Desperately Seeking Sharon, Part 4

Visions of Sharon

How long I was out? An hour? A day? Time had lost all meaning. Guido said I was mumbling incoherently but my rantings occasionally would make some sense. As he paddled us out of that steaming swamp, he cleverly turned on my voice-actuated recorder and clipped it to my collar. Most of what I muttered was garbage, but here is a transcript of some of my more cogent utterances:

Ain’t it just like Sharon to play tricks when you're tryin’ to be so quiet?
Batty sits here stranded, though he’s doing his best to deny it
And he draws a sheet full of Sharon’s, it’s so tempting to try it
Google and Flickr on the laptop, the screen’s a little soft
In his computer the hard drive just coughs
The internet connection’s acting rough
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Batty and his muse, so entwined
And these visions of Sharon that conquer his mind

In the empty net where the gamers blindman’s bluff role play
And the all-night surfers watch auctions on eBay
He can hear the lonely click of his mouse, and strains
Asking himself if it's him or them that’s really insane
Batty, he’s all right, he’s just a bit weird
He’s delicate and draws like Vermeer
But that just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Sharon’s not here
The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Sharon have now taken their place

Now, little Batty lost, he does his work so frivolously
He denies his misery, he likes to live vicariously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a long-ago post to see
He's sure got a lot of gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the screen, he starts to stall
How can he explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Sharon, they kept him up past the dawn

Inside the web, an emoticon goes up with a smile
Voices echo this is what salivation must be like after a while
But Sharon must of done the highway race
You can tell by her comely grimace
See the primitive wallpaper frieze
With its stick-figured women, all eating cheese
Hear the one with the mustache say,
"Jeeze, I can’t find Sharon's knees"
Oh, the beret and ribbons hang from the head of the girl
And these visions of Sharon, they make everything whirl

The Professor now speaks to the Weaver who’s pretending to care about it
Saying, "Name me someone that’s not an artist and I’ll buy him a crayon forthwith"
But like Batty always says to himself,
“Ya can’t draw that well yourself can ya man?”
As the Weaver‘s unamused smile is wan
And Sharon, she still has not showed
We see these empty links now corrode
Where her cape with an “S” once had flowed
Batty now steps into the road
He says, “Everything's been redrawn which was once old”
On the back of the flash animation that loads
While his MacBook explodes
That gnarled finger fondles the delete key and then refrains
And these visions of Sharon are now all that remain

“Too much time spent listening to Blonde on Blonde in your stoner days, eh, boss?”

Good old greazy Guido, always looking out for me.

“No, she's a brunette, and thank God we're finished with this hellish river!”

“Aren't you forgetting something, Batty?”

Guido's perpetual sneer had turned upward, changing into a most disturbing leer.

“I can’t think of anything, what is it?”

“It's time for your tick check.”

Just then my cell phone buzzed, on the screen a cryptic text message:

Batty, R U Psychic? -SS

And it was then when I knew where I had to go to find Sharon.


Part 4 of 7