Inspektor Zig

Inspektor Zig is an existential detective. A garage philosopher, a cosmic thinker. If he cannot figure this shit out, nobody can. He sips tea. He sips coffee. He stares into space. Yes yes yes. The puzzlement. The enigma of Being. Everything is fair game for Inspektor Zig.

What speaks inside our heads? Zig has been listening to this voice for half a century. Sometimes it is Silence. Empty noise. Radio frequencies. Satellites. Intergalactic messages.
Sometimes it is God.
“Hello, Zig. Long time no speak.”

What now, pal, if anything? Zig is talking to himself again. Or is he? Who makes the words, the language? The vibrations inside his head are remarkable. Human consciousness. Electrochemical messages. Synapses firing. Not firing. Hippocampus triggered.
I have a memory.
A memory of a town, a village.

Zig is a forgetter. He needs to write things down. He keeps a notebook. A composition notebook. Scribbled reminders. Observations. Cosmic spirals. The great spiderweb of eternity.
Eat a vegetable.
Buy toothpaste.
Call Zoë.

Zoë is an ex-girlfriend. They had had fantastic sex in the past. Zig wants to reminisce. Relive the experience. Alas, it is impossible. Zig needs to move on. Let go.
Still.
The images remain.

What is a person? An accumulation of memories. A bioelectric experience. Inspektor Zig needs a case to investigate. It has been a long time forthcoming. Depression is setting in. Angst. Space telescopes are revealing incredible things. Somehow Zig has stopped paying attention. Stopped observing. Out there… is in here. Innerscape. A peephole into the Self.

What is Death? What is Birth? I need to clarify the matter. The voice again! Where is it coming from? Zig has read too many books. This is the price of admission. The toll paid to the ferryman to get to the Other Shore. Row your oar, Charon. Row.

Queens Boulevard and the twin-yellow lines of eternity. Inspektor Zig pilots a Buick Skylark. He half-expects the vehicle to deliver him to Nirvana. He slams the car door. Zig is enlightened. Just kidding. Not so fast. Not so easy. Then again, why not. Zig is a bodhisattva. Zig is an electric Buddha.

Drops of rain. Raindrops. Am I the last person on the planet?

I am a memory machine. I fabricate everything. Nothing is real. We engage simulacra. I am made of flesh and atoms. Electrons orbit my brain. What does Niels Bohr have to say about this? Heisenberg, are you listening? I could sure go for a Pilsner.

Full Tilt, a novel. A theory of everything. A novel about everything. Only Inspektor Zig can investigate. He has the right tools. A lathe. A milling machine. A Miller MIG welding machine.

Ooops. Did I hurt your electronic feelings? I had a girlfriend who hated when I responded to her text messages with the letter K. She said I was being rude. I was just trying to echo Kafka.

Inspektor Zig to the rescue. No job is too big or too small. An electric typewriter and a black rotary telephone. Welcome to the museum of secret surveillance. Binoculars. Telescopes. Cameras.

The robot squirrel was a seven-year-old boy’s idea. We designed it immediately. Now, it scampers through the metropolis, jumping from telephone pole to tree, and peeping into people’s quarters.

There is nothing here but here. It is possible that nothing will  ever happen again. But Inspektor Zig thinks this is improbable. There is always movement. Particles. Waves. Now and again, even a little fuckie-fuckie between wife and husband.

The sliding-glass doors of Amerika are portals into the sumpholes of memory. What lurks behind the iron chainlink fence? The tangles of razorwire and red-lettered signs warning people to keep out. Is it the Sump Monster?

Yellow diggers dig up this island. Making quarter-acre prison yards. Houses with aluminum siding. Two-car garages where nobody parks a car. This island is your island. From the Red Hook Marine Terminal in Brooklyn to the lighthouse at Montauk Point.

We try. We fail. We sort of make it.

Inspektor Zig hangs a shingle. I Am a Novelist. The Novel is a Machine. The machine-poet of Ronkonkoma is losing his mind. Send him to to Astoria, Queens. Send him anywhere. Please. Just not here.

Zoë’s nipples are hard beneath her white tanktop. Inspektor Zig pulls off her panties. She opens her legs. Strawberry pubic hair. Zig unrolls a latex condom on his dick. Pushes into Zoë’s wet strawberry patch. He feels the spread of her left hand on his right buttock. “Fuck me, Inspektor,” she whispers.

Inspektor Zig opened a secret intelligence file on himself. You cannot sleep on anybody. His black composition notebook was a record of Zig’s private mind. To a degree human thoughts can be made into words. Zig was skeptical of the process, of language. Nevertheless, he wrote like a graphomaniac, like a scribomaniac.

Zig sits at a machine. Riding the waves of an electromagnetic sea. Troughs. Peaks. Everything gets documented. Recorded. Amplitude. Night sky. Blue supergiants are among the ten thousand stars people can see with a naked eye. Rigel, the right kneecap of Orion, is a blue supergiant. Orion’s left armpit, Betelgeuse, is a red supergiant star.

Inspektor Zig begins investigating a case at the beginning of the beginning. The end is always unscrolling. The 1929 portable Underwood typewriter is a remarkable machine. It was designed in Bridgeport, Connecticut for the sole purpose of bang-bang-bang-kerbang-bang-banging out the Great Amerikan Novel. 

The Novel is a Machine.

The beginning of the Third Millenium is a curious moment for Inspektor Zig. Urgent. Requires vigilance. Alertness. Sleeplesness. You cannot sleep on anybody. Every murmur is a clue. Every ripple in the fabric of Spacetime. Please not take the job of inspekting lightly. If you do… don’t take this job!

One last question from Inspektor Zig: Are you the last person in the metropolis? If so, how do you proceed? Are you with me or against me? Are there enough supplies? Is a nuclear winter a long winter? Was it an asteroid? A fragment from Denver? Did it smash into New York City? Obliterating everything and everybody.

If so, how now, pal? 

What next?