Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Cupid
It turns out Cupid was a fat man dressed in a toga, who took his last stand on top of a department store in the height of Christmas season. His big crescendo was to fire off a dozen heart-tipped arrows into the torsos of the crowd below. His outfit also had wings, of the inexpensive Halloween cherubic variety, the feathers made of polyester, one of those plastic yellowish halos with the adjoining headband, and a brown felt quiver. Truth be told, considering the quality of the arrows (twelve carbon-fibre shafts with goose-feather fletching and tempered steel tips finely sharpened and dipped in red acrylic) and his bow (a compound with composite frame), he really skimped on the attire, suggesting his act was more important than his presentation, or maybe he just ran out of money. All the arrows hit with more or less fatal results, which you'd think would be a testament to his skill, but for the fact that before he'd launched even the first one someone in the crowd spotted him and shouted, with a hint of long-buried glee, “Holy shit, it's Cupid!” At which point everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up at him, and pointed, and laughed. And then, when he started firing arrows into the crowd, sure most took off for cover screaming, but an astonishing number of people just stood still. Their feet riveted, they practically bore their chests for the arrows to find, smiling, tears of a joyful sort streaming down their faces right until the very last moment of penetration, which, being so very, astonishingly, incomparably final, took everything else away.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
The Portal
I remember when a portal opened up inside my brother Lucas. The whole Event still resonates in my memory as being among the most definitive of our shared history. The way it happened was that my brother, who was not accustomed to interdimensionality or really anything that might transgress his very rigid parameters for what could constitute reality, who had lived the first years of his life quite literally in a bubble of poly-urethane with a compromised immune system, and who had understandably and without any prompting begun early on to seen the exterior world as an intrusive threat, had therefore no extant psychological defense against the portal that opened from nothing deep in his right thigh as he played gladiator with a wooden sword in our ordinary suburban backyard, underneath the swing set. The portal, not large by any conventional logic, yet encompassing universes, embedded neatly into the surface of his right superficial femoral artery and by doing so sprung a small but nonetheless excruciatingly painful and life threatening internal hemorrhage, which we didn't know at the time but would soon learn.
What we did know, those of us who were present (which is to say, myself, my mom, dad, our little sister, mother's sister, father's brother, and a couple neighbors, so in fact a great many people and certainly everyone who was of any significance to the family and Lucas in particular), was that Lucas had gone from happily slaughtering an infestation of imaginary Gruelbats in the Bleakpits of Daemonia to lying completely prostrate and as sickly pale as I had never seen him, a horrifying gasping wail issuing from his throat, his mind abandoning all capacity for the palatal phonemes of articulate speech. An ambulance was summoned, mother in hysterics (having practiced for many years a refined automatic neurological collapse at the slightest appearance of regression in my brother's health), father assuming his equally refined stolid gaze and robotic efficiency, myself and sister Amy huddled in a corner, bequeathed by the situation and our precious years with an uncomprehending but total dread, as poor Lucas, by now covered in sweat and entirely Beyond All Recognition, was carted off on a stretcher to his proximate salvation.
We, the children, visited Lucas in the hospital the next day, with our aunt and uncle, to the incontrovertible impression that Something Was Terribly Wrong. The signs were abundant and unmistakable: in addition to the general pallor that hung palpably in the air, my mother sat in the waiting room, her eyes bleary red from weeping, while father paced up and down the hall saying nothing but communicating the first truly perceptible cracks in his armor of implacable efficiency that we'd seen since Lucas had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of four. Amy and I played as best we could with the cheap plastic toys in the kid's waiting area. Being 8 and 9 already and as such far past the age where such trinkets might genuinely intrigue us, we could at best generate a facsimile impression of amusement, if for no other reason than that such a reassurance might impress on my mother that the world, or at least her family, could still muster a modicum of normalcy, even or perhaps especially in times of crisis. We weren't fools, and understood dire necessity when surrounded by it, and thus we calmly stacked oversized lego blocks one atop another with all the brave enthusiasm of actors on a stage that is in the midst of being burned to the ground.
Now children are seldom credited with as much comprehension of adult psychology as they quite often possess, and it was certainly no mistake that I, then, perceived the last shreds of maternal sanity give way to a prevailing hysteric wind as the doctor drew the pair of them aside and conveyed some horrific, though evidently not fatal, news. In that moment I could somehow tell that my mother would never be the same, that the final nail had been firmly embedded in the coffin that was her already pathos-ridden understanding of the universe; I could see, though cripplingly unable to articulate the perception for many years, that her world view had presently shifted to reflect a new and total belief, namely that existence itself had probably always conspired against her happiness in this her sole and most precious domain of power, to confound her every attempt at protection of her wards, and leave her irresolute and defeated.
What I learned later, communicated to me and my sister with the quiet seriousness of parents attempting desperately to avoid utterly shattering the already fragile and diminishing happiness of their children, was that the two-dimensional half-centimetre of circular portal in Lucas' thigh, which had opened at a right angle in the surface of his arterial wall, was causing an alarming amount of blood to escape into his body, while at the same time the half-section located inside his vein, acting as a trans-dimensional gateway of sorts, whisked away to Lord Knows Where another equally precious quantity of plasma, so that internal bleeding and the peculiar and unprecedented internal-yet-in-fact-external bleeding together meant that Lucas was very rapidly Bleeding to Death.
Unfortunately, modern medical science lacking experience with intravenous trans-dimensional portals, and entirely incapable of manipulating them with conventional medical instruments, elected for the drastic but nonetheless time-worthy approach of hacking the whole leg right off, just below the hip. My mother had to leave the room when it came time to explaining this, and I still remember the awkward metaphor my father used: “It's like when you have a candy cane, only the end of it got broken in your pocket and kind of crushed, and you still want to keep the whole thing but you can't keep it with the end hanging on, because bits of it are getting everywhere and its making a mess in your pocket, so you throw away the end bits that you don't want so you can keep all the good stuff. You know?” We nodded, of course, and bit our tongues at the absurd juxtapositions of severed limbs and mint-flavored candy. The odd and vaguely cannibalistic confluence of the two gave me nightmares consisting of crumbling, blood-drenched legs marching through corridors towards me, blossoming gaping toothless mouths all over their surfaces and whispering my name, always in my brother's voice, but horrifically distorted with a perverse melancholia, rasping also with a dark slow-motion baritone that shook my subconscious and intimated at mysteries that would unravel my skin and cause the flesh of my eyes to blister.
When Lucas came home we assembled like a Royal welcoming committee on the driveway, with helium balloons and presents we'd meticulously selected from Toys 'R' Us to avoid prompting unnecessary awareness of his dismemberment (as if such a thing could be avoided); I remember that I got him a big super soaker water pistol, and my sister got him a chess set. Strangely enough, I don't remember what my parents bought him. Soon after the Event their actions began to blur for me into an indistinguishable continuum of helpless guilt, one futile gesture after another, each one too little and too late to banish what had already transpired, the evil that could not have been prevented or even remotely anticipated, the great Denial against which all the heretofore assumed parental omnipotence consummately vanished, revealing only the sad and altogether human weakness of their paternal and maternal forms.
I remember holding my gift up as the nurse wheeled Lucas out of the para-transpo vehicle; I remember my arms lowering involuntarily at the sight of him, face down, expressing a dejection I did not until then know to be possible, a manifest full-body, one-legged sadness that was vastly in excess of what any twelve-year old child should, in the fullest throes of their most potent, attention-starved emotional hyperbole, be capable of mustering. I remember his eyes looking up at me, leaden, too far gone to even judge or recriminate: a spectre of something against which my pathetic offering seemed a ludicrous bathos. I remember dropping my gift and crying, too overwhelmed, rendered once again into a simpering babe, hastily silenced and ushered away by a woman, probably my mother, but recollection blurs into coos and swaddling gestures and eventually silence. It all blurs.
That night I heard him crying in the bunk above mine: a relentless, whispered, gasping sob hearkening to the deepest cthonic agonies his soul had thus prematurely become witness to, and eventually his arm slumped down with the release of someone entering a new plateau of misery, where the crying becomes muted but the suffering turns heel and lodges itself in the emotional registers of the stomach, heart, and sacrum. And he said to me what I could never hope to forget or banish or in anyway make right, “Ethan, I'm scared.” My brother was scared. The unknown mysteries that ordinarily imbue a child's fantasies with delight and possibility, with soaring Peter Pan cloud-decamptments and rolling hills of infinite splendour, had for Lucas been exposed as a fraud: the vast uncertainty of the world, proven to be as supernatural and real as anything he had comprehended in his dreams, was defined by a prevailing note of malice, bearing down right now and right here, and of all the people and children and sufferers in the world, on him.
I did then what I had never done before or would do again, what we never spoke about afterwards but which the situation seemed to demand, and suffering my own private collapse of security and immortality – because with precocious wisdom I knew what had sundered him forever from happiness could just as easily befall me – and my young heart bursting with uncontrollable filial sympathy, I climbed up to his bunk and wrapped my arms around him and held him until the sun rose and illumined nothing but the skin of our trembling hands and the stark unremitting future that bears portals into children's thighs like the sparkling eyes of god.
What we did know, those of us who were present (which is to say, myself, my mom, dad, our little sister, mother's sister, father's brother, and a couple neighbors, so in fact a great many people and certainly everyone who was of any significance to the family and Lucas in particular), was that Lucas had gone from happily slaughtering an infestation of imaginary Gruelbats in the Bleakpits of Daemonia to lying completely prostrate and as sickly pale as I had never seen him, a horrifying gasping wail issuing from his throat, his mind abandoning all capacity for the palatal phonemes of articulate speech. An ambulance was summoned, mother in hysterics (having practiced for many years a refined automatic neurological collapse at the slightest appearance of regression in my brother's health), father assuming his equally refined stolid gaze and robotic efficiency, myself and sister Amy huddled in a corner, bequeathed by the situation and our precious years with an uncomprehending but total dread, as poor Lucas, by now covered in sweat and entirely Beyond All Recognition, was carted off on a stretcher to his proximate salvation.
We, the children, visited Lucas in the hospital the next day, with our aunt and uncle, to the incontrovertible impression that Something Was Terribly Wrong. The signs were abundant and unmistakable: in addition to the general pallor that hung palpably in the air, my mother sat in the waiting room, her eyes bleary red from weeping, while father paced up and down the hall saying nothing but communicating the first truly perceptible cracks in his armor of implacable efficiency that we'd seen since Lucas had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of four. Amy and I played as best we could with the cheap plastic toys in the kid's waiting area. Being 8 and 9 already and as such far past the age where such trinkets might genuinely intrigue us, we could at best generate a facsimile impression of amusement, if for no other reason than that such a reassurance might impress on my mother that the world, or at least her family, could still muster a modicum of normalcy, even or perhaps especially in times of crisis. We weren't fools, and understood dire necessity when surrounded by it, and thus we calmly stacked oversized lego blocks one atop another with all the brave enthusiasm of actors on a stage that is in the midst of being burned to the ground.
Now children are seldom credited with as much comprehension of adult psychology as they quite often possess, and it was certainly no mistake that I, then, perceived the last shreds of maternal sanity give way to a prevailing hysteric wind as the doctor drew the pair of them aside and conveyed some horrific, though evidently not fatal, news. In that moment I could somehow tell that my mother would never be the same, that the final nail had been firmly embedded in the coffin that was her already pathos-ridden understanding of the universe; I could see, though cripplingly unable to articulate the perception for many years, that her world view had presently shifted to reflect a new and total belief, namely that existence itself had probably always conspired against her happiness in this her sole and most precious domain of power, to confound her every attempt at protection of her wards, and leave her irresolute and defeated.
What I learned later, communicated to me and my sister with the quiet seriousness of parents attempting desperately to avoid utterly shattering the already fragile and diminishing happiness of their children, was that the two-dimensional half-centimetre of circular portal in Lucas' thigh, which had opened at a right angle in the surface of his arterial wall, was causing an alarming amount of blood to escape into his body, while at the same time the half-section located inside his vein, acting as a trans-dimensional gateway of sorts, whisked away to Lord Knows Where another equally precious quantity of plasma, so that internal bleeding and the peculiar and unprecedented internal-yet-in-fact-external bleeding together meant that Lucas was very rapidly Bleeding to Death.
Unfortunately, modern medical science lacking experience with intravenous trans-dimensional portals, and entirely incapable of manipulating them with conventional medical instruments, elected for the drastic but nonetheless time-worthy approach of hacking the whole leg right off, just below the hip. My mother had to leave the room when it came time to explaining this, and I still remember the awkward metaphor my father used: “It's like when you have a candy cane, only the end of it got broken in your pocket and kind of crushed, and you still want to keep the whole thing but you can't keep it with the end hanging on, because bits of it are getting everywhere and its making a mess in your pocket, so you throw away the end bits that you don't want so you can keep all the good stuff. You know?” We nodded, of course, and bit our tongues at the absurd juxtapositions of severed limbs and mint-flavored candy. The odd and vaguely cannibalistic confluence of the two gave me nightmares consisting of crumbling, blood-drenched legs marching through corridors towards me, blossoming gaping toothless mouths all over their surfaces and whispering my name, always in my brother's voice, but horrifically distorted with a perverse melancholia, rasping also with a dark slow-motion baritone that shook my subconscious and intimated at mysteries that would unravel my skin and cause the flesh of my eyes to blister.
