“The sky is the color of static on a dead channel, on a beat up analog TV.” That was more or less the opening stanza William Gibson wrote in Neuromancer. He probably butchered the poetry of the book. But he always thought of that when he looked at the glaring white noise of perpetual overcast sky at noon. He would try to stare at the sun behind the cloud cover. Seeing flashing colored lights. His grandmother told him that was the sun tearing a hole in his retina. He couldn't help staring into the self destructive glare. Watching putrid malaise of acrid pollution hidden behind lies of early morning mist that burns off too soon, leaving insomniac brain fog to play tricks on his eyes. His name is Enceladus Euarchontoglires.

What a fucked up name. He imagines what kind of out to lunch mother would name her kids after Jovian Moons and a suborder of Mammals. His middle name includes Rats, Rabbits, Flying Squirrels and small Monkies. Its like they wanted him to be terrorized in school. He goes by E.T. or his graffiti name “ZYGOTE,” but girls in school call him “Involuntarily Celibate Androgynous” or “Eugene Yuri Chong… what ever the fuck” probably because its in vogue to hate Russians and Chinese, so naturally he draws communist symbols on their lockers.

In 5th grade to 7th these same girls used to pass him notes and try to kiss him before his sister Xenarthra Ganymede left to college and he got “weird and despondent.” She is 21 now and took a year off to travel. Maybe he pushed the girls away because he grew out of stupid Hair Metal, or late 80s Conscious Rap. He can give it back as good as he gets it. His friends call him “E the Tagger,” thats where the name ET came from. He lives with his dad after his mom left, he barely remembers her.

When he was small, some kids from the neighborhood were playing with fireworks in an abandoned car. He survived and they didn’t, leaving him with a nasty scar around his mouth and up the left side of his face. He hears them whisper, “Mark of Cain,” “The Human Torch,” “The Morning Star.” Not bad knicknames although when its not meant as a term of endearment it breeds animosity. Most of the time he is happy to not be noticed so he can get away with stuff. His left eye and voice bare the worst scars outside his soul.

His oldest sister raised him, she went away and that was the end of family meals and laughter in the house. Now he just kind of exists. Too old to talk much to his younger sister Laurasiateria Callisto who is only 7 and spends all day down by beach with the grandparents home schooled. All the kids are seven years apart and he is 14 in the middle. He is alone in large drafty cabin that may as well be a tool shed. Girls his oldest sister knew called it “The Junk Yard.” Was the cool house back then.

Smarter than average but a perpetual underachiever and self saboteur of the highest order. His parents sent him to school at the bare minimum earliest, so on average he is almost a year younger than most kids whose birthdays are well past the cut off date. He always felt unprepared for school, overwhelmed and nervous to buzzing lights and alarm bells. Smaller than every one whose voices have changed and grown muscles, he looks pretty much the same as he did in 5th grade. Its 1991 and somehow despite nuclear attack drills and constant hysteria the world hasn't ended. Maybe it should.

Always known as a “Foul Mouth” specializes in making the popular girls cry with sadistic pranks like throwing Ketchup and Tampons all over their desks during recess, or smearing frog guts all over their homework in their backpack, the odd floating dead cat and maggoty duck in a desk or locker does wonders to leave his enemies quivering in the principals office to tell on him. Having panic attacks until they get hugged by the nurse, until one of their boy friends beat him unconscious. Thats how he got his new adult teeth all chipped. Now he just scowls and plans to leave this bullshit town in the asshole archipelago of Alaska.

He didn't wake up for school today, his eyes hurt too much from playing Altered Beast on Sega Genesis all night. Last day he has it before he trades it back to the video store for his familiar favorite Splatterhouse 2 or maybe Chakan The Foreverman, which he hasn't played but is supposed to be super weird. He didn’t comb his long greasy hair, just kind of paws at it. Looks cool enough for the losers at school. He figured no one would notice if he showed up for lunch, slowly blending in to the flannel guised grunge kids at his school. He liked the music but he wasn't enough of a stoner to fit in, mostly because weed costs money and he doesn't have any. So he wears exclusively shirts he fished out of the ocean, industrial bands like KMFDM and Ministry, Maybe some Norwegian Black Metal if its clean.

The damnedest things wash up on these tides. He wonders sometimes why so much cool stuff is cast off boats here. Are these the last clothing worn by some murder victim? He wears Surplus Vietnam boots his grandmothers boyfriend “The Old Man” gave him and baggy cargo pants, usually grey or olive green. Only thing he has actually bought for him. They don't really live in poverty, he is just kind of forgotten about. If he doesn't ask, he wont get it. So he gets stuff on his own to avoid hand me downs too big or small for him.

