"The Factory is the Time and Space of Our Everyday Subsistence"

Debord opened his gold cigarette case with a slash of his fingernail.

"Where have you been, Shimmy?

"Go away."

"I looked everywhere," he said, digging into his pocket for a lighter. "Where were you?"

Under the bed, in the closet, under the ottoman, in the bathtub (waiting for the spigot), in front of the stove, beneath Tony's computer desk, on the back porch -- what was that noise? -- asleep on the bed and inside the empty newspaper box and the loveseat and on a phone-book-sized stack of "poems."

"I've been busy," I said. I wiped my brow with a licked paw.

"Shimmy, you must understand. Raoul Vaneigem says the factory is all around us. It is, he says, the morning, the train, the car, the ravaged countryside, the machine, the bosses, the chief, the house, the empty newspaper box in which we sleep, the family, the trade union, the street, one's purchases, pictures, one's pay, the television, the dental floss and shoelace one chases, one's language, one's holidays, the tabletop hockey game under the bed, school, housework, boredom, prison, the hospital, and the night."

Debord lit a Gaulois and sucked deeply into his lungs. A sash of smoke rose between his fingers and a water bug rattled in the bathtub.

"Vaneigem also says the factory is the time and space of our everyday subsistence," I reminded him. "It is the becoming accustomed to repetitive moves and suppressed emotions, emotions sampled through the proxy of intermediary images. I can make a water bug faint inside the bathtub."

"What are you afraid of, Shimmy? What made you so scared?"

Seven thousand lepers! A candy chair and some certainty, a red cape around my neck and a dead moth at the end of my wet snout.

"The new dog across the hall," I said. "Weed thong, a larch she lost."