A transnational immigrant baptized in a pool of liquid surfactant at a Dominican Republic Export Processing Zone, Neutron Janey would hand-sew grey-colored Disney shirts in 110-degree heat until her fingers bled sticky goo; then, the overseer would switch her to the red shirts to make things extra tasty. Cameras captured her every movement; we’ve held screenings. The close-ups are worthy of The Seventh Seal, evoking real pathos as the stretch lines of her upper cheeks go taught like fishing line caught on a tin can, then loose in time with the crack of the whip along her swollen back as we watch her lips linger softly on the edge of the picture screen, noting in shallow breath how the pantheon of Disney villains stay stitched into the sweatshirts: many-tentacled sea hags, stepmother botox witches drawn straight from neoconservative hips of vein-tight panty-hose bitches at a slightly outré office party. Newsflash! The photocopier always captures your flabby-assed varicose veins, you career-minded fuck, then projects the whole thing back on the side of a Manhattan skyscraper.
Neutron Janey can bloodhound a packaging trail like Baron Samedi in a forensics lab, sniffing out the most arcane watermark: Masonic goat-heads, a muted post horn. Musty imprints translated by an old village Brujo who exists on the margins of the conflict, just outside the barb-wire barrier of this Dominican EPZ—into letters, Neutron Janey discovers, spelling out “Interface” from a crack forming at the center of an ice-covered pond. After knifing the eye of a vulture skull, the Brujo extracts a bullet from behind Neutron Janey’s bruised ear. —You want a revolution—, he says. —Here’s your revolution.— A handful of bullets drop into her palm.
Spitting in the old man’s face and screwing the crap out of the vulture skull, she begins to see “Interface” all over: scrawled on the wall of the fly-infested outhouse behind the main fabrication plant, burned into the hide of a emaciated pack mule running out of time before the rinderpest hits the bone marrow. Back inside the EPZ for work the next morning, circumscribed within a demilitarized space of corporate tax-breaks and 16-hour workdays, of sewing machines needling themselves into full-blown HIV, of time cards punched by the papilla of microscopic scabies in a horde of Tsetse flies—Neutron Janey begins to visualize explosions:
Small bangs. At first. Miniature stars exploding over a model of the Milky Way because this is what the Brujo means with his arcane fingers tracing the outline of a crepe-paper large intestine. She practices for weeks with the gaseous discharges of her own body: gunpowder snot balls, eruptive eye sand, explosive poly-textual pus from ingrown hairs gone wretched in a bleach washtub, until she can eventually nod, with great concentration, in a pentagram pattern causing silver flash grenades to stop the assembly line, cause the rotors up-and-went shitty with nobody none the wiser. Aborted pregnancies stall halfway through the assembly line in masses of oily placenta under Neutron Janey’s half-numb face. Once the conveyor belt starts up again, the most oxidized afterbirth can be boxed in bright day-glo colors with a eunuch-of-the-month. Imagine little Sally Farnsworth, of Peoria, Illinois, opening her X-mas gift to find a mass of sticky fetus liquid coating Barbie’s insides. Neutron Janey nods her head, and the doll gives a long distance bang all over the kid’s palpitating self-esteem.
She arrives like a fireball in our town, Desiccation, when we are still quite young. For every hand of strip-poker played with our cigar-smoking peers, we gain access to bank accounts numbers, trash barges, gnarled orange peels bursting with ripe genetic data; with each fuck she fumbles through on some dim casting-couch of a bachelor pad, cucumbers slathered in Vaseline, we receive sensitive case information on the construction materials used by our enemies. Her infiltration opens up deep cover possibilities for other operatives, and within one year of Neutron Janey’s first shifting infiltrations, 73 of the newest Blackout Angels are immersed in language programs calculated to convert their speech into case-sensitive dialect. We screen endless hours of old Tom Brokaw Ted Koppel Johnny Carson tapes to eliminate regional markers, correct organic dysglossia, and work out short comedy routines predicated on the differences between men and women or white and black people. Our agents work retail at town center kiosks (selling designer pottery, cell phone covers, home-genealogy kits), or they serve as community centers “greeters,” orderlies at the local hospitals suggesting new combinations of the presidential names for the freshly born. The Roosevelt Harrison Roosevelt Harrison craze—one of Janey’s.
Of course we draw heat, and so reduce contact. No more furtive notes rolled in dog shit and left in certain pre-marked scooper bags. Instead we use remote astrological commands, the passage of a certain comet over the Southern Cross, the nadir of Mercury’s interface with Venus, the burnout finale of a supernova from the start of time bursting forth across a supersaturated Gemini…So long as night is clear in the Interface, we can mobilize 1,500 evacuees from a time-stamped subdivision into an angry mob bent on the destruction of the neighboring pre-packaged city, as easy as a seemingly harmless Little League rivalry assumes epic proportions once the kids make it personal with switchblades and jelly fuck-bracelets.
Still, cast adrift in radio silence, some weaker agents develop daytime-TV identity conflicts: heterosexuality, intense paranoia. —No one nose me no more (sic),— says the suicide note of a prime deep-cover agent, reported in The Digital Record with images of his shaved head painted with red-lacquer, a dellicato squash inserted awkwardly up the anus. Other agents surrender to their cover story: the fineness of ground sirloin so easily plucked from the butcher’s rack, gingerbread bonding over groggy goblets of over-indulgent eggnog and casual wife swapping, the glowing warmth of warm Mississippi quail breast served with wilted lamb shank, intestinal flambé and socialite-expelled shat brownie under soft lighting without the kids for an anniversary dinner until the babysitter takes her Rufies and becomes so much more compliant to your low-wages fumbles.
Meanwhile, the Brujo’s skull becomes a kind of demi-god back in the Dominican Export Processing Zone. Hand puppets mimic his long chin and kids make his jaws spout dire proclamations to the factory girls: —You’ve been sterilized through the water,— or, most likely, —You’ve been sterilized through the sewing needles,— or —You’ve been sterilized by the brujo hisself.—