Presentation

Saturday evening I was guided into a small conference room.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom. - Gilles Deleuze

When the quote appeared on the projector the audience roared into applause. Throughout the day I had become reliant on Elaine, following her from room to room in the giant complex building, signing documents and being introduced to men and women with foreign sounding names that I could not quite place.

I was quite discouraged when her abandoned chair beside me was suddenly occupied with a man with a curled mustache smoking a thick cigar. He gave me a large grin and a puff of smoke as he sat down and turned his attention to the front.

The audience of several dozen quieted as Elaine walked to the podium, and began to introduce the aspects of cognitive memory, dependency on association, and various philosophical jargons that left very little information for me to gather through acuteness alone.

The thought passed that maybe these were investors in this project I had become tangled in, yet what reason would they have to be meeting now… with me… so close to the beginning of it all.

Elaine walked to the side of the stage and the conference continued one speaker after another. After each the speech, the man with the mustache beside me showed all his teeth in a massive grin, and blew a cloud of smoke, then stood and applauded loudly.

At some point in the day I noticed from a distance that a few of the audience members were drinking from martini glasses. Something was unusual about the liquid that filled the glasses. At first I had thought it was the dim lighting to accommodate the projector, but it drew my attention from the monotonous lectures up front.

A small man in a server’s outfit was bringing a single martini glass to each of the audience members, resting on a circular plate, with a napkin draped over the top of the glass. As he moved he kept a hand in position above the concealed glass in preparation to catch any movement or bumps along the trip. This was very unlike any bar patron I had witnessed who was easily adept at carrying half a dozen assorted drinks through a crowded chamber without effort or worry.

The man would deliver the drink, and then stand off to the side as the recipient would take a sip. The woman on the side of the aisle in front of me was currently sipping it down slowly, taking effort to get each gulp out of the glass as if it had the consistency of Jell-o.

The liquid itself scared me. The ooze inside the glass reminded me of black oil, yet it writhed with red lines that seemed to hold the substance in form like the thick veins of a pulsing organ. My racing imagination summoned images of a substance made from the black tar scraped from a lifetime smoker’s lungs in an anti-smoking campaign, fermented and bottled to perfection.

The lecture went on, my attention focused on each sip of the black and red goo drizzling into the lips of each occupant of the row in front of me. Each glass finished resolving in the little man collecting the glass, then returning with another for the next guest in the row. Each time waiting for the guest to finish the glass before moving on to the next person.

I looked at their mouths, black and vile. I looked at the front screen, verbose expressions and scientific charts… The man in the overcoat received his glass, and slowly sipped it down… The chart on the board had arrows pointing to the temporal lobe on a model brain… The women with white gloves folded her reading glasses and took a sip... The brain on the screen began to rotate… the man with the mustache beside me took his glass from the plate and slammed it with one sip… the screen showed guns firing, showed trees decaying in fast forward, and then in reverse, showed people waving and then being dropped into the sea…

I turned around, the little man offered me his tray, offering the concealed drink under the tray. The little man. The little man. I pulled the napkin off.

The glass was empty. I looked at him, stared into his eyes. He frowned, and stared back.

The audience began to laugh. They laughed at me. The fingers pointed at me. All around they laughed, the mustache man waved his cigar in the air and let out thunderous bellows.

I looked at the little man. He shook his head, clearly disappointed, and walked away.

On stage the man had stopped in mid lecture, laughing pointing, laughing. Laughing. Laughing.