When Lucas came home we assembled like a Royal welcoming committee on the driveway, with helium balloons and presents we'd meticulously selected from Toys 'R' Us to avoid prompting unnecessary awareness of his dismemberment (as if such a thing could be avoided); I remember that I got him a big super soaker water pistol, and my sister got him a chess set. Strangely enough, I don't remember what my parents bought him. Soon after the Event their actions began to blur for me into an indistinguishable continuum of helpless guilt, one futile gesture after another, each one too little and too late to banish what had already transpired, the evil that could not have been prevented or even remotely anticipated, the great Denial against which all the heretofore assumed parental omnipotence consummately vanished, revealing only the sad and altogether human weakness of their paternal and maternal forms.
I remember holding my gift up as the nurse wheeled Lucas out of the para-transpo vehicle; I remember my arms lowering involuntarily at the sight of him, face down, expressing a dejection I did not until then know to be possible, a manifest full-body, one-legged sadness that was vastly in excess of what any twelve-year old child should, in the fullest throes of their most potent, attention-starved emotional hyperbole, be capable of mustering. I remember his eyes looking up at me, leaden, too far gone to even judge or recriminate: a spectre of something against which my pathetic offering seemed a ludicrous bathos. I remember dropping my gift and crying, too overwhelmed, rendered once again into a simpering babe, hastily silenced and ushered away by a woman, probably my mother, but recollection blurs into coos and swaddling gestures and eventually silence. It all blurs.
That night I heard him crying in the bunk above mine: a relentless, whispered, gasping sob hearkening to the deepest cthonic agonies his soul had thus prematurely become witness to, and eventually his arm slumped down with the release of someone entering a new plateau of misery, where the crying becomes muted but the suffering turns heel and lodges itself in the emotional registers of the stomach, heart, and sacrum. And he said to me what I could never hope to forget or banish or in anyway make right, “Ethan, I'm scared.” My brother was scared. The unknown mysteries that ordinarily imbue a child's fantasies with delight and possibility, with soaring Peter Pan cloud-decamptments and rolling hills of infinite splendour, had for Lucas been exposed as a fraud: the vast uncertainty of the world, proven to be as supernatural and real as anything he had comprehended in his dreams, was defined by a prevailing note of malice, bearing down right now and right here, and of all the people and children and sufferers in the world, on him.
I did then what I had never done before or would do again, what we never spoke about afterwards but which the situation seemed to demand, and suffering my own private collapse of security and immortality – because with precocious wisdom I knew what had sundered him forever from happiness could just as easily befall me – and my young heart bursting with uncontrollable filial sympathy, I climbed up to his bunk and wrapped my arms around him and held him until the sun rose and illumined nothing but the skin of our trembling hands and the stark unremitting future that bears portals into children's thighs like the sparkling eyes of god.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Dater
On May 23rd, 2010, Julio de Malaggar posted his first online dating profile to the well-known free online dating service, OkCupid. The contents, appearing beneath a staggeringly anachronistic photograph of the author with one leg elevated on a leather-backed chair, hands rested daintily upon velveteen knee, his perfectly Edwardian attire completed with a pleated cravat, read as follows [ed.’s note: all errors, grammatical and otherwise, are those of the author and are preserved for historical accuracy]:
Username: prettyladdiesmmm
Profile: I offer greetings to all my dandies and lascivious receptacles of love: your glistening concavities are welcoming to my manlihood. I see that you fawn lightly over the casually awarded pleasantries of your man-lovers, in this society that is our world in this day and age. It has been many years since I have experienced contiguity with lady-flesh; many many moons since I have encircled, nay ensorcelled, a woman’s bosom with my cubits. I have strong (irresistible!) desires to exchange abundant mouth-juices with your mouth juices in rituals of facial interchange. In my private chambers I regularly invoke the old bacchanalian rites that are available to the loins of this earth – oh you sweet feminines how you torment me with your dangling rondures – to lavish deserving satisfaction upon men by appearing before the mind’s eye as a sort of imago. My lady imagos are the most voluptuous this side of Venus, and I challenge any other man to upstage me in this regard. Rest assured, dear readeresses, that you are well attended to in the love-suanas of my mind’s bordellos.
Come to my bedside, my carnal pleasure-mates, and fall under the ridiculous intensity of my thrusting willpower. I will see you transported to the Heavenly plane of super-abundant sexiness, where you will orbit the lustful love-kernel that is my undeniable face.
When not inducing swooning in all the beautiful women who pass by me on the street as I engage in my swaggering daily constitutionals, I enjoy tennis, tea-drinking, croquet, commenting on matters of national political significance with my friend while we sit and drink Ouzo from slender-necked glasses in the courtyard behind my Mediterranean-style apartment building, reading the magazines, sailing internets, looking at pictures of my favourite women (all of them!), eating olives from small sticks that the woman at the department store hands me in a sultry coded gesture of wanton love-festing (if it is you reading this, I am personal love-making you tonight you coquettish marvel queen!), being a charming man to all the world, writing love advertisements in the OkCupids, telling you all about myself, my beautiful women, that are waiting for me like immaculate objects of hot festering desire.
You should contact me if: you are passion-quivering with sweat streaks of unbearable trembling deep-throaty bodily need. If you like good conversation and men who is intelligent and will listen to you, before and after sex. If you are hungry from mediocrity and want to spice up with a bit of meaty perfection. That’s me!
Username: prettyladdiesmmm
Profile: I offer greetings to all my dandies and lascivious receptacles of love: your glistening concavities are welcoming to my manlihood. I see that you fawn lightly over the casually awarded pleasantries of your man-lovers, in this society that is our world in this day and age. It has been many years since I have experienced contiguity with lady-flesh; many many moons since I have encircled, nay ensorcelled, a woman’s bosom with my cubits. I have strong (irresistible!) desires to exchange abundant mouth-juices with your mouth juices in rituals of facial interchange. In my private chambers I regularly invoke the old bacchanalian rites that are available to the loins of this earth – oh you sweet feminines how you torment me with your dangling rondures – to lavish deserving satisfaction upon men by appearing before the mind’s eye as a sort of imago. My lady imagos are the most voluptuous this side of Venus, and I challenge any other man to upstage me in this regard. Rest assured, dear readeresses, that you are well attended to in the love-suanas of my mind’s bordellos.
Come to my bedside, my carnal pleasure-mates, and fall under the ridiculous intensity of my thrusting willpower. I will see you transported to the Heavenly plane of super-abundant sexiness, where you will orbit the lustful love-kernel that is my undeniable face.
When not inducing swooning in all the beautiful women who pass by me on the street as I engage in my swaggering daily constitutionals, I enjoy tennis, tea-drinking, croquet, commenting on matters of national political significance with my friend while we sit and drink Ouzo from slender-necked glasses in the courtyard behind my Mediterranean-style apartment building, reading the magazines, sailing internets, looking at pictures of my favourite women (all of them!), eating olives from small sticks that the woman at the department store hands me in a sultry coded gesture of wanton love-festing (if it is you reading this, I am personal love-making you tonight you coquettish marvel queen!), being a charming man to all the world, writing love advertisements in the OkCupids, telling you all about myself, my beautiful women, that are waiting for me like immaculate objects of hot festering desire.
You should contact me if: you are passion-quivering with sweat streaks of unbearable trembling deep-throaty bodily need. If you like good conversation and men who is intelligent and will listen to you, before and after sex. If you are hungry from mediocrity and want to spice up with a bit of meaty perfection. That’s me!
Friday, September 10, 2010
The Toilet Seat
Leroy was born on a toilet seat, and got stuck. His mother forgot him there for a day till he started wailing, but she couldn't pull him loose. She lowered herself to the floor by the toilet and let him suckle her teat. This went well with the newborn, though soon he began to shiver and tremble with the cool air of the water beneath him. Leroy's mother fetched him a blanket and a space heater, and the shivering subsided. His being stuck saved tremendously on diapers, and with the extra cash his mother could afford to feed the little babeling all the gourmet apple compote his stomach could contain. Leroy grew, though not particularly strong, and he squinted often at the sunlight peering through the window into his small corner of the world. His mother gave him toys until he was old enough to read, at which point he did. He acquired an education in this manner.
When he was four, still stuck, his neighbour Delila, also four, came over to visit. Thus he acquired his first friend, immersed in the confines of his ceramic prison. He learned of fealty and kindness, and eventually abandonment when one day, having lent him her favorite plush toy Boogaloo – who was a furry purple arthropod with long antennae abutted in plastic eyes covered all over with very authentic looking teeth – she left his commode for good. Called away, Leroy wondered, by powers greater than the allure of his simple friendship. His mother still loved him, though, and showered him with gifts and water and breastmilk until he was eight.
At twelve, child services came by to examine his situation. They concluded summarily that a terrible evil had been committed against the child, and the mother for this would be separated from him and imprisoned in a gulag deep below the earth where her breasts would be exposed into a metal crate containing wolf pups, and she would never again see her child for the torment she bequeathed to him by her negligence. The solicitude of child services was limitless towards Leroy, however, and they concluded that freeing him from the eternal preserve of his toilet seat would represent the greatest trauma by far, and thus it was better to leave him be, alone in the bathroom, though sans the security and attendance of his abusive mother. Thus began Leroy's adolescence.
Once in a while a girl would pass by his house, and peer into the bathroom out of curiosity. She might come with friends, and seeing Leroy there, covered in pimples and quite beside himself for shame, they would begin to laugh and giggle and deride him. Leroy blushed during these moments, and wiggled as deep into his toilet as he could. Sometimes the girls would come alone, and on these occasions he found himself more courageous by a good deal, and he even called out to them as they turned around to leave, though none ever stayed long enough to say hello. The state graciously provided Leroy with a computer, feeling it inappropriate for him to be denied any of the modern conveniences that defined his generation's youth. Unsuccessful with girls, though rapturously intrigued by them, he took to distracting himself with video games. His favorite was Super Mario Brothers, which he played on an SNES emulator to the exclusion of more contemporary offerings. He felt a certain idealistic fascination, verging on envy, for the freedom with which the Mario Brothers could submit their bodies to pipes. He marveled at the locomotive possibilities this represented with the youthful exuberance that characterized his age group and gender demographic.
In his twenty-first year of incarceration, a young female student moved into the house. She was studying anthropology at the university and her name was Abelle. She moved in and out of the bathroom with a lithe beauty, and for Leroy she would pirouette as she brushed her teeth, and sing him jovial melodies about the Irish hills (where she had never been, but she was a hopeless romantic for other people's idiosyncracies). Leroy fell hopelessly in love with her, and told her so: she laughed and patted his cheek, and told him roommates must never fuck. He sulked for a week until she made him flower bread out of the petunias growing through the living room floor.
She stayed there for a year and was then replaced by a fraternity. The house filled up quickly with young men carrying kegs of beer and branding each other on the shoulders with hot pokers and cigarette lighters. They indoctrinated Leroy into their fraternity (gamma-gamma-gamma) by making him wear a diaper on his head for a day, which they all considered an ironic gesture considering where he lived. Leroy didn't understand the joke but submitted to his treatment out of a deeply rooted physiological desire for masculine friendship, which thus far in his life he had entirely lacked. He had never met his father, and believed that all middle-aged men wore mustaches and traveled by means of rotary concave propeller caps. The fraternity celebrated his condition by drinking often and loudly. Eventually they left in a terrible conflagration of spontaneous homoeroticism, which neither Leroy nor the fraternists anticipated or would ever admit to thereafter. Leroy had his first homosexual experience at this time, with a man whose name was unpronounceable owing to its origin in the pantheon of Elder Gods. He politely explained, in between blow jobs which he administered for Leroy with his knees planted securely on the ceramic tiles, that for a human to pronounce his name would result in that person's immediate transformation into a monosyllabic manifestation of entropy – into what he further described as the daemonic inversion of the holy word Om.
The State thereafter underwent a transition to severe Randism, and a few of its representatives eventually came to visit Leroy, who by then was twenty-five. They told him him he was no longer eligible for social assistance, being a theoretically able-bodied man with no inherent physiological, psychological or scatological issues. They told him he would have to find work or otherwise find himself out on the street. When they said this he noticed the balding head of a man peer around the corner of the bathroom door. “That's Hobart, the landlord,” explained the State representatives. “He has an acute bathroom phobia and until now has never visited, but this morning he overcome his fear out of an even greater hatred for the ideological contempt your behaviour demonstrates towards the social weal.” Hobart nodded tacit agreement.
Thus compelled by the simultaneous disapproval of various authority figures, Leroy began producing elaborate harmonic melodies using the limited but poetically austere harmonics of his stomach and ceramic toilet. With the assistance of friends, he established what he dubbed the “Symphonic Atrium” in the bathroom, and coupled his body-toilet music with other percussion instruments, and charged passersby five dollars an hour to sit and enjoy his performances. The New York Times wrote glowingly about the experience in their Arts column, “Leroy's performance is a marvel of the auditory and the olfactory. He has combined the smells and sounds of human defecation with the pure resonance of undilute percussion. The two harmonize with each other in unanticipated ways, drawing depth from one while at the same time a stochastic tremolo from the other. It is their interpermeation that transforms the simple rhythm of one, and the disgusting physicality of the other, into a transcendent synecdoche of shit-sound.” Leroy didn't understand the review at all, but appreciated the naked photographs the reviewer continued to send him afterwords.
Eventually a man with revolutionary tendencies called Ponquist began to paint a portrait of Leroy with his words. The gist of it was that Leroy represented all the frailties of humankind, and was an extant martyr for the suffering everyone must endure. Already a popular conversation topic among hipsters, the addition of messianic qualities elevated Leroy to an unparalleled degree of public renown. An endowment fund was created for his benefit, and quickly grew glutted with the enthusiastic donations of those who had come to adore the toilet as a receptacle for human misery. In a matter of minutes his house was torn down around him and the toilet seat raised up onto a dais. He was surrounded on all sides by transparent glass, and a rich, gold trimmed carpet cascaded down marble steps in his new apartment, where he had been placed by a freight helicopter.
