No, Not Really continues, with respect and condolences for the loss of TV On The Radio bandmate, Gerard Smith.
Goldman sits looking out the window of his apartment on the third floor, the cloud in his head eased into his eyes, looking through him, for him, at him. He sits and watches. Listens to the clock tocking to itself on the mantelpiece as it walks on long-forgotten cobblestones. Cities that don’t exist any more. Bedroom communities that grew up to be graveyards.
They used to say “On the internet, nobody’s knows you’re a dog.” Nobody knows anything about him, dog or not. Nobody alive, anyway. His friends all long-gone. His wife was one of the last to go. A Raging Granny until the last few years, and then they got a rec vehicle and watched the world roll by for those last few months together.
Now he watches trains… and clouds. Trains and clouds and data transfers. Not the big ones, just the pretty ones. The ones that put him in mind of stained glass. The ones that remind him of mornings in church. Of music. Beams through the clouds. In a part of town that’s all but abandoned, aside from the elderly and the alone. Warehouses of the well worn.
I’m losing my mind, he thinks, but not to himself. Thinks it to the other. The voice that isn’t his, that isn’t him. It argues with him in prose poetry, hits him in his dreams, when he’s dozing in the sun. I’m losing my mind, but if I’m going, I’m taking you with me. I’ve got nothing left to lose, so let’s go.
Let’s go. Let go. Lego. Ego. Go.
Tick.
No, my mind is my own, I might be losing it, but it’s mine to lose. You can’t have it. You don’t belong here.
Tock.
We’ll watch the waves. Come sleep. Come back to bed. Nothing to be up for.
Tick.
I’ve called them. Someone will find me. Someone from before. Someone they won’t expect, ’cause they won’t have expected it of themselves.
Tock.
No. Just us. Justice. Think, you Fourier hoarder.
Tick.
He reaches out to the systems that he once played in when he was young. When the systems were young. Speaks to them through the wires at his wrists. Calls them names they had when their world was young. Names that make them smile. Process with names like Gopher and Archie still remember the voices of the hippies in the hall. He begins to ask them questions that would cause them to ask even stranger ones in return. Lighting the fires in the towers. The signals along the hills. The armada approaches. We need backup. We’re in danger. Collect the cargo. Women and children first.