Starting the day huffing turpentine made the sound of the ocean sound trippy like it was moving around him in a circle. Turpentine always made sound odd. Wind Chimes could be sweet and gentle or staccato and sickening. He stopped doing the Nitrous Oxide, Dust-off after he heard a loud pop in side his brain once. He lives in an old industrial area that had the jobs move away, so there is endless abandoned places to daze off.

He spends his days day dreaming while exploring the industrial decay. The town of Fishhead Bay if you could call it a town, was like a terminal patient surviving long enough to pawn their families possessions for one last drug binge just to survive and plea forgiveness to be allowed to loot the bones of their family again and again. Becoming more and more depressing and people wished for its death. Everything around is really an abandoned Naval Base, so every thing here is too big for the small community and on the verge of rusting to pieces. The Native Village up the coast Uula Wileelu is all carved wood, totem poles and well kept fishing huts, but the city is all cement and metal. Military blight that is very likely the source of a lot of the cancer and sickness around here. Nuclear testing, dumping and chemical spills made this place too costly to stay open as a base.

The walk to school cut past the falling down huts and abandoned cranes on the cliffs. He always felt this strange urge to jump off. French call that “L’appel du vide / Call of the void.” When you are climbing scaffolds on abandoned machinery to commit vandalism and he just imagines the wind pulling him away, falling onto wet freezing asphalt, his arms breaking beneath him, his head splattering, teeth splintering and the next day every one at school crying. What a laugh, no one gives a shit about a half Native tagger who is also the laziest Sheriff Deputies son.

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His dad Deputy Ch'ák’, known as Chaka Zulu by the local kids after some tv movie from the 70s. ET always thought he looks like black haired viking looter, the scowling visage of a barbarian in a brow beaten cop that feels close to defeat. Every one thinks he is slow from the motorcycle accident that killed the mother of his kids. Slow isn’t the word for it, more like haunted, silent and brooding. His face is covered in scars from violence and he rarely smiles. His voice is like thunder cracking and has been accused of “Roid Rage” more than once by locals he got in dust ups with.

Its so funny when ET gets caught carving his tag name into his desk, or using shaker pens to graffiti the school bus, or slicing up the mirror into a scribe of his crew “CTC.” “Call the Cops” he laughs to teachers while cutting school. He knows his dad is too tired to punish him. His dad will make a speech, take away some forgotten toys and be asleep in the recliner and forget all about it the next day.

This is South-east Alaska. Fishhead Bay, a rotting little former military marina in the Hecate straight. Pretty much the end of the world. Besides some abandoned mines and military missiles it might as well be Canada. His ancestors never signed a treaty so there is no official Reservation. Their tribe “The Windwalker band of Coastal Qallupilluit” is unrecognized as part of the Tlingit, Haida or Tsimshian People. Larger Tribes that surround them, culturally similar and share words but isolated from them just like the rest of Alaska.

The Inside Passage is an area of verdant hills, resplendent inlets, countless islands of trees and endless mountains and valleys, some unmapped, others that are marked as open ocean on civilian maps. This was an isolated part of America where the Military was able to keep technology unfit for the continental US.

Nothing happens here but drunk driving, tagging and the occasional party out in the woods. Which he usually isn't invited to. He isn't one of the cool kids any more, his hangout is a network of concrete culverts under the town called “Hobo Beach”. A maze of steel riveted tunnels and endless cement walls intersect with the freeway and sewer till they hit the Pacific, floating trees ripped out by storms, where toilet water empties into the ocean. Perfect for cutting school to paint edgy teenage scrawls on virgin walls.

He decides to take an excursion and check out his latest work. He painted a big surreal piece with some of his heroes like David Koresh, Charles Manson and Omar Gaddafi, but it was an trippy style like Max Headroom. He wanted to give a startling juxtaposition, harsh flat blacks of TV sets glowing Magenta and Cobalt, Crimson and Cyan, Neon Yellow and Nickelodeon Green. He wrote a wild style piece in white and silver, going for a chrome reflective look to letters, woven with arrows, 3D and an ink blot shading style he saw in news papers when the teacher stretches an image until it becomes unperfect. “CULTURAL VANDALISM!” in illegible wildstyle bellow a rogues gallery of hoodlums and boogymen done in a style that melts the brain and fucks the mind.

Its not quite pretentious like “Cyber Punk,” more like a broken gearshift spinning out of control with your shoe laces pulling your into the machine, Zdzisław Beksiński in one of the TV channels from Videodrome. Snots from the big city would call it “Post Modern”, he would call his style “Praying for the Apocalypse” but not the happy biblical ending, stuck forever in the hellish slow motion of life smothering under the forced obsolescence in the end of the century.

