Footnote 8, (A Fall is a TRIP)

⁸This footnote is surely an accidental discovery, like so much of your expanding awareness. After several weeks of satisfying afternoon research on your subject, focusing particularly on The Trial and Death of Henri d'Mescan book from 1954, you have nearly completed an analysis of the collaborationist "Vichy Papers" that have been attributed to d'Mescan during the German Occupation of France from 1940-1944. The historical problem is that the complete dossier no longer seems to exist, leaving all researchers interested in the subject recourse only to the secondary criticism. From these studies, most notably Julian Belcher's Master Race Groupies: d'Mescan and Celine (Brugge, Belgium: Reparation House, 1972) and Marie Rothschild's Necessary Death (Chicago: Center-less U P, 1983), as well as a variety of text's suggested by Davis Schneiderman, you surmise that the "Vichy Papers" are not only greatly exaggerated in number, but that in all likelihood, have never even existed. Davis is prepared to install this research as the basis for the introduction to The Trial and Death of Henri d'Mescan segment of Multifesto: A Henri d'Mescan Reader (and in all possibility has done so), until a footnote in one of his suggested readings raises your suspicions.

Footnote 16, (Eclectic Cultural Space)

¹⁶At an early twelfth-anniversary party for the only known launch of Howard Hughes's infamous airplane-boat, the Spruce Goose, where 3000 different sized radio-controlled replicas of the craft took flight over the water, Henry Mescaline wore a jester costume on the dock, waved a steel wand with a small monkey head on top, and shouted, even as the police dragged him into the paddy-wagon, that the Spruce Goose had succeeded in its mission to airdrop microscopic propaganda on the fuel-soaked phytoplankton, and that an electrification of their cellular structure would create an alternate evolutionary dynasty. When Hughes's honor guard checked the original ship's hull after the replicas had safely landed, an unidentifiable slimy substance, undifferentiated tissue, coated everything in the thinnest sheath of cellophane.

Footnote 24, (Lovemaking by Applied Mathematics)

²⁴Note 200, found on page 173 of Ingrid Hausemann's You've Killed the Wrong Man! (Calcutta, NM: Dendrite P, 1969) attests to the fact that the only remaining copy of the complete "Vichy Papers" (with the exception of a particularly virulent piece called Crocodilopolis), has been last seen in the vaults of The Publisher in 1982. Upon an inspection conducted several months after their arrival, the documents are found to contain numerous recent alterations and additions, effected by an experimental form of liquid paper and artificial carbon-dating also discovered, apocryphally, on various d'Mescan papers housed in his archive in the small Mississippi town of Future, MO, which supposedly includes the "missing text" Crocodilpolis. Of course, nothing can keep you from taking a flight to the Show-Me State that afternoon, Davis's steaming breath beside you to investigate, his hand crawling up the tight skin of your fluid calf.

Footnote 32, (How do I Count Thee? Let me Love the Ways)

³² Concerned about precisely these types of ideological reversals, we had spent the past few days conducting extended interviews with Phoenelia Yeer's coterie of specialists and health care professionals (seemingly numberless as we were shocked to discover), including her general practitioner, first obstetrician, pharmacist, chiropractor, psychotherapist, psychologist, second obstetrician, podiatrist, dermatologist, urologist, acupuncturist, cardiologist, ophthalmologist, rheumatologist, gastroenterologist, endocrinologist, nephrologist, neurologist, nutritionist, oncologist, gynecologist, otolaryngoloist, proctologist, dentist, and traveling psychic. After filling each in about her current travails, we discovered that they unilaterally recommended that she either increase or decrease her cocktail of prescriptive sedatives, Prozac, Paxil, Prilosec, Allegra, Demarol, et al., in favor of a regimen designed to promote a more positive mental and physical state. We sorted through all the data, and developed a general list of recommendations in mantra form that begins: "Check quickly for open wounds. Pat a dirty cloth napkin over a cut on the knuckle. Have two egg whites for breakfast, a scooped out-bagel and soft drink·" We left it for her at the desk of the Wonderland Motel in Ithaca, NY, in case she happened to pass that way again.

