Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah, Vol. 2 (Director's Glut)

GIGANTOMACHIA

Oct 04, 2024

A drawing by Piranesi of a fantastical crossroads stuffed with monumental works of art and architecture, overload by colorful psychedelic letters that say "ALMOST" — *ALMOST: Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah*

14 – NOLI ME TANGERE, MY LOVE

Right, so, like, before we sink back into the story, I have to ask you a favor. Dear, dearer, dearest reader, I would be just so grateful—picture me wagging my tail, hopping around and mentally subscribing you to the A-tier of my Christmas Card list—I mean I would be ecstatic, unstinting with love and affection, if you could um just stand up and accompany me outside for a sec. That’s all: Let’s shut my laptop, let’s turn with a sigh from my makeshift desk on straw-strewn wood, and, keeping our shoulders drawn so we don’t knock over the teetering stacks of tomes, let’s link elbows and step onto my sixth-story roof. There’s something we need to discuss—but first, I’d like to offer you some refreshments. Coffee? That’s a maculate splash of hot darkness, bitter and strong like life too early in the morning, like an onyx dissolved. Or would you prefer some twining herby tea to blossom along the enchanted canals of your nostrils? Here, take this flakey cakey pastry rubied with gelatinized strawberries, and then sit yourself down on that plush crimson armchair beneath the hanging spider-plant and the many-spiked cyclops-skull altar to Nothing.

And please, let’s not stare too much at the sky, it’ll just distract us from this radically awkward conversation we absolutely must have—but sure, also I admit that up here our god’s-eye view is quite distracting: how below us the sunken, decadent city, its glass crenellations spiraling out from our sumptuous epicenter, is a tripolar plaid of moods: how some squares fester like carcasses too rotten for vultures, others are golden and blessed as pie lattices, still others are foggy blue-white as deep freeze and populated by upright ants. 2024 has been a rough year. Basically everything is on fire, in flames vermilion, cerulean or emerald, soft flames plum, mango-yellow or milk-blue… though I guess it’s true sometimes I can’t tell hallucination from lucination, delusion from lusion, reality from ality. There, past the city’s outer limits—massive trash behemoths, plate-armored with billboards, grind through garbage dumps in which entire civilizations are rotting away, no? And on that liminal lake’s far shore, I can see the water congealing, so thick with microplastics that you could sprint over its surface, theoretically, at least if you were wearing the right sneakers sold by the right messiah-musician. Also hark: distantly above us, those oblong glimmers are bug-eyed satellites that can see everything we’re doing, they are recording me gesticulating on this rooftop, pacing up and down beneath pergolas and espaliers, pushing up my large discoid glasses and trying my utmost to broach an embarrassing topic—and with every sentence I speak, the satellites’ software personalizes still further the ads in my bathroom mirror. Hush hush, I know: the machine has eaten everything, and now our beautiful world is coming to a close. Foods have already begun to disappear from our stores, there are only about ten species of animal left in the “wild,” and even apart from the warring world of sore worries, I, in my mid-thirties, have caught the first distant scents of my grave, which I dig out helplessly with every spoon I lift to my lips. Each descending disaster just reminds me more: I need to talk to you now. We don’t have much time, and I need to get it right.

Reader dearie, this is hard to say, but… but I suppose I am sorry. Yup, very very very sorry. Okay? Yes, it seems crazy that I spent all last volume arguing with you. Even as I painstakingly, with romping pomp and disrobing probity, narrated my black-magisterial emergence into this cursed existence, I unwitly saw fit to fight you at every point, accused you of salty assault, behaved as if you sourpussly suspected every syllable I pattered… but you weren’t hostile, were you? I was wrong! Right? After all, you are still here, hovering over the second volume, jiving on my roof with me in this moving moment from the center of both our lives—and your present presence can have only one meaning, just one sole single interpretation: you love me.

Shh, it’s awright: I am fully aware how much you adore me. You just cannot get enough! Every razz that I matazz dances into your ears, so light and so heavy, imposing a cloying smile upon your slewed lips, skewing your gruesome features into hobgoblinoid glee aromaed with vulgar amour. And after you’ve finished my book—once the last horripilating echoes of my boom-ooming voice fade away away away—you will set off restless and balloon-headed, flinging your limbs down the knotted streets of your godforsaken town, repeating aloud your favorite of my frontflipping phrases and chuckling, grateful to the point of tears that I manipulated grammar for your marveling amusement. Your slackly wacky cheeks sheening with liquefied joy, you will thank the universe that you read something so magical and raw and sad and ecstatic and free and playful and more than a bit demented and even sometimes difficult and hard to bear, this art that hides thorns and traps inside its kisses, that charges around looking for an exit, that cuts open colors and buries you in a hail of prisms.

You will shudder. Looking at a sky whose stars jitter like the gold laser-sights of sniper seraphim, you will wonder whether there maybe is a God, since what else could have produced the artist to produce this book that is less a stream of meanings than an Axis Mundi, an Yggdrasil of image? Shake your head in wonder. You don’t know, but you can’t sit still with these thrills. Later, lying in a bed whose blankets have softened into fairyland moss, you will toss and burn, full of fever and rainbow; then the next day, you will proselytize to your friends and family about the many health benefits of reading my miraculous work. You will announce that in art you crave barbed flamboyance—it scrapes you clean. Leaping up at the kitchen table, knocking your chair back and pointing a finger at your cowering grandmother who just does not want to pony up the measly few bucks for a copy of this all-healing book, you will screech: “Don’t you see, Grandma? A grain of salt sweetens sugar! A smattering of terror tempers sentiment! Freedom must bleed!” This sudden but practicably catalytic analysis will make you freeze and forget your dopey relatives, and then a flatulent afflatus will gush in and loft you back to your home, where you will begin to hack out your own so-called masterpiece, thereby initiating a causal chain that ends with me suing you for plagiarism, you fucking chimp.

But for now your smittenness is to me an asset and a blessing. It means you won’t revile me when I’m vulnerable. It means I can be frank as an open ulcer, honest as a maudlin nihilist—and you’ll forgive my petitions and repetitions, my longueurs and my solecisms, my hate-hate-hates and my love-love-loves. Around you, I can be bad, dumb, ridiculous, annoying, and arbitrary; I can write with unfettered cathartic creativity, skipping blithely after my own laughter into pitfalls and wormholes. Oh my dilapidated darling! Instead of worrying that you’ll peek through the windows into my heart, I will build a solarium, an aquarial shark park, and a lapidary palace of frilled flabella inside a giant glass cast of my entire body. I will become terminally nude, sitting lotus and making fandangulous gewgaws for you as we bop atop this rooftop and aidlessly await our century’s series of apocalyptic conflicts, clashes which will be infamous for millennia, if indeed anybody is left to feel that our times were notorious—yet but because you love me, I can keep crafting art as a prophylaxis against these fears and this carnage, this polterzeitgeist; I will keep calm and trundle on into my primrose thicket with its ivory-tower anthers, weaving words as if the future doesn’t exist, driven by my bumptious noblesse oblige to satisfy you in your ludicrous, misguided, and self-damaging adoration.

Because look. You shouldn’t love me. Our romance is no good and all bad. Sorry, but I’m just not right for you. Why? Well… *Sigh*—let me put it this way, my unbosom buddy: you stick around, and I’ll treat you rather less than kindly, if you catch my spindrift. I am nothing less and nothing more than an auto-masochistic meat-island from inner space. I am moody and insomniac, malicious, capricious and devilicious. No lie I will straight-up lie to you, my so-so bro, my dissed sis—I’ll lie and lie and lie, laughing behind my lily fingers, imping and pucking, pimping and ucking. Then, in a savage but characteristic variation on the tablecloth-swished-from-under-dishes trick, I’ll tug the rug from under your fat flat rat feet and browbeat you after you slip and bash your turnipy pate. So don’t dare be disappointed if I don’t live up to my promises! I’m warning you: If you keep reading you’re a sucker reborn every minute as a worse sucker. You’ll be ashamed you promoted this mope. You’ll go humbly to your grandma—but she’ll have cut you from her will. Go abase yourself before it’s too late! Bin this book and run, cuz I hate anyone stupid enough to love me! You disgust me! Back in the last volume, you contradicted me for the same reasons a bully throws snowballs at his crush—but that ain’t cutely obtuse, that’s abuse, so lumber on outta here before I conjure up some coppers and get a restraining injunction on your saggy, fawning, derivative, razzle-dazzled face-ass! You’ve heard of village idiots, right? Well, my far from fantastic unfriend, you are one of the very few to achieve the exclusive rank of world idiot! You have an awe-eliciting and dare-I-say generational talent for suckitude, and the only reason you haven’t swept the global records for repulsive asininity is that no one has the stomach to record you! You probably think yellow snow tastes like bananas! You believe that ants have bones, and that billionaires shouldn’t be explosively de-billioned, and until you were eighteen, you wouldn’t eat broccoli unless your mom put it on a fork and imitated a plane!

But waity-wait-wait—what am I doing? I’ve lost control, unleashed my demons… I’ll beat a retreat to the roof’s far corner and stand looking away from the reader, my hands clasped in a dangling flesh bouquet of tingling fingers. Who have I become? Whence this rage? Gah… As my thoughts flap toward me from the furthest corners of the sky, I, both absently and presently, glance into the street below, bending the complex construction of my hirsutely human head, with its emperorial ears and draggly quiff, down to look at the isometric pedestrians and the cadences of the sentences their feet insinuate, sentences that end each second, end and end in the bobbing periods of their mortals’ heads—below me is a living diagram of the time dimension, roundskull mundane dancers foxtrotting foreshortened to the grave. Watching their embossing whorlings, I begin to remember who I am, I recall my principles, remind myself of a key insight: that the folly of humans makes them forgivable. How can they know any better? As for you—you were always going to overestimate me, to be disappointed by my blarney; you were born purblind, fated inane. Indeed, the roots of your numb incomprehension gnarl and spiral back to the beginning of all known existence, when the Big Bang splashed out and hardened into a vast grinding mechanism of consequence, an unstoppable architecture of cause-and-effect that galloped steaming down billions of years, caught your mother upon its temporal lance, and speared her belly, launching you up through the terraqueous parabola of your days on earth, rocketing along foredoomed to be awkward, boring, loathsome, and boonless, with a body odor that made flies drop dead and drove many a mosquito to suicide.

So how can I be angry? I forgive you. Darling deer, let’s step back into my converted dovecote, that cozy crib stocked with bookshelves and a bed whose thick vert blanket is woven from soft foliage. Here we shall unsheathe my secrets. This room may have no windows—but we don’t want any. While we’re in these watercolor stone walls, the cursed world simply does not exist. It may throw bombs at itself, and its leaders may bark orders from their poles—later these drab realities will be our problem; later we’ll die; but for now there is only fuzzy warmth, only us, only verbal art, only a warlock perfume of sounds, and only your favorite person: me, a 1970s dreamboat with brambly sideburns and handlebar mustache, wearing a bathrobe which opens rakishly on a gold medallion nestled in my chest hair. I swirl a snifter of brandy, teeth clenching the stem of a meerschaum. My whole body rattles with effort as I struggle uggily to do something nearly impossible: to open up to you, my lubber, to unfold the muscly fan of my heart, to bellow-blow its fiery breeze over your clay face, and amid that hot heat to admit what really happened. To show you the horrible truth. To reveal why I am the way I am, a maimed monk who read every book and trained till he could bench 30 times his own weight. As I bare this stunted unnatural hothouse soul of mine, I will pace, and perhaps my terrycloth bathrobe may billow suggestively around my titanium contours… but do not take advantage of my turned back to touch me. I assure you I would nimbly elude your grasp—and as a disconsolation prize you would receive only the irrevocable loss of my friendship. Despite your televised pleas, and any full-page apologies you might book in prominent rags, I would ignore your entreaties till the end of your life. I know you love me, but noli me tangere. I’m just not into you.

You remind me too much of myself.

15 – I ACT, THEREFORE I AM

Actually, look—I need some space. Your frog eyes are sort of drilling into the side of my head. Here, look at my laptop: its screen has two buttons: LOW and HIGH. I click HIGH. Our room rumbles and ascends on a steel pole above the metropolis… Now come, I want to unlimber myself in a setting befitting the splendor of my saga. I nudge open the dovecot door: our little platform, surrounded by a waist-high wooden railing, towers miles above the modern world, so elevated that from up here reality’s sour dark power is harmless as semblance, abstract as art. Even the ugliness is beautiful, with its gridded lights and skyscraper stalagmites, gushing glaciers and elephant’s feet of radioactive lava, sparrows popping like corn and old language snowing down in grimy flakes. The stars wobble, the moon beats like a heart; flying anglerfish and star-shrimp infest the algous sky, ever more rarefied taxa swimming through the upper strata, luminescent rays skimming the foamy tops of the oxygen waves; and somewhere just over the horizon there is a great hammering as of a titanic weapon being forged. Truly, this epic panorama of precipitate apocalypses is the fittingest backdrop for the momentous drama I’m about to plop into your lap, this family opera scooped from the aching depths of my breaky heart.

So let us transform the sky into the black screen of a storyvision—and do ignore the shrieks and crashes from the streets. Those geeks’ agonies needn’t worry me and you, boo. A mountainous 3D film is powering up above us:

DIRECTED AND INDITED BY: STATAN THE WHITE.

A great fuzziness collects against the void, heaves and begins to wail, sharpening into the all-too-familiar image of me as a babyoid screaming mandragorishly. You’ll have to forgive me that ear-shearing scream: I had been telepathically partitioned from my mom, then witnessed her death and resurrection, and now, as she sat around entranced, I was boiling away in the microwave of pain, steaming like a kid-kneed bean being squashed by the pudgy finger of fate, roasted legs blanching, brain tied in knots and guts ripped with rot. I was bawling alone in a cruel new cosmos, crushed within the clamps of existential anxieties I no longer understood yet still deeply inhabited, feeling like a gnomon with neither dial nor sun. What I needed—all I needed—was my mommy.