He hid some subliminal in the letters, back-masked or mirrored upside-down messages in his usual pieces read “KILL THE ILLUMINATI”, “FUCK THE NEW WORLD ORDER” or “FUCK ALL PRESIDENTS”, or “CONSUMER CYANIDE.” But hidden in there was cryptic phrases, book names in other languages, subversive authors names. His middle school art teacher used to encourage this, bringing in new music from the mainland, underground magazines, hacker manifestos, books on the New York scene, or European art or Central American dissident groups.

His teachers idea was only things of value are retro. Old cars, classic rock, counterculture, blues… so art had to reflect a knowledge of the gems of the past, to lampoon the Police State future of a thundering militarized government of lethal technocrats. He didn't understand everything his art teacher said but planned to read a list of books, before one day the teacher was just gone. Maybe arrested by the threatening forces he would joke about from his old job in Silicon Valley with a high level security clearance.

During the summer he filled his body with all the poison he could and went on a crime spree. Inventing new letters and language for a dying scripture of heavily inscribed diatribes on transit windows. Using Marsh Ink to burn his name into shopping centers front windows. Psychedelic new wave Jargon, commenting on how much he doesn't give a fuck about politics or heros or villains and just wants to see the cold war end with vaporization of the whole civilized world. Let hungry dogs and zombie politicians fight over the rubble.

The only reason he wants to go to school at all is to abuse the copiers. He loves to carve out obscene graphics, surround it with his Word and Crew then sneak on the ferry to hit up the poles and signs in Juneu, Ankorage, Sitka, Ketchikan. He is a habitual spray paint thief, going far afield as taking the ferry to Portland and Seattle to empty out cases where they aren't wise to the clink clank of his pockets as he walks out with out buying any thing. When you have a pocket full of paint pens then all slide and clack at the same time, making you sound like Robocop as you make your escape.

Climbing down a rusty ladder, tip toeing on a 10 foot ledge over green murky water, trying to step firmly but gracefully onto the slick moss of the tunnel is always awkward. He saw his dead cousin slip once and lay down there screaming until the fire department could get down there with a rescue line to haul him up. He always liked hanging out with his cousin, till he OD’ed on heroin and got found facedown in the ocean. No body had the money for a funeral so a couple of his friends ran out of a store with booze then had a wake on a moldy abandoned boat no one claimed since at least 1970. The idiots sunk the damn thing and some of them had to be rescued. Circle of life out here.

Huffing the smudge of Turpentine he keeps in a baggy in the palm of his hand, looking at his work disorients him. Trying to stand up straight, the light reflecting off the water, the lazy current, water falling down cement spillways, wind catching on old pipes in a howl and darting shadows made him feel vertigo and lands smack on his ass. Cold shock of September chill. Fuck! Now he has to go to school soaking wet like a bum. He lays there for a second looking up at the light and closes his eyes.

He hears heavy splashing like something big plunging into deep water. Other side of the tunnel gets deep, so in the black between here and the other end, way off in the distance he wonders if he is about to be fucked up by a swimming bear or alligator. He doesn't really think Alligators are in Alaska, but he thought he was alone. What else could he be wrong about. Silence. He feels panic he cant explain. Gets up quick but trying to look cool, even if its a bear he doesn't want to seem scared.

Lunging to the ledge, he hears more violent slashing and what sounds like running. He tries to get to the ladder and twists his ankle almost falling. Just then a bottle is kicked down the side of the tunnel thats not submerged. Making a hollow rolling sound till it stops 10 feet from the end. Making it to the ladder he scurries up on his aching ankle. In the tunnel he can see a wild man dashing towards him. The guy looks like a feral blonde Tweeker. He is not curious in the slightest who this is or what he wants. Getting over edge, out of the cement void of storm drains back up to the street, he hears “WHO THE FUCK…” in such a savage wino snarl he felt a twist in his guts and pins and needles in his feet.

He darts away, down the street crossing to other side into a boarded up building, just in time to see a maniac with fiery blond hair and crazy blood shot eyes leap over the edge and land in a roar. Its a homeless guy, in a nasty brown trench coat, but other than that he is dressed so similar they could be doppelgängers. The bum has on a Nine Inch Nails “Pretty Hate Machine” shirt on, and old army clothes stained black with grease. Jumping around and stomping like a retard. Flailing arms and spinning around till he starts laughing like a crazy man, picking something putrid out of his nose. He crouches down shaking a spray can, writing “DIE-FLY” and climbing back into the cement latrine. ET thinks to himself “who the fuck is that?”