An attack came a month later by the Anti-Toilet Mafia, a group that had formed in direct opposition to the confinement imposed upon Leroy. They perpetually drenched their heads with fresh urine and considered it their solitary function in life to liberate Leroy from his confines. On the other hand, they were arrested by those adherents who slept in an entanglement of limbs around Leroy's feet, an adulatory posse, who rose up at the slightest sound of intrusion and brandished sharpened plungers and razor sharp floss wire: what they called the Filaments of Dread. A terrible battle took place at the entrance to his lavish bathroom, and all his attackers and defenders perished. The very last one to go, with his dying breath, unknowingly spoke the inverted word of Om and set in motion a tremendous sequence of entropic discombobulation.
All the bodies that had accumulated in the space between Leroy's toilet and the entrance to his mansion spontaneously erupted into a blood-water river of human juice. Leroy was swallowed up, and the force of it tore loose his toilet from its moorings. He was washed to sea where he sat in perfect buoyant calm upon all that remained of his previous life. The last remnant of his childhood clung to his ass like the vice-grip fingers of an extremely large and plastic man. He paddled intuitively in the vast waters around and below him, having acclimated to the aquatic through many hours of deep meditation on the nature of liquidity. He proceeded to enjoy his newfound freedom by getting moored on a small tropical island.
At first he believed he was the only resident of the island, and composed long eulogies to himself which he recited forwards and backwards to maintain strong mental acumen. He contemplated the many men and women he had loved in his life up to that point, and wept tears for each of them that mingled into the salty brine of the sea. He thought fondly of his mother, who must long ago have perished in her wolf-box, and of the wild Ponquist who transformed him into the vessel of divinity. He wondered at the world that it had never known the quality of life that being embedded in a toilet seat produces, and he began to laugh at the marvel of his existence as it had thus far unfolded.
“Excuse me, sir, but would you mind not laughing so loudly. There are some of us who have been here for a long time and grown accustomed to a certain level of decorum, you understand. It's only polite to defer to your seniors in all matters of etiquette, as we've lived long and hard lives and have only the deference of those younger than us from which to draw comfort,” said an old man behind him. With great difficulty Leroy turned himself around and for the first time beheld a dozen other men and woman, all stuck firmly in toilet seats, all witheringly old, and all sitting on the ground. Their heads pointed in different directions to the sea and sky. At this point Leroy became enlightened, and devoted the remainder of his days to carving the sanguinary principles of mortality into tablets made of sand, which he placed reverently at the limit of the waves. When he died his soul discovered that the universe was an enormous toilet seat, which his spiritual posterior continued to occupy for some time thereafter. THE END.
When he was four, still stuck, his neighbour Delila, also four, came over to visit. Thus he acquired his first friend, immersed in the confines of his ceramic prison. He learned of fealty and kindness, and eventually abandonment when one day, having lent him her favorite plush toy Boogaloo – who was a furry purple arthropod with long antennae abutted in plastic eyes covered all over with very authentic looking teeth – she left his commode for good. Called away, Leroy wondered, by powers greater than the allure of his simple friendship. His mother still loved him, though, and showered him with gifts and water and breastmilk until he was eight.
At twelve, child services came by to examine his situation. They concluded summarily that a terrible evil had been committed against the child, and the mother for this would be separated from him and imprisoned in a gulag deep below the earth where her breasts would be exposed into a metal crate containing wolf pups, and she would never again see her child for the torment she bequeathed to him by her negligence. The solicitude of child services was limitless towards Leroy, however, and they concluded that freeing him from the eternal preserve of his toilet seat would represent the greatest trauma by far, and thus it was better to leave him be, alone in the bathroom, though sans the security and attendance of his abusive mother. Thus began Leroy's adolescence.
Once in a while a girl would pass by his house, and peer into the bathroom out of curiosity. She might come with friends, and seeing Leroy there, covered in pimples and quite beside himself for shame, they would begin to laugh and giggle and deride him. Leroy blushed during these moments, and wiggled as deep into his toilet as he could. Sometimes the girls would come alone, and on these occasions he found himself more courageous by a good deal, and he even called out to them as they turned around to leave, though none ever stayed long enough to say hello. The state graciously provided Leroy with a computer, feeling it inappropriate for him to be denied any of the modern conveniences that defined his generation's youth. Unsuccessful with girls, though rapturously intrigued by them, he took to distracting himself with video games. His favorite was Super Mario Brothers, which he played on an SNES emulator to the exclusion of more contemporary offerings. He felt a certain idealistic fascination, verging on envy, for the freedom with which the Mario Brothers could submit their bodies to pipes. He marveled at the locomotive possibilities this represented with the youthful exuberance that characterized his age group and gender demographic.
In his twenty-first year of incarceration, a young female student moved into the house. She was studying anthropology at the university and her name was Abelle. She moved in and out of the bathroom with a lithe beauty, and for Leroy she would pirouette as she brushed her teeth, and sing him jovial melodies about the Irish hills (where she had never been, but she was a hopeless romantic for other people's idiosyncracies). Leroy fell hopelessly in love with her, and told her so: she laughed and patted his cheek, and told him roommates must never fuck. He sulked for a week until she made him flower bread out of the petunias growing through the living room floor.
She stayed there for a year and was then replaced by a fraternity. The house filled up quickly with young men carrying kegs of beer and branding each other on the shoulders with hot pokers and cigarette lighters. They indoctrinated Leroy into their fraternity (gamma-gamma-gamma) by making him wear a diaper on his head for a day, which they all considered an ironic gesture considering where he lived. Leroy didn't understand the joke but submitted to his treatment out of a deeply rooted physiological desire for masculine friendship, which thus far in his life he had entirely lacked. He had never met his father, and believed that all middle-aged men wore mustaches and traveled by means of rotary concave propeller caps. The fraternity celebrated his condition by drinking often and loudly. Eventually they left in a terrible conflagration of spontaneous homoeroticism, which neither Leroy nor the fraternists anticipated or would ever admit to thereafter. Leroy had his first homosexual experience at this time, with a man whose name was unpronounceable owing to its origin in the pantheon of Elder Gods. He politely explained, in between blow jobs which he administered for Leroy with his knees planted securely on the ceramic tiles, that for a human to pronounce his name would result in that person's immediate transformation into a monosyllabic manifestation of entropy – into what he further described as the daemonic inversion of the holy word Om.
The State thereafter underwent a transition to severe Randism, and a few of its representatives eventually came to visit Leroy, who by then was twenty-five. They told him him he was no longer eligible for social assistance, being a theoretically able-bodied man with no inherent physiological, psychological or scatological issues. They told him he would have to find work or otherwise find himself out on the street. When they said this he noticed the balding head of a man peer around the corner of the bathroom door. “That's Hobart, the landlord,” explained the State representatives. “He has an acute bathroom phobia and until now has never visited, but this morning he overcome his fear out of an even greater hatred for the ideological contempt your behaviour demonstrates towards the social weal.” Hobart nodded tacit agreement.
Thus compelled by the simultaneous disapproval of various authority figures, Leroy began producing elaborate harmonic melodies using the limited but poetically austere harmonics of his stomach and ceramic toilet. With the assistance of friends, he established what he dubbed the “Symphonic Atrium” in the bathroom, and coupled his body-toilet music with other percussion instruments, and charged passersby five dollars an hour to sit and enjoy his performances. The New York Times wrote glowingly about the experience in their Arts column, “Leroy's performance is a marvel of the auditory and the olfactory. He has combined the smells and sounds of human defecation with the pure resonance of undilute percussion. The two harmonize with each other in unanticipated ways, drawing depth from one while at the same time a stochastic tremolo from the other. It is their interpermeation that transforms the simple rhythm of one, and the disgusting physicality of the other, into a transcendent synecdoche of shit-sound.” Leroy didn't understand the review at all, but appreciated the naked photographs the reviewer continued to send him afterwords.
Eventually a man with revolutionary tendencies called Ponquist began to paint a portrait of Leroy with his words. The gist of it was that Leroy represented all the frailties of humankind, and was an extant martyr for the suffering everyone must endure. Already a popular conversation topic among hipsters, the addition of messianic qualities elevated Leroy to an unparalleled degree of public renown. An endowment fund was created for his benefit, and quickly grew glutted with the enthusiastic donations of those who had come to adore the toilet as a receptacle for human misery. In a matter of minutes his house was torn down around him and the toilet seat raised up onto a dais. He was surrounded on all sides by transparent glass, and a rich, gold trimmed carpet cascaded down marble steps in his new apartment, where he had been placed by a freight helicopter.
An attack came a month later by the Anti-Toilet Mafia, a group that had formed in direct opposition to the confinement imposed upon Leroy. They perpetually drenched their heads with fresh urine and considered it their solitary function in life to liberate Leroy from his confines. On the other hand, they were arrested by those adherents who slept in an entanglement of limbs around Leroy's feet, an adulatory posse, who rose up at the slightest sound of intrusion and brandished sharpened plungers and razor sharp floss wire: what they called the Filaments of Dread. A terrible battle took place at the entrance to his lavish bathroom, and all his attackers and defenders perished. The very last one to go, with his dying breath, unknowingly spoke the inverted word of Om and set in motion a tremendous sequence of entropic discombobulation.
All the bodies that had accumulated in the space between Leroy's toilet and the entrance to his mansion spontaneously erupted into a blood-water river of human juice. Leroy was swallowed up, and the force of it tore loose his toilet from its moorings. He was washed to sea where he sat in perfect buoyant calm upon all that remained of his previous life. The last remnant of his childhood clung to his ass like the vice-grip fingers of an extremely large and plastic man. He paddled intuitively in the vast waters around and below him, having acclimated to the aquatic through many hours of deep meditation on the nature of liquidity. He proceeded to enjoy his newfound freedom by getting moored on a small tropical island.
At first he believed he was the only resident of the island, and composed long eulogies to himself which he recited forwards and backwards to maintain strong mental acumen. He contemplated the many men and women he had loved in his life up to that point, and wept tears for each of them that mingled into the salty brine of the sea. He thought fondly of his mother, who must long ago have perished in her wolf-box, and of the wild Ponquist who transformed him into the vessel of divinity. He wondered at the world that it had never known the quality of life that being embedded in a toilet seat produces, and he began to laugh at the marvel of his existence as it had thus far unfolded.
“Excuse me, sir, but would you mind not laughing so loudly. There are some of us who have been here for a long time and grown accustomed to a certain level of decorum, you understand. It's only polite to defer to your seniors in all matters of etiquette, as we've lived long and hard lives and have only the deference of those younger than us from which to draw comfort,” said an old man behind him. With great difficulty Leroy turned himself around and for the first time beheld a dozen other men and woman, all stuck firmly in toilet seats, all witheringly old, and all sitting on the ground. Their heads pointed in different directions to the sea and sky. At this point Leroy became enlightened, and devoted the remainder of his days to carving the sanguinary principles of mortality into tablets made of sand, which he placed reverently at the limit of the waves. When he died his soul discovered that the universe was an enormous toilet seat, which his spiritual posterior continued to occupy for some time thereafter. THE END.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Two Half Melons
The worship began almost as soon as the Melon Halves were injected with the potent formaldehyde concoction. Everyone knew the world did not lack for deities. Nevertheless, there was an unmistakeable allure to the unchristened, immortal concavities of Honeydew that science had chosen, before anything else, to inoculate against mortality. You could certainly argue, and many did, that the real progenitor God was the scientific community, whose agents selected the Melon for the experiment. But this is akin to saying that the Judeo-Christian God was wrought by the men who wrote the bible. From the perspective of the devout this is blasphemy, and even from the perspective of the educated atheist does nothing to increase knowledge of the believer's real motives for his faith. We all knew that the real God was implicit in the mystique of the Melons Themselves, and the prevailing liturgy thus became a tale of causa sui: the Melon elected for Itself to be grown, harvested and shipped to the Santa Monica laboratory where scientists were busily conducting research on biomedical gerontology (life extension). Once there, the Melon invoked Its powers of grace to be positioned in the laboratory within arms reach of the experimenter who, being junior, was tasked in that moment to fetch something organic for his more senior colleague. Why was the Melon halved? Because the junior researcher had intended to consume It, of course. He'd just finished slicing the melon in two with his pocket knife, and was on the verge of piercing its (now) sacred fruity interior, when the urgent call from his colleague for a specimen came ringing through the intercom. The subsequent events have since become as canonized for Melonites as are the twelve stations of the cross for Christians, or the pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims. The Fourteen Phases of Melonic Purification begin with four pre-injection moments, consisting of the Reluctant Lowering of the Knife, the Hoisting of the Melons, the Preliminary Migration, and the Arrival at the Site of Injection. These four moments are succeeded by the six moments of Holy Melonic Transformation: the Stationing of the Melons, the Angling of the Syringe, the Compression of the Syringe, the Contact of the Fluid to the Melonic Membranes, the Suffusion of the Fluid, and finally the Chemical Melonic Transcendence. The entire purification cycle is concluded with the following four moments: the Subsequent Migration to the Janitorial Closet, the Unknowing Profanation of the Melons before the Janitor, the Janitor's Retrieval of the Melons, the Melons Final Transmission to the World.