Yet she was g-g-gone, away in a way. Had returned without returning, had been solved and dissolved, slowly condensing into a porous presence for four powerless hours of mother horror before my father recurred. From the smoking ruins of my mouth there rose up forever an aural mural of alarm, like a scream in a dream of no ceilings—nevertheless the erstwhile protectress of the universe barely acknowledged my distress, just rocked me and shushed and kept staring at the window without seeing through its pane, oddly nodding with her birdy face flushed bright, eye-valleys misting over with drizzle. She had never looked so high-framerate: every second slapped her in the chops, so that she woke up sixty times a minute, and her eyelids couldn’t ruck up any higher and always did, and her pupils were luminous black opals. Swooning, crooning, she was marooned in lunar ecstasy, turtleshelled in a well of pleasure; buuut, well, consider my fool’s-eye view, ok: consider that by all appearances she did not give a shit that we’d been separated. How could she be happy? I’ll be realish: as far as I the baby was concerned, she should’ve been gouging her face and keening a threnody at the destruction of our connection, sobbing and mourning with me, we should have been blistering our throats with our intertwining hortations of grief, like organic ambulances attending our own crucifictions.

But repine not! I ain’t never been a sadsack to sprawl in postures of solemncholy decay! Blushing I embraced anger, bear-hugged rage and roared till I grew blue hot and condemned my mom as cruel, uncaring, stupid and crazy, and sought an ally in my father, whose glorious return I greeted with unusually strident and interested cries, verbally hurling myself at him in order to punish her. It didn’t work, but my dad tickled my nosey-nose—oblivious to my mom’s pale visionary hyperventilations—then lofted me up and airplaned me around the six-sided studio bedroom. For a few seconds I flew gloriously, triumphant in the throne harness of my father’s handy hands; I had claimed him, this ace pilot, and now that my mom had lost all interest in me, she could go work every day, while he stayed home, and we would do nothing but make funny faces full time… though by now the funniness was already draining from his face as he remembered what he’d fumed about all the blaze home: the tussle with his boss about an inswept elegancy my dad’d added unplanned to twin divans, a lindisfarne flourish of which his fossilized chief could never have dreamed. His mangy, spineless coworkers hadn’t backed him up, but his peachy-faced, adoring and sympathetic young wife definitely would. “You’ll never guess who proved himself the rankest, most blindest of all bog-drinking goblins today, once again,” he began, then vigorously worked over his boss’s logic, jabbing like a fast-footed prizefighter reducing a subnormal cripple to rubble. He was just reaching peak hilarity when my mom launched her bomb:

“I met God.”

A car crash occurred on his face as opposing emotions wrapped themselves around each other, caught fire and flamed out. His first impulse was to continue the boss-bashing anecdote, he’d just been getting to his knockout hook. But… God? Huh! Best not to take it too seriously, yet. Best to keep cool, scout the lay of the land, analyze then act decisively. He made a face that combined elements of fox, hound, and hunter, his left eyebrow flaring diabolically.

“Oh? Was God waiting at a bus stop?”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Dude’s supposed to be everywhere, isn’t he?” Then he softened. “Hey, don’t be mad, ‘I met God’ is just a crazy thing to greet me with, that’s all. And you know I don’t like bosses! Always imposing their own mediocrity… Aw, baby, come on—I said I’m sorry, didn’t I? Tell me what happened to you.”

It was my mother who showed me how to be.

1. I feel, therefore I am.

It was my father who showed me how to act. For he was a man of action, the sensei of attitudes, ripostes, stances and swordplay. He demonstrated maneuvers, tactics, the significance of footwork and handwork and headwork.

2. I act, therefore I am.

These are the levels of a man.

As my dad listened, he wore two expressions. His eyes took on the squinty aspect of a suspicious assessor, an auditor of reason; but with the remainder of his face he smiled, mugged and interjected comically, sometimes turned away and stooped to blow blustery horse-lips at me. Yet I was too shellshocked and hell-rocked to repay his horseplay with wide smiles, and soon he started to look at me, to lose his tactical calm and really look. Sunken shippishly in my stained cradle, where twilight’s oblique red beams hit like laser strikes, I looked nothing like a regular baby. Thin blond hair had come in, yes, but only around my ears, and to both sides of my eyes I had wrinkles like upside-down checkmarks. My mixture of grief and sullenness, arrant despair and ornery unsoothability, combined with the nappy blankie swathed around my shoulders, made me resemble an elderly man who’d died as a re-baby and been unearthed millennia later, crusted in the ashes of his internal Vesuvius. My dad’s scopelike eyes focused sharper and sharper, into a cleaving acutance—then when she confessed to passing out, he shouted, “JESUS CHRIST,” spun from me and began ranting at her real fast, but still pretending calmness, saying oh man obviously she was bein’ honest about what she felt happened, but he had doubts about the nature of her experience, and maybe they should reclassify this event as medical, and she needed to see a doctor a.s.a.p. what the fuck!

She disregarded him and kept up the slow drip of description, spellbound by her own story; and my dad, demoted, shocked she’d brushed him off, could only recede, hunch with arrowslit eyes, pluck his lower lip and assess and process and play guess chess. I watched her too, resentfully fascinated and moved despite myself, nursing my grudge yet unable to ignore the splendid unfolding of her bolded emotions. Her flangy face, usually high and blithe around my dad, hue of blue skies with bouncy clouds, dropped, darkened, developed rainfall and the sinister crepitations of lightning; but as her tale’s path wound toward the ground zero of infinity, her mood burst and cleared, purged itself of storms, gained sunshine and birdsong and tremorous rainbow. Joy thickened in her throat. What had happened to her? Well, she’d collapsed on the bed—then a voice said: LET THERE BE DARK. And there was dark, forever…

But eh, before we continue, let me admit now that I’m gonna titivate and titillatize her story here and there, cuz look man I like using my voice, not hers, and in any case the character of my mom, rather than being strictly her own ovine self (i.e. my real maamaa), has never been anything but a giant fleecy animatron whose every motion and notion I’ve programmed—even my agnification of her an apt yet artificial affectation—my silly strings flinging her digits through intricate fidgets, her flocked eyelids and jaws clacking up and down as she bleats my script for every reader that rushes along. Yeah and sure, under the woolly wispsies of that lacquer & enamel animal, translit by the blaring flare of my frivolous brolixity, rapped in a thousand lies, there is indeed the dear creature that we might dub my actual mom; yet what business is she of yours? Back off! Let! her! be! Her real life and verifiable ipseity ain’t got nothin’ to do what I’m inoculatin’ into this here so-called brain of yours.

Recall please: I, your sly guide, though lovely am no dealer of root truths and real revelations, but a malicious maestro of Siamese surfaces, a labyrinth spinner of lucky lux and relics deluxe, a Goldberg mime of imitations of reflections of illuminations! So why don’t you get lost… in the dream? Why grasp after such a foul and unsightly critter as common, muddy-garden-variety Truth?

Do you always shit every bed you see, or are you just that unhappy to see not her but me?

Too bad!

16 – FROSTY TOUCH OF IMMORTALITY

Then it was light, and my mom was lying down and sitting up, and her body felt soupy and sloppy, drips of essence slipping over its edges (a bizarre state which she demonstrated in the present by holding her head as if it were a brimming bowl). Concentrating on keeping herself unspilled, she’d gingerly opened one eye, then the other. To all sides thunderclouds turned and churned, fraying and braiding into the distance, converging toward a blackwhite Hole of Holes that was steadily sucking all matter into its antilight—including my ma. Oh no! Forgetting her brimming head, she twisted up from the Hole and did a sort of breast stroke, yet was caught inside something and couldn’t move, and so slid backward, her body inexorably beckoned by the pulsating whiteblack endbeginning. But that stuffed void, both full and empty, still and in motion, scared her worse than anything, so once again she strained to yank herself away, clawing up clouds, slopping pieces of her spirit pell-mell. Slowly the hole’s pull waned, but it had torn her cohesion, and her skull spilled iridian self-drops. What in the heck was happening? Where was she? Who was she?

Above rose a sort of sun, a smooth slippery sun that rolled and hopped in place and emitted a strange new type of light, a solid-fluid illumination that spread in spiral stripes and dripped redgreen orangeblue, articulating the boundaries of its experimental brightness until it collected into the shape of a colossally tall yet relatively narrow humanoid hunched over a workbench. This awesome alt-radiance, encircled by tumbling cumuli and ensquared by rotating indescribabilities, had a long narrow dark head with a welding mask and two slim flat ear-appendages that hung past its chin, and was sitting with splayed knees on a fold-up chair, welding in a rainbow spark storm whose sparks hailed down like spiky suns, while grumbling continuously in a weirdly squashed but recognizably male voice. He was obviously God, but man had not been made in his image. Not quite. And he was building a… what was that? Its dimensions didn’t make any sense. It seemed to recede into the table…

Back in our living room, my mom, dazed by rejoy, was letting fall each word as if she didn’t know what word would follow, excavating every clause before lifting it through hundreds of kilometers of crystallized happiness to the surface of her mouth, where the emerging words underlit her ruddy beak with gold. At the deity’s appearance in her story she laughed, which rousted my dad upright and bristling, her possible stroke(?) and delusion(!) being for him no laughing matters. Yet she was chuckling at what she’d tell him next, amused and pleased by the form God had taken. She had seen this form dozens of times, God could not have been more familiar, she knew now, even if back then, as a disembodied soul with a headful of haze, she couldn’t pin down his identity and actually grew more and more frightened at his tremendously familiar yet somehow unrecognizable presence. Finally she panicked, lost control, and—cheeped.

God startled. In one flow he flung away his torch, shoved off his mask and wheeled glowering, and his snouty face, with its bean-shaped skull and overlarge white eyes, exploded across her entire sight into a cartoonishly Pollockian supervolcanic nightmare of viruliferous divine ire. She screamed seven screams simultaneously, a big shriek that broke into smaller flapping shrieks. And then he spoke, his voice alien and carven in air and shawled in crinkling foils of distortion, as if coming down a chain of a thousand amplifiers. Every syllable rippled through her essence, frilled down to her fundament, serrating and scalloping mazes to the frays of her shantung soul’s fluttery fabric.

AND WHO, ARE YOU?

He spoke without quote marks or tone, not so much speaking as bringing words into eternal existence, so that they’d always already been said forever. Everlastingly self-resurrecting, his question hit her like a whispering mass of writhing bricks and smashed her with the unpausing power of its superlative nonsensicality. Who was she? Whaaaat? Crushed, gushing bits of essence, my mom spurbled, “Shouldn’t you know? Aren’t you…?”

HEY! KEEP IT DOWN, WILL YA? God, many-rippled with moirés of avant-garde light, slid his meshed eyes from side to side, swinging his cylindrical snout with its round black nose. Beneath that umbo nose, he had just two upper teeth jutting way out in front of a recessed underjaw… in fact, he looked stupid, silly, even kinda wacky, what with the cozy felt eyelids that snugged his white eye-tops voluptuously, his squashed floppy blue chef’s-fedora, his slender black ears flapping out behind him. Leaning in, God juxtaposed one white-gloved backhand against his muzzle and “whispered” conspiratorially from the side of his mouth: JUST BETWEEN YOU AND MESELF—GOWRSH, I GUESS I AM THAT I AM: THE SPIRIT OF PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE, AH-HYUP! Yuk-yukking, he slapped his godly knee and with the backswing knocked off his two-tiered crown. TSK! He picked it up and, clucking, dusted off cloudmust. Then he abruptly serioused. NOW, WHO ARE YA, ANYWAYS?

My dad’s lips puckered. “God was Goofy?” But she was not giggling anymore, and nor should you. In the afterlife she’d had no idea who Goofy was, much less that he was a mascot of capitalo-imperialist propaganda (fuck you!) and anyway as God he did not only exude boutades of cheer, friendliness, and ramshackle clumsiness, but was also terrible and beautiful, his polychromatic pelt glowed like fiber hyperoptics, and his pupils were spinning black foliate stars which contained every text in the world written in regal overlapping leaves, and his awesome muzzle had just flapped open and asked again the most ridiculous and difficult and terrifying question that a God could possibly ask. How could a God not know its own creation? “Me?” she peeped. “Who I am…?”

HYUP.

“I can’t remember, okay? It’s not fair! Where are we? Am I dead? What happened? What are you? Am I going to Heaven or—” Goofy God coughed into his palm and waved her off, seemingly embarrassed. Then a random inspiration rose through her, a name from the past that came sparkling up out of her own depths like a star from a lake. “I’m Anke!” she yelled. “Anke Whorl!”

The sempiternal toon doggy scratched his pate, then shrugged broadly, the monk’s mantle slipping down his skinny black forearms.

WHOZAT?

This final interrogative was too much. It broke her down. It disassembled her aerial chemistry at a spectral-molecular level. Her head reconfigured itself a dozen times a second without ever getting any thought to match colors. She diffused, disintegrating, throwing off parts of herself into 26 dimensions. A directionlessness sectioned her. A void thrived in the intervals of her vitals. She was—she had been—but—but then a godly hand, shrunk down to nearly human size, descended monumentally on her shoulder, emitting from its curves the comfiest warmth of all time, all winter bonfires and tea and blankets, and she flowered back into her shape, infused and innervated by that amazing warmth, the heat of a grizzled fatherly womb, the soft toasty sun of everything safe and okay forever ‘n’ ever—and in that infinite instant she really almost died for good, and would have dissolved into his spirit had he not spoken, soothing her in a truer, deeper, more resonant voice of voice of voices.

LOOK. THAT’S WHO YA ARE.

Goofy-God aimed a finger behind her. Turning, she saw she was sitting up from inside a corpse, a poor sad dead girl sprawled sideways, so close yet far as a photo. The body had to be hers… yet surely she’d looked different in life. In her dimmed memory, she’d been squeaky and malformed, dumb and annoying, dislikable and ineffectual—but asprawl on that bed lay a harmless soft-cheeked kind-faced girl, dead yet perfectly normal, not even ugly.

