The vacuum was the wakeup call. It must have started itself in the middle of the night. Smart appliance: great with space, awful with time. Keeping an inhuman schedule. It woke up, overworked, slurped me out from under my topsheet like a tablecloth trick. Left the bed perfectly made. Cascaded into feedback around me. Crosshatch patterns of the basest wavelengths ciliated the carpet, plus intake hiss, static rocket launch column(s) of sound(s) buckled the bedroom. Meanwhile any circle you can see, but a circle inside another circle especially, is an optical/audible illusion. Reality is only apparently discrete. No sound is the sound of itself. Sound is a record of its surroundings, decomposable into whatever sounds its negative spaces imply.
I figured I’d ride the wave when it blew itself apart. Air manifold heaving me handfirst into hardwater-soiled toilet, anchored by my elbow like to some faulty vending machine. Pincers of frequency opportune as wasps, rattling down the toilet’s handle or targeting the chain or flapper with enough amplitude to activate, dropping the water column, extruded like involuntary pilates through litanies of pipes, passing me to the kitchen. One foot’s toes found a tee joint behind the dishwasher, got some hip behind the back foot, kicked it spigot-first from under the counter.
The top rack slid hesitantly ahead and emptied, sounding like a hasty ball pit exit or burnt popcorn. The bottom rack was catapulted then. More decisive—chorus of biohazard sharps—metal chewing glass squeakily. I surfed the dishwasher across the carnage to the garage door and jackknifed through its screen, landing a backflop on the hood of my self-driving mid-size crossover hybrid SUV, my vehicle of choice due to its nominal redundancies inspiring within me a positively bovine sense of security.
Well, yeehaw. Dr. Strangelove-splayed over the windshield, heels scrambling over the headlights, only places the eyes of a car ought to be, no detriment at all to self-driving. That would have been when it dawned on me that the car’s eyes were all over the place, distributed, and its perspective was composite, a bug’s. It would see me, my face, if it saw my face, if it did something we would call seeing to something it’d call my face, the car would see me like some trashy psychedelic painting, smeared predictably along a mystery axis, mysterious more to me than the car, which has of course never experienced the visual stylings of Alex Grey.
Would have been. 4D-faciality would have dawned on me then except for higher-priority dawnings, the sun for one, a din picking up, streets opening from neighborhood to side roads to expressways, the fact that we were not alone but joining a flock of vehicles on autonomous warpaths. Genuine revving blended with the synthetic whines of the hybrids. Cars slalomed into lampposts, telephone poles, and each other apparently at random, but adhering to a broader choreography. I got my own glorious pike through a Tesla semi’s windshield, already taking my bow, and made my exit.
