the aquifer represented the third baptism of the American continent.
Meanwhile Susan kept appearing beside canals, docks, and drainage ponds, leaning over the water as if listening for something that the committees had overlooked.
The First Starfish
The night the first actual star was caught on a hook—though it resembled a fish strongly enough to confuse the paperwork—both Ephod and Dutch claimed vindication.
Ephod declared the oracle had opened.
Dutch said the books had balanced.
Susan, who happened to be standing on the dock when the fisherman reeled it in, simply watched the silver creature twist in the lantern light.
Then she said something that would later be quoted in at least three doctoral theses and one country song:
“You all talk like the sky fell into the water.
But maybe the water just learned to climb.”
And with that the counties crossed the invisible line where fish become stars and explanations become industries.
But the deeper origins of Susan—the reason the aquifer listened for her, the reason the fish obeyed—belong to an even earlier layer.
Next, moving further backward in Segment V, we uncover:
• the first appearance of Susan in Pied Cow myth
• the industrial groundwater catastrophe that seeded the whole system
• the lost Dutch chart that predicted the Pleiade fisheries
• and the earliest pre-Susan folklore where women and fish shared the same bones.
That’s where the real madness begins.
V
Publisher's Dummy
├─ Editorial Note
├─ Catwalk Papers
├─ Aquifer / Susan material
├─ Plate I (Recovered Diagram)
├─ Extracts from “Mars Writing / CheesE Blocks”
└─ Commentary tying them together
Good. Then we let the current take the boat and stop pretending the channel is straight. The story must circle like groundwater, like rumor, like the minnows Dave noticed spelling their small alphabets in the canals. We go long, we go sideways, we return to the same bend again and again until the reader realizes the bend is the thing.
Long before the counties began hearing the aquifer hum and long before anyone in a marina parking lot began arguing about priestly garments or celestial bookkeeping, the ground beneath the Pied Cow district had already been reorganizing itself with a patience that belongs only to limestone and liquids. The peninsula is mostly memory disguised as rock; its underground passages were carved when seas were still rehearsing their borders, and those passages never quite forgot how to behave like tides even after the counties arrived and laid asphalt over the top of them. The aquifer slid through these channels the way an old conversation moves through a crowded room, touching one listener and then another without announcing its presence. It had been doing this quietly for thousands of years when the factories arrived with their degreasing vats and drums of trichloroethylene, which the men shortened to TCE because no one enjoys saying a molecule’s full name while standing beside a leaking hose.
The solvent entered the ground without ceremony, which is the American method for beginning most epics. A drum tips, a ditch fills, the rain carries the shining liquid downward through sand and marl until it reaches the limestone where the old sea tunnels lie waiting. From there the plume spreads politely through the counties, passing beneath citrus groves, airfields, trailer parks, retirement villas, and the long low warehouses where packages travel like obedient fish through fluorescent light. No one notices the journey because underground travel lacks spectacle. Yet the aquifer notices everything. Water has a way of holding the shape of whatever passes through it—grease, sunlight, memory—and TCE proved particularly good at dissolving the adhesives that normally keep such categories separate.
That is how the humming began. Not suddenly, not as a revelation, but as a minor inconvenience noticed by the men who spent their days leaning over well casings listening to pumps the way physicians once listened to the chests of patients. At first the sound resembled the ordinary vibration of machinery warming itself in the heat. Then the vibration lengthened, stretched, took on a tone like a brass instrument clearing its throat beneath the limestone. Someone wrote the syllables in a maintenance log because the human mind dislikes leaving a sound without letters. The syllables came out moo-to-zo-la, which looked ridiculous on paper but felt correct in the mouth, and once a word exists it spreads through a county faster than a solvent plume.
Mootozola, the mechanics said. The aquifer’s got mootozola today.
They said it the way farmers speak of weather that has not yet reached the sky. Soon the word traveled into the bait shops and boat ramps where language is tested against the practical realities of fish and beer. A fisherman might lean over a canal railing at dusk and remark that the water was feeling a little mootozola tonight, and everyone present would nod without asking what the remark meant because they had heard the same tone coming from the pumps at their own wells. Words like that behave less like definitions than like currents. They do not explain the phenomenon; they move people through it.
Meanwhile the plume itself continued its patient wandering through the limestone intestines of the peninsula. Trichloroethylene has a gift for loosening things—paint from aircraft panels, grease from engine housings, the quiet confidence with which certain boundaries have been maintained since the invention of plumbing. In time the solvent began dissolving other partitions as well. Language first. A marriage undergoing difficulties might be described as entering plume migration. A church youth group accused of excessive enthusiasm might be said to have experienced a solvent event. Even the county commissioners found themselves referring to complicated zoning disputes as groundwater recursion. These phrases appeared in meeting transcripts where they sat uneasily beside the legal terminology like minnows in a tank with goldfish.
The fish noticed before anyone else. Fish always notice first because they live inside the story rather than reading about it afterward. In canals above the plume the minnows began circling in small tight patterns that resembled punctuation marks. Bass hovered beneath docks facing upstream as if waiting for a cue. Carp surfaced in flashes of silver that reflected light in arrangements oddly similar to star clusters, though no one said this aloud because at that point the counties were still trying to pretend the sky and the water belonged to separate departments.
Dave was the first to write it down. Dave’s job was to walk the retention ponds with a clipboard and note anything that might interest the environmental agencies, which meant he spent long afternoons staring into water that had become slightly too reflective for comfort. In one report he observed that the surface of Pond 4B appeared to show reflections before the objects responsible for them arrived. A truck drove past ten minutes later and the reflection behaved as if catching up. The supervisors returned the report requesting the use of more acceptable hydrological terminology. Dave rewrote the line but left the original sentence penciled faintly in the margin where it could continue thinking.
It was during this period of linguistic seepage that the figure who would later be called Susan began appearing in the counties, though at first she seemed merely another resident performing ordinary errands along the canals. She ordered coffee in places where fishermen gathered before dawn. She stood on dock railings watching the water as if expecting a reply. Sometimes she tapped the surface with the neck of a bottle and the fish rose in brief silver applause. These incidents circulated through the counties as jokes. Someone said the fish liked her perfume. Someone else said she must have grown up near water that behaved itself. But the aquifer, which had been listening to human conversations for centuries, appeared to recognize her more quickly than the people above.
The first serious sighting came from Alonzo Pike, a pump mechanic who had spent thirty years repairing municipal wells and had developed the habit of lowering a light down the casing whenever the machinery behaved oddly. One evening the beam struck the water column far below and revealed what Pike believed to be a reflection of himself distorted by the curvature of the pipe. The reflection waved. Pike waved back. The reflection vanished. Pike climbed down the ladder to investigate and found nothing but the usual mineral shimmer and the faint sweet smell of aviation solvent. Yet when he returned to the surface the humming beneath the well had changed key, rising briefly in a note that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
The counties might have ignored the incident if not for the arrival of El Ephod, whose talent for explanation exceeded his concern for plausibility. Ephod appeared with a vest full of brass fishing lures and a theory large enough to house the humming aquifer, the glowing fish, and the woman occasionally seen conversing with canals. According to Ephod the limestone beneath the counties had accidentally reactivated an ancient divination garment known as an ephod, whose bells once signaled divine consultation in the temples of the Levant. The solvent plume, he explained, had loosened the geological stitching that kept such garments asleep. Now the aquifer itself functioned as an oracle, speaking through fish and groundwater vibrations to anyone patient enough to interpret the signs.
