ANNOUNCER:

We present. . .

VOICEMAIL

SFX:

Click and hum of computer hard drive throughout. All the VOICES are treated slightly.

NARRATOR:

Mister Sandman's poem had stopped writing itself. His mind was a blank screen.

But his computer could talk all night. He left the speech option running.

All the messages had names. They announced themselves. In customised voices. They filled the void of his bedroom.

VOICE 1:

Moises Perkins

VOICE 2:

Lafcadio Piker

VOICE 3:

Maisy Obadiah

NARRATOR:

Who were these fractal persons? The network couldn't filter them. They always got through.

VOICE 1:

Talon Memmott

VOICE 2:

Potts Kenton

VOICE 3:

Igna Beth Bosanquet

NARRATOR:

Of course they used false identities. All the old digital trick-boxes. He knew their gamey spam. But why such blatantly synthetic IDs?

VOICE 1:

Crux P Krauser

VOICE 2:

Baldwin Larsen

VOICE 3:

Wendy Farrago

NARRATOR:

Tonight's litany of exotic nomenclature was incessant. Even his own name seemed awkward, unfamiliar, a mouthful of alien tongue. He had to repeat it. SANDMAN. SAND-MAN. . . His name was his password. It named his parts and inner partitions. But who — what — did these names refer to?

VOICE 1:

Randolph Lubbock

VOICE 2:

Elvis Kuhlmey

VOICE 3:

Mohammed O'Reilly

NARRATOR:

Should he open their messages? Only to endure their predictable pitches — for black-market erectile aids or the transfer of funds from Lagos to his honourable self?

VOICE 1:

Augustus Oshagbeme

VOICE 2:

Lucky Lafayette

VOICE 3:

Hortense Laloux

NARRATOR:

Or should he yield to the mystery voices of pleasure? Open the portal to their secret places? Their private attachments?

VOICE 1:

Millie Honeycutt

VOICE 2:

Serena Quimby

VOICE 3:

Adelaide Atnikov

NARRATOR:

No. . . no. . . He had to move on and ignore all names, delete all headers, scroll them quickly into the dark.

VOICE 1:

Avery Vance. Subject: Pheasant sound barrier.

VOICE 2:

Horace Bachelard. Subject: Your great hands on week!

VOICE 3:

Arthur Haruni. Subject: Pigeonberry ain cabaret. . .

VOICE 1:

Tybalt Turner. Subject: Flesh-colored ultra-martian vegetable.

VOICE 2:

Merrill Melbert. Subject: Laid-back joystick for all users.

VOICE 3:

Hereward Neubauer. Subject —

NARRATOR:

The subject line made him pause.

VOICE 1:

The Collected Poems of Mohammed O'Reilly

VOICE 2:

By Hereward Neubauer

NARRATOR:

There was clearly some confusion about authorship here. Sandman was unsure. Was it opening time? Would it attach itself to him? Perhaps all the files would open. He could be an early adopter. He could collect the complete set. The poems might be a portal to these encrypted IDs. Sandman pointed and clicked.

SFX:

Alert chime

VOICE 1:

See — postal ministry may daemonise!

NARRATOR:

This poetic idiom was clearly new.

VOICE 2:

Stick-man in the sarcophagus!

VOICE 3:

By Avery Vance the Flaming Pisser.

NARRATOR:

He was not going to be intimidated.

VOICE 2:

By Avery Vance the Flaming Pisser.

VOICE 3:

The linear may chimney you straight up, you fish!

NARRATOR:

Sand-man. . . Silicate man. Yes, he was Sandman. They had his name. And his numbers.

VOICE 1:

It's officialdom. It's official.

NARRATOR:

It meant official doom? Sandman always knew his numbers would never add up, always needed updating. He'd always kept it up with up-grades.

VOICE 2:

Try binary handmaiden!

VOICE 1:

O dominatrice, my benchmark show us 'the aesthetics of frustration'.