Now her memories switched on like lights. Through spectral tears she saw herself staggering backward through her life, through tramp, seclusion, childbirth, marriage, loneliness, through the university crisis, the chasmic school days, the mother of stone and the father of air, the guilt, the shame, the fear—just a pink-beaked girl struggling through crises, a tender scraggy tomboy with a homemade haircut and rawboned features and the alert eyes of a prey bird, wanting so badly to be liked but hanging at the fringe of every group, chatting and joking nervously but ignored or mocked, again and again offering well-meant vulnerable friendliness only to get disdained and excluded, and yes sure sometimes that girl had been gauche or neurotic or un-self-aware, lacking in raw wit and high style and sparklin’ charm and breezy easiness, yet she’d been kind and okay and not a bad person, more than okay, a good person who’d never done anything truly wrong. Both in her story and in front of us she cried, and I greeted her tears with gratified glee: finally the Sharky Matriarch was suffering too! HAH! Yet but despite this babyish misprision, in truth she was happier than ever, for as she’d viewed her life she realized that her flaws and insecurities had been understandable mistakes, and like everyone else she had been stunted by the world, and God (whose heavy-heavy yet super-comforting gloved hand blasted warm fuzzy furnace-love and more-than-love, better-than-love, better-than-anything straight into her quintessence) forgave and cleansed all people, regardless of who they were and what they did, all humans were his special pets and there was no Hell—and that was the moral of the story she was relating to my dumbstruck dad, that everything would be different now, that she understood everyone, that he was okay, she was okay, baby would be okay, everything was okay, even the moon hobo was a victim of life, and she didn’t have to worry, God loved her and protected her and everything would work out fine as long as she could remember everything that God had—

A jacket dropped into her lap, breaking her trance. She tossed up her hands uselessly while I cackled. My dad overhung her, grim thumb pointed toward the front door in an unconscious parody of her goofabulous God.

“I’m taking you to the hospital.” She started to protest, but he sliced through. “No, Anke—you don’t have a say.”

Her eyes dropped. After a few seconds she stood up meekly.

I clapped my stubby nubs and crowed in evil victory. I had no real idea what was happening, but I knew my momly nemesis had been humbled. DIE!

DIE DIE DIE DIE!

Yet… we both know that I didn’t deeply mean that curse, and that as a narrator I’ve set the crosshairs on my father. Here, let’s pause the screen and rotate his figure, so much more solid than his young wife: check out the stab scar below his left nipple, the fading tattoos of attack animals (tigers, scorpions, crocodiles) on his back and right bicep, the pores of his steel scruff, the rotting colonnades of his molars, the runnels of ocular red jigsawing toward his royal-blue irises, the global neuronal racetrack centrifuging its inputs around the rim of the bowl of his brain, processing her story and squirting in admixtures of his own memories and sensations and opinions, flooding it with his personality till his entire reaction turned the same color it always turned. My father, my forerunner, with all his schemes, systems, and techniques, with his mastery of minor miseries and his fencer’s finesse of footwork defense, requires no imagist to mask him and has earned no illusion of mine; let him show what he thought to be his real face. Let him wage his own war. Read through him.

17 – THE CRUSADER DRAWS STEEL

Are you comfy-womfy? It’s not too brisk out here, I hopey-wopey! Sweetie, I can get more blankets if you’re cold! You don’t have to pretend to be tough with little old, silly old me. You mustn’t brandish that mask. Hush. Well, you’d be better be toasty: we’ll be up here all night while I shoot truths, while I regale your stunned sensorium with the versicolored shimmer-stream of memories projected by my heart onto the insides of my ribs. Naturally, I haven’t forgotten your infatuation, and really I know I could narrate whatever I want, I could detail my toenails and you would slubber up every drop of my story, because you just cannot get enough; but you’re in luck: I’m feelin’ storytelly, and I’m tellin’ you now, Habibi, if you want to fathom me, you’ve got to fathom my father. Peer deep into the deeps of my face: don’t you see him? Lift your lookers to my hairline—there’s a clue! Listen, everything I say about my father points back to something about me, and so, although thus far you’ve been such a lax reader that entertaining you solves my constipation, I’m gonna have to request that from now on you assemble on your own some of the baby blocks of themes I’m providing for your eddyfication. Compare the people on display, read the text not just in front of you but also under your feet, stay sharp and don’t let me trip you up as we trip into this next bit, where we’ll watch you watch me watch my father star in his favorite role: High Holy Crusader.

He was going to fight the universe.

And I so needed a hero. Doubly vulnerable, I was facing a rude obtrusion. See, we had completed another lap of the spiral of the plot of our pain, and cyclically returned to my least favorite place, that horrific site which so often divides our rouletted lives into Before and After: the holy-white hell of the hospital.

Strollerbound I lamped out like a stressed prosimian at the hospital’s rustling white death, beeping beeps and aseptic arctic dyspepsia. Poof: my rebellion was quelled. Quite convinced of my coming reincarceration, I’d have dragged myself through blood to escape, or supplicated the woman otherwise the source of my direst torment—had she not discarded me, clambered onto a metal tongue, and been absorbed into a massive machine mouth. I howled, repenting too late. The metal mouth, whose symmetrical throat arced off into the earth, puckered around her, hardened into a shell, then began to spin, slowly at first but speeding up until it whipped around at thousands of revolutions per minute, spinning like a gyroscopic spaceship firing green and blue lasers into her cranium while my father watched with scientistic reverence.

All the way to the hospital he had honked and sworn at other cars, while instructing her that if anything similar to her seizure should ever happen ever again she had to call an ambulance right away, that precious hours had been lost, because something physical and inescapable had caused the whole loony delusion and they needed medical answers now—but then the limp, portly neurodoc, some strange amber specimen of enervated invertebrate, had the nerve to inform my dad that the brain scans were clean. No signs of damage. Nothing. My father felt not relief but rage. He glanced down at his knuckles, dusty and veinous. “So you’re saying you don’t know anything.”

I looked at him sharply, whiffing a delicious danger.

The doc—combover, no chin—shruggled casually, having missed the viciousness scabbarded in my dad’s reply. “Heart’s fine too. And there’s the blood test… we call you if anything surfaces. If I were you I shouldn’t worry. Could have been panic, hysteria, the stress of running. Lack of oxygen. Eh. Come back if there are more symptoms, and in a month we do a follow-up.”

My dad looked up smiiiling and caught the doc by his gummy, glutinous eye. Friendly as a fig, he said, “So her massive, full-blown, insane hallucination, where God appeared as a cartoon dog, just yapped on up out of nothin’, huh? And I don’t gotta worry that it could recur any time?” The intensity of those last three words was accentuated by his finger jabbing on the pinned-up acetates of his wife’s brain, a thwack-thwack-thwack that made the doc’s grey lips shrivel till his face took on the sepulchral look of last year’s coldcuts.

Then the doc resolidified and shruggled again, a tic that my father was growing to mislike. “Or she did meet God. But if that makes you uneasy, sir—think of it as a stress-induced loss of consciousness, followed by a dream.”

I started sobbing without understanding why, for the acrid doc, alas, had just described my life on earth. My mom bent over me and giggy-blucked, tapping my chin, lips and nose, soundtracking each impact with a bing. This distraction, a gesture of ineffable perfection, shot golden arrows into my stormclad heart of darkness, impaled it and pumped it full of temporary gold. Through thunderclouds she floated in a gloriole of serenity, behind her head a dawn sun coronating her with blinding stripes. Oh, how marvelous! I surrendered completely, ready to take her back—but she was already drifting. While I faded sullenly from her weightless arms, while Doc and Dad’s talk washed over her caoutchouc-coated exteroceptors, she stared at the ghostly radiographs pinned up over lights, chiaroscuro scans of what looked like nothing real, certainly not the jewel inside her head. The body was the oldest joke. The scans were fantasies. The light real. The light was really real. She teared up.

My father noticed the tears. He skewed his eyebrows at the doggish doc.

“Maybe… maybe you ought to look closer.”

“How?”

“Use a different tool.”

“What tool?”

“Like, for example, your common sense.”

“Sir…”

Stricken, my mom sidled over and tugged at his sweater sleeve. My father brushed her off. One sir had irked him; two sirs were a little much to tolerate. He could not fuckin’ stand fake respect—not to mention lethargic medical malpractice leading to the untimely perishing of his wonderful wife, of his son’s mother. “You just don’t care, huh? You’re willing to let her die cuz you can’t be arsed to work! Got your pay already, right? So who gives a shit? Well, I DO. If I had ten medics in here, all ten would tell you to take a second look!”

The flabby, flaccid doc drew back, indignant, then shot his only bolt.

“Sir, tell me where you did acquire your degree in medicine? I suppose twenty years on the television wards—and then you diagnose each patient before the first commercial break!”

Hoo! That vitiated etiolate would never have dared such cockiness to my pugnacious fireplug dad if he hadn’t been protected by the redoubtable badge of his nametag (or so my dad intimated later). My dad dispensed his special grin, the one a-bubble with trouble which made his mouth-area look like bones and raw meat—but then he spoke in the derpy chirrup he normally reserved for particularly precocious toddlers. “Golly, I guess you’re right—I’m very stoopid. Ain’t never even finished high school. Just a simple, stunned son-of-a-bitch, a haw-haw airhead, an’ I don’t know nuttin’, least of all fancy-pantsy abstractions like manners, or laws, or why”—he extended the callused menace of his finger to the doc’s floppy nose, then wiggled the finger—“why I shouldn’t answer rudeness with rudeness, know what I’m sayin’?” His finger winked. Goggling at it, the trepid doc snapped his teeth shut and, balling up his fists on his desk, acquired a used-tissuey expression of facial constipation. My dad chuckled, gathered his jacket, and let himself be herded by his fluttery wife to the door, winking back to the costive doc glaring after him. “You be good now, darlin’. You oughta open your mind a little, before you kill anyone else.”

He'd won, as he victoriously relived in the van. I agreed emphatically and laureled him with love words; I may have had little idea what battle had been fought, yet I recognized my champion. But had he really won? Granted, he’d established that he was not to be mocked—but the doc’s thorn stuck in his brain, his intelligence had been challenged, his hustling, self-hyping mind had been called into question, and soon the question of her sickness would ratchet up into a personal referendum on his worth, as he sought and fought for the honest practitioner who would save everything, up to and including his pride, with the proper diagnosis of radical sickness needing swift specific surgery. With a valiant lip curl that could have been framed by the visor of a bascinet, my father galloped out jousting against the lazy, overpaid, uppity medical establishment, the corrupt chuckleheads who refused to investigate properly a mystery seizure, syncope, and shekinah whose sinister secret source might well surface again and KILL the mother of his child, leaving him a single father without his sensitive and beautiful and sweet wife, fuck! No more good times with her! The thought tore a tear from his eye. She’d expire in his arms, and he would throw his head back and howl as in the worst and heart-wrenchingest way possible it became clear he’d been right all along, he’d known better than anybody, and could have saved his wife, if only, if only he’d pushed aside the bastards, forced his way through and fulfilled the prophecy of his fear!

In the grip of this gothic fantasy, he wangled appointments with two separate academic neurologists, piloted her to each and played them off one another, comparing their lily-smooth brains and weak-watered hypotheses with scorn. Epilepsy? Heat exhaustion? A minor heart attack? Oxygen deprivation? Drugs in the cider spray from the robber’s dropped bottle?

Well, this last was his own theory. Several times very early he roved out dressed in black, wearing padded gloves, and it emerged later—to my mother’s vociferous dismay—that he’d hunted for the diamond-hungry bum, apparently to give him a few cost-free and definitely-very-polite lessons in courtesy, respect, and leaving the weak the fuck alone, and possibly to extract the name of whatever freak disease the bum might’ve transmitted via his foul mead.

But no dice.

18 – A BURGEONING ELEUTHEROMANIA

Had I been a hack ventriloquist’s puppet in my cradle, or an energumen possessed by language ghosts that granted me the faculty of locution, I might have summed my bummer by bellowing the following query:

“My mom, my mom, why hast thou forsaken me?”

For, alack and a-woe, it seemed my progenitress really had lost her zest for what she once blessed as best: wee little me. In those high-kilowatt weeks after her seizure-of-sorts, she more or less forwent yours truly in order to spend most of her downtime in immobilized astonishment, staring mutely through our sky-walled hexahedron painted with moving windows, her sodden face a pink, open-mouthed receptacle for all existence, amid resonant space where harmonies rebounded in cold bright air, within a colossal frosted bell that pealed silence. Far from seeming sick, my mother was radiant with the blue crystal fire of enlightenment, a post-visionary illumination that apparently entailed no action other than just being there, being here extra-hard, immanent in the moment, hydroplaning through a haze of higher meaning that years later she couldn’t quite communicate. As long as I’d known her, she had never been more than tentatively stationary, drawing back from every dialogue as if it were trampling through her inmost temples; every stimulus came as a shock, and like anything alate she might suddenly flap away. Now, however, she slowed. Her moods rippled serpentinely. There was space for the tick of a clock, the tech of a breath, the tiny crystalline tock-talk of the universe winding down. She stiffened her historically slumpy shoulders, took the wheels of what had been her bumper-car eyes, and learned how to drive a look.

Oh, she had blossomed inside, become thick with internal herbage, smooth and soily and sunwarm, developed tranquil waterfalls and healing fountains, had turned into an azure-eyed temple festooned with leaves, a misted, chirping refuge amid the seething mysterious jungle of spacetime. In short, she was pleasing but impersonal and, to the rind of my once-blinding mind, boring. Before her fainting fit, she had kneeled before me in her need; now I had shrunk to something merely marvelous. My mom gazed at me with love of the universe, but I didn’t want love of the universe. I wanted love of me.