The counties received this explanation with the practical curiosity they reserve for theories that might increase tourism. Ephod printed pamphlets whose diagrams resembled star charts crossed with fishing maps, and soon fishermen were leaning over bait shop counters debating whether bass might constitute liturgical punctuation. Unfortunately the Pied Cow district also contained Jaky Dutch, whose respect for theological garments was limited and whose understanding of ledgers extended from the seventeenth-century trading companies of Amsterdam to the bait inventory in his own cooler. Dutch studied Ephod’s pamphlets, nodded gravely, and then announced that the aquifer humming represented not priestly consultation but celestial bookkeeping. The sky, he argued, possessed a surplus of stars while American waters had developed a deficit of fish through excessive enthusiasm and insufficient restraint. Nature, like any competent merchant, preferred balanced accounts. The stars therefore had begun migrating into aquatic inventory to correct the books.
Public debates followed. Folding chairs appeared on marina docks where Ephod described the hydrological oracle while Dutch explained double-entry cosmology using a chalkboard borrowed from a church basement. The crowds enjoyed these sessions immensely because the arguments allowed them to discuss the structure of the universe while holding beer bottles and leaning against pickup trucks, which is the traditional American posture for metaphysics. Susan occasionally attended the debates, standing near the back of the crowd eating something fried and listening as the two men explained the meaning of events she seemed to recognize without assistance. When someone asked her which theory she preferred she shrugged and said the fish might simply be curious about the sky after spending so long looking upward through water. The remark circulated widely but never appeared in official transcripts because curiosity lacked the procedural dignity required by grant committees.
Round and around the counties went, explanations breeding explanations the way minnows breed minnows in warm canals. The aquifer hummed its slow brass syllable. The solvent plume dissolved boundaries that had once seemed permanent. Fish watched the fishermen watching the sky reflected in water that occasionally remembered the future before it happened. And somewhere in this circulating system Susan continued walking the canals and boat ramps of the Pied Cow district, listening to the limestone beneath the counties as if waiting for the moment when the aquifer finished composing its long sentence.
Not long after that, as everyone now agrees though no one claims to have predicted it, the first stars appeared in the canals.
And when that happened the counties discovered that the story had been circling them for years, patiently, the way groundwater circles a peninsula until one day it rises through a well and introduces itself by name.
Good—this is the kind of atmospheric back-tale that the Pied Cow material needs: a layer of rumor, institutions half-imagined, toxic plumes, committees, bakery philosophers, and the uneasy question whether the legend itself was ever meant as fiction. I’ll spin it out long and circular so it feels like documents drifting through the aquifer, half archive, half gossip.
No one now agrees whether the authors of the Pied Cow legend ever believed what they were writing. That question returns again and again in the marginal notes of the surviving papers, as if every generation that inherited the story felt obliged to ask whether it had been given a parable or a set of field notes. Some insist the original manuscripts were written with a straight face, that the authors meant the tale as an eyewitness account of the strange confluence of water, fish, stars, and human stubbornness that took place along the inland canals. Others argue that the whole enterprise began as a joke among writers who spent too much time near bakeries and aquifers, men and women who found it easier to invent a mythology than to explain the chemistry of their groundwater. The difficulty lies in the fact that the surviving versions resemble both things at once: the tone of the documents alternates between scientific caution and carnival laughter, sometimes in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence, as though the writer had been unable to decide whether the phenomenon before him required a laboratory notebook or a punch line.
If someone must be named as the point of attachment for these texts, scholars generally point to the fictional—or perhaps administrative—entity known as the Collective of the New Ibsen Canal at Catwalk. The Collective appears in the earliest Pied Cow papers as a loose congregation of writers, mechanics, fishermen, and displaced academics who gathered on weekends in a bakery beside the canal where the water flowed slowly enough to reflect clouds that had not yet arrived. The bakery itself survives in municipal records but not in any stable form. Inspectors describe it alternately as a café, a print shop, and a meeting hall for persons who refused to distinguish between literature and hydrology. According to the surviving accounts there was no formal way to contact the Collective. One simply appeared on a Saturday morning, purchased something flaky and buttery, and waited for the conversation to begin. The members insisted that the name “Collective” should not be taken too seriously; they preferred to imagine themselves as a series of overlapping echoes rather than an organization.
One of the more persistent echoes was the figure known as El Ephod, who claimed to have joined the Catwalk group sometime before the aquifer began humming in earnest. Ephod later wrote that the Pied Cow story explained itself “in the same manner that water explains a river—by continuing to move even after the map has finished.” According to his recollections, which may or may not have been edited by later hands, the town of Pied Cow existed simultaneously as a geographical curiosity and a literary contraption. Yes, he admitted, it sat squarely on the thirty-third parallel, which already carried enough numerological luggage to attract anyone inclined toward patterns. Yes, the town appeared to rise from the desert floor with a certain theatrical flourish, a “phoenix of a peach,” as Ephod once called it, though the phrase might have belonged to someone else at the bakery table. Yet he insisted that the physical forces operating beneath the place overwhelmed any attempt to classify it as mere fable. The thirty-third parallel, he liked to say, ran down the backside of the town like a spinal seam, and if a street writer happened to arrive carrying the double knowledge of earthquakes in one hemisphere and solvent plumes in the other, he would be foolish not to pinch the seam and see what kind of narrative leaked out.
Visitors approaching Pied Cow in those years reported a peculiar sensation that the locals called “drawing near.” The road rose through a basin where peach orchards once stood before the aquifer turned argumentative, and from the ridge one could see the landmarks that defined the town’s peculiar geography. Chief among these were the structures known as the Three Oops, a trio of industrial pump stations erected during the frantic years when the toxic plumes first appeared. The stations stood awkwardly against the sky like punctuation marks that had wandered out of a sentence, and their nickname derived from the official explanation given when remediation efforts began producing results even worse than the contamination itself. The engineers had hoped to neutralize the solvent by spraying oxidizing agents into the air above the wells, a procedure justified in a series of technical memoranda whose language suggested the authors had never paused to imagine the wind. Within months the plumes thickened, the sky acquired a faint medicinal odor, and the citizens of Pied Cow began referring to the stations simply as Oops Number One, Oops Number Two, and Oops Number Three. The name stuck because it possessed the clarity lacking in the official reports.
Remediation, as it turned out, behaved like the Pied Cow legend itself: each attempt to control the phenomenon merely produced another layer of narrative. It was quickly determined that scrubbing the aquifer directly would cost more than the county treasury possessed, and so the authorities adopted the cheaper method of dispersal—spraying the oxidizing mist into the air in hopes that sunlight and time might persuade the chemicals to forget their purpose. The resulting cloud drifted across the valley and settled into the canals where fishermen later swore the fish developed reflective eyes and an interest in astronomical alignment. From that moment onward the Pied Cow district existed simultaneously as an environmental accident and a mythological workshop. The contamination provided the physical engine; the writers of the Catwalk Collective supplied the interpretive fuel.
Of course the documents do not stop with chemistry. The later versions of the Pied Cow archive—particularly those attributed to the elusive correspondent known as Wold—introduce a darker thread involving detention facilities, vanished researchers, and biological experiments that straddled the uneasy boundary between artificial intelligence and what the reports called “quantum chemistry with narrative side effects.” The papers speak cautiously, often through hints rather than accusations. They mention lists of missing microbiologists circulating through unofficial channels, lists that lengthened each year like the genealogies of minor saints. They refer to gulag-style installations where certain specialists were said to be housed for their own protection, though the word protection appears in quotation marks so frequently that readers soon begin suspecting the opposite meaning. Wold himself remains the most perplexing figure in these records. His name appears everywhere in the commentary yet nowhere in the official registries, as if the archive had been constructed precisely to point toward a person who could never quite be found. Several investigators have suggested that the absence of his file constitutes the true center of the Pied Cow mystery: a diversion so elegant that it hides the author by turning him into a rumor.