Those uninitiated into the melonic mysteries may find it difficult to entirely reconstruct the events that transpired from the the names of the Fourteen Phases alone, but the essential point to understand is that Science, in its capacity as the transmitter of immortality to the Melon Halves, chose to reject the Melons for some perceived imperfection. In doing so, they inadvertently positioned a single man, the Janitor Perry Winkleton, as the catalyst for Melonism's rapid ascendance. Science therefore beheld perfection, but either could not see it for what it was, or was even in full view of it ultimately dissatisfied. The Janitor, who is to Melonism what St. Paul was to Christianity, undermined the haughty indifference of the Scientific worldview with the clarity of uneducated humility. He perceived simply that the Melons were sacred and precious, and retrieved them from the garbage bin where they'd been thrown. Lovingly, he rinsed Them off and carried Them to the people so that Their truth could be experienced by everyone. It was Perry Winkleton who spoke out at the First Melonic Council against the sectarian desires of the new, self-titled Left and Right Melonists. These followers, though undeniably devout adherents to the Melons, came to wildly divisive conclusions about the respective qualities of each Half. Some records suggest that Science injected Immortality into the Left Melon before the Right Melon, thus undermining the legitimacy of their equality as manifestations of Godhead. The Right Melonists, by contrast, argue that the Second Injection illustrates a more perfect Transmission of Immortality, that the First Injection had to be repeated before the universe could fully acknowledge its occurrence. The Second Injection became thus the culmination, perfection, and unification of the Melons as the divided-yet-not-really-divided true God.
Perry Winkleton, however, rejected the notion of there being two Melons, which is to say in any sense of religious, spiritual, allegorical or anagogical significance. To prove his point he held the Melons aloft and hurled them at the gathered assembly, where rather than splattering apart they fused for a single moment, in mid air, into the Holy Perfect Melon, before coming to rest on the conference table as two separate halves. Thus for a time the Left versus Right Melonist division hid itself underground, and a new eschatology began to circulate that one day the Melons would reunite, thereby delivering lasting peace and nutrition to all the world. Perry Winkleton himself adopted this as the revealed doctrine of Melonism, and actively promoted its transmission to non-Melonists wherever he went. If anything proved to be Winkleton's undoing, it was his unabashed acceptance of all peoples into the folds of the Melon. His martyrdom was secured when a group of Melon separatists waylaid him with lead pipes on his way home from a Melonic Conference, and pulped his head in like a ripe melon. Despite Winkleton's murder, he was successful in preventing the inclusion of the First and Second Injections as additional phases in the Melonic Purification, which very quickly became canonized after his death. To this day, Melonists continue to await the coming to fruition of the Melon's Oneness, and wage a constant struggle against the temptation to devour Its Holy Juices by slicing out their tongues and pulling out their teeth. God Bless the Melons Halves, for Their Gifts Are Always Sweet and Come in Pairs.
Those uninitiated into the melonic mysteries may find it difficult to entirely reconstruct the events that transpired from the the names of the Fourteen Phases alone, but the essential point to understand is that Science, in its capacity as the transmitter of immortality to the Melon Halves, chose to reject the Melons for some perceived imperfection. In doing so, they inadvertently positioned a single man, the Janitor Perry Winkleton, as the catalyst for Melonism's rapid ascendance. Science therefore beheld perfection, but either could not see it for what it was, or was even in full view of it ultimately dissatisfied. The Janitor, who is to Melonism what St. Paul was to Christianity, undermined the haughty indifference of the Scientific worldview with the clarity of uneducated humility. He perceived simply that the Melons were sacred and precious, and retrieved them from the garbage bin where they'd been thrown. Lovingly, he rinsed Them off and carried Them to the people so that Their truth could be experienced by everyone. It was Perry Winkleton who spoke out at the First Melonic Council against the sectarian desires of the new, self-titled Left and Right Melonists. These followers, though undeniably devout adherents to the Melons, came to wildly divisive conclusions about the respective qualities of each Half. Some records suggest that Science injected Immortality into the Left Melon before the Right Melon, thus undermining the legitimacy of their equality as manifestations of Godhead. The Right Melonists, by contrast, argue that the Second Injection illustrates a more perfect Transmission of Immortality, that the First Injection had to be repeated before the universe could fully acknowledge its occurrence. The Second Injection became thus the culmination, perfection, and unification of the Melons as the divided-yet-not-really-divided true God.
Perry Winkleton, however, rejected the notion of there being two Melons, which is to say in any sense of religious, spiritual, allegorical or anagogical significance. To prove his point he held the Melons aloft and hurled them at the gathered assembly, where rather than splattering apart they fused for a single moment, in mid air, into the Holy Perfect Melon, before coming to rest on the conference table as two separate halves. Thus for a time the Left versus Right Melonist division hid itself underground, and a new eschatology began to circulate that one day the Melons would reunite, thereby delivering lasting peace and nutrition to all the world. Perry Winkleton himself adopted this as the revealed doctrine of Melonism, and actively promoted its transmission to non-Melonists wherever he went. If anything proved to be Winkleton's undoing, it was his unabashed acceptance of all peoples into the folds of the Melon. His martyrdom was secured when a group of Melon separatists waylaid him with lead pipes on his way home from a Melonic Conference, and pulped his head in like a ripe melon. Despite Winkleton's murder, he was successful in preventing the inclusion of the First and Second Injections as additional phases in the Melonic Purification, which very quickly became canonized after his death. To this day, Melonists continue to await the coming to fruition of the Melon's Oneness, and wage a constant struggle against the temptation to devour Its Holy Juices by slicing out their tongues and pulling out their teeth. God Bless the Melons Halves, for Their Gifts Are Always Sweet and Come in Pairs.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The Arrow
The arrow struck Arlin in the chest somewhere between Tobermory Rd. and Fleetwood Cr. He staggered a bit at first but eventually caught his breath and his bearings. Surprisingly, it didn't hurt, and the bleeding stopped after a couple blocks. Since he was already on his way home, he decided to hit the sack and worry about it in the morning.
When he woke up at first he couldn't even remember anything happening the night before. He'd gone out to the bar with some friends, and afterwords had wandered home by himself, as he usually did. Then his hand found the wooden shaft sticking out of his chest, and the hard, smooth fletching at the end. He toyed with the idea of pulling the arrow out, but he didn't have the strength to.
Putting on a dress shirt, so the end could stick through the buttons, he went off to his job at the chocolate packing plant. Normally lifting boxes was no problem, but with the arrow in his chest he found the work quite difficult. The boxes kept bumping up against the wood, and he couldn't get a good hold of them.
“You should get that checked out, man,” said his manager, who usually didn't give a shit.
Arlin shrugged. “I think I'm ok, really. It doesn't hurt.”
“Yeah, but how can you ever expect to impregnate a woman with that sticking out of your chest? I mean, look at the angle on that thing. Looks like it was shot from below you! Perfectly positioned to make intimate congress just impossible.” His manager was also the kind of person who enjoyed using expressions like “intimate congress” and “woebegone affiliations”. “All your affiliations will be woebegone, I'm sure of it,” he added.
With some reluctance, Arlin went to the doctor later that day. The doctor checked his pupils, his ears, and the reflexes in his knees. “You seem to be healthy,” he said.
“But what about the arrow?” Arlin asked.
The doctor turned back around from where he had been carving a totem of the Greek ithyphallic god Priapus, and scratched his chin. “Oh,” he said, putting on his glasses.
“Is it serious?”
“No, I don't think so. There is only mild gangrene. It looks quite old, infact, and was probably there long before the arrow struck you.”
Arlin nodded, “I got it from my childhood, from the tiny ocular rivers that signified my place of yearning for the inexpressible, and the subterranean channels of my early pubescence, which languished a bit too long in the secret interim before my emotional chrysalis could properly unfold.”
The doctor wasn't listening. “Here, take a few of these, all at once, or many of them spread out over some indeterminate period of time, depending on the intensity of your placebo. I've also given you a referral to a good psychotherapist I know. And don't scratch at it.”
The psychotherapist was busy riding a wooden horse, wearing a Pippi Longstocking wig, when Arlin peered in for his appointment. “Come in, come in!” said the therapist, who did not dismount. Arlin sat on the only seat in the room: a child's potty. “It's to expose you to acute feelings of infantilization, thereby causing your id to enter into a state of directionless imbalance, making you more malleable to the will of the presiding authority. It's also amusing to me, and I always indulge in my amusements. Now tell me why you're here so we that we can entirely ignore your words and delve into the suggestive reality I will provide for you.”
“There's an arrow in my chest. It's made some things difficult, like lifting boxes at the chocolate factory, and forgetting my mortality.”
The therapist had come close to Arlin as he spoke, and placed his lips around the end of the arrow. He was sucking on it, and flicking his tongue against its wooden surface. “Tell me abut yuh muher,” he said, running his fingers up and down the arrow, delicately caressing it, as beads of saliva began to dribble down his chin.
Arlin tried to recoil, but the arrow tip protruding from his back connected to the wall behind him.“She was an uncontrollable gossip, and spent most of her young adulthood riding on the lapels of rich businessmen. She used to tell me it was the fastest way to get across town. For six months she lived in the washing machine of a French diplomat, and was only discovered when the Italian maid overheard her making love to a German repairman whose metallic hammer kept banging up against the side of the washing machine's gaping hole. I mean opening. She was thrown on her ass, where she stayed for a year accepting the generosity of parliamentarians who threw money at her, and plane tickets, and their weddings rings. She had the power to make men forget their problems. This was all before I knew her.”
The therapist was smelling the wood deeply, his eyes rolling back into their sockets a bit with each whiff. “Yes, oh yes. I see it very clearly now.” He stood up abruptly and slapped Arlin across the face. “You disgust me. How long have you pretended not to notice that your father is a homosexual?”
Arlin shrugged, “He was always a homosexual. He only married my mother to temporarily escape the attention of the pink mafia, from whom he had stolen a priceless artifact. It was an ornamental carving of the moment when a man loses his youth irrecoverably, captured in terracota like those soldiers in China. It was being preserved in bile, which of course was doing nothing for its complexion.”
“Your only hope is to subject yourself to the iniquities of love. I know a beautiful woman you must marry. Here is her number. Her name is Melinda. The winks I am giving you now are merely a facial tic and have no suggestive meaning.”
“Alright.”
Arlin met her at a drive in movie. She had a quiver embedded in between her breasts. Whenever she quivered, it quivered. “You're very pretty,” he said.
“You're not the first person to have assumed that the remarkable appearance of coincidence is likewise an unavoidable promise from God.”
“Of course not. But by the same token, I could be the first person for whom this is in fact the case.”
“What makes you so special?”
“A love of probabilities only masks a deeper fear of fate. I don't give a rat's ass about fate or chance. In fact, I never think about either. I didn't choose for this arrow to stick through my chest, and I didn't choose for you to have a beautifully proportioned quiver. I don't think I've ever seen one quite like it.”
“The odds are really outstanding.”
“Sure. But then again, so what? It's not like there's an ideal formula for happiness floating out there, waiting for us to shoot it down. All arrows arrive at their destinations with perfect randomness. Even the most masterful shot is still at the mercy of the wind.”
“I acquired my quiver in a terrible accident. I was racing through an amusement park looking for the exit, when I happened upon an exhibit describing the exploits of Robin Hood. Only, this wasn't the conventional version in which Robin Hood substitutes himself for regulatory economic mechanisms and as a metaphor for Stalinism; instead, the Hood persona was being played by a retired philosophy professor who was busy attempting to reduce all the world to a great theory of receptacles. He called me up on stage to demonstrate his point through a complicated system of gestures, diagrams, and phallic knives.”
Arlin leaned in close, “And he impaled you with the quiver?”
She shook her head, “Oh no. Years later I had it surgically implanted in my chest, as a symbolic gesture of affinity with the substance of his argument. The accident was listening to him in the first place.”
Arlin nodded. “Yes, I often think it's entirely possible that I fired the arrow at myself, that night.”
“Do you want to make love?”
“I think it's the only reasonable thing left for us to do.”
When he woke up at first he couldn't even remember anything happening the night before. He'd gone out to the bar with some friends, and afterwords had wandered home by himself, as he usually did. Then his hand found the wooden shaft sticking out of his chest, and the hard, smooth fletching at the end. He toyed with the idea of pulling the arrow out, but he didn't have the strength to.
Putting on a dress shirt, so the end could stick through the buttons, he went off to his job at the chocolate packing plant. Normally lifting boxes was no problem, but with the arrow in his chest he found the work quite difficult. The boxes kept bumping up against the wood, and he couldn't get a good hold of them.
“You should get that checked out, man,” said his manager, who usually didn't give a shit.
Arlin shrugged. “I think I'm ok, really. It doesn't hurt.”
“Yeah, but how can you ever expect to impregnate a woman with that sticking out of your chest? I mean, look at the angle on that thing. Looks like it was shot from below you! Perfectly positioned to make intimate congress just impossible.” His manager was also the kind of person who enjoyed using expressions like “intimate congress” and “woebegone affiliations”. “All your affiliations will be woebegone, I'm sure of it,” he added.
With some reluctance, Arlin went to the doctor later that day. The doctor checked his pupils, his ears, and the reflexes in his knees. “You seem to be healthy,” he said.
“But what about the arrow?” Arlin asked.
The doctor turned back around from where he had been carving a totem of the Greek ithyphallic god Priapus, and scratched his chin. “Oh,” he said, putting on his glasses.
“Is it serious?”
“No, I don't think so. There is only mild gangrene. It looks quite old, infact, and was probably there long before the arrow struck you.”
Arlin nodded, “I got it from my childhood, from the tiny ocular rivers that signified my place of yearning for the inexpressible, and the subterranean channels of my early pubescence, which languished a bit too long in the secret interim before my emotional chrysalis could properly unfold.”
The doctor wasn't listening. “Here, take a few of these, all at once, or many of them spread out over some indeterminate period of time, depending on the intensity of your placebo. I've also given you a referral to a good psychotherapist I know. And don't scratch at it.”