NARRATOR:

This random assemblage of signifiers was clearly a strategy to confuse the spam filters —

VOICE 2:

Try binary handmaiden!

NARRATOR:

— to stop the nightly memoranda from virtual sex services.

VOICE 3:

The ugly may barnyard her. . .

VOICE 1:

Nude luncheon-flesh alerts!

VOICE 2:

Sperm warfare!

NARRATOR:

He was smartly targeted.

VOICE 3:

Hi Sandman — you incomparable vermin!

VOICE 2:

You try to out-pod yourself. Too fast.

VOICE 3:

You try to delete us — treachery!

NARRATOR:

Sandman tried distraction. To lose himself. In the odour from the biomass plant across the river, drifting through his air-filter grill. In the flickering lights of the magnetic trains along the routes of the old motorway.

VOICE 3:

This is Jason in Pompano.

NARRATOR:

Sandman knew no Jasons. He did not visit with anyone on the beaches of Pompano in the Florida Homelands. He only wanted peace and democracy there.

VOICE 1:

It's some sanctimonious rapprochement.

NARRATOR:

Sandman was postponing action again. They seemed to know about his false consciousness.

VOICE 3:

Sandman is a silly man. Silly man.

NARRATOR:

He ought to stop typing about himself in the third person and take some inter-action with these voicemails. Who was sampling his data?

VOICE 1:

No rocket-smooth muscle answered the last roman candle that smallpox-proof shone on the aunt-hill.

NARRATOR:

Sandman had to unpack the symbolism — if there was symbolism.

VOICE 1:

That sampleman is my shearing machine.

NARRATOR:

Introspection was called for. Sandman rose from his plastic baggy and walked to the window hatch.

VOICE 2:

Crusty, don't splat the golden arc at an end of this longing clock.

NARRATOR:

A faint light at a window. The Sandman with mantis face nods away, taking in the data from the 'hood.

VOICE 3:

He mimic nonentity on joystick.

NARRATOR:

The grills of Mitsubishi Shoguns, battle boxes with huge concave wheels are deluging him with black propaganda, rich as the Amazon.

VOICE 1:

They are sleep-deprived crocodiles sprouting mould.

NARRATOR:

Sandman had learned to adore the cult of brands and customer choice — the choice to be mesmerised by the aisles of packaging in the glaring hypermarkets.

NARRATOR:

He is now naming phenomena according to their brands, the signs of the true religion.

VOICE 1:

He wants to bark like a toad.

VOICE 3:

But he has no career structure. .

VOICE 2:

Better to be misunderstood deeply yet true, thus owning many telephoned parallels in life's experience.

VOICE 3:

Skyplanted, we whisper: "this is my first moo-cow battle; chauvinisms on ferromagnesian drafting paper. . ."

NARRATOR:

Sandman, silicate man, now has no strategic plan. But his screen won't stop blinking as word, words, the words fill up his boxes, mailing him to armoured brain death.

VOICE 3:

I cry in harlot's light
I death, wholeness o zero houri

NARRATOR:

Sandman is the fly in the cathedral of the atom.

VOICE 1:

Who has a paper-palisaded three page microanatomy?

VOICE 2 :

Organise the arcades of dropped lust.

NARRATOR:

They were mere millions of wriggling info-bits, writhing with cunning, seeking union with a contact, a contactee.

VOICE 1:

We are as admirable as the frantic scattering of old salt on the wings of hypertrophied beetles.

VOICE 3:

I cry in harlot's light
I death, wholeness o zero houri

NARRATOR:

Sandman speculated about his former partner, Adobe Collis-Brown. Was this network of anti-language her action plan? Her re-active mind-set?

VOICE 1:

Her secret had been divulged — such harmless sacramental pleasures as girls should love. . .

VOICE 2:

The arcades of dropped lust.

VOICE 3:

Shameless you consummate me, my dairyman!