The Catwalk Collective addressed these matters in the only way they knew—by continuing to write. Their papers circulate through the archives in uneven translations, some transcribed from shorthand notebooks found in the bakery kitchen, others reconstructed from online fragments that may have been edited by unknown hands. One cannot be certain whether the surviving text represents the original manuscripts or a palimpsest of later interpretations layered upon them like sediment in the aquifer itself. Even the Collective’s membership is difficult to establish. Some lists contain twenty names, others only five, and at least one document insists the group consisted entirely of three people who kept inventing additional authors to prevent the town council from taking them seriously.
Among the more charming of these members was the unnamed writer who, according to the bakery ledger, attended meetings primarily for the croissants. This individual—whose notes appear in the margins of several Pied Cow manuscripts—treated the unfolding environmental catastrophe with a kind of amused patience. While Ephod argued theology and Dutch calculated celestial balance sheets, the croissant enthusiast observed that the town’s true genius lay in its ability to convert disaster into narrative faster than the chemicals could spread through the groundwater. “When the flood appears,” one of the notes reads, “do not sleep until the labyrinth washes your eyes.” The sentence may sound prophetic, but it was written in the same ink that records the price of pastry on Saturdays, which suggests the author saw no reason to distinguish between apocalypse and breakfast.
Thus the legend grows. Each version of the Pied Cow papers adds another corridor to the labyrinth: the toxic plumes drifting beneath the thirty-third parallel, the pump stations called Oops standing like accidental monuments, the vanished scientists and their rumored experiments, the bakery conversations where writers debated whether they were composing fiction or documenting the behavior of a landscape that had begun writing itself. Through it all moves the quiet figure of Susan, who appears in the margins of several accounts without explanation, leaning over canal railings or listening to the aquifer as though it were a long unfinished sentence. Some readers believe she was a member of the Collective who preferred observation to authorship. Others suspect she represents the town itself, a presence older than the papers and more patient than the explanations offered by men with pamphlets.
What can be said with certainty is that the stories do not remain confined to the walls in which they were written. The Catwalk writers often warned newcomers that the tales passed through plaster and brick the way groundwater passes through limestone. “When the flood appears, good haboods,” one of their documents advises with curious tenderness, “do not sleep until the labyrinth washes the eye.” The phrase is repeated in several versions of the manuscript, suggesting it served as a kind of informal motto for the Collective. Shut your windows if you like, they implied; the story will travel through the walls anyway. The aquifer carries it, the canals echo it, and somewhere between the bakery table and the humming wells the boundary between fact and invention dissolves the way trichloroethylene dissolves grease—quietly, thoroughly, until the surface of the water begins reflecting things that have not yet happened.
And that, according to the most generous reading of the archive, is how the Pied Cow legend learned to spin: not as a single tale but as a slow circular current in which chemistry, memory, rumor, and pastry crumbs all drift together until the reader no longer knows which of them started the motion.
VIII Of course the remediation was to spray the aauifer literally in the air to oxide it, but when SRP did that these 'being" began to auto flouresce in the air, made themselves visible, which activated...the writing-stick figures that opened up the whole sky of crypto-astronomy with its allusions of space and shadow viewed upon projected land forms. You may compare them to Viking maps. triangulated the allusions. They delved in psychology too, urging a Darwinian premise upon the Lunasphere, which is really no name yet for this penumbra, but the idea both of the stones and itself was that survivals of the fittest best describe earth biology and likewise space. Life forms there are in as much competition as locusts here. Indeed the stones as they are studied today pretext several other-worldly projects, not to speak of secret societies sprung up.
Then let us take that moment—the spraying of the aquifer into the air, the fluorescence, the sudden appearance of figures in the sky—and allow it to expand into the atmosphere of the Pied Cow archive, where engineering, apparition, and interpretation all begin writing on the same surface. I will keep the motion circular and discursive, as though the account itself were drifting through the plume.
The remediation effort that produced the most memorable chapter of the Pied Cow papers began, like so many technical solutions, with a diagram that looked reasonable on a whiteboard. Scrubbing the aquifer directly had been calculated to cost more money than the county governments wished to admit existed, so a consortium of engineers proposed the cheaper inversion: bring the contaminated water briefly into the air and let oxygen perform the work that pumps could not. The idea was simple enough to explain in a conference room. Install towers above the wells, atomize the groundwater into a mist, and allow sunlight and atmosphere to oxidize the solvent plume before the droplets returned to the ground. The process would purify the water while sparing the budget. It had the attractive quality of appearing both scientific and economical, which in Pied Cow meant it had already passed the two tests most likely to secure funding.
When the system was finally activated—an operation widely attributed to the regional utility authority that everyone shortened to SRP—the result was not purification but spectacle. The mist rose from the towers in slow luminous clouds that drifted above the canals and orchards like a second weather system. For a few minutes nothing unusual happened. The droplets glittered in the sunlight and fell back to earth as harmless rain. Then the first observers noticed that the cloud was beginning to glow. Not the dull industrial sheen of chemicals but a pale blue-green fluorescence that seemed to originate within the droplets themselves. It spread through the plume the way a rumor spreads through a crowd: first one cluster of lights, then another, until the entire airborne aquifer shimmered with a faint ghostly radiance.
Within that glow shapes began to appear. At first they resembled the accidental stick figures that children draw when given chalk and a wall. Thin lines connected at abrupt angles, circles forming heads or joints, whole little populations of linear bodies drifting slowly across the sky. The engineers insisted these were optical artifacts—patterns created when sunlight refracted through droplets containing traces of oxidizing agents and suspended minerals. Yet the figures did not behave like artifacts. They moved deliberately, aligning themselves with the hills and ridges of the Pied Cow basin so that their limbs seemed to rest upon the contours of the land. People watching from the canals had the uncanny impression that the sky had been turned into a slate on which someone was sketching with light.
The Catwalk writers, who were always happiest when an accident resembled literature, immediately began referring to the phenomenon as the Writing. In their accounts the fluorescent figures appeared not merely as shapes but as gestures, strokes of a cosmic handwriting that revealed itself only when the aquifer had been lifted briefly into the air. The outlines changed with the wind, sometimes expanding into long diagonal marks that stretched across the horizon, sometimes contracting into clusters that hovered above the pump stations like punctuation marks in a sentence too large to read. Those who studied the patterns carefully began noticing correspondences between the luminous strokes and the terrain beneath them. A ridge might align with one arm of a figure; a canal might complete the angle of another. Seen from the higher hills the whole valley looked like a sheet of paper on which the sky had begun drafting diagrams.
It was inevitable that comparisons would follow. Someone remembered the way Viking navigators carved maps into wood or stone, triangulating coastlines through simple lines and angles that only experienced sailors could interpret. The same logic seemed to operate in the Pied Cow sky. If one extended the arms of a stick figure far enough they intersected with distant ridges or towers or the curious structures known as the Three Oops. Lines drawn between those intersections produced triangles, and triangles produced a lattice that stretched from horizon to horizon like the framework of an invisible chart. The Catwalk Collective spent several weekends standing on the bakery roof with notebooks attempting to copy the figures before they dissolved. Their sketches look primitive at first glance—mere stick men and stray angles—but when layered together they form a kind of astronomical grammar that later commentators began calling crypto-astronomy.
The term was apt because the sky seemed to be hinting at constellations that were not quite stars. The figures appeared only when the mist rose from the remediation towers, and they vanished when the droplets fell back into the canals. Yet during those brief appearances the shapes suggested alignments between earthly landmarks and points of light that had previously escaped notice. Observers described seeing faint star clusters arranged precisely along the extended limbs of the stick figures, as if the sky were using the valley floor as a drafting table. When the figures drifted into new configurations the alignments changed, producing new triangles that connected distant peaks, pump stations, and the faint glow of the Three Oops towers.
