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Chronicle of the NonPop Revolution


 
The Essay
Show #246
Sayonara, Cyanora
David Gunn

Cyanora steered her Hudson Wingback into the driveway of her Boise Street duplex shortly before 2am, weary from a day parked in front of a cathode ray tube keyboarding cryptic aleatoric characters into her arts council's data stream. Today's task had been particularly grueling (that is, difficult, not full of runny porridge) -- she had tried to link the score of John Cage's 4'33" to a vigesimal algorithm discovered in a Mayan reliquary that dated from the 12th century. On the surface, it seemed easy enough: Cage employed a base 20 datachain to arrive at two hundred seventy-three seconds for the precise duration of his piece; a wall painting in a Yucatan cavern, the Mayan ancestral home, depicted ancient indians dancing the fandango while using a similar numerical recipe to describe the sun's rotation around the earth. But all other correlations were tenuous, indeed. In the end, she had told her supervisors that the similarities were probably just happenstance.

As she traipsed up to the front door, she noticed a faint orange glow emanating from her kitchen. Ah, Evadio had probably left the light on again. Evadio was a 23-year old woman from a tiny Stone Age colony in British Honduras, coincidentally a water buffalo's day's trek from the Mayan homeland. Though unfamiliar with the custom of outing the light when leaving a room, she did show great promise as a conductor of mineral-based music, possibly because her low-tech upbringing had made her especially cognizant of acoustic events that occurred within the interstices of inorganic solids. Her interpretation of Holst's "The Planets" performed by a consort of didgeridoos, for example, was astounding in its inanimate limpidity, and Everest Records had already signed her to a recording contract.

Cyanora briefly recontextualized her body to the consistency of gruel, squeezed through the mail slot, tossed her bag of statistical samplings and cafeteria mayonnaise packets onto the newel post at the bottom of the stairway, recorporealized, and flicked on the light. It took her only a moment to realize that the light hadn't responded to the switch, that it had already been on, and that it consisted of a faint orange glow which emanated from the kitchen.

"Evadio?" she called out. There was no reply, but there was a muffled sound from the kitchen, a sound not unlike 400 owls attempting to outwit a giant badger in the rain. Cyanora crept slowly towards the kitchen door. The closer she got, the fainter the owlly sound became. And when she abruptly pushed open the door, the noise disappeared altogether. But sound was quite happy to take a back seat to the sight that greeted her.

At the same time, two blocks away in a dimly lit office in the rear of Boise Street Best Dry Cleaning, a shadowy figure was telephoning Saskatoon. She dialed 306-327-5623, the number of the cabin in which Peter was presently up to his ears in attitudinal sensory organs. She let the phone ring 30 times before hanging up. She checked the number, redialed it, let it ring 30 more times, hung up again. Something wasn't right. On the desk in front of her sat a manila envelope that Kinkajoul had given her just before he fled British Honduras. He had told her it contained scientific data vital to a powerful pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis, Indiana, and that they would probably go to extreme measures to retrieve it. Well, Kinkajoul had disappeared, as had Wingate, as had Kinkajoul's nephew, and as Cyanora was about to. She looked at Kinkajoul's telephone number again and smiled: 306-ear-lobe -- what a dead giveaway that was!

A sense of déjà vu suddenly overwhelmed Evadio and she ducked as a nide of noses burst through the front window, cleaved the space she'd just vacated, and impaled the wall behind the desk. She glanced up to see dozens -- or really, noddies -- more irate snoots milling about levitationally in the shop’s antechamber, apparently out for blood. Hers was Type O positive, and she aimed to keep it all on her insides. She reached up, snatched the envelope, and dashed for the back door. As she slammed it shut behind her, she felt it begin to buckle as a novena of peeved proboscises hammered into the transom. Evadio ran back to Cyanora's house. Her car was there, good. But ... that orange glow emanating from the kitchen -- she'd seen it before ... in her village near the river when Kinkajoul had exposed all those awful eyeballs to the light! The memory made her shiver, and she decided not to enter the house. But what, then, would she do?

I, for one, dear audient, wish I knew, because this little tale is beginning to get out of hand, the right one, that is, the one that's holding up this 246th episode of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, the one that was supposed to bring this story to a reasonable conclusion but which now will take who knows how many more episodes to wrap up, and the who who knows that is probably not, though one never knows, Kalvos.