VOICE 1:

Adhesive, you Winnipeg me, room-mating stalwart!

VOICE 3:

You aviate me. . .

VOICE 1:

You instantiate me, equidistant. . .

NARRATOR:

In a previous after-life Sandman had been a marketing operative, massaging messages. Now he was plotless, jobless but still listed as human. Although he'd dropped off Adobe 's list, during her pole dance.

VOICE 3:

She rejoiced that she had fallen among hoop people.

NARRATOR:

Upon whom the refining and softening influences of religion evidently had fallen.

NARRATOR:

He looked forward to the protective stance of her hand. He felt he'd spent years crawling across a paper while sniffing through littered clothes, seeking clues. All false.

VOICE 2:

The plethora of carnivorous life provides lobotomies.

NARRATOR:

Sex was now a dead language. He felt himself oozing out of a swamp but it was only a bed at five o clock. "The pink light of civilisation will not protect us much longer," she'd often said.

VOICE 3:

We have not been happy with the activity in the room.

VOICE 1:

The petrified womb.

VOICE 2:

Oh the sad dong of his incompetence.

VOICE 3:

A lax time for his folded willy in its god-collar.

NARRATOR:

Sandman knew he had to act, not let others write him to their discs.

VOICE 2:

Sandman knew a truth. He was being told it was for the best.

NARRATOR:

Sandman knew a truth. He was being told it was for the best.

VOICE 3:

Clear whichever disease at this URL. Fully trailing packages to fulfil your requirement.

NARRATOR:

He was at least not created through the intervention of insects as she had sometimes supposed.

VOICE 3:

Get under this, Sandman, pump that harpie, quick, quicker — whinnying is your appropriate mode

NARRATOR:

All was quite well. These voice messages were not a neural short-circuit between the inner ear and the brain. Between the brain and the pointed nose. Nice!

VOICE 1:

"Stay — chew powder here!" they (hot-potted) said aloud.

NARRATOR:

Sandman knew they were starting to narrate him. They knew.

VOICE 2:

Everyone knew.

VOICE 1:

Too much! Muchness!

VOICE 3:

If we yield to liquescence,we can never do anything good in the wide world.

VOICE 1:

Don't talk into your handful of bent coinage.

NARRATOR:

Sandman remembers: rotund investment analysts and well-padded girls glow with crimson omens. . .

VOICE 2:

Fleet-finger Goatman passes, whirling his shamanic necklace at the bag ladies.

VOICE 1:

The bunkers are breaking up.

VOICE 3:

I am sprinkled wreckage.

VOICE 1:

You'll get slashed.

VOICE 2:

Night after night.

NARRATOR:

Sandman heard the worst. Ambridge was burning.

VOICE 1:

Red Alert in Fat City.

NARRATOR:

When he'd heard the first reports of the mall riots, he'd laughed. A whole mouthful of bad air. "We needed a good purge," he told imaginary listeners. He imagined he heard the crackle of blazing thatch.

VOICE 1:

Turnips or bacteriotherapy?

VOICE 2:

If I had to choose I hope I should have the guts.

NARRATOR:

Sandman has made a working model of his head. It is a vertical plastic cylinder of oily water, generating slow skeins of swirling reddish fluid as it rotates.

VOICE 1:

Bubbling under the doom-god.

VOICE 2:

Warty white bearded god.

VOICE 3:

Lovely jubbling, like cellulite. . ..

NARRATOR:

Sandman has so many memes and dreams.

VOICE 3:

The rejuvenated princess was wearing a marital aid.

NARRATOR:

He once appeared totally bare armed with only a briar pipe. It was only a dream joke.

VOICE 3:

The earthmind is a trepanning scam.

VOICE 2:

Do not be his movie.

VOICE 1:

Here is her fifty minutes.

VOICE 3:

Hold my cradle downwards in a feathery scream.

NARRATOR:

The universe winks in Sandman's eye. It winks into life.