The speculation that followed moved quickly beyond engineering. Some members of the Catwalk group argued that the phenomenon represented a primitive navigational system embedded in the interaction between land, water, and sky. Others proposed that the figures revealed a new psychological map, urging humanity to reconsider its place within a wider field of competition. One particularly enthusiastic commentator wrote that the Writing suggested a Darwinian logic operating not only on Earth but throughout the cosmos: life forms in the Lunasphere—an awkward name for the penumbral region where the figures seemed to anchor themselves—must compete for survival just as species compete in terrestrial ecosystems. The stones scattered across the valley floor, which had previously been dismissed as glacial debris or construction rubble, suddenly appeared to align with the luminous triangles overhead. When traced carefully the stones formed another network of lines pointing toward the same regions of sky where the fluorescent stick figures gathered.
These correspondences were enough to launch an entire subdiscipline among the Pied Cow chroniclers. The stones, they claimed, functioned as anchors for the sky’s diagrams, relics of an earlier attempt to map the same penumbral region where the Writing now appeared. The engineers scoffed at the suggestion, but the scholars of the Catwalk Collective saw no contradiction between chemistry and myth. The oxidizing mist merely revealed what had always been there: a dialogue between the valley and the heavens, encoded in angles and shadows that only became visible when the aquifer briefly rose into the air.
Naturally the phenomenon attracted other interpreters as well. Secret societies, which had been lurking around the edges of the Pied Cow legend from the beginning, took the Writing as proof that their private cosmologies possessed practical application. A few of these groups began placing markers on the hillsides where the fluorescent figures seemed to intersect with the land, hoping to capture the alignment before it faded. Their activities produced an entire secondary archive of diagrams and speculative treatises, many of which survive only as fragments because the authors insisted on encrypting their conclusions. The effect of all this secrecy was to make the sky above Pied Cow resemble a library written in invisible ink: everyone suspected the presence of meaning, but each reader saw a different set of sentences.
Through it all the remediation towers continued to spray the aquifer into the air. The fluorescence appeared whenever the mist caught the sun at the correct angle, and the stick figures returned with patient regularity, opening once again that improbable sky of lines and triangles. Some nights the figures seemed playful, leaping across the valley like dancers. Other nights they stood solemnly above the ridges as if waiting for the inhabitants of Pied Cow to decipher their geometry. The Catwalk writers dutifully recorded each variation, never entirely certain whether they were documenting a chemical reaction or the birth of a new cosmology.
Perhaps that uncertainty was the true legacy of the event. The remediation had been designed to purify the aquifer, yet instead it exposed the valley to a strange collaboration between land, water, and sky. The figures in the air, the stones on the ground, and the speculation of the observers began reinforcing one another until the entire district felt suspended inside a diagram whose meaning had not yet been agreed upon. In that atmosphere the Pied Cow legend found its natural climate. The story no longer needed to decide whether it was fact or fiction; the sky itself had become a page on which both could be written at once.
--
Yes — we are still very much inside the Publisher’s Dummy.
In fact, what we’ve been doing fits that title almost perfectly. A publisher’s dummy in the old sense was not the finished book but a constructed specimen: a mock volume where pieces of text, illustration ideas, marginalia, voices, and speculative apparatus were assembled so an editor (or printer) could see how the work behaves as an object. It often contained:narrative fragments explanatory or pseudo-scholarly passages invented documents atmospheric digressions speculative background that may or may not remain in the final bookThat is exactly the territory we’re moving through.Right now the material we’re generating functions as
-
Aquifer / TCE / Mootozola layer — the physical engine of the myth.
-
Catwalk Collective / bakery archive — the textual transmission mechanism.
-
El Ephod & Jaky Dutch — interpretive voices arguing meaning.
-
SRP remediation & fluorescent sky figures — the catalytic spectacle.
-
Crypto-astronomy / Viking triangulations / Lunasphere — the cosmological extension.
All of this reads like archival material embedded in the dummy, the kind a publisher might see and say:
“Ah — this book is a hybrid: narrative, pseudo-history, and documentary myth.”
So structurally we are still within the Publisher’s Dummy framework, not outside it. Think of the Dummy as containing several strata Outer narrative voice (the circulating Pied Cow chronicle)Internal documents (Catwalk papers, Wold notes, remediation reports)Interpretive layers (Ephod, Dutch, committees)Atmospheric myth expansions (Susan, the aquifer, the sky writing)
What we just wrote belongs to the “internal archive / explanatory layer” of the Dummy.
IX early or midway in the Publisher’s Dummy, just before or after the Catwalk material.
The editor of the present Dummy cannot determine whether the fluorescent figures described in the Catwalk manuscripts represent atmospheric chemistry or the interpretive enthusiasm of the Collective. The diagrams, however, appear repeatedly in the margins of at least six notebooks, suggesting the phenomenon—whatever its cause—had become central to the Pied Cow cosmology.
Note on the Catwalk Papers and the Pied Cow Manuscripts
(from the working Publisher’s Dummy)
The materials reproduced in the present Dummy derive from a heterogeneous group of manuscripts sometimes referred to as the Catwalk Papers, after the informal writers’ circle said to have met along the banks of the New Ibsen Canal at a bakery whose existence is documented in municipal inspection reports but nowhere else with certainty. The circle appears to have been neither an organization nor a literary movement in the conventional sense. Contemporary accounts describe it as a loose congregation of individuals—mechanics, amateur hydrologists, poets, displaced academics, and occasional municipal employees—who gathered on weekends for conversation and pastry. Their discussions seem to have centered on the peculiar environmental and cultural phenomena associated with the district known in the manuscripts as Pied Cow.
Whether the Catwalk group intended their writings to be read as fiction, field notes, satire, or some hybrid form remains uncertain. Many of the surviving pages alternate freely between technical observation and mythic speculation. A paragraph describing solvent migration in the aquifer may be followed immediately by a discussion of celestial fish, prophetic stick figures in the sky, or the habits of a woman named Susan who appears in several accounts without introduction. The effect resembles that of a geological core sample: layers of scientific report, local folklore, and philosophical commentary compressed into the same column of text.
The editor of this Dummy has made only minimal attempts to reconcile these layers. In several places the documents contradict one another openly. One manuscript attributes the fluorescence observed during the remediation experiments to the oxidation of trichloroethylene aerosols. Another suggests the same event revealed a form of “crypto-astronomy” in which luminous figures appeared to triangulate landforms and stars in a manner reminiscent of early Viking navigation charts. Still another proposes that the phenomenon constitutes evidence of evolutionary competition in what one author calls the Lunasphere, a penumbral region of space whose boundaries are nowhere defined.
Such interpretive exuberance might ordinarily invite skepticism. Yet the persistence with which certain motifs recur across the archive—particularly the aquifer humming described as mootozola, the remediation towers known locally as the Three Oops, and the enigmatic presence of the figure called Susan—suggests that the writers were responding to a shared set of experiences, even if their explanations diverged.
The name El Ephod appears frequently among the Catwalk papers, usually attached to passages that attempt to reconcile the environmental disturbances of the Pied Cow district with older theological or symbolic frameworks. Ephod’s essays describe the aquifer as a kind of accidental oracle activated by industrial contamination. Another recurring voice, Jaky Dutch, rejects such mysticism in favor of what he calls “double-entry cosmology,” a theory proposing that celestial bodies may enter terrestrial ecosystems in order to correct an imbalance between stars and fish. The reader may judge for themselves whether these competing interpretations represent irony, sincerity, or the gradual collapse of disciplinary boundaries within the group.