This stage didn’t last long, but it formed and transformed me. Hombre, it determined the remainder of my days. The maternal plasma’s lakelike placidity achieved the seemingly impossible: it averted me from her. If she’d been gruntled or disgruntled with me, I’d soon have been ensorcelled, engrossed again in our grand game, excusing her everything and extracting all my happiness from the way she enjoyed my existence—but now, unable to trap her attention, scarred by each failure to have my demands met, I dishabituated, I stopped even attempting to reach her, withdrew all my perseverating baits and traits and peered out banefully from my crib’s cave, where I’d swaddled myself in black. Who needed her? Crossing my raspberry-elbowed arms, I turned up my snob nose, sneered and decided I was better off alone, without any milky stink or abrasive embrace. I would prove I didn’t need her! Ha! Magma seethed in my cheeks, every sight shipwrecked in the ocean of my eyes.

Yet my fuming sulk, all fumaroles and sulfur, smoked itself out ere long. Sun and moon swept through our room, and soon my lava cooled, my scales hardened, and my heart turned obsidian. Slowly I opened to the momless wild, breathing its steep and bracing air, perking at the shrieks of pterosaurs in the misty distance—then suddenly my heart flapped up and soared away over mountains that fell back like scared bystanders. Already repressing that I’d ever wanted her stupid company, I beat my hollow chest and hallooed into the mommal chasm, into the organo-mechanical canyons beyond my sequoia-slatted crib. After all these months I could breathe! For miles around me, there was no mother, no other, just endless leagues of vision. The world on easy mode, on real and deep mode, was the world without other people, with my face at the bottom of the frame, asking for nothing, wanting nothing, staring up like a part of the moon fallen from the sky. Ahhh: silence and air unshared. I grew calm as a mom, as a collection plate in a derelict chapel—and it would be this lassitude that opened the next door for me, onto a moment most monumental, one that would hover above me like a black monolith, charging up my consciousness for its next labile and vibrantly polyvalent evolution.

Remember that my mom painted vases, to supplement our income, and also that her simple, happy-colored amphorae moved way more units than my dad’s florid avant furniture; and so, prompted by his repeated gentle remarks on long-term money-flow, and although still staggered from her ecstatic ascent, she returned to painting an hour or two a day, spreading newspapers on her spattered table, palming terracotta urns and adding whatever parrot colors she pleased, never pausing to plan, brushing on brash hue after rash hue—that is, whenever she wasn’t zoned out at some greater truth hidden within vaseness itself. And so yeah… one day there she was, a vessel beautifying vessels, and there I was, strapped into my cradle as usual, and I must have griped some primeval groan because she swiveled to me and stared. Refusing to meet her eye, I ook-ooked and strained against my buckled bonds, sullenly resisting though only to make a point and no longer with my usual thrashing desperation, my purply plowing hyperbole that made mountain-chains of every emotion. No, I had matured, and now my withered and beaten face, all austere nobility and melancholy self-sufficiency, suffered with a silent, poignant grit that could not but inspire her pity and empathy. All at once, she understood not just that I felt imprisoned, but that, perhaps, it was time to try trust.

Heretofore, any orthodox mommologist would have laughed off the suggestion that my mother’s scrutiny might ever relax; but now, with no further ado or adon’t, cooing like a birdcharmer, she unbuckled me, lifted me out and lowered me assfirst onto the floorboards. My jammied legs gave way, and I fell forward onto my fists, those teensy pink seashells at the ends of my twiggy arms.

(My body, as always, felt like a maladroit bricolage.)

Up close the floor was teeming with microbes living out their lame lives in flat cities of hair and grime. Casting a vast rubbly shadow, I gurgled above that cryptozoic xenoscape, an addle-pated god-baby leering out from the window of the plane of my consciousness. “Go play,” the mother in the deep sky urged, her hands withdrawing like spaceships taking off from my atmosphere.

At first I kept cantilevering vacuously, unsure what she meant for me to accomplish out there in the arduous wilderness beyond my usual corrals. So far I’d always been strapped, carried, cribbed; there’d been no question of my moving around freely, left to rove over rugs where god knows what embedded nails might serve as a fatal snack. Now the open, sunblasted spaces blew on me with williwaws of awe. Suddenly many alien locations which had existed hitherto only as totems on my visual map—a japanned shelf, an arched table, an ogre-headed armchair with a teal velvet cushion, a homogenous thicket of unpainted terracotta, and a choice selection of fascinating grottoes—lay within reach of a determined and intrepid tot. Dare I? Dare I not? If I didn’t make a break for it, I’d never forgive myself, though any migratory sally would indubitably climax with dramatic re-immurement. Well, screw it—expecting to be shanghaied at any moment, I toppled onto my knees and surged off with my head lowered, floundering through yet another effort to prove a point.

But the sensation of free motion was intoxicating. Instantly I forgot her, whisked away by the emotive power of moving, of crawling, scraping my palms and bellying along abjectly yes yes but as master of my own destiny! Oh, that magic captain-at-the-wheel sensation of directing myself, of choosing my own path though it be circular and in vain! For now it mattered not that I bumped against walls—pah! Of an equally pale insignificance was the baby gate, and the fact that the wider room was only a larger cell. Cackling reprobately I paddled across the pine-plank floor, floated over leagues of shining board, glided above a Lilliputian world. So began anew my love for freedom, or at least for the elusive illusion of freedom we all get at most and at best and at worst and at least. This burgeoning eleutheromania would turn my life into a bumpy, tortuous, cliffside journey, a fervent bumble toward the promised land where I could do whatever I wanted all the time every day. Always that utopia of liberty postulated itself at me. Beyond our walls, the jungle. Beneath the paving stones, the beach. There, where the grass is green as gravesites. Even right now, I’m digging through that same old wall, for the possible perfection of freedom on the other side. Within every white page ahead, there could be the right words, the words that will show me what I need, or the words that will cement my name and earn me the income to escape my job, my cold dovecote, my enslavement to various duties and anxieties; not to mention the words that could free me from death, the words like perfect corpses for all time, preserving my era, smelling strangely in symbolic costumes that become ever more hieroglyphic. For me, gold and immortality have seemed never more than a mock-alchemical concoction away—but my alembics break, the recipe is written in wingdings, and the alcahest is time itself, and every syzygy perverts and evects.

You’re expecting me to crash into something. To smack into baleful calamity and once more get wretchedly impounded by my officious ma, as befits this satirical misery-sauna. But not yet. Unlike your standard-issue, unsalted baby, I rapidly established what would hurt me and thereafter evaded it rabidly, having an already highly developed sense of cowardice. I guess because her characteristic caution had been cauterized, her sensitive never-ever nerves sedated and wrapped in gaze, and because I exhibited an apparent maturity and self-control awfully strange to see in a baby, by that evening I’d earned free run of our cloister, and I crisscrossed and cusp-circled it many times, free to hide beneath chairs, to pat the ever-pacific, ever-condescending orange kitty, to plunk myself down below the west window and gawp at the apocalyptic sunset, that terrorific bomb-blister splitting open like the cranium of an infant fruit. Yes, an angry baby’s crimson head exploded above the horizon, feathered serpents of night twined themselves into the xanthic sky, and pompous clouds threatened to throw tantrums, disclosing stars through holes in their minds. So beautiful and ugglesome, how every day figured the end of the world! Death swamped me in red, and I hurried onward, harried, grunting and gakking as I scrambled along the hexagonal perimeter. Instinctively, obsessively, undissuadably, I was struggling to establish a means of escape, escape from everything up to and including manic tramps and the dissolution of souls. Grinding past the baby gate, tapping on the dark-blue baseboards as if a secret egress might swing wide, I crept along the walls in elliptic cycloids, then, when I despaired, wove with my path Celtic triskelions around St. Mom, drawn always back to her, vagrant in her gravity still, unable to orbit far from her though she was frozen with her paintbrush dripping, head haloed with butterflies and birdie-flies and starry gnats, eyes flitting like bats out of heaven, as if she were about to levitate for joy out of her own body and this time for good.

19 – WORKING-CLASS SUPERHERO

My love, please do excuse these excursuses, I’m just jockeying us into place for the next dingy disaster to deform my demeanor. Yeah, thaz right: some more bad shit’s gonna go down. Arguably even worse. Or okay—much worse.

Soon enough you’ll see why I act this way.

But first something niceish. See, for the next few months my dad was convinced of my mom’s imminent death and became ever more vehement that he could detain that death through research and pitiless importunity. This exalted effort, this epic campaign to save his family from iatric malpractice, brought out in him a rare furor of fighting-spirit and peppy chutzpah. Finally he had a selfless, worthy war, and to win it he also had to succor us, to protect as he had never protected, to fatherize maxwise. Roundaboutly, my mom’s fit had initiated the next great show, the one-time shining matinee that was the fullest and furthest flower of my father. We had entered The Golden Age of My Dad.

Of course, a Golden Age is naturally limited, doomed even in its bloom. I’d just come out of the Platinum Age of my mom, the Crystal Age, the Sun Age, where there is no Fall and no serious possibility of a Fall, only divine perfection forever—but that total utopia had been false, and there was no immortal paradise, only temporary escape, only alightings in the flight from lightlessness. Now my highest possibilities would be Golden Ages, which are never indestructible: true to the nature of gold, they are soft and pliant, and have no hard perfection, and even in their burnish what you notice is the shadows of the figures passing across their surfaces, how gold is a dark light. Now the base color of the world, its underlying backdrop, was darkness, blackness across which colors occasionally poured. Now the base was pain, and pleasure a script of clouds across the page of the sky. Now, and hereafter, I would peer out from my hiding places, one hand to my wound, the other stretched up in happy praise of a song, a book, a person, a moment, a sunbeam, a gull, and from the umbra of my slumber would rise the vision, and for every six days of dull grey desolation I would be granted a day of joy. Cursed with rapture—always chasing the brazen flavor—using art like drugs and bitching when it wouldn’t get me high. Ah, but what medicine except rapture exists for the sick-at-heart? What else could make me forget the spear in my side, and the bitter taste of a centurion’s gall?

Enter my father. During the idyllic days of her nervous illness, he sped home early nearly every night, forsaking his private travails at the workshop in order to minister to his unbelievably precious and moribund wife and less-than-entirely-alive infant. Each eve, each garden of evening, as the cobalt fundament dimmed, aged, and bled pink at the edges, my mom’d rouse from her reverie and transplant us to the crowded, cozy kitchen, where she fried ground beef or steaks, slitting lettuce while I sprawled under the table and gazed up at a friendly orb spider shushing me. This obliging spider always waved, its hairy chelicerae drooling while it eyed my succulent fontanelle. As a tribute to our nightly camaraderie, I’d scat to my octo-eyed pal some nonsensical free verse, which my mother invariably took as a performance for her benefit (as if!), stooping to tickle me and celebrate till we’d hear my dad’s shoe on the stairs, an annunciatory creak that set off blaring fanfare, the hyper clopping of hooves, the eager cheering of beery crowds, all to amplify the moment when the door roared open and disgorged my father leaping in like a grizzled lightning bolt smelling of ozone and wood and smoke. He’d sing out upon seeing me, dive like a fighter pilot, snag me and spin around aeronautically. Hoisting me against a sawdusty shoulder, he’d bestow a woody kiss on her, “Mmmmwah,” and she’d blush and float through the kitchen, doling out the plain meal of meat, cheese, bread, pouring him his nightly cup of black coffee. From his arms I’d watch him watching her, as he gauged the mooniness of her mood; he always kept up a merry patter though a little aloof and a bit tenebrous, edges of the day’s darkness clinging—but then they’d eat side by side, the radio on super low, the TV an eye shut in the background, and he’d burp and leak steam and she’d drape a hand over his forearm and lean her forehead against his, and he’d make faces to amuse her, and his smile would pass into her face, which’d pinken and redden, and in turn this smile’d pass back redoubled into his face, and by the time supper ended, he'd be all revved up, reenergized and primed to deliver for us another amazing episode of the Dad Show.

Later in the long nights he’d sink into chain-smoking research in a borrowed textbook on exotic mutations of epilepsy, drowsing off as he was overcome by the soporific potency of medicalese—but first, while my beaming ma washed up, he’d declaim to us, stride up and down the heady boards of our kitchen, and more often than not spontaneously perform an impromptu play based on that day’s strife in the master’s atelier. Most important was that they discussed neither God nor death. Instead he had to cram the room full of his very most cheerfulest self. Gesturing with gusto, doing mimish faces and Three-Stooges-type voices, he’d stage his daily troubles as a cruciblous clash between two stupendous dynamos: an irksome, conceited, and desiccated boss who lisped and fluttered around butterflyishly and hadn’t ever had a single original thought, poised against my dad, star apprentice and most rebellious innovator, a sinewy satyr garlanded with rejoinders, all iron irony and insouciant insurrection, burning everything down with his flaming observations—a thwarted Alexander the Great in clown-paint, who foresaw a fanciful future for furniture yet who flapped feebly against the fetters of a fat-cat conventionalist.

In reality, my dad’s boss wasn’t effeminate, just French and long-haired and upper-middle-classy, and their joint worklife involved more steely dignified orders on his part and on my dad’s part more passive-aggression, unfunny bitter banter and wit d’escalier, bu-u-u-ut the way my father relayed his dopey days made my mom laugh till her eyelids leaked, and I too would guffaw though I comprehended nada. Scratching my pot-belly, smiling askewly, with eyes like withered moons in plastic bags, most of the time I looked as if I were jonesing for a brew, a ciggie, and a telly, yet around my dad at his dadliest I firmed up, exclaimed, giggled, and became not entirely unlike a regular child, if significantly uglier and more purulent. For him, I was all ears, all eyes, all heart—all those body parts so squishy and jellylike and electrified.

