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How did the number-crunchers up in Accounting expect us to do it? How did they expect The Guide production staff to get through the stressful days before deadline without a lot of snowy through-the-nose stimulation, some calming single-malt whiskeys down-the-hatch, the ministrations of masseurs on our knotted lumbars, and hustlers-on-call for refreshing quickies up-the-butt in the editor-in-chief's toilet?

Luckily Raùl, The Guide's office manager, knew a little bit about accounting himself from his days with Enron/Panama. How would the spreadsheet guys at headquarters know whether or not 42-inch plasma monitors were absolutely de-rigeur, as Raùl insisted, on every desk in the Art Department? We could count on the guys from Guide HQ in the Caymen Islands never visiting Boston to see whether Raùl's fancy electronic purchases were actual or hypothetical. Those phony receipts sure covered lots of Glenfiddich, shiatsu, and imported Montreal danseurs nus.

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But a year ago last February, the shell-game came crashing down. Raùl slipped up. The proverbial straw was an expense report listing a $612 charge for some emergency take-out rations. You see, we all missed the final deadline one issue and had to work a couple hours into dinner time. Raùl said the money went to "French Kiss Escargot." But the undoctored receipt that he mistakenly submitted-- emblazoned "French Kiss Escorts" told quite a different story. The shit hit the fan, Raùl was called on the carpet, and soon the Accounting guys were breathing down our necks about every paper clip and square of toilet paper.

When it rains it pours

As luck would have it, that's around when The Guide's creaking Samsung thermal-paper fax machine got a terminal case of glaucoma. Maybe the lens on the poor thing was glazed-over after years of churning out a daily grind of press releases from the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and GLAAD. Whatever the reason, the scroll of faxes we'd find every morning curling their way down the hall toward the toilet were a blur of meaningless word-salad-- hatecrimemarriagequality, safespeechidentityprotection, emilyslisterine, translesbianvolleyball. Everything was in gray type only one shade darker than the streaky, dishwater-hued paper.

It wasn't just press releases that were affected. The Cedar Rapids "Eagle" wanted us to update their ad to tout "Colonic Health Tuesdays! With Wheatgrass Chasers and Half-Price Prune Margaritas!" But gazing into fax's fuzzy rorschach, Raùl saw "Crystal Meth Thursdays! With Hydroponic Grass and Magic Mushroom Frappes!" The day that issue hit the streets, Guide staff had a good laugh over it during our 10am absinthe-break. However the bar owner wasn't so amused, and with his motorcycle-gang connections reaching into Upper Saskatchewan, soon business was hurting all over.

Even Accounting realized something had to be done. So they did what they'd vowed they'd never do again-- and deputized Raùl to go electronics shopping. In the old days, this would be the occasion for requisitioning a few more Nikon Coolpix SLRs and Apple G5 workstations-- or at least phony receipts for same. But with a guy from Corporate Forensics trailing his every move, Raùl disported himself to Walmart where the obvious Everyday-Low-Price option was the Kimilsung Electrifax, "Crafted with Pride in North Korea." Maybe the fax machines' prideful makers were slave-laborers or something, 'cause Sam Walton seemed itching to get these babies off his hands. Not only were the gadgets just $11.99, they even came with a free in-store coupon good for one squeeze on the boobs of the checkout lady.

The Kimilsung may have been a bargain, but it was no beauty. There were odd bulges and protuberances, and a manual with the clarity of machine-translated Serbo-Croatian. But who cared? Faxes poured in clear as daylight. Now we had a new reason for dumping the daily output of the NGLTF, HRC, and GLAAD PR-departments right in the trash-- we could read them.

Everyone was happy.

For a while.

But as time went by, it became clear that the Kimilsung Electrifax represented a new vista in thermal fax technology. Week by week, it seemed, the thing was getting warmer, and then hotter. By July, we noticed that even if you just brushed the push-buttons, you'd still get blistered fingertips. Ever see the vomit of a kid who mistook a glo-stick for a freezer pop? At night when you turned off the office lights, that was the Kimilsung's eerie luminescent color.