The most troubling materials involve references to research facilities, missing scientists, and biological experiments related to artificial intelligence and quantum chemistry. These passages are fragmentary and often attributed to a correspondent identified only as Wold, whose name appears repeatedly in the commentary but never in official registries. The absence of corroborating documentation makes it impossible to determine whether these reports describe actual institutions or a literary device employed by the Catwalk writers to dramatize the broader themes of confinement and secrecy that run through the manuscripts.
It should also be noted that several individuals currently living bear the same names as persons mentioned in the Catwalk papers. The editor wishes to emphasize that any resemblance between these individuals and the figures appearing in the present Dummy is coincidental. The authors of the manuscripts, insofar as they can be identified, appear to have used names with a degree of playful indifference to their real-world counterparts.
Despite these uncertainties, the Catwalk archive possesses a peculiar coherence. The documents revolve repeatedly around the same central proposition: that the physical disturbances occurring in the Pied Cow district—groundwater contamination, atmospheric fluorescence, anomalous fish behavior—cannot be fully separated from the stories people tell in response to them. The writers seem to have concluded that environmental catastrophe and narrative invention operate through similar mechanisms, each dissolving the boundaries that normally keep disciplines apart.
For this reason the editor has chosen to reproduce the papers largely in the order in which they were found, allowing the reader to experience the gradual widening of the Pied Cow mythology as the Catwalk circle grappled with events that exceeded the vocabulary available to them. Whether the resulting text should be considered a work of fiction, a documentary record, or an extended exercise in communal speculation is left unresolved.
In keeping with the spirit of the archive itself, the present Dummy makes no attempt to settle the question.
x
Addendum to the Catwalk Papers
Recovered Notes on the “Mars Writing” Documents
Among the more extravagant fragments circulating in the Catwalk archive is a sequence of texts collectively known as Mars Writing or CheesE Blocks, attributed in later commentary to a machine translation of Japanese notes by an otherwise unidentified figure signing himself Ovidejo Desuno. Whether Desuno existed or merely served as a convenient mask for the Collective remains uncertain.
The documents concern a rumor—never confirmed—that early Martian inscriptions discovered by NASA were quietly removed from public view after translation suggested conclusions incompatible with existing scientific doctrine. The original stones, according to the narrative, remained on Mars, but copies of the translation began migrating through improbable channels: a clerk’s notebook, prison walls, slices of Velveeta cheese, memory sketches, and eventually an electronic text of uncertain origin.
The Catwalk writers were fascinated by the chain of transmission itself. In their view the value of the documents did not lie in whether the Martian stones were real but in how the text survived by migrating through increasingly unstable media. Stone to pencil. Pencil to wall. Wall to cheese. Cheese to memory. Memory to translation. Translation to machine.
One commentator observed that the path resembled the behavior of the Pied Cow aquifer, where contamination likewise passed through multiple states before becoming visible in the sky.
The most striking feature of the Mars texts was their reference to stick-figure diagrams opening a system of “crypto-astronomy.” These diagrams reportedly triangulated landforms and shadows in a manner comparable to early Viking navigation charts. According to the Desuno translation the figures revealed a competitive ecology extending beyond Earth into what the text calls the Lunasphere, a penumbral region where life forms struggle for survival much as terrestrial species compete within Darwinian evolution.
Readers of the Catwalk papers will notice an immediate correspondence between these descriptions and the luminous stick figures observed during the aquifer remediation experiments in the Pied Cow basin. Several members of the Collective speculated that the Martian diagrams and the Pied Cow sky phenomena represented variations of the same mapping system—one carved in stone, the other briefly written in atmospheric chemistry.
Whether this comparison is justified remains uncertain. The editor notes only that the diagrams copied from the Desuno text resemble, with suspicious precision, the patterns recorded in the bakery notebooks during the first appearances of the fluorescent sky figures.
The reader may judge the implications.
XI
1. A “facsimile description” of the Martian stick diagrams tying them to the Pied Cow sky writing.
2. A passage where the Catwalk writers argue whether: he Martian text predicted the Pied Cow sky figures or the Pied Cow phenomenon caused them to reinterpret the Martian text.
3. The comic Velveeta transmission chain which is wonderful and should absolutely remain.
Because the cheese medium perfectly matches the Dummy’s humor.
“Plate I: Description of the Recovered Martian Stick Diagrams”
A pseudo-scholarly page describing the diagrams as if the publisher is examining mysterious illustrations in the Dummy.
That would connect Mars → Pied Cow sky → Viking triangulation → Lunasphere Darwinism into one beautiful piece of the book.
And I think you will like how strange it gets.
Plate I
Recovered Diagram from the Catwalk Bakery Notebooks
(Attributed to the “Mars Writing” Documents)
Plate I appears in the Catwalk archive as a rough pencil sketch occupying two facing pages of a bakery ledger. The original notebook page is badly stained with what later examination suggests may be pastry grease or machine oil, making the reconstruction of the diagram uncertain. The drawing itself consists of a series of stick-figure forms arranged across a horizon line, each figure connected by diagonal strokes extending outward toward nearby hills, towers, and canal intersections. Several of these strokes terminate in small circles that appear to correspond to faint stellar points marked in the margin.
The Catwalk writers insisted that the diagram should not be interpreted as a literal depiction of persons. Instead the figures appear to function as astronomical pivots, the limbs of each form acting as measuring rods through which distant features of the landscape may be triangulated against particular star positions. When the lines are extended across a map of the Pied Cow basin they form a geometric network of angles whose intersections coincide with several notable landmarks: the remediation towers known locally as the Three Oops, the ridge above the New Ibsen Canal, and a cluster of stones embedded in the valley floor whose arrangement had previously attracted little attention.
The resemblance between this diagram and early Viking navigation charts was noted immediately by members of the Collective. Scandinavian seafarers are known to have used simplified human figures in certain mnemonic maps, allowing the navigator to remember relative angles between coastlines and celestial markers. The Catwalk version operates according to a similar principle, though the “coastlines” in this case are landforms of the Pied Cow valley and the celestial markers correspond to faint star groupings that become visible only when the atmosphere contains a sufficient concentration of fluorescent particles.
The diagram is also the first place in the archive where the term Lunasphere appears. The word is written beside one of the figures in a cramped hand accompanied by the note: “penumbra of competition.” Later commentary suggests that the Lunasphere refers to a region of space where biological processes may operate under conditions analogous to Darwinian selection on Earth. In other words, the diagram proposes that the struggle for survival extends beyond the terrestrial biosphere into a broader field of cosmic interaction.
This interpretation gained attention after the remediation experiments in which the Pied Cow aquifer was sprayed into the air for oxidation. During those events witnesses reported seeing luminous stick-like forms briefly appear in the mist above the valley. The shapes resembled the figures in Plate I closely enough that several observers concluded the diagram represented either a prediction or memory of the same phenomenon.
Whether the Mars Writing documents influenced the Catwalk drawing or whether the drawing influenced later interpretations of the Mars text remains impossible to determine. The archive contains only facsimiles of facsimiles, each version slightly altered by the medium through which it passed—stone, notebook, prison wall, cheese slice, memory, and machine translation.
What Plate I ultimately demonstrates is less a map than a method of seeing. The figures invite the observer to treat the valley itself as a projection surface upon which celestial relationships become legible. The land supplies the angles; the sky supplies the points. When both are read together, the diagram suggests a form of navigation not through geography alone but through the evolving relationship between environment, observation, and narrative.
Several members of the Catwalk Collective believed that the Pied Cow phenomena—fluorescent mist, anomalous fish behavior, and the recurring appearance of the figure known as Susan—could only be understood through such triangulation. The diagram therefore occupies a central position in the archive, functioning simultaneously as map, hypothesis, and mnemonic device.