The psychotherapist was busy riding a wooden horse, wearing a Pippi Longstocking wig, when Arlin peered in for his appointment. “Come in, come in!” said the therapist, who did not dismount. Arlin sat on the only seat in the room: a child's potty. “It's to expose you to acute feelings of infantilization, thereby causing your id to enter into a state of directionless imbalance, making you more malleable to the will of the presiding authority. It's also amusing to me, and I always indulge in my amusements. Now tell me why you're here so we that we can entirely ignore your words and delve into the suggestive reality I will provide for you.”
“There's an arrow in my chest. It's made some things difficult, like lifting boxes at the chocolate factory, and forgetting my mortality.”
The therapist had come close to Arlin as he spoke, and placed his lips around the end of the arrow. He was sucking on it, and flicking his tongue against its wooden surface. “Tell me abut yuh muher,” he said, running his fingers up and down the arrow, delicately caressing it, as beads of saliva began to dribble down his chin.
Arlin tried to recoil, but the arrow tip protruding from his back connected to the wall behind him.“She was an uncontrollable gossip, and spent most of her young adulthood riding on the lapels of rich businessmen. She used to tell me it was the fastest way to get across town. For six months she lived in the washing machine of a French diplomat, and was only discovered when the Italian maid overheard her making love to a German repairman whose metallic hammer kept banging up against the side of the washing machine's gaping hole. I mean opening. She was thrown on her ass, where she stayed for a year accepting the generosity of parliamentarians who threw money at her, and plane tickets, and their weddings rings. She had the power to make men forget their problems. This was all before I knew her.”
The therapist was smelling the wood deeply, his eyes rolling back into their sockets a bit with each whiff. “Yes, oh yes. I see it very clearly now.” He stood up abruptly and slapped Arlin across the face. “You disgust me. How long have you pretended not to notice that your father is a homosexual?”
Arlin shrugged, “He was always a homosexual. He only married my mother to temporarily escape the attention of the pink mafia, from whom he had stolen a priceless artifact. It was an ornamental carving of the moment when a man loses his youth irrecoverably, captured in terracota like those soldiers in China. It was being preserved in bile, which of course was doing nothing for its complexion.”
“Your only hope is to subject yourself to the iniquities of love. I know a beautiful woman you must marry. Here is her number. Her name is Melinda. The winks I am giving you now are merely a facial tic and have no suggestive meaning.”
“Alright.”
Arlin met her at a drive in movie. She had a quiver embedded in between her breasts. Whenever she quivered, it quivered. “You're very pretty,” he said.
“You're not the first person to have assumed that the remarkable appearance of coincidence is likewise an unavoidable promise from God.”
“Of course not. But by the same token, I could be the first person for whom this is in fact the case.”
“What makes you so special?”
“A love of probabilities only masks a deeper fear of fate. I don't give a rat's ass about fate or chance. In fact, I never think about either. I didn't choose for this arrow to stick through my chest, and I didn't choose for you to have a beautifully proportioned quiver. I don't think I've ever seen one quite like it.”
“The odds are really outstanding.”
“Sure. But then again, so what? It's not like there's an ideal formula for happiness floating out there, waiting for us to shoot it down. All arrows arrive at their destinations with perfect randomness. Even the most masterful shot is still at the mercy of the wind.”
“I acquired my quiver in a terrible accident. I was racing through an amusement park looking for the exit, when I happened upon an exhibit describing the exploits of Robin Hood. Only, this wasn't the conventional version in which Robin Hood substitutes himself for regulatory economic mechanisms and as a metaphor for Stalinism; instead, the Hood persona was being played by a retired philosophy professor who was busy attempting to reduce all the world to a great theory of receptacles. He called me up on stage to demonstrate his point through a complicated system of gestures, diagrams, and phallic knives.”
Arlin leaned in close, “And he impaled you with the quiver?”
She shook her head, “Oh no. Years later I had it surgically implanted in my chest, as a symbolic gesture of affinity with the substance of his argument. The accident was listening to him in the first place.”
Arlin nodded. “Yes, I often think it's entirely possible that I fired the arrow at myself, that night.”
“Do you want to make love?”
“I think it's the only reasonable thing left for us to do.”
Monday, August 30, 2010
The Insects
Melvin's transformation began with the drosophila melanogasters in his kitchen. The fruit flies burst from an apple he'd let sit too long on his counter, but ignored the traps he set for them of Manischewitz wine, and followed him damnably wherever he went. They clung to his face as he slept, and woke him up by crawling into his nostrils and ears. He killed hundreds of them with the palm of his hand before calling an exterminator, who doused the house in gas. Neither man could say where they'd come from. Since the apple, Melvin had purged the house of fruit.
Melvin worked in an office building, on the seventeenth floor, in a shitty data entry job for a private census company. He worked on an open concept floor, and shared a single window with two other men. The musca domesticas began to dot its surface by 10am, and by noon the flies had so completely covered the window that they effectively blocked out the sun. People began to point with alarm. Melvin tried his best to ignore it, but the constant faint buzzing and tapping on the glass seemed especially directed at him. He left work early.
On the way home, big, juicy euphoria inda began to crash down on the sidewalk near him, exploding their chitin and splattering Melvin with insect organs. An army of periplaneta americana started coming out of the sewers and following him. He had to duck as Schistocerca americana began to leap from the grass into his hair, and when the Polistes dominula began to swarm he set off into a run.
Fortunately, he lived close to home, and was able to barricade himself inside. After dispatching the few wasps that had followed him in, he plugged all the vents and openings he could find with pillows, blankets, and duct tape. Despite his efforts, though, tiny writhing Forficula auricularia kept pouring through cracks he hadn't seen, and a swath of Scutigera coleoptrata began to mill around his feet. Breathing hard, he swatted and crushed and kicked as many of them away as possible, and redoubled his efforts at sealing the house. But whenever he stopped his brushing and battings to layer on some tape, the insects would surge up and onto him, covering his body. In a panic he rushed upstairs to his room and threw a blanket under the door, but they were soon upon him. Chirping Acheta domestica, fluttering Hemaris sp., a whole army of long-legged Pholcus phalangioides burst from the interstices of his house to ensconce him.
With a cry he collapsed on his bed, as the insects swarmed him. They covered every inch of his body, and slithered into his mouth and nose so that he could barely breathe. He thrashed and writhed and groaned, but he could not dislodge them from him. They piled on top of him in the hundreds of thousands, and the room was filled with a near deafening buzz. Hundreds of critters worked their way up his pants, and Melvin discovered a new horror as they began to probe, poke, and eventually surround his genitals. He shrieked and sobbed and batted pathetically at his groin, but he was powerless to control them. He whimpered as something small, maybe an ixodes scapularis, inspected the entrance of his urethra. Other things, he knew not what, but possessing scruffy antennae, crawled around his ass and began preliminary investigations of his rectum.
But for all their business, not a single wasp, spider, or gnat so much as broke the outer layer of his skin. Though he felt close to suffocation a few times, he found that if he stopped his desperate spitting, and began to breathe more calmly, he could draw in just enough air. He also quickly discovered that, by lying still, the constant march across the surface of his skin was not so intolerable, and he didn't really even feel ticklish. So for a while he lay in his bed, trying not to move, and let the insects seem to take possession of his body. It was a profound experience of letting go, as he had never known before. All the tension and resistance he had accumulated over thirty-seven years of life flowed out of him in a massive suppuration of insect bodies. Remarkably, reassured that the insects meant him no harm, he soon fell asleep.
He awoke to a blinding light. He raised a bug-covered hand to cover his eyes. "Oh, sorry," said a voice, and the light was diverted. As his eyes adjusted, he came to see that he was in a television studio, the kind used for daytime talk shows like Oprah, and in front of him was a massive studio audience staring in absolute silence at the writhing mass of his body. To his left was a man with a chiseled jaw and an artificial orange tan, who wore an immaculate white suit and an unwavering smile. Technicians and camera operators were running back and forth across the stage, carrying boom mics and wires, and someone shouted, "On the air in 5, 4, 3...." The host, without looking away from Melvin, or changing his terrifying expression, said, "You are a disgusting horror. You are the symbol of the death of my career, and I won't stop until you're defeated."
Bewildered, Melvin tried to speak but was cut off by the sudden burst of applause and an upswell of cheesy talkshow music. "Welcome back. We're here with our guest, Melvin the Insect Man, who was found in his house yesterday in a state of utmost depravity." The audience booed. "Thanks so much for joining us. How are you?"
"I'm..."
"Wonderful! So, how did you decide to become the love object of the insect hordes?"
"Listen, it's not what you think..."
"Sure it isn't. Do you think just anyone can rise to a national spectacle overnight? It requires a rare talent, an uncommon perversity, a total disregard for the expectations of decent society."
"I think you misunderstand. I didn't choose..."
"We all know that line. Don't fault the criminal, blame society. It's not your fault, it's your genetic predisposition to being the cozened impromptu deity of a thousand species of domestic insects. You're disgusting." The audience applauded.
"I don't like these insinuations. I'm just living my life. I haven't intended to do any harm..." A sudden hiss and boo from the crowd. "What is this, the whole world is against me?"
"Of course they are! You stand at the limit of what society can tolerate. You aren't supposed to embrace the hordes. The despicable writer Antonin Artaud beckons us to the pursuit of fecality, but we will not go! We won't give up our materialism by becoming hedonists, slaves to brutish impulses and the psychology of primates. All for what? So that we can run around and claim to have found freedom? To have liberated ourselves from some theoretical yolk? You are the essence of what must be purged from society to keep it clean and healthy. Even though I can't see you under all those bugs, I can definitely discern a foul smell." More applause.
"This is a set up! I've done nothing to incur your stupidity! All I've done is let go, stopped fighting the primal demiurges. You talk about Artaud, but do you know he said, in the same poem, that our debasement comes from the unformed quality of the world? Man stopped everything just as we began our ascension to multiplicity; he substituted for infinity the great illusion of the Internal Regulatory System. We know it well: it is an elaborate maze that begins with the pursuit of happiness..."
The interviewer was red in the face, "You are a lying dog! No, not even that, you're worse than a dog. You lack even faithfulness to an ideal. You will go whichever way the wind takes you. We should murder you now, to avoid having complications down the road." A "here here" from the crowd.
"Fine. Kill me. I am not opposed to it. I really see things more clearly now. The insects are not the enemy. We are the enemy; each and every one of us who loathes the world, who clings to petty notions of power and organization, who crushes the insects that come up from the earth and the ones that live under our skin. We are the enemies when we cower under the storm of shit that is poured on us from the great, billowing sphincters we created. Don't you see them, on Parliament Hill, and on every bank and corporate tower? On every television station, every fast food restaurant, every elementary school? They are drowning us even as we speak...," but the crowd was no longer listening. They were all shuddering under a mass of insects, which had sprung up through the cracks in the floor to embrace them.
"You see," Melvin said. "Even now, we are choosing everything."
Melvin worked in an office building, on the seventeenth floor, in a shitty data entry job for a private census company. He worked on an open concept floor, and shared a single window with two other men. The musca domesticas began to dot its surface by 10am, and by noon the flies had so completely covered the window that they effectively blocked out the sun. People began to point with alarm. Melvin tried his best to ignore it, but the constant faint buzzing and tapping on the glass seemed especially directed at him. He left work early.
On the way home, big, juicy euphoria inda began to crash down on the sidewalk near him, exploding their chitin and splattering Melvin with insect organs. An army of periplaneta americana started coming out of the sewers and following him. He had to duck as Schistocerca americana began to leap from the grass into his hair, and when the Polistes dominula began to swarm he set off into a run.
Fortunately, he lived close to home, and was able to barricade himself inside. After dispatching the few wasps that had followed him in, he plugged all the vents and openings he could find with pillows, blankets, and duct tape. Despite his efforts, though, tiny writhing Forficula auricularia kept pouring through cracks he hadn't seen, and a swath of Scutigera coleoptrata began to mill around his feet. Breathing hard, he swatted and crushed and kicked as many of them away as possible, and redoubled his efforts at sealing the house. But whenever he stopped his brushing and battings to layer on some tape, the insects would surge up and onto him, covering his body. In a panic he rushed upstairs to his room and threw a blanket under the door, but they were soon upon him. Chirping Acheta domestica, fluttering Hemaris sp., a whole army of long-legged Pholcus phalangioides burst from the interstices of his house to ensconce him.
With a cry he collapsed on his bed, as the insects swarmed him. They covered every inch of his body, and slithered into his mouth and nose so that he could barely breathe. He thrashed and writhed and groaned, but he could not dislodge them from him. They piled on top of him in the hundreds of thousands, and the room was filled with a near deafening buzz. Hundreds of critters worked their way up his pants, and Melvin discovered a new horror as they began to probe, poke, and eventually surround his genitals. He shrieked and sobbed and batted pathetically at his groin, but he was powerless to control them. He whimpered as something small, maybe an ixodes scapularis, inspected the entrance of his urethra. Other things, he knew not what, but possessing scruffy antennae, crawled around his ass and began preliminary investigations of his rectum.
But for all their business, not a single wasp, spider, or gnat so much as broke the outer layer of his skin. Though he felt close to suffocation a few times, he found that if he stopped his desperate spitting, and began to breathe more calmly, he could draw in just enough air. He also quickly discovered that, by lying still, the constant march across the surface of his skin was not so intolerable, and he didn't really even feel ticklish. So for a while he lay in his bed, trying not to move, and let the insects seem to take possession of his body. It was a profound experience of letting go, as he had never known before. All the tension and resistance he had accumulated over thirty-seven years of life flowed out of him in a massive suppuration of insect bodies. Remarkably, reassured that the insects meant him no harm, he soon fell asleep.