My mom nightly overflowered with sorrow for his suffering, as his kitchen performances lofted from the smallness of his boss to the largeness of his loss—to everything he wasn’t doing, everything he so badly needed to accomplish to lift us into a livabler life. Here his clown-paint flaked off, revealing aurum, clouds on blue, many horizons hanging in his head. Ultimately, his underpaid, debasing job under an obviously narrower man was to be tolerated with a taut jaw, as a necessary tho humiliating way of making dovetails mesh before his own sales took off and he could fund an atelier where he would be the boss, and doughty teams of derring-doers would dedicate their adeptness to building his designs and disseminating my dad all over the damned nation. And business would take off, he was sure. If the acclaim of his neighbors, coworkers, and friends-of-friends was to be trusted, he had supernal talent, coruscating skill, and a despotically circumjudicial originality. Nobody made furniture like his, and everybody fuckin’ knew it. So what was wrong? Well, there were some skill-extraneous weaknesses he could admit. Hardly anybody’s perfect! Example of a lack: try as he might to reform his manners, to don le beret noir, he just did not have the requisite disposition to rub elbows with hobnobbers—he was too much the truth-teller, the free spirit speaking the real when no one else’d dare. Even when cufflinked hands were poising golden pens above monogrammed checkbooks, my dad, the holy fool with his holy honor, refused to talk arty bullshit. No, his Sphinx Throne III was not an “ironic take on post-colonial Orientalism”—whatever the fuck that meant. It was a busty, curve-haunched sphinx with a drunken Mona Lisa smile holding up a throne carved with aging harems and maggoty lemons. It had no meaning except its own inherent awesomeness and mastercraftsmanship. Fuck off!

Her brow knitsome, my mom would suggest that maybe a little politeness could go a long way. My father agreed easily, as if she hadn’t at all contradicted him. True, he’d say, such hostile eccentricity as his might be tolerated in the high-status or the notorious, but he had no reputation, no allies or patrons, not a single bloody connection—for there was a second flaw he had grudgingly to admit: that of being self-made, being unfortunately and fortunately nothing more than the plucky, mentorless scion of a proud family of lobster fishermen from Oldlostland. It was he and he alone who to establish his world had to face the unfair fairs and corporate hogs and monocled nose-buckets who wrinkled their fuzzy litter-box muzzles at his avant-fantasy furniture, his dragon-encrusted dressers, his triangular coffers with flowing scrollwork, his wanton mascarons, his four-postered bed whose finials were buxom harpies. As always, the work itself was his ace in the hole: all these future antiques were executed with a technical superiority that obliterated everything else on offer to the conventioneers; so how, despite his prickliness, and despite the eye-popping prices, could his splendidly nonpareil fantasias go unpurchased?

Well, she’d float, being nicer and salesmanliker might help; and until he had more customers and wider repute, maybe he could lower the prices, a bit. Ah no no no, he’d say—then idiots would think his work was worthless. To be sure, he and she might have grown up relatively poor, so they calculated worth a little differently. But here was a little-known fact: cash contained neurotoxins. Just holding hundreds cut off blood to the brain! Nascent senses of taste drowned in expensive champagne, and many-zeroed checking accounts inspired in imbeciles the desire to display their insipid imp-sized importance. In the market for nothing higher than social status, the so-called elite purchased costly la-di-da trash art that was two yellow stripes and a blotch of vomit, to hang in their Brutalist lofts furnished with stainless-steel abortions intended to destroy nature and rob you of the will to live, chairs and tables like catalogue models, the whole glassy ensemble enshrined in a halo of abstract theory and commercial cant. What feeble-minded blather! Where were the aristocrats? Bah! He should have been born in medieval times, there he could have uncomplicatedly thriven, in a simple, honest life… Luckily however, these people were just cashmere sheep, just velvet lambs, and they were quick to change course and follow, to shamble after their bellwethers faithfully, bleating to show their love of the flock. All he needed was one tastemaker, one cognoscentus with a little gnosis, to stamp an imprimatur on his vanguardish grandeur, and we would be swept away on a tide of cash into a mogul’s Xanadu furnished in the mightiest style, with his personal workshop overlooking a mountain range, and he’d have rottweilers, and roans, and a black watch whose face would be a golden skull to emblemize the costliness of his time, and (best of all of course) a beauuuutiful wife whose life he’d saved through his own persistent guile.

And look here, reader—I’m not only satirizing my dad. This personality template, this pugilistic stance he exampled, laid another spiritual cornerstone of the respiring pyramid of myself, set the tendrilous branches of my ego budding with the glomeruli of glamorous predilections. Everything he did soaked into my ink and transfused this text—so please don’t think that my skeptical remarks on him and the bodeful foreshadowing mean that I’m crafting a hit piece on my treasured mom’s rude fecundator. No. Maybe I should point out that in many people virtue and virtuosity often seem negatively correlated, as if missing a part of oneself, being incomplete or stunted, causes other parts to hypertrophy, talent flourishing as a form of self-defense. Fighters like my father often pour all their hopes into a single skill, in the righteous dream of becoming untouchable experts, of being useful and special and admired in their professions, not to mention proportionately remunerated. All day every day such warriors slug their way toward the shining visions of themselves they’ve so cherished and nurtured, and each failure only makes them eagerer to prove the world wrong, so that on their deathbeds their cataracted but ever-captious eyes can glaze over in final peace, and they can disembark from this ark of tears knowing that they were right all along about their own unusually high and unrepeatable value, right despite the sense of failure that had dogged them, the intimations of mediocrity in the aging faces in their poor men’s mirrors. And yet such people do what normal, well-balanced people just cannot do. Illness is a whip. Through him I have my fascination with the problematic, with the good-bad and the bad-good, the ambivalence of a self-promoter’s bravery.

My father always made every goal into an epic quest to rescue the future. High upon his storm-bound rock, bride at his side and baby at his feet, he raised his adze and swore he’d carve out his Victory.

20 – THE ALL-IMPORTANT MESSAGE

Then along came the fourth neurologist. Significantly an older woman, a dumplingish grandmotheroid with half-moon specs she peered over. Paging through printouts, she said little, listened nodding to his exegeses, and to herself made two diagnoses: one about my mother, another about my father. Barely glancing at his distaff half, this sly sugar-pie grannie treated him, praising the research he’d reached, the concepts he’d conquered, the battle he could now finally end. “Mr. Whorl, you could have been a doctor,” she said agreeably.

My father had been wearing his brigadier-general private-investigator face: chiseled lips impassive, cuboid jaw set, supercomputer eyes scanning and analyzing every detail of every verdict. Convinced he appeared cryptic, he had no idea that his right eyebrow was savagely cocked, a furred scimitar sizzling through the shit-mist of his foe’s foolish hypotheses. However, at her soft-soap his eyebrow subsided, he erected his back and lifted his chin. “Thank you,” said he gravely. “So in your professional opinion there’s motive to be alarmed?”

Good god yes, he had weighty grounds for concern, especially since the other specialists had doled out non-answers that covered for their own incomplete perceptions. In his shoes she too would have warred for an apter etiology. However, in this case there was a harmless physiological process which she would walk him through. And it accounted for everything. Everything!

His eyebrow cocked like a gun. “Even the vision?”

“Even the vision.”

His eyebrow shot fireworks.

The diagnostress unpacked her pet hypothesis. It was a miracle of science, a crystal sphere of clarification that reflected within its logical geometry the fine lines of my father’s scientificish perspective. As the doc’s soothing serenities lapped over him, dissolving his salt and crust, he loosened, exclaimed, tipped forward, inch by inch relinquished his cynicism, eyebrows climbing like two caterpillars raising heads. Then the lock in his brain turned, and his mind swung open. Stars raced across his eyes as his joy feedbacked into euphoria. So happy he didn’t trust it, he exchanged a high-lumen look with my radiant and rosily smiling mom—whose obvious relief he misunderstood entirely.

Hallelujah, my mom crooned to herself. No more medical safari! No more gross lectures on neuroanatomy! God was lightening her load again—it just went to show that when she persevered as calm and kind and forgiving, why then all the answers just plopped into existence, spread out and tumbled into their seedholes, developed flowers and perfumed her way. Patience was prelude to godliness. All around her, the heads of daisies and tulips and daffodils and roses appeared, rotating gently within a wash of pink. A cowbell tinkled, wind petted the heads of trembling leaves. In her rejoicing she tugged at my tiny shoes, compelled me to dance a polka in my chest harness. “Bleh,” I commented trenchantly, with the corrugated face of a jaded pundit.

But my fee-fi-fo-father hadn’t just misread my mom, he’d also misread himself. Though he couldn’t have acknowledged it, he’d gradually stopped worrying much that she was at risk. More weighing of late had been his sense of duty to his own dire predictions, now that his relatives, coworkers, and friends had all heard him dramatize a desperate mission of salvation. By surrendering his quest, he would’ve risked coming off as hen-brained, histrionic, submissive to malign medicos—yet now this harmless older lady, who in her spare time surely made marvelous marmalades, was tendering up to him a gold-plated way out: not only was wifey okay, but also (and inevitably) he’d been right all along, heyyyy boyo. Fan-fuckin’-tastic! At the end he sprang up, moved to hug the mind doctor, who however held up her palms and smiled her no, demurring with an old-fashioned femininity that charmed him nevertheless.

All the drive home, my father retold and embellished on the neurodoc’s elucidation, slapping the wheel in uproarious celebratory glory of confirmation. See, the brain, he breezed, the brain’s making up the world as it tootles along. Sorting and categorizing. Measuring and laying out. Mapping, blueprinting, carving, wiring, nailing. Sure, there’s a world out there—but you’re not seeing it directly. You see, hear, smell, and taste only what your brain represents to you. In a way, the brain creates everything it sees. It is a God.

Whenever he nudged her, my mom half-smiled and half-nodded, out of self-defense only ¼-listening. Not that she’d ever argue, but she did not welcome any of his medical materialism in the minutest. She had felt what she had felt; she had seen what she had seen, and it had seen her back, and healed her of pain she’d suffered her whole life, and never again would she suffer the same. What he believed did not matter. Let him steam himself out.

The brain, he chortled, the brain creates your body! And in your case my love, what malfunctioned was your brain’s sense of where your body is, where your fingers and toes are, what sort of space you occupy. This sense is called p… propioception, and in situations of great stress it can get dislocated. Yanked out of place, my dad italicized merrily, veering his van as if it were a boxy alpha elbow swaggering down a cold school hall where the students were cowed cars and the lockers cowards’ condos. Therefore in the end, he trumpeted, the sequence of traumatic events is orderly and complete. Deprived of oxygen from her frenzied and frantic run home, her brain had powered down, glitched, and generated its internal sense of the body above the actual body, within its simulation of the room. Her out-of-body experience had been nothing more than a hallucination of p… poprioception. Easy-peasy, no mysterizee, hey hey hey golden days are here again, whee, viva la vie!

My mom stared at a shattered copse of trees whose skeleton broom-fingers whisked the silvery-blue sky, rattling against ambient albescence. She was hearing rather more than she wanted to hear. In the office she’d zoned out into flowers; him she couldn’t entirely ignore. Pulling me tighter despite my protests, she shut her eyes, imagined an ocean speaking to her like the slowly rolling pages of a holy book, the world itself instructing her in acceptance. Let everything flood through her without meeting resistance. Shhh. Shhhhhhhh.

His delight, in any case, was delightful. Like the rest of his personality, it was over-powered, both manly and childlike, infectious in no small part because of his demanding handsomeness, that face that looked cut from a boulder. Under the spell of his rocky-rambo wow-power, she could almost always participate in his romps, even when he was amped up about, say, an exotic variety of African wood; it’s just that this particular fit of joy was part of an implicit attack. But… did he even know he was attacking?

My dad grabbed her knee, squeezed. In full motoring flow, feelin’ light in streets full of light, he hadn’t marked her withdrawal. Despite appearances, he was no longer trying to convince her—he assumed she was already convinced—so much as reliving the lovely conversation in which he had been presented the brilliant answerkey on a mithril platter of unassailable logic. It fit every locked problem. Even the vision was easy to exlucidate. First well clearly she’d been delirious, likely from a lack of oxygen. She may even have passed out. Maybe she was dreaming! Secondly, there’d been a real friggin’ good reason God’d been Goofy, namely that Goofy was just the brain simulating a scene patched out of her memories, capeesh? Generating its own stupid God out of old material it already had lying around, because in a way that’s exactly what the brain always did. Bammo! Case solved and ambiguity resolved! Hail victory!

At the word “stupid,” she bolted upright with such roughness that I lurched against my chest harness. Its strap snapped. Too shocked to scream, I rolled down her oblong abdomen, caromed off her right knee, and hurtled below the dashboard, where my fragile body collided with boulders, repercussing down escarpments toward a De Chirico countryside with hundreds of palatial houses and none of them inhabited, hounds and cattle that were paper cutouts, and the birdsong a recorded lamentation from the last living bird of a species, a unicum calling out forever for a mate who did not exist, its song expressing all the grinding loneliness of being the only one of its kind. Hooting along to this rending soundtrack, I tumbled forever forward into the sucking void.

My ma, that temporarily eternal maiden, noticed not that I had tumbled into an infinite pit. Impelled by pique, she was about to prance over a dreadful threshold, a red-running Rubicon she had never even come close to crossing in the two years they’d been together. “It wasn’t stupid,” she blurted, contradicting him at last, this man thirteen years elder, so masterly, so skillful, so knowing and so wrong. “It was meaningful.”

He squinted at her blankly. “What was?”

Sixty ghosts shrieked out their souls simultaneously: the brakes. The van screeched to a stop, jolting me back into place as my father punched the center of the wheel. The van nasalized like a hurt elephant. “Motherf—” he began, only to toss a glance at my mom and swallow the verboten word. Lately she had not been especially fond of profane language, no sir. Grumbling with violence, he hit the wheel again; again the horn scorned its horrible one-note hate-song.

But next my dad did something amazing and altogether acharacteristic: he relaxed. He decided to let the psychopath go. To allow the criminally murderous kamikaze driver to escape without a third hornblast, let alone a traffic-light lecture, because hey mane what would it change, better to be mellow, after all his life was pretty goldarned good, right? He had his shit together, his wife was A-OK and thriving after her breakdown, even his sickly, caruncle-faced son had become noticeably less red if somewhat more grey.

A grey, I’d like to note, that complemented the desolating December light which in all its cold glory could not extinguish the glow of our nuclear family.

I’ve always been a mood chameleon.

“What were you saying?” he said, still too tight about the eyes.

She muttered that it didn’t matter. Better to sink back into ataraxia, she felt. It was easy: all she had to do was float recumbent, and she would be borne along and again like a leaf downstream to her fate. Never fight the universe.