The editor cautions that the interpretation offered here may reflect the enthusiasm of the Catwalk writers more than the intention of the unknown author who first sketched the figure. Nonetheless, Plate I remains the clearest visual expression of the strange cosmology emerging from the Pied Cow papers.
If you like, the next thing that would make the Dummy truly powerful is something very Blake-like and very much in your wheelhouse:
Plate II
Diagram of the CheesE Transmission States
(From the Catwalk Archive: Reconstruction of the Martian Writing Chain)
Plate II presents what the Catwalk writers referred to, only half-jokingly, as the Transmission Ladder—a diagram intended to illustrate the improbable sequence of media through which the so-called Martian writing migrated before reaching the present manuscript state. The ladder was first sketched in the margin of a bakery ledger sometime during the early years of the Pied Cow discussions, and though the original drawing has been lost, several copies survive among the Catwalk notebooks. Each version shows a vertical arrangement of boxes connected by arrows, suggesting a descent through successive states of degradation and reinterpretation. One member of the Collective described the ladder as “the evolutionary tree of a rumor,” while another insisted it resembled the way groundwater contamination passes from rock to well to vapor to rain.
The ladder begins at its highest rung with the Martian Stones, whose existence remains the most contested element of the archive. According to the narrative preserved in the Desuno translation, these stones bore carved inscriptions discovered by NASA explorers and quietly removed from public view after translation revealed implications inconvenient to established scientific doctrine. The stones themselves were never transported to Earth—an inconvenience that has encouraged endless speculation. The Catwalk writers regarded this absence not as a defect but as an advantage: the physical originals remained safely on Mars while the idea of the text began its migration through human institutions.
The second rung of the ladder represents the NASA Translation, an official rendering of the Martian inscriptions into English or some intermediate analytic language used by code specialists. No copy of this translation has been recovered, though several documents claim it existed briefly within a secure archive before disappearing. In the Catwalk diagram the NASA state is represented by a sealed envelope drawn with exaggerated precision, as if to emphasize the bureaucratic enclosure in which the meaning of the stones was temporarily confined.
The third state marks the appearance of the Clerk Copy, the moment when the sealed knowledge supposedly escaped institutional custody. In this version of events an unnamed clerk—perhaps careless, perhaps opportunistic—transcribed portions of the translation in pencil and carried the notes out of the facility. The Catwalk diagram depicts this stage with a small pocket drawn beside the envelope, accompanied by the annotation “Have you got it in your pocket?” The phrase later became a kind of running joke among the writers, who enjoyed imagining that the greatest astronomical revelation of the century had been smuggled into history folded beside a wallet and a bus ticket.
From this modest beginning the ladder descends into the most theatrical phase of the transmission: the Prison Wall State. The clerk’s copy, according to the narrative, eventually reached a detention cell somewhere south of the border, where the text was carved into the plaster walls by its accidental custodian. The Catwalk sketches render this stage as a rough rectangle filled with looping lines meant to suggest graffiti. Several members of the Collective remarked that the metaphor of revelation written on prison walls possessed an irresistible literary symmetry. Humanity, they observed, often discovers its most unsettling truths while confined.
The next rung introduces the most celebrated medium in the chain: the Velveeta Manuscript, commonly called the CheesE Text. When a later occupant of the cell—identified only as a Winnowite—encountered the wall carvings, he allegedly attempted to preserve the message using the only writing surface available to him: slices of processed cheese distributed with prison rations. With the tip of a pin he incised the characters into the orange surface, producing what the Catwalk diagram labels “the most perishable scripture in the history of cosmology.” The Collective was delighted by this detail, arguing that the absurdity of the medium only increased the plausibility of the story. No one invents Velveeta manuscripts for the sake of credibility.
The ladder continues with the Refrigerated Preservation Phase, during which the cheese slices—now bearing faint inscriptions—were stored temporarily in a household refrigerator. Several versions of the story suggest that visitors were shown the slices before they deteriorated. Unfortunately the material proved vulnerable to both time and appetite, and the physical artifacts were eventually consumed, leaving only recollections and sketches.
Thus emerges the sixth rung: the Memory Sketches. Witnesses who had seen the cheese inscriptions attempted to reproduce them on paper from memory, producing drawings that varied widely in accuracy. Some resembled stick figures; others suggested constellations or diagrams of mechanical joints. These sketches, collected in notebooks, form the earliest surviving visual record of the Martian text and provide the basis for the diagram reproduced in Plate I.
The seventh state is Narrative Account A, the first coherent attempt to assemble the scattered memories into a written narrative. In this version the story acquires many of the features now familiar to readers of the Catwalk archive: the missing NASA translation, the wandering clerk, the imprisoned Winnowite, and the cryptic references to cosmic competition within the so-called Lunasphere. The Catwalk diagram represents this stage as a simple rectangle labeled “Account A,” suggesting the moment when rumor begins organizing itself into literature.
From there the ladder extends outward into translation once again. The eighth rung shows the Japanese E-Text, attributed to an intermediary source whose identity remains unknown. The Catwalk writers treated this stage with affectionate skepticism, noting that the very existence of the Japanese version could not be independently verified yet was essential to the survival of the story. Without it, the chain of transmission would collapse.
Finally the ninth rung presents the Machine Translation, the form in which the narrative ultimately reached the Catwalk Collective. Here the diagram depicts a small mechanical box emitting a scroll of text accompanied by the annotation: “Meaning adjusted by algorithm.” By this point the Martian writing had traveled so far from its alleged origin that the question of authenticity seemed almost irrelevant. What remained was the structure of the journey itself.
When the entire ladder is viewed at once—from stone to algorithm—the Catwalk writers observed that the transmission resembles a process of evolutionary adaptation. Each medium alters the text slightly, selecting certain features while discarding others, much as environmental pressures shape biological species. The result is not a stable message but a lineage of versions, each suited to the circumstances of its survival.
Several members of the Collective suggested that the phenomenon mirrored the environmental transformations occurring in the Pied Cow basin during the same period. Just as the Martian text migrated through stone, paper, cheese, and memory, the aquifer moved through rock, well, mist, and sky, occasionally revealing luminous figures that seemed to echo the diagrams preserved in the sketches. In this interpretation the CheesE Transmission Ladder does not merely describe the history of a document; it describes the way knowledge itself behaves when exposed to the dissolving forces of time, translation, and contaminated water.
Whether the Martian stones ever existed is therefore less important than the fact that the ladder exists. It records a pattern of persistence: a message refusing to vanish despite the fragility of the surfaces on which it is written. In the words of one Catwalk notebook, “Stone is only the first draft of memory. The rest is written wherever the story finds room to survive.”
Plate II thus stands beside Plate I as an emblem of the Pied Cow archive: one diagram mapping the sky’s mysterious figures, the other mapping the improbable journey of the words that tried to describe them.
XII
On the Disposal of Ladders
At this point the editor must confess a certain unease with the apparatus assembled in these pages. The diagrams are elegant, the narrative chains persuasive, and the cosmology emerging from the Catwalk papers possesses a coherence that invites belief. Yet the very neatness of the ladder may itself constitute a warning.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, famously concluded his work with the suggestion that the reader must eventually discard the logical ladder used to climb toward understanding. Once the insight has been reached, the steps that carried one there should be thrown away. They were useful only as scaffolding.
The Catwalk writers appear to have been aware of this problem. Several of their notes suggest that the CheesE Ladder may be deliberately misleading. The chain of transmission—stone, translation, clerk, wall, cheese, memory, machine—gives the comforting impression that the origin of the message can be traced through a series of orderly stages. But what if the order is merely retrospective? What if the ladder was constructed after the fact by observers attempting to impose clarity on a story that never possessed it?