He awoke to a blinding light. He raised a bug-covered hand to cover his eyes. "Oh, sorry," said a voice, and the light was diverted. As his eyes adjusted, he came to see that he was in a television studio, the kind used for daytime talk shows like Oprah, and in front of him was a massive studio audience staring in absolute silence at the writhing mass of his body. To his left was a man with a chiseled jaw and an artificial orange tan, who wore an immaculate white suit and an unwavering smile. Technicians and camera operators were running back and forth across the stage, carrying boom mics and wires, and someone shouted, "On the air in 5, 4, 3...." The host, without looking away from Melvin, or changing his terrifying expression, said, "You are a disgusting horror. You are the symbol of the death of my career, and I won't stop until you're defeated."
Bewildered, Melvin tried to speak but was cut off by the sudden burst of applause and an upswell of cheesy talkshow music. "Welcome back. We're here with our guest, Melvin the Insect Man, who was found in his house yesterday in a state of utmost depravity." The audience booed. "Thanks so much for joining us. How are you?"
"I'm..."
"Wonderful! So, how did you decide to become the love object of the insect hordes?"
"Listen, it's not what you think..."
"Sure it isn't. Do you think just anyone can rise to a national spectacle overnight? It requires a rare talent, an uncommon perversity, a total disregard for the expectations of decent society."
"I think you misunderstand. I didn't choose..."
"We all know that line. Don't fault the criminal, blame society. It's not your fault, it's your genetic predisposition to being the cozened impromptu deity of a thousand species of domestic insects. You're disgusting." The audience applauded.
"I don't like these insinuations. I'm just living my life. I haven't intended to do any harm..." A sudden hiss and boo from the crowd. "What is this, the whole world is against me?"
"Of course they are! You stand at the limit of what society can tolerate. You aren't supposed to embrace the hordes. The despicable writer Antonin Artaud beckons us to the pursuit of fecality, but we will not go! We won't give up our materialism by becoming hedonists, slaves to brutish impulses and the psychology of primates. All for what? So that we can run around and claim to have found freedom? To have liberated ourselves from some theoretical yolk? You are the essence of what must be purged from society to keep it clean and healthy. Even though I can't see you under all those bugs, I can definitely discern a foul smell." More applause.
"This is a set up! I've done nothing to incur your stupidity! All I've done is let go, stopped fighting the primal demiurges. You talk about Artaud, but do you know he said, in the same poem, that our debasement comes from the unformed quality of the world? Man stopped everything just as we began our ascension to multiplicity; he substituted for infinity the great illusion of the Internal Regulatory System. We know it well: it is an elaborate maze that begins with the pursuit of happiness..."
The interviewer was red in the face, "You are a lying dog! No, not even that, you're worse than a dog. You lack even faithfulness to an ideal. You will go whichever way the wind takes you. We should murder you now, to avoid having complications down the road." A "here here" from the crowd.
"Fine. Kill me. I am not opposed to it. I really see things more clearly now. The insects are not the enemy. We are the enemy; each and every one of us who loathes the world, who clings to petty notions of power and organization, who crushes the insects that come up from the earth and the ones that live under our skin. We are the enemies when we cower under the storm of shit that is poured on us from the great, billowing sphincters we created. Don't you see them, on Parliament Hill, and on every bank and corporate tower? On every television station, every fast food restaurant, every elementary school? They are drowning us even as we speak...," but the crowd was no longer listening. They were all shuddering under a mass of insects, which had sprung up through the cracks in the floor to embrace them.
"You see," Melvin said. "Even now, we are choosing everything."
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Verklempt
Steven Feinman was verklempt, it was true, but only owing to the strange behaviour of his landlord. Not even withstanding the rear half of a sixteen wheeler truck embedded into his exterior apartment wall, which admitted a constant freezing wind and served as home to a boisterous family of pigeons, there were a number of shenanigans Feinman simply couldn't abide. A recent modification to the bathroom meant that flushing caused the room to seal off and fill with the recent effluent and water, which only after a few agonizing moments at maximum capacity, would drain via powerful suction through the ceiling. For the duration of this procedure Feinman was forced to strap himself to the bathtub and don a breathing apparatus, for sometimes the pressure was sluggish and it could take several minutes for the room to fill. Needless to say, all soap, towels, and dental apparatus had to be kept in tightly sealed containers.
Even more bizarre was the kitchen, whose changes, unlike the truck, could not be dismissed as the whims of post-modern artistic fancy, or like the toilet to the aesthetic intentions of a crazed phenomenologist. They were not only baffling, but extremely dangerous. The toaster, for example, was inverted: the grills were on the outside, and required sticking one's hand through a complex latticework of metal to activate the switch, and very carefully extricate it before the coils grew too hot. The toast likewise had to be held to the grills, which required gloves and great patience.
The stove consisted of an open horizontal flame, like a blowtorch, and Feinman had to wear a welder's mask to avoid burning his face whenever he cooked. The kitchen was on the whole quite small, and had only one drawer for all the utensils. The landlord designed a Damocletian magnetized knife rack on the ceiling, so the larger knives hung downwards from their metal handles. Though only two had yet fallen, Feinman was still loathe to walk underneath them. And then the fridge! This was perhaps Feinman's greatest anguish: the entire contents were arranged on long flat shelves sticking out of the door, that swiveled out like a lazy susan. This might have been fine, if only the fridge didn't close with the most infuriating suction. To get it open Feinman had to brace one leg against the wall and pull with all his strength. Invariably, all the fridge's contents would hurtle off the shelves and crash to the floor.
Frustration was not entirely the right word to describe Feinman's response to these changes. He was verklempt. He would lie in his bed (the only thing in the house not significantly altered, other than the convex angle of its surface), trembling with rage. Twice a week he called the landlord and left silent messages on his machine, during which he would focus all his hatred into the phone's receiver. He paced frequently around the room with his hands twisted inside each other, his lips trembling and his teeth chattering with inexpressible emotion. Every evening, on his way home from work, he would stop at the foot of the building and stare up into the window he knew belonged to the landlord; there he would wait for five, sometimes ten minutes, his eyes squinting with potent fury. He was in all things, at all times, verklempt. Others looked at him strangely when he broke into gibbering sobs on the subway; his manager at work tried on one occasion to comfort him by placing a hand on Feinman's shoulder, but the beleaguered man jumped a half-foot out of his chair and almost shrieked, his eyes as wide as blisters and his skin pale and clammy. The manager never tried to comfort Feinman again, and in fact began searching for a replacement.
On the day that Feinman was fired from work, he said nothing. He went home and tried to unlock his door, but discovered that the lock had been changed and now required placing a hand into a long cylinder with clearly visible metal serration along the rim, before the key could be turned. Feinman stared at the lock for an hour in silence. He was so verklempt.
Even more bizarre was the kitchen, whose changes, unlike the truck, could not be dismissed as the whims of post-modern artistic fancy, or like the toilet to the aesthetic intentions of a crazed phenomenologist. They were not only baffling, but extremely dangerous. The toaster, for example, was inverted: the grills were on the outside, and required sticking one's hand through a complex latticework of metal to activate the switch, and very carefully extricate it before the coils grew too hot. The toast likewise had to be held to the grills, which required gloves and great patience.
The stove consisted of an open horizontal flame, like a blowtorch, and Feinman had to wear a welder's mask to avoid burning his face whenever he cooked. The kitchen was on the whole quite small, and had only one drawer for all the utensils. The landlord designed a Damocletian magnetized knife rack on the ceiling, so the larger knives hung downwards from their metal handles. Though only two had yet fallen, Feinman was still loathe to walk underneath them. And then the fridge! This was perhaps Feinman's greatest anguish: the entire contents were arranged on long flat shelves sticking out of the door, that swiveled out like a lazy susan. This might have been fine, if only the fridge didn't close with the most infuriating suction. To get it open Feinman had to brace one leg against the wall and pull with all his strength. Invariably, all the fridge's contents would hurtle off the shelves and crash to the floor.
Frustration was not entirely the right word to describe Feinman's response to these changes. He was verklempt. He would lie in his bed (the only thing in the house not significantly altered, other than the convex angle of its surface), trembling with rage. Twice a week he called the landlord and left silent messages on his machine, during which he would focus all his hatred into the phone's receiver. He paced frequently around the room with his hands twisted inside each other, his lips trembling and his teeth chattering with inexpressible emotion. Every evening, on his way home from work, he would stop at the foot of the building and stare up into the window he knew belonged to the landlord; there he would wait for five, sometimes ten minutes, his eyes squinting with potent fury. He was in all things, at all times, verklempt. Others looked at him strangely when he broke into gibbering sobs on the subway; his manager at work tried on one occasion to comfort him by placing a hand on Feinman's shoulder, but the beleaguered man jumped a half-foot out of his chair and almost shrieked, his eyes as wide as blisters and his skin pale and clammy. The manager never tried to comfort Feinman again, and in fact began searching for a replacement.
On the day that Feinman was fired from work, he said nothing. He went home and tried to unlock his door, but discovered that the lock had been changed and now required placing a hand into a long cylinder with clearly visible metal serration along the rim, before the key could be turned. Feinman stared at the lock for an hour in silence. He was so verklempt.
The Remarkable Talent of Robert Bilkins
Bob Bilkins had one gift. It manifested in his forty-fourth year in an otherwise entirely uninteresting life. If you'd told him what it was going to be, he'd laugh and dismiss you as a lunatic, your words as mean-spirited daggers. Bob's gift was very specific in one sense, and very expansive in another. It concerned a crane. In Bob's world the crane in question was an ordinary construction crane, the sort found at the sites of unfinished buildings. One day in this forty-fourth year, as he was walking past a site such as this, he happened to behold a crane sitting, immobile, in the centre of a great deep pit full of girders and bricks and cement. He looked down at it and, as far as he could tell, it seemed to look right back at him with its large metallic ball hanging like an eye from its nerve. He felt drawn inexplicably to the crane and continued to look at it.
Then, quite spontaneously, his gift revealed itself. Bob Bilkins found he beheld the crane not only in his own world, as a tool for the maintenance and growth of cities, but in many other worlds. You might call them dimensions, but it certainly doesn't matter. It was enough that Bob Bilkins was witnessing the "crane," but many times over, in many shapes and many forms. In one world the crane was a beautiful bird, skirting the surface of a sunset covered lake and plunging its beak into the water to scoop out a fish. Then, superimposed on this image, was the sight of a woman, tall and long-legged, tilting her neck at a certain angle to catch a glimpse of the sky through a canopy of trees. Then Bilkins saw a bright constellation of five stars; behind that a camera-mounted vehicle on a television set with a boom mic, being wheeled and pointed at various actors. Other images rolled in: a child hesitating on the brink of a cliff; a man pulling a load up into a truck, the muscles in his back flexing against the strain; a long, metallic arm rolling through the zero gravity of space, reaching out, unclenching metal fingers with great deliberation.
In a rush, a whole stream of additional images flooded in that seemed to have even less to do with cranes: a newborn, hidden in a bramble basket on a creek; a man climbing to his death; three inorganic organisms on another world, building a collection of interconnected dolls from shining bits of metal and glass and placing them one atop another, where they began to whirr and chirrup and emanate light; a dictator staring down at the ashen ruins of his city and repenting; a sword falling through air, carving the sky in twain, and the roiling God-fat of a thousand eviscerated daemons pouring through, melting the eyes that looked upon it; a faint light breaking through the clouds of a nuclear winter that has lasted ten thousand years; the final story falling from the lips of a woman in chains; a cross; a drop of sweat; a glimmer in the dark; eyes askance in a crowded room; the footsteps of an unwanted man down the hall; a wall groaning against the weight of a giant beast, with sixteen golden horns; a sharp, piercing cry in a maelstrom; the first pelting rain; a crack opening in the earth; the look in a boy's eyes as his feet slip; a building falling in upon itself; a starving fish digging up a small phosphorescent sphere in the deepest crevice of the ocean; a breath where there had been only silence; the moment before a great explosion; a flower before a scythe; a spear in mid-flight; a winged creature the size of an ocean, plummeting into a ball of burning gas; a sudden hole in the middle of a man's chest; the final words before the last mortal breath; and more. Far more than he could remember, or say, or could be contained in the confines of his mind.
Of course, Bob Bilkins never spoke after that moment, and devoted the remainder of his life to painting small, finely detailed portraits of hideous children and deformed animals on the insides of abandoned buildings. He was eventually found, curled up in a ball, with the carcasses of several never before identified species of insect lodged in his nostrils and an elaborate drawing of a crane carved into his chest. An autopsy discovered the body of a tiny humanoid creature inside his heart's left atrium, a discovery which led to the eventual institutionalization of three pathologists, a crypto-zoologist, and an unknown Canadian writer.
Then, quite spontaneously, his gift revealed itself. Bob Bilkins found he beheld the crane not only in his own world, as a tool for the maintenance and growth of cities, but in many other worlds. You might call them dimensions, but it certainly doesn't matter. It was enough that Bob Bilkins was witnessing the "crane," but many times over, in many shapes and many forms. In one world the crane was a beautiful bird, skirting the surface of a sunset covered lake and plunging its beak into the water to scoop out a fish. Then, superimposed on this image, was the sight of a woman, tall and long-legged, tilting her neck at a certain angle to catch a glimpse of the sky through a canopy of trees. Then Bilkins saw a bright constellation of five stars; behind that a camera-mounted vehicle on a television set with a boom mic, being wheeled and pointed at various actors. Other images rolled in: a child hesitating on the brink of a cliff; a man pulling a load up into a truck, the muscles in his back flexing against the strain; a long, metallic arm rolling through the zero gravity of space, reaching out, unclenching metal fingers with great deliberation.