Above the road hung a stave of power lines on which crows formed the notes of an ostinato, but she couldn’t read music and the songs of the world do not always sing themselves, and so the all-important message slips by unseen.

21 – O, BUTCHERLY BABY!

And so the Goldenrod Age welked. You prolly thought it was about to bloom its bloomliest, but nah: my dad’s love and limelight had been the exotic blossoms of his anxieties, the pink tropical fruits of his panic. Now that the crisis was cancelled, his wifey-wife & sonny-son lost some of their emotional charge and immediacy, and he immersed himself back into the magmatic bubble bath of his ambition, investing his evenings in the workshop as he hatched a sequence of casino tables with the legs of fantasy beasts. Emmersing from us, he sculpted himself into all toughness and discipline, vigorous self-giving and drill-parade impeccability, bent on becoming a chisel-wielding god who would create a baroque super-destiny with no other aid than his own uppity panache and overpowering prolificacy. And he really was wicked prolific—earlier he’d rented a storage unit so he could empty the living room, but less than a year later he’d filled it again; his material outlay was insane and unsustainable and he was already ruining his knees, wrecking his wrists... yet burdens, handicaps, obstacles and curses just drove him harder. He was thirty-fuckin’-two, and time was dashing away. He needed to get better and better and BETTER, for in his rearview mirror he could already see Failure chasing him, bug-eyed and hurtling in its hunger for his hide. He had to become a machine supreme.

Parallely his nightly performances for us tapered off. He wasn’t in the mood anymore; he was tired; he was haunted. His fewing capers verged ever more on complaints as his selfish selflessness neatly inverted into selfless selfishness. Worse, the flaming of his career obsessions left behind a smoked-out fragrance of frustration. What youngish lion wouldn’t chafe? All those prison shifts in the master’s atelier, all those futile days off when he schlepped his newest creations, with their swoops and helices, tritons and djinni, to markets where people oohed and aahed and then blanched at the price-tags, as if quality it should cost nothin’. People, they just wanted everything for free, dig, they weren’t willing to work, he’d say to us, shrugging, into his playful face creeping a tarry intrusion, a ninja connotation of ashen tension, a perilous whiff of rain clouds dark on the horizon, thalassian seas churning with restless dragons.

So he fought on. True, most mornings he awoke a tad sad, folding her into his iron arms, but by the abrading scrape of his razor all his follicles clicked shut, and his eyes irised closed, steel shutters protecting the simulated missiles siloed in his nuclear brain. To him it often seemed he was a soldier still, though fighting for deeper justice than in the army, which for seven years had used him, a dumbass kid, after brainwashing him into obedience—not that he’d ever been sent into combat, but that was just yokel’s luck, he told me later, cuz if sent he would have killed many times over, would’ve been dragonish red-skied Armageddon to a buncha peasants, and for what? To enrich distant billionaires! Fuck the world order, fuck the elite, fuck the mold-men in control. However… he would never, ever say that the army was 100% wrong. It was captive to the wrong causes, but it preserved a lot of noble values and virtues that had been largely lost: fitness, strength, discipline, order, self-control, manliness, hard play, loyalty, courage. Obedience could be good too, when it meant being obedient to the right thing. It’s just that in this world, with these (ahem) socksucking rulers, there was no nobility in serving, in obeying, in agreeing.

Ever since his discharge he’d been master of his own destiny, a soldier of his own damn fortune, and he made sure his personal war, fought in the medium of inventive furniture, was a good war, a pure war, one that if won would enrich him and the world. He was fighting for something nobler than money, power, recognition, he’d claim. He was fighting because the establishment was senile and the buyers were piggish ignorami who impressed on the general public their desiccating taste for soul-killing, ball-milking modern furnishings. He wanted to make spaces monumental again, to blazon the flagrant pleasures of fantasy across this minimalist hellscape, to thrust his work’s blade into the belly of society and conquer this arid flatland where all was straight, rounded, square, acridly Euclidean, discorporate and corporatized. With scrolls and consoles, hellhounds and horned heroes, sepulchers and skeuomorphs, he would improve the day-to-day, sight-by-sight feeling of being alive for millions, as his workshops mushroomed into plenitudes. He would restore the fallen world and reenchant the home. He would revive the very corpse of beauty, and inspire people to strength, pride, and courage. Geronimo!

I couldn’t fully fathom my father’s fight, but clearly he’d win, whatever his foe, simply by dint of his tremendous astoundingosity. Clanking through sunbeams on his long dawn trod to his coliseum of excelsior, he’d heave-ho with a merry sigh to wrestle a hundred hippopotami, cheered on by thousands of raving fans all wearing masks of his face—then return at night fatigued and flinging blood but inevitably at least a little victorious. Admittedly, the tone of his tenacity had tuned grimmer, gorier, grotesquer. He’d hit the kitchen tap and it would spurt hot pus. His dust-sneezes blew off the top of his skull; it rolled around clattering as he yelled at my mother to pick it up quick ‘fore it got filthy. A shepherd’s pie he made turned into the steaming image of a linen-shrouded grave. His teeth, always his greatest weakness, felt like talc; two had already crumbled into pasty potsherds. His twice-broke ulna pulsating, he’d die every night and be resurrected in the morning. War was not for dabblers or badlings! But from my crib, this pained campaign against the artisanal hegemony was no whit less mesmerizing than his playful apotheosis for us. Already I was learning to love the hero’s journey in daily installments, shadowplayed by puppets in the theaters of my eyes, by reflections in the waters of my ewer eyes.

It helped too that he palavered with me peerishly, even sometimes swerving his soliloquys to solicit my opinions though we both knew I could not formulate a stance even at the gunpoint of a question mark. His manner may have been tainted with intensity, with tincture of vinegar amid gravelly sugar, yet I never felt excluded from his vision. Far from it. I felt us allied and was totally willing to wreak havoc for his cause. Merely indicate and I would kill. With my single tooth a throat disembowel. In his service I was a grizzled, tin-helmeted sergeant baby, ready to hunker in bunkers against overwhelming opposition as long as I got to watch my father the high-flown acrobatic capitaine fight, this nimble combat saint who raised me to his plane and honored my need for freedom, this swashbuckler who, even in the acidulous armpits of his acridest anger, never ordered me around, never lifted me against my will, never once subjected me to the niggling indignities of wiping or feeding. Indeed, he most frequently served as the ambassador of emancipation, counseling my mother to let me do what I pleased even if my will was to flipper in a berserk mode to and fro like an ungainly flesh potato. Every night he fried like a meteorite into our dimming demesne and vanquished the fractious dark, a liberating fireball sent from heaven to translight our slice-of-life realism into diabolic romanticism. Spurred by his ebbing presence, I flourished into a father-fanatic.

On the udder hand, my mudder continued to impose an absolutist regime on me and became thereby my despised warden. Against my will she tugged and lugged, dressed and undressed me sans nuance, swapped my diaper then shortly afterward licked her thumb and rubbed pudding from my muzzle. Pyargh! Lately her milk reeked like blue cheese: as that sour paste oozed down my throat, curdled dairy glopping in furry folds, my eyes fogged over from fungal stink, and some of my more tenuously alive brain cells croaked at the osmic insult and died with tiny revolted groans. What could I do against her moist tyranny? What insurrection could I orchestrate, I so puny in this otherwise xeric climate without other manna clouds or nectar holes? Like many a dependent, I had to play my complaints close to my chest, settling for revenge in relatively minor and unwhelming ways that just snarled our lives further into the brambles of familial pain. E.g. I often refused to face her, turning my old cold woldy profile, sullenly unrolling a distress message that she never decrypted correctly. But what did I want? Apologies on knees? Full attention please? I had it: She’d hover above as if nothing had gone wrong between us, making clowny faces and softly chiding me and cavorting from side to side, trying to catch my housefly eyes—and grimly I’d look everywhere else, determined to transmit my protest. Stymied, she’d deploy her unstoppable weapon: she’d crab her fingertips against my stomach and tickle me and despite myself I, the sergeant of solo self-command, would shatter into laughter, but a laughter that was humiliating, extracted from me against my will, a laughter that pained and enraged as it foamed at my bones and whammed at my diaphragm.

Wretchedly, only THREE DECADES LATER would I discover how sorely I had misapprehended my ma, how badly I had flubbed our bubble of lovely love! Stop and think about that: thirty years elapsed before my mom and I, on the eve after a family funeral, inclined to each other over some rare wine, and, hesitating from shyness and embarrassment, traced our parted paths back to the first fissure, the fatal fork that mortally divided our directions: I mean the loss of the telepathic link. I—paper-airplane-faced, having drawn my cape about myself, and gazing porphyrically into a metaphor of space—confessed to my ma over the slashed chasm still spasming between us that in the terrorful era after the traumarama of her theophanic fit I had felt unmourned, oh cripes, abandoned, betrayed, tossed nude into the cold of the old, old, old world.

My mom, red-eyed, fretting at a lace doily, had reacted with disbelief, alarm and astonishment. In her mind our telepathic connection had never once changed. She could still sense whether I was happy or sad, awake or asleep— never more and never less. And Stefsie, she added bluely—her eyebrows anticlining—of course of course even in her highest elations she had never forgotten her baby for more than a few minutes, had even often beheld in scriptural cloudage the translucid eidolon of the man her son might become. To her, nothing could have been holier, more beautiful and wondrous than my baby self. After her fit, she had loved me harder than ever, because she could finally love without fear. She hadn’t been distant at all. She’d only been less anxious.

Picture me as a sundry-woed adult (my eyes tragic Maraschino cherries in teacups of fog, my cheekbones the bleached perpendicularities of a tuberculotic Romantic protagonist) disintegrating, powdering away in the sorrowful sunlight of her reply as we uncovered my mistake and its sequelae.

Back then, she hadn’t been able to explain my bile—and it tormented her. Why was I rejecting her? Had she failed me somehow? Forgotten to feed me, left me to freeze alone on a chill afternoon? Was she a bad mom? But why? What on earth had she done to deserve such hate?

At first she resisted her fear, employed her new gnosis and forced herself to stay calm. For a while, control was easy. Really, only a few hot flickerings of wrongness licked at the fizzing edges of her fat, creamy bliss, her vanilla-and-cinnamon sense of floating in a carbonated womb, protected by a new way of being and seeing and feeling. She wouldn’t lose her exaltation, she thought, if she held tight to the brightness. If just she stayed conscious of truth, each morning’s light would freeze her in holy formaldehyde, and the postdiluvial dove would bless the sky, ascending from the aurora’s fuscous arborescence.

Yet in the face of her baby’s loathing, any day could darkle if she allowed gloom to agglomerate or the shadows to slip from her fists. Whenever she stopped holding herself directly awake, everything decayed into the ugly mush of the days of yore, and her imperfect beauty of spirit turned into perfect heinousness of body, and all goodness came to an end. Briefly, at least. What’s more, moon by moon her gorgeous stained-glass animation of God seemed to be bleaching and leaching out, turning ever less heavenly, ever earthlier and funnier and unfunnier too. Contracting, she occupied ever less of her flesh, abandoning her outposts as she retreated to the dank and resinous torch of her heart; huffing after her dwindling felicity, she spelunked into her solar plexus, plunked into the shrinking thermals of her sacred experience until everything outside her kernel echoed in from someplace external. In these trances she slowed, turned reptilian. She may have loved me unto death, but if I chanced to flap open my pauper’s lips and emit a sonic miasma of despair, why, my gone mom’d clue into my exequial monody only many, many seconds after the overture wails, would transfer her unmown field of sight to me most snailishly and observe my upset with unurgent submersion, with a numb serenity I found infuriating. Those eyes buried in her face! Oh, how I roasted her on the coals of my hate!

O, butcherly baby! Would I have had mercy, had I descried her dismay?

Then, inevitably, her anxieties rippled out and intersected her certainty about salvation. What if… her son had turned against her out of some primordial instinct, sensing that there was something wrong with her? That she was impure, arrogant, stupid? What if she had sinned for thinking she could explain what no one can understand? What if she had disobeyed? Now she recalled God’s access of wrath. She recalled the word “forbidden.” She remembered Evil.

22 – SEISMIC PRESENTIMENTS

Indeedy-do she was spiraling crying down matutinal heliclines from cloudcuckooland. As she daily whooshed down those death-scented descents, everything outside dimmed and dimpled and disapparated, while the horizons crowded so close they seemed to elbow the windows whipping past. Sights, signs, portents, cyphers—all illegible. Had she done something wrong, or not? Seen something she shouldn’t have seen? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t decide, couldn’t even discuss it with her vehement husband. Alone she looked to the world for its answer—and the world moaned. Now in bloated dread moments came momentous omens, whose meanings shifted emphases depending on who looked: an ominous prank call, the flashing smash of a glass, another fire a few streets further, fire fire everywhere, baffling yowls from the cat, in my puke a cheesy chunk of blueness. At the mumble of thunder her heart knocked at the door to her throat. Puzzling over a jigsaw sigil at the kitchen table, she glanced down seemingly out of coincidence and spotted my friend the orb spider boogeying up her denimed thigh, shimmying his cephalothorax as he skiddle-bopped along in fast-motion progressive dance. To her this moment metaphorized everything, everything. For me, it’s when I realized he was not my friend, that he was eldritch devil octo-death, the drooling, duplicitous, and polydeformed peak of deadly evil and scariest frigging thing she ever met in her little life, if her squeaked shriek, spasmic skipping, and shaky sobbing were any sign, if the prompt murder of my orb-bummed false friend were any indication, the explosive decompression and separation of his hairy operations as I wept and wept at this terrible treble troublem of death, at a death and death itself and the death of my last trust in a stranger stranger than I.