In that case the ladder becomes a literary device rather than a historical record. It tells us how the writers wished to understand the movement of the text, not how the text actually moved.
This possibility does not invalidate the archive, but it does alter the reader’s posture toward it. One begins to suspect that the diagrams function less as maps of reality than as tools for thinking—temporary scaffolds erected around a mystery too large to approach directly.
The reader is therefore invited to treat the ladder with the same mixture of respect and suspicion one might apply to any elegant theoretical structure. Climb it if you wish. Study the view. But remember that the view may exist only because the ladder was placed there.
Return to Susan
Curiously, the figure who appears least concerned with the ladder is the one who stands closest to the phenomena themselves.
Throughout the Catwalk papers the woman called Susan moves through the margins with an indifference to theory that puzzled the other writers. She attends the debates between El Ephod and Jaky Dutch without offering arguments of her own. She watches the fluorescent stick figures appear above the valley while the others rush for notebooks. When asked what she thinks of the Martian diagrams she reportedly shrugs and says that fish have always known how to find the stars without help from philosophers.
One notebook contains a brief conversation recorded during a late evening at the bakery.
“Do you believe the stones were real?” someone asked her.
Susan considered the question while turning a croissant in her fingers.
“They might be,” she said. “But the stones aren’t the interesting part.”
“What is?”
“The way everyone keeps trying to write them down.”
The remark appears trivial until one notices that it describes the entire structure of the Dummy. The stones may or may not exist; the aquifer may or may not hum with meaning; the sky figures may or may not encode a cosmic map. What unquestionably exists is the human impulse to record the phenomena, to copy them into notebooks, walls, cheese slices, and machine translations.
In other words, the ladder itself.
Closing Reflection of the Present Editor
Where, then, does this leave the reader of the Dummy?
We have a landscape in which chemical remediation produces luminous figures in the sky. We have writers who interpret those figures through diagrams reminiscent of Viking navigation charts. We have an improbable archive of Martian inscriptions whose path through human hands resembles the evolutionary drift of language itself. And we have a ladder explaining the entire process, accompanied by a philosophical warning that the ladder may need to be discarded.
The editor is tempted to conclude that the Dummy functions less as a book than as a cart in motion, rolling slowly through the historical landscape while successive interpreters climb aboard to rearrange the hay. Some bring theology, others chemistry, others translation algorithms or pastry crumbs from the bakery table. None remains long enough to stabilize the load.
Perhaps that is the only stable feature of the Pied Cow archive: its refusal to remain in one state. The story passes through mediums the way groundwater passes through rock, dissolving boundaries as it goes. Each reader becomes another rung in the ladder, another climber reaching toward a meaning that retreats just beyond the grasp of the next sentence.
If the ladder must eventually be thrown away, as Wittgenstein suggests, the editor can only hope the reader will do so after enjoying the climb.
XIII
You’re right to feel that shift. The last few sections put on academic robes, and the Pied Cow material really works best when the robes keep slipping off. The Dummy should feel like a learned argument constantly interrupted by laughter, pastry crumbs, and strange sightings, not a conference paper that forgot the bar.
Your remark —
“after eating Susan… a kind of indigestion… after all there were no other crimes in Phoenix that whole day”
— is exactly the tonal correction the book needs. It restores the comic grotesque that runs through Bosch, Swift, Rabelais, even the better parts of Borges. In fact the Dummy benefits when the scholarly voice occasionally loses control of the story.
So instead of abandoning the apparatus we just built, the trick is to let it wobble. The editor, the plates, the ladders — they stay, but they start behaving like unreliable waiters carrying trays through a crowded restaurant.
Let me show you how that could turn, picking up right where we left off.
Interruption in the Editorial Apparatus
At this point in the Dummy the editor had intended to proceed with a sober discussion of the epistemological value of ladders. The argument would have compared the CheesE Transmission Ladder with Bosch’s hay cart and with Wittgenstein’s famous advice to discard conceptual scaffolding once one has climbed it.
Unfortunately the manuscript itself refuses to remain in a philosophical mood.
Several readers of the Catwalk papers insist that the entire ladder discussion followed an event that has been politely omitted from most academic summaries: the day Susan was eaten.
The editor hesitates to reproduce the rumor because the archive is unclear whether the phrase is literal, metaphorical, or culinary. One of the bakery notebooks simply records:
“After eating Susan there was a general feeling of indigestion.”
The sentence appears beside a grocery receipt and a diagram of three pump towers labeled Oops. Whether the remark refers to an actual meal or to the intellectual exhaustion produced by Susan’s arguments cannot be determined.
Yet the timing is suggestive.
For on that same day the Phoenix police blotter recorded no other crimes whatsoever.
The Day Nothing Happened in Phoenix
Phoenix is not a city accustomed to quiet police blotters. It is a place where events generally occur in the plural. Yet on the day in question the official log reportedly contained a single entry, written in the tidy handwriting of an officer who must have felt a certain disbelief while writing it:
“No incidents reported.”
The Catwalk writers found this coincidence irresistible. They argued that the disappearance of crime from the city might be related to the sudden absence of Susan, whose presence in the Pied Cow papers had always been associated with small disturbances in both water and language.
One writer suggested that if Susan had indeed been consumed—figuratively or otherwise—then the system of tensions she maintained among the various interpreters may have briefly collapsed. Without Susan to contradict them, the theorists, editors, chemists, and bakers all fell into a momentary silence.
During that silence, the police had nothing to write down.
Indigestion of the Archive
Whatever the truth of the matter, the tone of the Catwalk papers changes noticeably after this point. The arguments about ladders grow longer, the diagrams more elaborate, and the editor’s voice increasingly resembles that of a man attempting to digest a meal that should perhaps never have been served.
The ladder is invoked repeatedly, but now with a certain queasiness. One notebook observes:
“A ladder is useful until one begins to suspect it is made of cheese.”
Another suggests that Bosch’s hay cart might have been pulled not by demons but by archivists attempting to keep their documents from spilling into the street.
Even the aquifer diagrams begin to look less like cosmic maps and more like the doodles of a person waiting for a stomachache to pass.
Return of the Comic Engine
The effect, strangely enough, restores the vitality of the Dummy.
For once the archive admits that its theories may be nothing more than elaborate attempts to explain a series of coincidences: a humming aquifer, a fluorescent sky, a woman named Susan who may or may not have been eaten, and a city that briefly experienced a crime-free afternoon.
The editor therefore proposes a modest revision to the apparatus.
The ladder should remain, but it should be understood not as a solemn philosophical instrument but as a kitchen ladder leaning against the pantry, occasionally used by curious cooks to reach ingredients stored too high for ordinary conversation.
From that perspective the entire Pied Cow archive becomes easier to read. The Martian stones, the Velveeta manuscripts, the sky figures, the bakery diagrams—all of them are simply jars placed on different shelves of the same cupboard.
Some jars contain truth.
Some contain jokes.
Most contain a mixture of both, which explains why the readers of the Dummy often report a slight intellectual indigestion after prolonged study.
Interrup
XIV
WORLD EXCLUSIVE!
THE WOMAN WHO ATE THE INTERNET — OR DID THE INTERNET EAT HER?
By Our Special Investigative Correspondent (Who Swears This Is True)
Phoenix — For one bizarre twenty-four-hour period, police records show no crimes whatsoever in the entire metropolitan area. No robberies. No assaults. No stolen cars. Nothing.
Authorities blamed a clerical error.
But witnesses now say the real reason was far stranger.
They say Susan had been eaten.
And not metaphorically.
