The oubliette has a body of Latvian crevice and sunshine blind, right across the portside café she sways in two bodies distinct but ultimately, unseparable, devilicious, an automaton of cellular attention-to-adhesive. Eyes closed, VI, XVII, as it rarely happens, a constellation of IV and a number of zeroes, neatly folded into accounts from Zurich to Macau, brokers intimately sharing the Christmas morning gift of embracing each last digit, the remains still elegant, enough for countries to pay their national attribution to the beacons on Mars, and at a later iteration, Saturn. On days, when the snowflakes draw an orgy of Sierpinskis across the highways of crimson and cinnamon fuckpale beige, she comes alone, like a virus she comes, with an intensity she seldom flickers to virility double, even treble. She comes first in a hotel room. The air smells like ozone and in the corner, Sibiu surplus stomp oil. The IV fades, III remains unsolved. The oubliette has a habit of imprinting memories, the locks that lead to those memory universes are tight. Ping them in certain patterns, certain timing. Take the wonderland vasopressine, thake the merriment cocaine. Memories go blank, rigid, the color of a dead dragonfly.

Bobby Quine flips the tarot, the deck says it is all in the oubliette. Quine cuts the decks, shuffles, cuts again. Always the same cards. But he is forgetting, he learns how to forget. And he is getting exceedingly efficient at it.