One evening there were two gunshots in the next block, then the Wagnerian rise of sirens. Then more shots. Oh god. She wisped from window to window, peering out from the frames’ sides. Nothing out there but night, noise, nothingness that rustled and was full. She had to let Marty know. In case she—oh god. Gangs and cops everywhere! Urban battlefields! CARNAGE! Hunched low beside the phone, enveloping me so she might absorb the bullets, she dialed the atelier and squeaked out a feeble request for her husband, so distressed that she forgot to mention his name. The quavering of her quilted voice, however, betrayed her identity. All my dad’s coworkers had heard festooned anecdotes of my mom and her pinballing panic attacks, her myriad and multiplying needs which obviously could be a bit manaclous to my high-firing’ father at times, god bless ‘er ‘elpless ‘eart. In fact, my dad’d intimated to them that the medical hysteria had come out of her hypochondria, her conviction that she was about to have a second seizure, and that a shrewder man would not have taken her so seriously, no sirree.—And you know what? My father was prattling in all innocence. He believed what he was saying. He always did. Whatever tumbled out of his mouth became his truth he’d die to defend, his social life a tightrope act on the cable of language swinging from his lips; funambulist of his own proclamations, he slid and glid along without ever falling into anything so gummy as veracity. Did he not leave a shining trail of smiles? Was he not the hero of everyone’s hopes, the helot apostle of ornament?

From my crib I strained to catch his pantherous cadences, his voice that rasped like a paladin’s sandpaper. My dad was the only entity who could save us from this war-torn night with its insinuendos wending through fang-frilled air—he would make everything okay, if he appeared, for his bonhomie soothed and rescued, and he slew shadows with the light of his look. He was the Hero.

On the far end of the phone, he was patient and munificent, Solomonic, winking to the other men and reassuring her in loud, round, sunny tones that she wasn’t going to get shot. Who had anything against her? She was just about the sweetest person in the world! Yeah, ‘course he meant it! But look: it broke his heart, Peachy Peach, or at least dented it, but he was too busy to come home—the biggest fair of the year was lurching ever nearer—and she oughta make some hot cocoa ‘n’ practice deep breaths ‘n’ compose herself somehow.

We must have died eleven times that night. But even worse for her were the nights when the telephone rang and on the other end jostled her parents or a girlfriend in a flurry of nosy worry. Here her fears were insidiouser, capelike portents beating slow wings as the Others posed queer questions, probed into her temper, and pried into her beliefs with an unelicited solicitousness which did not feel entirely sincere in its curiosity about the sinuosities of her newly fluvial theology. Offended and trying to hide it, she repeated and rerepeated that she had accepted Christ—though in reality she’d thought little about Christ; he just kind of came along with God, in a package deal with the Holy Spirit. What did it matter? The specific details were beside the point, what mattered was her experience, what mattered was repenting and forgiving and loving and loving, like God loved her, like God loved everyone. There was no hell, she’d say subdued. She knew that much. Ok and what was God exactly? What had she seen? Did she really think that the creator of the universe was a commercial cartoon figure whose precious message was that she should love herself? Well, kind of! Her mother ordered her to cork the gobbledygook; her father listened with sympathy and then, being very German, suggested that joining a mountaineering club might be just the medicine; her girlfriends doubted too but were subtler, pirouetting around how she’d changed and attempting to lure her out for cocktails. Which, like, no. Not a snowball’s chance! She just wanted to be alone! Since the incident, everyone had morphed into pursuers to be foisted off, equilibrium-assaulters best kept at bay by polite, peaceful, walled-up words, because they would never understand, nobody understood.

She’d hang up with a smoldering-hair, cold-sweat hunch that she had just outlasted an all-out attack on her eternal soul; settling back unsettled, she’d seethe a little and try to soothe herself, just as my dad had requested.

I’d watch with my gaper agape. When she hung up, I gulped down a fly. Where was my daddy? Each morning it seemed he might never return.

I bawled against it all, but I could not stop him leaving.

Then Kitty turned against us. This big-cheeked longhair had always tolerated our tender touches, too lofty to bother loathing, but now it spurned our worship and fled muttering into shadowy precincts. For several nights on end it loudly scrowled yet could not be found, its scrilly wowl as disembodied as if the apartment itself were possessed by the animadverting phantom of a peevish feline. Finally Kitty started throwing still fits, silent tantrums. It lounged in the sun, its face a zap, crackle-whiskered and storm-eyebrowed from the electric nimbus of its puissant personality, louring with its long staticky fur sizzling orange-mandorlishly, the annihilating noonlight frilly flaring around it in a sustained yellow memo of vitriolic ire as it accused us with sesamoid eyes that were the alien viridian of a cosmic punisher. Untouchable as an indemnified principality, the cat seemed to pass a judgment on us irrefragable and final, the appeal dispatched before our trial ever began, the sentence unstinting slaughter. Were Kitty more able, it would no doubt volunteer nicely as our spritely carnifex. One day my mom shuffled into the bathroom and spotted it staring down from atop the medical cabinet, its eyes two hot emeralds of hatred locked on her in an exsanguinary glare, a low-muzzled, top-of-the-eye stare like a murderer imprisoned for life gives to the hated warden, as if only her size were saving her from a swift shish-kebabbing. Then it hissed and shivered away. After it she yelled, “What? WHAAAAT???”

And this-all was rather harsh, don’t you think? My mom certainly felt insulted, unfairly handled and ignominiously vetoed. Did she not scoop its litter and spoon its vittles? What had she changed, to earn this animal’s inimicality? At first she was hurt—at second, hardened. Kitty was Marty’s anyway, his unneutered Russian Longhair, shaggy ocher apple of his eye, always a self-reliant and lordly little tom and yet suddenly much more male than before, having hardened overnight into a penetrant masculine presence who truly deserved the name with which my father had originally knighted him: Chief Tiger.

A few days later this chieftain ambushed her in the laundry room. Crouching atop the dryer, tail featherdusting, our bicep-cheeked, power-faced Chief Tiger protended a silken sinew and patted air, unsheathing his claws, shoulders rippling with predatorial suppleness. She made to nudge him aside with a laundry basket, but he hissed her away, batting air bullyingly: just try it, bitch. Well, she tried it, and got raked down her forearm, three jagged crimson gouges that she would sear with antiseptic and check compulsively for weeks. Bolting off from her agonized cry, he paused and eyed me cat to caitiff, assessed my frightened, submissive, about-to-begin-bawling face—but just bared his canines’ pinnacles and roved onward snarling, imperial nostrils steaming curly piles of champignon clouds. Then he hopped onto his front paws and strode topsy-turvy into a red-and-blue checked room I never saw again, his ocher-silk cilia wafting behind him, growing longer, unfolding and flowing underwaterishly while he flounced, a subaquatic antipodean rippling through images of himself till he disappeared behind a giant statue of a laughing Grim Reaper. Gone!

Chief Tiger was clearly evil. But weren’t all cats? What kind of cruel chaos creature were she and I penned inside with? Grim now the coaly clockspace after dark, we twin weaklings waiting in bituminous nothingness, somewhere a fell hunter skulking in sidereal shadow. Brr! Better than ever the vesperal recrudescence of my dad, to save us from the moody demon he owned.

That evening she made her case for ditching the killer cat, concluding that if my dad even in the slightest valued the continued biological existence of their amazing baby then he would rehome this ochre cougar with its poison claws. He was flabbergasted by her tale, all livid alarm and glowering vengeance till she unbandaged her forearm and bared for him three little red ruts. His face briefly turned into an exclamation mark. “Anke!” His consternation drained and he began to laugh, and as he laughed, her eyes went blank and turned into an ellipsis standing in for what she wasn’t saying.

“Anke, don’t give me that look!” Merrily he brought up an engrimed hand and flexed for her a cicatrix knuckle dug open like a scarlet quarry. “Problem is,” he added, “You never feel any real pain day to day. So the little gets big. No doubt Chief Tiger was just having a bad day, maybe he has a tummyache or kidneystones. Otherwise why all the howls lately?”

Her prosecution foundered altogether after Chief Tiger slinked in and headbutted my father for cuddles, snrking, purring, benevolent, satiated, a flopping mass of fearsome affection. My father petted his belly and crooned at him fondly, ever the sucker for animals and small kids. She snatched me and backed up watching the tigrous forest warrior’s every move.

New truth #109: my dad wouldn’t always save her. Couldn’t.

And especially not from himself.

23 – THE OPPRESSED VS THE CRUSHER

Yes, my father had started catting and dogging my mother. For example, one needly night, a-think-think-thinkin’ on his titanic tasks, casting about for every extra fortminute, he proposed verrry mildly that it might could be good for his gentle & gorgeous Galatea to attempt once more to fetch their comestibles. To this salt-sugary suggestion she offered no aural reply, tendered only the hesychastic satyagraha of her engrieved face twitching with fear and offence and surrender and defiance, a richly switching clash of twinges that twanged his guilt strings. Ah baby forgeddaboud it, he muttered muttly.

Then the day before the big fair, after he had slogged through his sixth double-shift in a row, he zoomed home to a lumpenly steaming meal of 85% mega-garlicky hamburger chow and 15% rigatoni—just the ratio he liked in fact except she’d boiled the rigatoni to death, the noodles pasty as corpses dredged from the sea, as substanceless as ghosts leaking through his teeth. No need to chew! Hwah! Contrasted against his own taxing and fastidious work, against all the blistering labor he logged for her sake, these gruesome noodles sufficed to set the mealy red moths of anger flapping up his esophagus.

But he poured water on their bloody wings. Poor girl. His invalid, his valetudinarian. Still. Didn’t seem right she put so little care into his meal. Did she care? Hm. Pity for her could only go so far. Too far? Guiding smile awry, he remarked that he found it weird that she seemed not to have noticed that the noodles were not exactly what even a medieval peasant might dub edible.

“You don’t like it?” she breathed, eyeballing her works. The noodles… were not all that bad. Not perfect, mind you. But no one with a kid in tow could cook noodles perfectly every time. How rude! Mean! Nitpicky! she said silently.

In her inmost ear his voice sibilated like slow husky snake lightning: How wasss he ssssupposssed to eat thissss?—And the toxins in his tongue, the acid in his assessment, told her everything. The subtext screamed: he had already been angry. Already fuming. Already disappointed, tired of her, so tired he couldn’t even look at her. The noodles were but sluices for his mood.

Her indignation imploded into insecurity. Out dribbled a duo of teardrops, twin harbingers of a torrent of eye-water and tongue-stutter, a doubled downpour he greeted with a tsk, an appalling tsk, an apocalyptic tsk that signified to her the calving of a continent, the schism at the end of their time. Why had he been staying later at the workshop? Why had he been withdrawing physically and emotionally? SUDDENLY SHE KNEW WHY. He HATED her! Closing her openings, and opening her closings, she bared her rainy face to him and in nunnish agony awaited the demise of their relationship and all that was fine.

But the end did not begin. Instead his whiskery warmth washed over her, scratchy wildfire skinheat as he embraced her, first delicately but then, as she gave way, building up and climaxing in a strong rocking clinch, squeezing her with one arm and scooping her head like a baby’s, tutting and hushing and swaying with her till at last she went slack and the tears tapered. Who could resist this mighty hug of a fire bear, carrying its own summer? Wowee, he really did know how to rescue her, she thought, cheek on his chest, swashing into a third mood just as powerful as the anger and fear, yet far cleaner: love. Love!

Not for long. In his warmest bass he apologized without admitting wrongdoing, airily subtracted his last few witticisms then with a juck-juckly jocosity that irked he added that ah well y’know twas a tittle bit tough, a bittle lit fiddicult if not everyone did their fair shares, that he (Marty the Martian) and she (Anke the Allemagne) had tied the knot and divided the labor, right, he made the moolah and she made the foodah and well the night before the biggest fair of the gollydarned year he did need victuals he could stomach. Sorry, kiddo! Then he prodded her stomach as if he’d been funny, as if she should laugh.

But she couldn’t. His swollen fat statements hung dripping pollutants, refusing to fade, leaving the sickly, tickling aftertaste of his faint impatience, which he’d nutrasweetened with condescension. Labile as cooked liquor, she caught fire, angry flames squirting through her wooden veins. Turns out she was the next building to burn—though the flames were instantly put out by the sprinklers of her own eyes. This time he didn’t need to tense a single tendon: all on its own, her fiery anger angled down sharply into fluid angst. Splash! Snuffling she lowered her gaze in deep, deep shame of being such an obtuse and useless fool who most certainly deserved everything she was about to get.

She got nothin’. My father had rinsed off his rage, had shed his sense of offence through bold and free expression, then paid her off with an apology. The matter had been shattered. All done fightin’, he shrugged her off and readdressed his dinner, neatly segregating the noodles and forking into his eight-o-clock-shadowed maw his garlicky beef and most of hers too, making sure to remind her that after all he did need a foursquare meal for the morrow.

Retreating my way, she spooned up muddy mouthfuls of peach pulp, speaking to me syruply, cajoling me with nonsense underlined by strain and whiffing of fear. For the first time in a while I looked directly into her face—and saw raw need, and was seared, and was speared, and was mirrored: those church-window eyes! So tragically real! My spleen peeled like a bell pear, my heart offered itself up for her to eat. Oh at last my god at last! She was turning to me again for real! Here, in the mucky-uck, blucky-bluck bottom-bottom-bottom of a disturbed and turbid day, shone the shekinah of the wondrous miracle solution, the express phoenix ride back to Eden! Look look look at her pain, I more or less counseled myself. Her confusion. Her will to be good. Dude, she’s suffered enough. Soften your heart! Capitulate! Abdicate the lonely iron maiden of your maddened wasp-stung self and say yes yes I will yes ma I am your son!

At the consecrating pecks of these dovelike thoughts all the windows, doors, gates and grates in my head creaked wide, the spirit doves flew out cooing and the lamps in my eyes lit their own wicks, and she unfastened her mouth and heaved a city-shaking sigh of relief and love and—

But no.

No no, I-I-I couldn’t trust her. I had been betrayed too often. Refusing her spoon, I cruciformed my miniscule arms, turned an unchivalrous chin and harrumphed phlegmatically, groping for a pacifier I liked to chew like a cigar.