VOICE 3:

It wanks him to death.

NARRATOR:

Sandman would like to do verbs properly and have an after-life but so do six billion other people. The four forces of the apocalypse — gravity, magnetism, the strong forces, the weak forces — are not worshipped.

VOICE 1:

It's started again. . . . the sputum transgression. . .

NARRATOR:

People ought to be horsewhipped, thinks Sandman the Sad Man, then they might not send him their unique selling points for their dwindling points of light. The heat death begins to die.

VOICE 1:

Between the desktops dreaming of grit he caterwauls and flails in the bodybag's thinning tissue.

VOICE 2:

Those anti-sin ramparts excrete the gold bug I enclosed earlier.

VOICE 3:

Diaper my bad dreams, do not press my mucus moss under the hammer of your numbers.

NARRATOR:

Sandman is afraid. He now knows the Internet gives the possibility to continue certain projects started in the howling walls.

VOICE 3:

The first public thunderstorm.

NARRATOR:

He fears the cold stars sliding over Sloane Square. . .huge coils of protein in the sky. . .

VOICE 1:

All mouths of the rodents are carefully mechanised.

VOICE 3:

But whizzing landscapes will permit the late-life disrobing of convenient statues.

NARRATOR:

Unsolicited dreams: Sandman is wearing a pointed hat.

VOICE 2:

With a monkey's feathery tail to simulate imbalance.

VOICE 3:

In the department store a table of breakfasting Christians plot to ambush girlfriends.

VOICE 1:

Their hats jangle badly.

VOICE 1:

Line up at the death till.

VOICE 2:

Roll out the money. . ..

VOICE 1:

Yes, it looks like breaking news in that sunburnt April. The dork sings!

VOICE 3:

We assume many of you like to "trade the promotion" and may have made some big, fast money doing some shopkeeper self-improvement.

NARRATOR:

But his action plan has nil targets.

VOICE 2:

Current price-word on the street is this great hands-on week could take off at any moment and double infertility housewares, as an mix-up!!! King-size!

VOICE 1:

Only stonking fat digits.

VOICE 2:

Timing is everything! Vandalize the weary. . .

VOICE 1:

Sandman, you thumbtack! So self-satisfied, with your globular head slumped in the congratulatory mayonnaise of your toxic garnish.

VOICE 2:

I Sandman be an erect lie detector.

VOICE 1:

Cancel his cutlery caterpillar, with the phlegm pontiff.

NARRATOR:

Sandman recognises this naming of parts. It takes him back to the attacks, he means the attics of childhood, the well-rehearsed calling of names to make him run round in circles, these creeping people are exercising a similar technique.

VOICE 2:

You are a stare-about pale-striped love-lacking winter-wasted stiff-bosomed rough-leaved thick-ribbed Pre-renaissance worm confounding spectrum analysis.

VOICE 1:

His leaky non-event deserves capital punishment by inserting a rubber tube!

VOICE 3:

Grim breaths ran down her backbone under the drab architraves.

VOICE 1:

Don't corpse the hanky-panky shock troops!

VOICE 2:

Is the object to be impaled using Pan pips?

VOICE 3:

I am trying for a zoning here to get out of my carapace and go higher expelling hoarse regrets that sky isn't skin.

VOICE 1:

She is bleating so flatly.

VOICE 2:

When you want to see a great keeps lady, I'll tell you what mars-sector leeriness means. . .

VOICE 3:

He grows such a fat hair.

NARRATOR:

Sandman needs to motivate. But his story eludes him, however much he fiddles around with dating his myth and adjusting the grand chronologies of self-justification.

VOICE 1:

Dark matter fills the suburbs.

NARRATOR:

The past is a tattered film set, with a few tiny backlit scenes of delight. And the future is a wall of beige fog into which he dances, with frivolous jerky arm motions, trying to match the latest polyrhythms.

CREDITS