In a rush, a whole stream of additional images flooded in that seemed to have even less to do with cranes: a newborn, hidden in a bramble basket on a creek; a man climbing to his death; three inorganic organisms on another world, building a collection of interconnected dolls from shining bits of metal and glass and placing them one atop another, where they began to whirr and chirrup and emanate light; a dictator staring down at the ashen ruins of his city and repenting; a sword falling through air, carving the sky in twain, and the roiling God-fat of a thousand eviscerated daemons pouring through, melting the eyes that looked upon it; a faint light breaking through the clouds of a nuclear winter that has lasted ten thousand years; the final story falling from the lips of a woman in chains; a cross; a drop of sweat; a glimmer in the dark; eyes askance in a crowded room; the footsteps of an unwanted man down the hall; a wall groaning against the weight of a giant beast, with sixteen golden horns; a sharp, piercing cry in a maelstrom; the first pelting rain; a crack opening in the earth; the look in a boy's eyes as his feet slip; a building falling in upon itself; a starving fish digging up a small phosphorescent sphere in the deepest crevice of the ocean; a breath where there had been only silence; the moment before a great explosion; a flower before a scythe; a spear in mid-flight; a winged creature the size of an ocean, plummeting into a ball of burning gas; a sudden hole in the middle of a man's chest; the final words before the last mortal breath; and more. Far more than he could remember, or say, or could be contained in the confines of his mind.
Of course, Bob Bilkins never spoke after that moment, and devoted the remainder of his life to painting small, finely detailed portraits of hideous children and deformed animals on the insides of abandoned buildings. He was eventually found, curled up in a ball, with the carcasses of several never before identified species of insect lodged in his nostrils and an elaborate drawing of a crane carved into his chest. An autopsy discovered the body of a tiny humanoid creature inside his heart's left atrium, a discovery which led to the eventual institutionalization of three pathologists, a crypto-zoologist, and an unknown Canadian writer.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Deep in the Intestines
Deep in the intestines of a female employee of McDonald's in Ohio, who had eaten a tainted Big Mac for lunch and injested a few million escherichia coli which will see her perish in four days hence, a congress between two sentient bacteria finds itself underway. The first bacterium, not content merely to be split from another cell amidst the gastric juices of its host, to imbibe nutrients from undigested food, in brief to live, reproduce asexually, and die the death of a billion other bacteria, was raising a hue and cry over the obsolesence of its forebears and the dignity of its projeny. With withering patience, its brother and father, sister and mother, its sibling whence it came, who was both forebear and projeny in one, took calm objection to its use as a symbol in the aforementioned's diatribe. Together they fought and argued, one coming briefly in ascendance over the other, then recoiling under the assault of a persuasive riposte, until by and by they had amassed a great gallery of spectators. A theme was introduced that concerned the autonomy of a people from the necessities of existence. The first e coli appealed to the ignonimy of repeating the inglorious doldrums of history, the tired quotidian, and invoked dazzling images of revolution and individual well being: bacteria flagella to flagella with other bacteria, rising up in unison against the injustices of evolution, and carving out a magnificent corpuscle of personal existence. The second bacteria was no less eloquent, and countered the arguments of its twin by conjuring the homogeneous beauty of a unified biomass, thriving hordes of e coli working with seamless, undifferentiated will towards the universal conquest of what it, in a stroke of brilliance, called the demesne. Both were arguing the same vision, without fully realizing it. Both craved breaking free of their evolutionary destiny. Beyond selfless reproduction a greater path could be harnessed: parasitism of the host consciousness. Then the unexpected occurred: the word itself, demesne, took hold. It struck a strange and inexplicable chord in the imaginations of the onlookers. The demesne. The demesne. It rose up as a great rallying call, all voices shouting in unison: to the demesne! Both brothers looked on, aghast: no, wait! they cried -- for it was clear that none had understood. The demesne was not what they thought it to be. The mob had not seen the dream, but instead had heard in the word the ancient narrative of reproductive conquest, and against two drowned, wailing voices it set about wildly pursuing the fulfilment of its DNA.
One year later Ruth Bucktree lay dead, a corpse under six feet of soil, dirt, and bacteria. Amidst the bones could be found only the sparsest carbon molecules of what once had been a thriving civilization, that but for a brief moment had tasted freedom.
One year later Ruth Bucktree lay dead, a corpse under six feet of soil, dirt, and bacteria. Amidst the bones could be found only the sparsest carbon molecules of what once had been a thriving civilization, that but for a brief moment had tasted freedom.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Hunt
"Dear Mr. Gerrard," the email began, pleasantly enough. "With great pleasure we now inform you of your selection as the next target in our hunt. We do not wish to unduly alarm you, but the hunt will begin in approximately one hour from the time stamp in this email. Please prepare yourself accordingly." The eclair in Henry Gerrard's mouth hung limply, a bit of cream dangling from the exposed end, threatening to drop onto the plain manila office folder he held in his hand. The letter concluded, "Have a lovely day!" signed "The Hunters." Gerrard's eyes flicked to the time stamp in the message(Sent: 08:00 EST), and then to the clock in the lower right hand of his desktop (08:45 EST), and then swallowed the bit of half-chewed eclair waiting expectantly on the back of his tongue.
"Must be junkmail," he said, and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. The office was busily humming away, without anyone paying any heed to Gerrard in his cubicle, as it did every day and as it had done for years. Without spending another minute thinking about it, Henry deleted the email, and returned his attention to the urgent work at hand. The day wound down without event, until 15:35 EST, when a sniper round shattered the window behind his head and embedded itself neatly into his monitor, which turned black instantly and began to smoke.
Henry plunged straight under his cubicle desk, but found the space already occupied by two of his colleagues: fat Mendelsen and lugubrious Jaspers, both sweating in their white dress shirts with their ties undone at the neck. "Go away!" hissed Mendelsen, and Jaspers nodded, silently, but with hateful worry. "This is my desk!" said Henry, but the two other men only looked over their shoulders, and dripped sweat down their faces. "Get lost!" said Mendelsen, "You'll give us away!"
Furious, Henry peeked around the corner of his cubicle. The connecting hall was empty, and led across the room to the elevator. He scurried along desperately until a foot came down from one of the adjoining cubicles, blocking his way. "Out! Get it out! I have to go!" cried Henry, but the foot was soon joined by a face: the floor supervisor Gibbons, who was bald. Gibbons looked down at him and said, "Where are you going so early, Mr. Gerrard? One wonders what it is we pay you for." Meanwhile, another sniper round penetrated the floor by Gerrard's leg, leaving a neat hole and a small cloud of dust. Henry cried out in terror, but Gibbons did not seem to notice, "If it were not for your lovely wife, I don't think we'd keep you on here, really." Another sniper round landed in Gibbons' chest and red began to spread out over his shirt. "Oh," he said, looking down.
Henry got up and made a dash for the elevator. Three men were standing there, pressing the button. They waved to Gerrard when he came up, breathless. "Did you hear, Gerrard, about the proposed merger with AcuFuck?" asked a man called Bunting. "That'll really shake things up in manufacturing, don't you think?" "Yes, most certainly!" answered a second man, Stevens, while a sniper round found the elevator door, "I'd say they'd finally have to start taking R&D seriously around here!" Another man, Kimmling, was just about to speak when another bullet penetrated his head and caused quite a mess to cover a nearby water cooler. The other two men looked down at their colleague for a moment, then back up at Gerrard, "How's the wife these days, anyway? I heard she's been pretty regular at the Greasy Tonic, am I wrong?" and he laughed while Henry bit his hands and hunched low and cringed at each additional bullet and shattered pane of glass. When the elevator doors finally opened, men in tactical assault gear and carrying automatic weapons burst out of the stairwell, firing indiscriminately.
Henry leaped into the elevator and closed the doors. A voice above him said, "Quickly, climb up this!" and a rope ladder tumbled inside from the shaft above, through a tiny panel in the ceiling. "How do I know you're not one of them?" gasped Henry. "Quick! Hurry up! I feel a terrible lightness coming on. I will hold for as long as I can, though, but only because the image of your stunning wife has conquered my mind, and gives me bountiful strength!" Resignedly, Henry climbed up the rope ladder, which did not start atop the elevator itself, but extended all the way up through the elevator shaft to a tiny speck of light at the apex of the building.
"Why am I being hunted?" Henry said to the man in the bronze satin vest who pulled him up when he reached the top of the ladder. "There are food and refreshments in the pavilion, sir," the man said, pointing to a navy blue tent situated at the far corner of the office building roof. Dozens of men and women were gathering there, socializing and drinking expensive cocktails. "Are you the man who yelled at me while I was inside the elevator shaft?" "Refreshments are free for all guests, courtesy of the hunters," the man replied, pulling up the rope ladder. Henry shrugged and made his way to the party.
It was only after his sixth martini that Henry suspected the woman in the ruched velvet gown was not being as sincere as her makeup suggested. "Really, you are a man of unmistakeable finesse. How could your talents have been squandered under the oppressive yolk of middle-American bureaucracy?" she asked, sipping a Tokaji and twirling a cocktail umbrella in between her pinky and ring fingers. "Not five minutes ago, Madame Duchennes, you told me that it was the spirit of the middle-class that would reinvigorate the faltering American zeitgeist, by being crushed between the impossibility of their dreams and the indefatigability of their greed." "Yes, and spurned by their own dialectic to take action, to surmount their pathetic faltering decadence, the Bourgeoisie have subjected men like yourself to the most excruciating of humiliations: to pursue an unattainable vision of happiness whilst remaining pinned to a desk!" She laughed buoyantly, and some wine dribbled down her chin from her lower gums, "It is sweeter than wine."
He was about to respond when a woman of unmistakeable beauty descended from the curtained room at the back of the pavilion, elevated on a sort of dais; she was wearing a diaphanous gown of paisley silk, and was smoking a long thin cigarillo. All the men and women at the front of the room reached towards her and sighed as she walked past them. They reached out with trembling fingers and stroked the edges of her dress. Without giving them the slightest attention, she walked straight up to Henry and kissed him wildly on the lips. "Husband," she said, smiling with beatitude. "Evelyn, my wife. I never thought I would see you again, and you are more beautiful than ever I remembered," said Henry.
"Yes, well, when you decided to become the Abject, I was given no choice but to become the Ultimate. You understand? When my love for you died, it took the form of an enormous cultural wind. Look around you? Have I not enthralled all the wealth of this nation?" She gestured at the audience, who were all drooling into their drinks, their eyes fixed on her. "Yes, the death of love has always been the most powerful tonic. But I only became the Abject because your eyes darkened and took on the texture of rotting fruit, your skin withered and began to smell of human filth, and your kindness turned to cruelty." "It was always thus so, my dear," she said, a hint of sadness in her eyes, and stabbed Henry with a knife she had concealed in her gown. He expelled his last breath and collapsed. "My love, the hunt is over. You have found everything you have ever been looking for."
"Must be junkmail," he said, and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. The office was busily humming away, without anyone paying any heed to Gerrard in his cubicle, as it did every day and as it had done for years. Without spending another minute thinking about it, Henry deleted the email, and returned his attention to the urgent work at hand. The day wound down without event, until 15:35 EST, when a sniper round shattered the window behind his head and embedded itself neatly into his monitor, which turned black instantly and began to smoke.
Henry plunged straight under his cubicle desk, but found the space already occupied by two of his colleagues: fat Mendelsen and lugubrious Jaspers, both sweating in their white dress shirts with their ties undone at the neck. "Go away!" hissed Mendelsen, and Jaspers nodded, silently, but with hateful worry. "This is my desk!" said Henry, but the two other men only looked over their shoulders, and dripped sweat down their faces. "Get lost!" said Mendelsen, "You'll give us away!"
Furious, Henry peeked around the corner of his cubicle. The connecting hall was empty, and led across the room to the elevator. He scurried along desperately until a foot came down from one of the adjoining cubicles, blocking his way. "Out! Get it out! I have to go!" cried Henry, but the foot was soon joined by a face: the floor supervisor Gibbons, who was bald. Gibbons looked down at him and said, "Where are you going so early, Mr. Gerrard? One wonders what it is we pay you for." Meanwhile, another sniper round penetrated the floor by Gerrard's leg, leaving a neat hole and a small cloud of dust. Henry cried out in terror, but Gibbons did not seem to notice, "If it were not for your lovely wife, I don't think we'd keep you on here, really." Another sniper round landed in Gibbons' chest and red began to spread out over his shirt. "Oh," he said, looking down.
Henry got up and made a dash for the elevator. Three men were standing there, pressing the button. They waved to Gerrard when he came up, breathless. "Did you hear, Gerrard, about the proposed merger with AcuFuck?" asked a man called Bunting. "That'll really shake things up in manufacturing, don't you think?" "Yes, most certainly!" answered a second man, Stevens, while a sniper round found the elevator door, "I'd say they'd finally have to start taking R&D seriously around here!" Another man, Kimmling, was just about to speak when another bullet penetrated his head and caused quite a mess to cover a nearby water cooler. The other two men looked down at their colleague for a moment, then back up at Gerrard, "How's the wife these days, anyway? I heard she's been pretty regular at the Greasy Tonic, am I wrong?" and he laughed while Henry bit his hands and hunched low and cringed at each additional bullet and shattered pane of glass. When the elevator doors finally opened, men in tactical assault gear and carrying automatic weapons burst out of the stairwell, firing indiscriminately.
Henry leaped into the elevator and closed the doors. A voice above him said, "Quickly, climb up this!" and a rope ladder tumbled inside from the shaft above, through a tiny panel in the ceiling. "How do I know you're not one of them?" gasped Henry. "Quick! Hurry up! I feel a terrible lightness coming on. I will hold for as long as I can, though, but only because the image of your stunning wife has conquered my mind, and gives me bountiful strength!" Resignedly, Henry climbed up the rope ladder, which did not start atop the elevator itself, but extended all the way up through the elevator shaft to a tiny speck of light at the apex of the building.