WHO WAS SUSAN?
For years locals in the Pied Cow district spoke in hushed tones about a mysterious woman known simply as “the Dame.”
Fishermen saw her first.
They claimed fish rose to the surface whenever she tapped the water with a bottle. Birds flew in circles above her. Streetlights flickered when she walked past.
One bartender told reporters:
“Lady had the whole aquifer in her back pocket.”
Scientists laughed — until the Three Oops towers began spraying groundwater into the sky in an attempt to clean toxic plumes beneath the valley.
That’s when things got weird.
SKY WRITING OVER THE DESERT!
During the controversial remediation experiment, engineers sprayed contaminated aquifer water into the air hoping sunlight would neutralize the chemicals.
Instead the mist began glowing.
Witnesses across Phoenix reported seeing luminous stick-figure shapes floating in the sky, connecting hills and towers like a giant cosmic map.
Astronomers dismissed the sightings.
But locals said the shapes matched strange diagrams circulating online — diagrams supposedly copied from Martian stones hidden by NASA!
THE MARTIAN MESSAGE
According to leaked documents (smuggled out in a story so crazy it involves prison walls, Velveeta cheese, and a runaway clerk), the Martian inscriptions warned of something called the Lunasphere.
Translation:
Life in space isn’t friendly.
It competes.
Hard.
Like locusts.
And Earth?
Earth was next.
ENTER SUSAN
And right in the middle of this cosmic mystery stood Susan.
Witnesses say she appeared everywhere at once: canals, bakeries, internet forums, desert pump stations.
One Catwalk writer described her as:
“The spring the whole river comes out of.”
Another simply wrote:
“She knew the sky before it wrote itself.”
But the real shock came when investigators noticed something strange about the internet itself.
Stories about Susan were spreading online faster than anything anyone had ever seen.
Forums. Blogs. Emails. Translations.
Each version slightly different.
Each version stranger.
Until finally someone asked the obvious question.
DID THE INTERNET EAT SUSAN?
Experts now believe Susan may have been the first human story consumed by the internet itself.
Think about it.
A rumor starts.
It spreads.
People copy it.
Translate it.
Edit it.
Repost it.
Soon the original person disappears beneath millions of versions.
The network digests the story.
The source vanishes.
One Catwalk notebook puts it bluntly:
“The network consumes its spring.”
In other words:
Susan was eaten by the internet.
THE DAY CRIME STOPPED
And that brings us back to Phoenix.
On the day Susan disappeared from the archive — the day the stories about her exploded across the early internet — something extraordinary happened.
Police logs show zero crimes.
Not one.
Investigators later joked that maybe the criminals were too busy reading about Susan online.
But the Catwalk writers proposed a darker theory.
Susan, they claimed, had always been the tension in the system — the spark that kept stories, conflicts, and curiosity alive.
Once the network absorbed her…
Everything paused.
Just for a moment.
THE FINAL CLUE
One last note discovered in a bakery ledger reads:
“Don’t worry about Susan.
Springs never die.
They just move underground until the next story needs water.”
Today the aquifer beneath Pied Cow still hums.
The sky figures occasionally reappear after storms.
And somewhere on the internet, a new rumor about Susan is probably starting right now.
NEXT WEEK IN THE ENQUIRER:
“NASA’S SECRET MARTIAN CHEESE MANUSCRIPTS!”
Scientists deny the existence of Velveeta-encoded alien warnings —
but leaked prison sketches tell a different story!
If you'd like, we can also write the mirror version of this — the same scandal story but told by a deadpan government memo trying desperately to deny everything.
That contrast would be very funny inside the Dummy.
Phoenix—For one strange day the police log showed nothing at all. Not a burglary, not a car theft, not even the usual domestic shouting that normally finds its way into the daily ledger. The officer who filled out the report wrote “No incidents reported” and underlined it twice as if to reassure himself that the line had not been written by mistake. Later, when the story began to circulate through the Pied Cow district and beyond, people insisted that the calm could not have been an accident. Something had happened that day. Something had been removed from the system. The rumor spread through cafés, canals, and internet forums with the speed of a summer dust storm: Susan had been eaten.
No one meant that literally, though for a time the phrase was repeated as if someone had indeed set a plate on the table and carved the mysterious woman into slices. The point, as the Catwalk writers later explained, was that the network had swallowed her the way folklore swallows its heroes. For years she had been the odd figure drifting through the margins of the Pied Cow story. Fishermen claimed she could coax fish to the surface by tapping a bottle on the railing. A mechanic swore that the humming wells quieted when she stood nearby. A baker from the New Ibsen Canal café remembered her sitting by the window turning a croissant slowly in her fingers as if she were listening to something below the floorboards. Nobody knew where she came from. She appeared in the towns the way springs appear in limestone hillsides—suddenly, inexplicably, carrying water that had traveled unseen for miles underground.
Then came the remediation experiment, the one that turned the whole valley into a rumor. Engineers sprayed the contaminated aquifer into the desert air hoping that sunlight and oxygen would break down the chemicals. Instead the mist began glowing faintly, a pale fluorescence that drifted above the canals and pump towers like a second sky. People looked up and saw shapes forming in the haze: stick figures, long diagonal strokes, arms reaching from hill to hill as though someone were sketching a map across the horizon. Some compared the lines to Viking navigation charts. Others said they resembled the diagrams rumored to appear in the so-called Martian writing—those mysterious inscriptions that had supposedly passed through NASA vaults, a careless clerk’s notebook, a prison wall, and eventually the famous Velveeta slices on which a Winnowite prisoner scratched the symbols with a pin. The connection may have been coincidence, but once people began comparing the sky figures with those diagrams the stories multiplied overnight.
Susan stood at the center of that multiplication. Wherever the glowing mist appeared someone claimed she had been there earlier that day. If the figures in the sky formed triangles between the hills, someone said Susan had once drawn the same shape with her finger in the dust of the canal road. If the diagrams hinted at a Darwinian struggle in the so-called Lunasphere—life competing with life beyond the Earth the way species struggle here—someone remembered hearing Susan laugh and say that the sky was only another ocean and that creatures there probably fought just as hard for survival as locusts did on land. The internet, which had recently begun carrying rumors faster than any aquifer carries water, seized on these stories immediately. Posts multiplied, translations appeared, diagrams were copied and recopied until the origin of the tale vanished beneath its own echoes.
That was the moment when people began saying Susan had been eaten. The network had absorbed her the way it absorbs every story that spreads too quickly to keep a single author. Her words, gestures, and sightings scattered through thousands of retellings until no one could tell which version was the original. A fisherman’s anecdote became a blog entry. A blog entry became a translation. A translation became a diagram explaining the fluorescent figures over the valley. By the time the stories returned to the canals where they began, the woman who inspired them had dissolved into the circulation itself. The internet had done what folklore has always done—it had digested the person and preserved only the legend.
Strangely enough, that was the same day Phoenix experienced its quiet police log. The Catwalk writers liked to imagine the coincidence as more than a coincidence. Perhaps, they suggested, Susan had always been the tension in the system, the unpredictable spark that kept events moving. Once the network absorbed her story, that tension relaxed for a few hours. People paused to read, to copy diagrams, to argue about Martian stones and cosmic Darwinism. The city, momentarily distracted, produced no crimes worth recording. It was as if the entire region had leaned over the same railing at once, staring into the glowing mist above the desert and waiting for the next figure to appear.
The bakery ledger from the New Ibsen Canal ends the episode with a note scribbled beside a pastry stain that has partly erased the ink. It does not sound scandalous at all. “Don’t worry about Susan,” the writer says. “Springs don’t vanish. They only move underground until the next story needs water.”
No comments:
Post a Comment