Rejected twofold, my mom survived supper by speaking seldom and focusing on holding herself still and unsilly, gripping herself like a lion grips its kitten, brumous eyes wandering out and in as she sociated and dissociated. Everything broke up broke down and broke out, the bibbed baby blurred into bibby babyness and the unhappy hubby hazed into hubbly harpyness, the high-pH pHenomenal world washing roughly over her in choppy waves of raw data, her ensconced consciousness reconstituting itself constantly and instantly, till the present did roar in all its presence: Colors. Forms. Rhythms. Exchanges. Relations. Dependencies. Destinies. Emotions. The groaning oceans of emotions. The filthiness facing, defacing and effacing her. The disgusting mess of herself and the world and her future. She imagined a snarl unsnarling. She imagined badness draining like dirty water, ink running clear. Imagined her emotions splashing up a-grumble out of the swimming pool of her soul. Imagined the rubber duck of her spirit pitching up and down amid a quietness of echoes asymptoting toward silence. Image upon image upon image, each projected slide coming closer to reality, to the scene before her, until our kitchen crystallized into a harmless scene at last where baby was just being babyish and cat was just being cattish and hubby was just being hunnish on account of the big fair tomorrow and okay, it was time to let the reins slacken, to relax.

The Big Fear waylaid her as she did the dishes. The frigging rigatoni again, they’d melted into greyish paste coating the pot’s bottom, tattered tubes flopping like the emptied eggs of cylindrical parasites. This ovarian pasta anemone seafloor, as she scrubbed, turned into a diorama of an ultimate reality, but one that was the antipole of whatever she’d glimpsed in heaven. Here was real reality: food. Dirt. Dish soup salted by tears. Pee and poop. Sleep and walk. The body the slavemaster. The body realest, so real that her many lost, dreaming, silvered hours seemed abstract. Suds snowed up her wrists. Steel wool etched her palm with abstract-expressionist glyphs. What was real? What was real? What had been possessing her mind? The preternatural clarity of post-sanctification had since fuzzed over with snow, and in those blizzards of white noise lurked demons of doubt, unkempt and deca-daggered, descending to impale her cradle of comfortable belief. Maybe you did something wrong, barked one. No, the entire vision was wrong, honked another. It was a dream! An anoxic seizure! A hallucination! Had Marty then a point? Was it all kooky and krazy? Was she sick sick sick sick? She desperately hoped she wasn’t lunatic. What smear of life awaited her without her dear divinity?—And wasn’t it wrong to ponder these questions? Shouldn’t she have faith?—But faith in what?

Seeking a reminder of happiness, she hush-shoed to my fortress crib. I, darling child, had crumbled asleep a-sitting and was folded like a hackeysack, chinsie ‘twixt my feetsies, blissed in numb dormition. Only in sleep did I ever peace out and forfeit my unheimlich jadedness, my cynically tolerant semi-smirk of a white-collar burnout. In that moment I looked mostly like an adorable baby, templed with a high fine round brow like an unmarred morning lake, ay-yi-yi eyes silked with fuzzless lids so spheroidal and smooth they resembled soft water in laminar flow over marble balls, my bitty body arborescing all over with masterwork vasculature lit from inside, perfect red and blue veins glowing in taxonomic dendrography, vital light pushing through my skin from beyond, from someplace ineffable where light was language and God was an unbegotten star parrot on an entelechic perch, his prolific and prolaliac squiggly squawks fulgurating through me as if my cranium were a keyhole.

Me, well—I was dreaming I’d motorcycled seventy-seven continents only to skid on a banana crust, skew and crash and fly with arms windmilling and smash on the gravel forehead first and slide seven meters further on my face, leaving a splash of sacred scarlet along the cold sabulous shoulder, making the ultimate abstract-artistic Zen statement in a superb brushstroke that cost my life and was soon swushed away by bristles of rain. My ten thousand lovers keened and poured ashes on their crowns, and even the natural world, all those mourning monkeys and lugubrious lions, posed in a grave moment of grisaille silence for my passing, while the traumatized rainbow stuck its cloud on backward and scribbled prurient execrations in harlequin graffiti across the bereaved sky, hoping thereby to provoke the absent father’s promised parousia.

24 – CRUCIFIXION OF THE ATOM

The next morning my mom awoke branded. On her right cheek: a vomitous blight of cracking acne. As if in the night she’d been lesioned by a slice of pizza. In the mirror she watched herself watching herself in the mirror, that strange stringy unstrung girl in reverse lifting fiddly fingers to the cantankerous furuncle and with her mousy touch making its sore wrath flare. That poor girl—that gore pearl—that fizzling frizzly fräulein pursing her lips, lips soft bubbly limp as rooster wattle, lips parting like two flat mimes in anger, the gap between them widening till it gave birth to a word which had started lungbound as pure pneuma, been exquisitely shaped in the blind masterpiece of biomachinery known as her larynx, grooved by the tongue and launched from its tip to explode out and express everything in one intricate airburst, a finessed breathness compassing her acne curse within a breaking aerial ball of language:

“WHY?”

What had she done? What, whaaaaaaat?

She fled that red satanic rune and came to collect me. In my sloppy sleep I welcomed the lagniappe of her warm mass, I built no barriers, sagged into her skin and smushed my nosy-wosy and would have suffocated gladly and ended all my woes and rues and blues right there—but the slap slap slap slap slap slap of the stairs offended me back into my flopping flesh, infuriating me beyond all mete and measure. I was about to tear into her when my father appeared—and god knew I coveted every evanescent interval I could win of him. My mom had taken us to watch her favorite knight handle his priceful hand-hewed fragilities down a serpentine stairway with two tight corners. Stag-beetle-browed, he cursed with diabolically inventive epithets that she did not especially want to hear. But ah, oh, profanity: wasn’t it the dirty-noodle truth? Nothing was sacred under this supremely silly sky. The rainbow it was over. The rainbow it was cooked. All amazingness had faded, God was a joke jigging on his own grave, and now only factorial aftermath awaited her, the residuum of her wrecked life a grey calculation. Several times the evil cat wauled from the third floor; this coming day with that demon seemed dug out of a northern fire’s icy belly, seemed an endless deranged dungeon of time stabbed through by the cold steel of ironic spring sunlight. Alone alone alone. She almost wished she were going to the fair. Almost—but aloneness was preferable to the fair’s peopleness, to that brutal welter of foamy money, to millions of eyes and ears, not to mention fires, riots, amok-knifers, and elegant businesswomen flirting with her cliff-faced husband right beside her own maimed mien while the embittered baby bawled for both of them, while Marty as Artisan Rebel-Champion chafed and scraped and gripped and griped of disgrace. No no. No question of going. She would have to draw all her fire from him now, to scorch herself on his hot-blooded strength and hope his charisma’s warm wake would water the waste hours. Trailing him, she clasped his side whenever he rested, always exposing to him the cheek without the carnelian esker, so intent on hiding this safranine defect that she had no idea her mouth was dragging down, philtrum enormous and lips dangling from her chin, her eyes deforming into trapezoids of sadness.

My father’d cottoned on to her mood, all right. He just wasn’t gonna say diddly-peep. Not today not now nuh uh no way, she really oughta know better. With this monster of a day ahead? Shit, after the finicky odyssey to his storage unit he’d have to load up his batshit bullcrap again and far more! And that was just the start! As she chewed chips, pet the cat and ogled television in bed, he’d endure the protracted, soul-holing cul-de-sac of the fair, wasting his fugacious time on nebulous non-buying ninnies, his tiny islet blockaded on all sides by corporate oligopoles whose glass disasters, metal egesta, and white plastic extrusions sold like factory-made hot cakes laced with the machinic heroin of Chinese mass cheapness. Then, if lucky, he’d get home by one a.m., nearly alive, bones boiled, face like something stretched and released. In short, travails were a-comin’, tribulations she couldn’t even fuckin’ imagine. Gyah! Being conjugally spliced to her was like… like ferrying delicate skeleton furniture down a twisting staircase of his nerves! He wouldn’t say nuttin’! Not. A. Word!

But to him, any bait was irresistible. He left no crumb uneaten, no banter unanswered, no scent unsnuffled. Sighing like a knife creeping from a sheath, at last he grudgingly inquired into her quagmire.

“It’s nothing,” she lied through millstone teeth.

“Okay. Whatever you like.”

She grunted.

My mom was holding me so I could see my father. I had one potatoey hand raised and laid against her cheek, a malapert gesture that suggested both touching and pushing away—but I had been transfixed by my dad’s hostility. Instantly stormclouds had sprung up over the sky, and a thousand clear kittycats of wind scampered across the landscapes of our flesh and hair.

After stacking one last anfractuous credenza into the van’s crowded back, my dad wiped his forehead’s dew, blew a doting sigh at his impractical practicalities, swayed back to snatch the overhead door and almost elbowed my mom in her fallen face. Propping me against her shoulder, she was staring down with dolor malodorous, just one big canker rankling in an aura of cancer. The sight infired him. “Consider this,” he said, a nightshadish crunch subtoning his raspy asperity. “You’re gonna say whatever it is sooner or later, except later you’ll be even madder, so why don’t you save us the trouble and hawk it up and looge it out now? I mean: please. Please, Anke. You’re torturing me!”

She fidgeted and pushed her mouth around her lower face.

Here he glanced down into my wide-staring eyes. Single-toothed, I gawped at him with the horror of a subnormal beholding an atomic blast. He shuddered and turned back to my mom. “Or what,” he demanded, “You want me to leave while you’re moping and mucking in your own mysterious thunderstorm? I’m s’posed to abandon you like this so you can hate me for that too?”

“Nn.”

“Or is it that you did something? Do I see guilt?”

“Hnnnn.”

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Not yet! What’d you do?”

“Nothing!”

“Anke.”

“I just wish I was coming along.”

“Wellllll, that was your choice, darlin’. Izzat all?”

“Yes. No.”

“No?”

“Yes. I don’t know.”

My father checked the sky as if there he might find forbearance. He did not, but his sloping cheek cascaded with an effervescent chain mail of sun sparkles, and for a magic moment our hero’s long-lashed Lancelotic lookers seemed to search for the overarching lucidation in that unfirm firmament so far above the balmy palm of the God whose nourishing mercy we bestrod, whose love bomb had been my mom’s psalm. And maybe that small pseudo-sign from my sire, that spark of seek, is why she decided to come clean.

“It's… I mean you’ll be mad at me, but it’s God.”

“God?”

“Hnn.”

“Anke!”

“Did I do something wrong, to Him?”

“Like what?”

“I can’t feel Him anymore. And it’s very, very… sad.”

Then tears, for the thirty-thousandth time in a week—but the word God had slid between his ribs like an épée of pure fear. The puncture drained the breath from his heart and the ruth from his truth; in pumped purified rage. As I watched in primal terror, witless and with no way of modulating my horror, he grew three inches, his muscles bustled with purple worms, his lively blue eyes smoothed and hardened into the lustrous smalt tesserae of a mosaic; he glassed and stoned over into the wrathful image of an avenging anti-angel whose god-ungiven mission was to destroy divinity, to stain his jeweled grail with God Sr.’s Fabergé blood. Why the FUCK was this horseshit back? Was she losing her goddamned mind? Could he even trust this nutcase with his son?

My dad had always been a champion dart-thrower. Every syllable he flung bullseyed my ear. “Look,” he spat, “I dunno if there’s a God, but if there is, I highly doubt he gives a rat’s ass about you or anybody. You know what he did? Ha ha oh I’ll tell you: God shit out the universe and then raped it, and the stars are what? My love, they’re his fucking SPERM! See, now there’s a feller knows how to have some fun, eh? Eh? Out in space, there’s billions, trillions of bastard civilizations, and everything everywhere always always dying dying! It’s death, death, death allllll the way down! Yeah, maybe something made the universe, but even if so we are just experiments—we are animals—we are brain machines—robots fighting and fucking. Otherwise explain to me why God hates poor people. Huh? What did retards ever do to suffer?”

The hero was slaying us. He may have been yelling at her, but he seemed to be yelling at me. And so I became monstrous: my ears were sucked with a schlurp into my anasarcous head, and a rheumatic eye opened in my cinder throat; I looked like the drainage ditch of a torture castle. But my father, probably because he’d beheld my ugliness too long, had also deformed, becoming a Punch-nosed jester of malice whose cheeks were awful cinnamon apples, his skull curving into the crescent of a reaper’s moon, his blade-chinned face slicing us open. I had never witnessed such evil, never seen a real monster—and it was no less a loved celebrity than my father, the Creator, God of Our Universe.

“Anke, if there’s a God, then what about bombed children, hello? Toots, up in your little bird-nest everything might seem all gootchie-goo and whoopdee-woo, but real life ain’t heaven. Real life is hell! Hell is HERE!” said Satan. “Now! I am LEAVING! And tonight I don’t wanna hear any mora this crap!” He slammed the back door and cut toward the driver’s seat. “GOOD BYE!”

Every cuss cut us like a crucifix rock. Jerking as if struck, we died violated martyrs many times over, trying to gaze into the glazed face of our vexed bombarder, to make him perceive the exenterating gravity of his crippling crime against us—but we flinched away from the scalding munition-light of the shockwaving Catherine wheels of his catastrophic eyes. He was murdering us with Dis words, he was stabbing us with slurs. I burbled blood while she died yet again and rotted with the frail flesh of her assailed faith, waning wailing into the earthy earth, a lurching church of roasted skin flensed by the hydrofoiling knives of his anti-spiritual scorn. Vultures ate her future, and spiders webbed her heaven, and concrete greeted her sacred green Creation. With a gut-tugging cry she ripped herself away, bleeding tears, fragments of her face spraying and strewing as she tottered up the front drive, and clutching me crawled up the stairs, head throbbing, knobbing, bobbing, wobbling. I seemed to be screaming inside her mind. Moaning, her head crashing, tears lubricating the stairs she was climbing on her knees, she grappled up toward the threshold of her sanctuary, repeating “No.” No. No. No longer human, animal, or holy. Not angel, not ant, not Anke. As her brain burst into harpies, I choked, my radium snot running on like the tacky ejaculate of an unfunny tragicomic.

Next volume coming in April 2025: TRIBULATIONS!

The Trees Reach Out to Touch Me