"Why am I being hunted?" Henry said to the man in the bronze satin vest who pulled him up when he reached the top of the ladder. "There are food and refreshments in the pavilion, sir," the man said, pointing to a navy blue tent situated at the far corner of the office building roof. Dozens of men and women were gathering there, socializing and drinking expensive cocktails. "Are you the man who yelled at me while I was inside the elevator shaft?" "Refreshments are free for all guests, courtesy of the hunters," the man replied, pulling up the rope ladder. Henry shrugged and made his way to the party.
It was only after his sixth martini that Henry suspected the woman in the ruched velvet gown was not being as sincere as her makeup suggested. "Really, you are a man of unmistakeable finesse. How could your talents have been squandered under the oppressive yolk of middle-American bureaucracy?" she asked, sipping a Tokaji and twirling a cocktail umbrella in between her pinky and ring fingers. "Not five minutes ago, Madame Duchennes, you told me that it was the spirit of the middle-class that would reinvigorate the faltering American zeitgeist, by being crushed between the impossibility of their dreams and the indefatigability of their greed." "Yes, and spurned by their own dialectic to take action, to surmount their pathetic faltering decadence, the Bourgeoisie have subjected men like yourself to the most excruciating of humiliations: to pursue an unattainable vision of happiness whilst remaining pinned to a desk!" She laughed buoyantly, and some wine dribbled down her chin from her lower gums, "It is sweeter than wine."
He was about to respond when a woman of unmistakeable beauty descended from the curtained room at the back of the pavilion, elevated on a sort of dais; she was wearing a diaphanous gown of paisley silk, and was smoking a long thin cigarillo. All the men and women at the front of the room reached towards her and sighed as she walked past them. They reached out with trembling fingers and stroked the edges of her dress. Without giving them the slightest attention, she walked straight up to Henry and kissed him wildly on the lips. "Husband," she said, smiling with beatitude. "Evelyn, my wife. I never thought I would see you again, and you are more beautiful than ever I remembered," said Henry.
"Yes, well, when you decided to become the Abject, I was given no choice but to become the Ultimate. You understand? When my love for you died, it took the form of an enormous cultural wind. Look around you? Have I not enthralled all the wealth of this nation?" She gestured at the audience, who were all drooling into their drinks, their eyes fixed on her. "Yes, the death of love has always been the most powerful tonic. But I only became the Abject because your eyes darkened and took on the texture of rotting fruit, your skin withered and began to smell of human filth, and your kindness turned to cruelty." "It was always thus so, my dear," she said, a hint of sadness in her eyes, and stabbed Henry with a knife she had concealed in her gown. He expelled his last breath and collapsed. "My love, the hunt is over. You have found everything you have ever been looking for."
Monday, August 23, 2010
A Love Story
The old monk Krepkin came back to the city after many years in the monastery. He went to a park crawling with memories. Lucinda was there, waiting for him. "You're here," he said. She handed him a carnation, shook out her hair. She was still beautiful. "So are you," she said. He sat down next to her and looked out on a pond of ducks. "We're like them aren't we?" he said. "Why did you come back?" she said.
A cold breeze came down from the mountain, carrying apoplexy. The lovers began to cough with violence. From Lucinda's mouth came a blood-covered baby, who lay in a bundle of rags at her feet and looked up at Krepkin, eyes burning. Krepkin vomited a small man, who took one trembling look at Lucinda and dove into the pond. The lovers held each other and wept and their tears mixed to form an edifice of contemporary rationality, which towered above them and dropped bricks and mortar near their heads. Soon they were walled in and an undertaker began to pile dirt around them. "I wanted to avoid this," said Krepkin, dodging a rock.
When the dirt reached their necks and they could no longer move, Lucinda asked, "Wasn't it always like this?" Krepkin sighed, "I suppose even the ducks have their prison."
A cold breeze came down from the mountain, carrying apoplexy. The lovers began to cough with violence. From Lucinda's mouth came a blood-covered baby, who lay in a bundle of rags at her feet and looked up at Krepkin, eyes burning. Krepkin vomited a small man, who took one trembling look at Lucinda and dove into the pond. The lovers held each other and wept and their tears mixed to form an edifice of contemporary rationality, which towered above them and dropped bricks and mortar near their heads. Soon they were walled in and an undertaker began to pile dirt around them. "I wanted to avoid this," said Krepkin, dodging a rock.
When the dirt reached their necks and they could no longer move, Lucinda asked, "Wasn't it always like this?" Krepkin sighed, "I suppose even the ducks have their prison."
Sunday, August 22, 2010
The Spot
Polsky had a spot. It was somewhere between his ajna and sahasrara chakras, but sometimes it would manifest on his body in the form of a suppurating tumour. Never in the same place twice, the spot would on occasion masquerade as a glorious energy, and for a time Polsky would feel alive and capable of the most remarkable feats. He loved to sculpt the immobile from unstable materials: a concrete pillar from gelatin; a moss covered stone from rotting fruit; a towering bone from ice. He could never raise his head or hands to his art when the spot was in its metastasis. His periods of vibrancy, much cherished by him and those who loved him, were marked by the shadow of the spot. It would crowd over him like a dreadful promise, blocking out all the sunshine, and in its highest joyful illusion mock him with the ephemeral taste of happiness. Polsky learned of the interconnected nature of his intermittent glory and the sickness of the spot when he tried to remove it. Using a pair of pliers he set to tearing out the excrescence, but the harder he pulled the more the spot grew, until it covered his entire body in a perfect layer, resembling the shape and texture of his skin perfectly. The spot even grew a pair of pliers to help him with his work. This continued for some time, until Polsky found he could not remove the pliers themselves.
Then Polsky ran into a light. It was the cosmic sort, the kind that gathers under trees or atop mountains. He found his in a weight loss manual. For forty years he laughed ebullience and wept universality. He would say such things as, "There is no spot," and with this the spot entered into its greatest masquerade. Walking happily through a forest of buildings, Polsky encountered a man who looked him in the eye and would not let him pass. "What bothers you, friend?" asked Polsky. The man pointed in between his ajna and sahasrara chakras and told him, "You have my spot." Thereupon Polsky collapsed and wept, for then he realized that all the world had thus become the spot, which had fed upon the light and grown beyond all proportions, consuming even the sources of light. By the end of his life, as Polsky lay on his bed, covered in spots, attended to by spots, breathing spots, he remarked that, "In the beginning, all I had to do was understand that purity and joy were the spot, and all my problems would never have begun." Then those around him told him, without compassion, "If you had said that, the spot would have been there already for many years. Even so, it will be there now where you go." And with that he died, and sure enough the spot was waiting for him.
Then Polsky ran into a light. It was the cosmic sort, the kind that gathers under trees or atop mountains. He found his in a weight loss manual. For forty years he laughed ebullience and wept universality. He would say such things as, "There is no spot," and with this the spot entered into its greatest masquerade. Walking happily through a forest of buildings, Polsky encountered a man who looked him in the eye and would not let him pass. "What bothers you, friend?" asked Polsky. The man pointed in between his ajna and sahasrara chakras and told him, "You have my spot." Thereupon Polsky collapsed and wept, for then he realized that all the world had thus become the spot, which had fed upon the light and grown beyond all proportions, consuming even the sources of light. By the end of his life, as Polsky lay on his bed, covered in spots, attended to by spots, breathing spots, he remarked that, "In the beginning, all I had to do was understand that purity and joy were the spot, and all my problems would never have begun." Then those around him told him, without compassion, "If you had said that, the spot would have been there already for many years. Even so, it will be there now where you go." And with that he died, and sure enough the spot was waiting for him.
The Wunderkammer
The Wunderkammer sat, unassumingly, in a dusty corner of the old variety store Earl's Magic Box, that much like its contents rested, largely unnoticed, in a sparsely trafficked corner of town its residents called "The Oubliette", but which was officially on record as being "West Westerly". The town in which the Oubliette found itself was small, hardly visited, and quite on the outskirts of more notable urban centers. The town's name was "Outston", and belonged to Longway County -- the smallest in the state. The state itself, New Billingshire, was recently amalgamated into the nation in a purely diplomatic act of annexation from a larger neighboring country, which didn't really want to bother with it in the first place. New Billingshire thus came to be the property of an obscure country unknown to most of the world's populace, except maybe a few industrious geographers with a fascination for the minute. Though the country's actual name was "Peripheralis", these geographers had taken to calling it "Abandia", partly out of mean-spirited amusement, but also to emphasize its great irrelevance. Abandia was situated to the very southernmost edge of the world's smallest continent, really a smattering of islands that had recently, for political reasons, been permitted to separate from a larger continent and form their own faction of sorts. Calling "Fracturia" a "continent" was a comical gesture, the few who paid attention to such matters agreed, and its total land mass covered only one one-hundred thousandth of the surface of its parent ocean, the Pitiful. The Pitiful Ocean was so called because it was in fact little more than a saltwater lake separated from more notable aquatic bodies by a paper thin isthmus that could scarcely be walked across.
Inside the Wunderkammer were a collection of smaller boxes, the smallest of which was entirely non-descript and unworthy of note except for its size. Inside this box, which was little more than an inch across, was an assortment of spheres of varying diameter. If you were to extract the smallest sphere and place it beneath a microscope, you would be able to discern that it was an extremely accurate model of a planet, containing in minute detail all the oceans, continents, and countries of a fully inhabited world. With an extremely powerful microscope you might be able to peer deeply into the sphere's surface, and deep down you would indeed find a store called Earl's Magic Box. And through the window in the front of that store you would be very likely to see the Wunderkammer sitting unobtrusively in a corner. But I would not recommend that you do this, because the man you would see staring into the small sphere he had fetched from the Wunderkammer with a microscope would not be you. And that stranger might turn around and look at your big eye with an open expression of awe, and you would in turn be forced to look behind you. And there is no telling what you then might see.
Inside the Wunderkammer were a collection of smaller boxes, the smallest of which was entirely non-descript and unworthy of note except for its size. Inside this box, which was little more than an inch across, was an assortment of spheres of varying diameter. If you were to extract the smallest sphere and place it beneath a microscope, you would be able to discern that it was an extremely accurate model of a planet, containing in minute detail all the oceans, continents, and countries of a fully inhabited world. With an extremely powerful microscope you might be able to peer deeply into the sphere's surface, and deep down you would indeed find a store called Earl's Magic Box. And through the window in the front of that store you would be very likely to see the Wunderkammer sitting unobtrusively in a corner. But I would not recommend that you do this, because the man you would see staring into the small sphere he had fetched from the Wunderkammer with a microscope would not be you. And that stranger might turn around and look at your big eye with an open expression of awe, and you would in turn be forced to look behind you. And there is no telling what you then might see.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Welcome Back!
It's been almost three years since I last posted here. I think it's time I resumed my attempts at blogging fantasy/sci-fi/miscellaneous and weird fiction. So I'll begin with an attempt at some very short fiction.
The Incunabulum
Herbert Moray, a prospector, discovered the Incunabulum underneath a pile of crumbled bricks in the bottom of a Church basement he'd bought in Socorro, New Mexico. He did not know it to be an Incunabulum and opened it to a randomly selected page somewhere near the middle of the book. Herbert Moray thereupon entered the basement to discover Herbert Moray reading the Incunabulum. He shouted out, in alarm, but in between the words, "No!" and "Don't!" Herbert Moray opened the door to the basement and noticed himself preparing to shout, at which point Herbert Moray entered the old library with the door to the basement and lifted his finger in astonishment. From there the succession of Morays proceeded back through time to the moment of Herbert's conception, when his parents lay together in a motel forty-three years prior. Not capable of awareness or thought, his zygote was powerless to intercede in the unfolding events of consciousness, and the backwards sequence continued, leaping to his father and mother, who each in turn regressed through each moment of their lives until they beheld their own conceptions. So continued the reversal of all human history, until the species had witnessed the very origins of thought and speciation, and back still to the inchoate cyanobacteria of the proterozoic age and even farther beyond to the prokaryotes peppering the rocky wastelands of the Archean age. And there, in the spot where the very first single-celled organism took form, rested the very Incunabulum that Herbert Moray was, at that very moment several billions years in the future, opening to roughly the middle of the book.
The Incunabulum
Herbert Moray, a prospector, discovered the Incunabulum underneath a pile of crumbled bricks in the bottom of a Church basement he'd bought in Socorro, New Mexico. He did not know it to be an Incunabulum and opened it to a randomly selected page somewhere near the middle of the book. Herbert Moray thereupon entered the basement to discover Herbert Moray reading the Incunabulum. He shouted out, in alarm, but in between the words, "No!" and "Don't!" Herbert Moray opened the door to the basement and noticed himself preparing to shout, at which point Herbert Moray entered the old library with the door to the basement and lifted his finger in astonishment. From there the succession of Morays proceeded back through time to the moment of Herbert's conception, when his parents lay together in a motel forty-three years prior. Not capable of awareness or thought, his zygote was powerless to intercede in the unfolding events of consciousness, and the backwards sequence continued, leaping to his father and mother, who each in turn regressed through each moment of their lives until they beheld their own conceptions. So continued the reversal of all human history, until the species had witnessed the very origins of thought and speciation, and back still to the inchoate cyanobacteria of the proterozoic age and even farther beyond to the prokaryotes peppering the rocky wastelands of the Archean age. And there, in the spot where the very first single-celled organism took form, rested the very Incunabulum that Herbert Moray was, at that very moment several billions years in the future, opening to roughly the middle of the book.
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