Footnote 40, (Working with the Popular Forces)

⁴⁰ A smaller project followed: The Surliness of the Last Days detailed Mescaline's clandestine interviews with former Vice-President Richard Nixon during the latter period of his service under Dwight. D. Eisenhower. Nixon, whose despicable support for the McCarthy hearings gave him as much chance of holding a future office as a B-movie President of the Screen Actor's Guild, was forthcoming and candid with Mescaline, who wrote under the name of one deceased Colonel Tact Gactenberg, a casualty of the Brooklyn shipyard during WWII. The interviews were edited and released as the series "Beneath-World" in such reputable publications as Timeweek, Newstime, and WeakNews to considerable acclaim. Gactenberg was nominated for a Servicemen's Penmanship Award, authorized by Congress for former military personnel whose work maintained the highest standards of journalistic integrity allowed by US military objectives. Gactenberg lost by a small margin to Ignatius Hampton's fluff piece "Snow Falling on Radio-Isotope Shelters," creating such a flap that the disguised Mescaline stormed out of the award banquet in a huff, upsetting a tray of cocktail shrimp in the process.

Footnote 48, (Perhaps we shall meet and differ)

⁴⁰ A smaller project followed: The Surliness of the Last Days detailed Mescaline's clandestine interviews with former Vice-President Richard Nixon during the latter period of his service under Dwight. D. Eisenhower. Nixon, whose despicable support for the McCarthy hearings gave him as much chance of holding a future office as a B-movie President of the Screen Actor's Guild, was forthcoming and candid with Mescaline, who wrote under the name of one deceased Colonel Tact Gactenberg, a casualty of the Brooklyn shipyard during WWII. The interviews were edited and released as the series "Beneath-World" in such reputable publications as Timeweek, Newstime, and WeakNews to considerable acclaim. Gactenberg was nominated for a Servicemen's Penmanship Award, authorized by Congress for former military personnel whose work maintained the highest standards of journalistic integrity allowed by US military objectives. Gactenberg lost by a small margin to Ignatius Hampton's fluff piece "Snow Falling on Radio-Isotope Shelters," creating such a flap that the disguised Mescaline stormed out of the award banquet in a huff, upsetting a tray of cocktail shrimp in the process.

Footnote 56, (On my Alter Ego's Dénouement)

⁵⁶ The career of experimental writer came Henry Mescaline came to an abrupt and tragic end with his seizure by angry riot police in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Covering the events for the radical, Situationist International arm of the Ladies Home Journal, Mescaline fled the 22,000-armed officers, National Guard, and federal troops ordered by Mayor Daley during the police riot, and in exasperation, pounded on the door of a small house in hopes of eluding the authorities. The occupant shouted an inquiry as to identity of the person at the door. Mescaline, full of the bravado that signified the best of his work, shouted "Mr. Mescaline" in reply, and was let in by the tenant, a student at the University of Illinois-Chicago completing, (coincidentally) doctoral work on Mescaline's distinguished career. Unfortunately, in the course of their discussion over high tea, Mescaline criticized the student's central thesis that Mescaline's current fiction was at best pandering to a crack-in-the-pan craze for flash fiction, cross-correlated, in this author's case, with a base and so-called "postmodern" fascination with re-possessing dyspeptic clinical spaces traditionally used by the autocratic armies of patriarchy--with predictably self-referential creative production. The student, under increasing pressure to complete his project, was forced to restrain Mescaline with duct tape before reading the entire dissertation aloud while rapping Mescaline's shins with a ball-peen hammer. After lulling him to sleep with what can only be described as the impenetrable, faux-ramblings of a excessively masturbatory academic intellect, dragged his body onto the front lawn, where he was then trampled by neighborhood children before his removal by federal agents to a "detainment" facility. There, truth be known, life seemed to flood out of him completely and with obscene speed, although witnesses claimed to perceive some vestigial movement, where his body shuttered as if in orgasm for a single millisecond, with a distant pulse penetrating the callused layers of a witness's skin, just as the end of prose poem might resonate by virtue of its "difference" for each reader, puncturing an oily epidermis of reason and fear.

Footnote 64, (Here we observe the failure of mimesis)

⁶⁴Here we observe the fallacy of the postmodern in all its ridiculous glory.