With office nerves already rattled owing to the drought of coke & scotch, Raùl lost it from our constant complaining. So one day last September 11th he borrowed oven mitts from The Guide's executive lunchroom, and deep-sixed the Kimilsung Electrifax with a crash in the office closet. And that's where we figured the machine would stay for good, nestled among all the unfilled back-issue orders and the personal-ad responses that arrive with postage affixed to the envelope, not loose the way-- over and over again-- the instructions say.

No one connected the dots at the time, but that's also when the office toilet, right next to that closet, stopped smelling like an industrial pig farm and became a place your nose might mistake for an Intel chip foundry, even if your eye would wonder at the bowl's coat of tawny scum. As for the Kimilsung Electrifax, it sat in the dark entirely forgotten.

Immaculate reception

If this were a normal story, that would be the end of it. There'd be a little black triangle as capstone to the previous paragraph, and by now you'd have gone to jerk off to Boyd McDonald's "Sex Histories" on page 112.

But then last December, we sent Raùl into the closet to toss out 2004's unfilled orders and all those mis-stamped personals replies, in anticipation of a new year of customercentric service.

The first thing we heard was a blood-curdling scream, followed by a lot of sobbing and Hail Mary's.

Whether we'd been crocheting, smoking a hookah, or planning the night's hookups on manhunt.net, The Guide staff put down its work and dove into the closet around the panting Raùl. We instantly saw what was the matter. Despite being switched off, disconnected from electricity and phone line, and tossed carelessly into its current resting place, the Kimilsung had received and printed hundreds of faxes, dated weeks, months, and years into the future. We joined Raùl in astonished awe, like we'd all just lifted the bun off a McDonald's cheeseburger and seen Jesus bleeding on the cross.

--GLAAD Hails Repeal of 1st Amendment
--Gay Republicans Trade 'Log Cabin' for 'Cross of Gold'
--NYC Group Lauds New Disease as Help in Fight Against Gay Sex
--All The Greater Picturesqueness of the Genitalia Make-Up Needs Can Now Be Yours!

We calmed down Raùl, put our heads together, and decided we had to keep this one close to our chests. We didn't want the Midnight Boston Globe poking around, or The Guide offices becoming a shrine for Catholic miracle-seekers disaffected by the shortage of priests and altar boys. We consulted a lot of 1-900 experts on the paranormal, who could offer no cogent explanation. So we turned to science.

After inquiries through back-channels, we got the skinny. Evidently there was some radioactive waste from the North Korean defense sector sequestered in the Kimilsung. When Raùl threw the fax machine into the closet, the stuff had broken out of its seal. Rings of highly enriched Saturnium-369 had formed inside the machine-- not enough to go critical, thank God-- but with just the form-factor to create something like a pantyhose-run in the surrounding space-time polyether.

Nuclear engineer Dr. Bokonamet Choskhor, Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Tehran, described it to us this way: the Saturnium-369 rings cut a wormhole in a future region of the space-time fabric, just a little beyond the event horizon. Past that threshold, all matter and information is trapped-- not cosmic rays, not gamma radiation, not photons, not even light can get out. Only one kind of signal can escape from that place of supercritical futurity-- data in a form so lightweight, so predigested, so insubstantial that even the quantum-gravity stringfields in the wormhole's sphincter can't hold them in. And that form of information is the Press Release, as that art has been perfected by LGBT political groups and marketeers. The Saturnium-369 rings encrusting our Kimilsung had grabbed those faxes from across the universe, wrested them from their safe place in the future, and lobbed them like a missile-from-Pyongyang right into our closet.

You can understand why the Kimilsung, even though it now looks like an oozing D battery, has pride of place in The Guide office, set directly next to the toilet (whose waters are now, with the proximity, a shimmering and sterile blue).

And those faxes? We've spent months winnowing down a representative sample. With hands blistered from the effort, our noses a little longer owing to the pressure of some pre-cancerous sinus nodules, we now proudly present them to you this April 1st. We may be locked in a chemo ward and won't be around to see it, but these missives-- straight from the galactic nether-reaches-- reveal homosexuality's radiant, glowing future.

And finally, for that little pointy triangle.