Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah, Vol. 1 (Director's Glut)
PRISMATIC WASTELAND
1 – A MIRAGE OF EYES
So here’s the deal:
Well okay wait. We’ll get to the deal in a minute.
First I wanna make it clear that I have no other choice but to offer you this deal in particular. Like, I am basically at gunpoint. This deal has been all but swathed in a blanket, tucked into a cradle, and dropped onto my doorstep. I don’t want to unwrap it, I am loathe to propose it—but in fact this deal is the fated destination of my entire life’s journey. At conception I was trussed to the eighteen-wheeler of time and sent thundering down to this junction, barreling in one unswerving line along the highway of inevitability, through the citadels and meadows of distraction, straight to this present nexus of time and space, mind and will, choice and deal, to this proposal whose parameters and conditions were decided eons before I—a lost, befuddled, and badly conditioned animal shot from the cannon of the womb—ever had a say.
Oh, I know what you’ll retort. You’ll cough politely, raise your index finger, cough again when I don’t stop speaking, and finally interject that by all appearances I am a free adult and could conceivably do something different. For example, I could turn away from the deal and bumble off into the fog. I could leave you in peace! But listen, my friend—in order to do something else, I would need to be someone else. So please, before you say anything more, I invite you to consider the crushing panoply of the past. Would you do me that favor? Just please briefly, for my sake, consider the first microbe and the avalanche of life it set tumbling down through deep time. Yes, consider the anaerobic bacteria whose waste turned our sky azure. Consider the lichen and the slime and the stromatolite, the fish who bloated into amphibians who hardened into reptiles who furred over into mammals. Then consider the ape who staggered upright, sparked bonfires and knapped stones, raised longhouses, bars and temples, palaces and pyramids—the turkeyheaded featherless biped who minted coins and made markets and marched in armies, invented paper and the skeleton key to meaning that is the phonetic alphabet. Consider the cross and star and moon and stripe and sickle and swastika, consider planes, ships, mines, manacles and yokes, pens and guns and vans, skyscrapers and subways, prisons hospitals graveyards and the factories that have blistered up and pumped the sky full of the wrong color of clouds—the arc is clear: each stage of history determined the next, each environment determined its habitants, each technology determined its society, and each society determined its citizens, and two of those prefab people were my parents, two late-20th-century half-educated workers with brains coiled full of rotten trauma and propaganda from the churches and ruling classes, two workers struggling through life with their self-images and ideologies haunted by the multifarious insecurities, uncertainties, and complexities attendant to being an aging ape brachiating from paycheck to paycheck. Those two profoundly stymied victims of history begat me, taught me everything wrong, then dumped me into the clunking gears of a social and economic grinder designed to mulch me into a member of the next generation of trapped laborers and boozy bamboozled voters. From there, no other route lay open to me but to become a wage serf and dedicate my entire existence to stabilizing my bank account—and so, step by step by step step step, I have been propelled here, to the offering of this deal.
You see, I may have been forged into a cog, but I was left with an essential flaw, a problem that couldn’t be molded out or greased away. The problem creaks and grates, it itches and scratches, it maddens, torments and compels—I am speaking, of course, of my undying and rapturous love for free time. Goddamn, if I were free I would drain every liberated minute to its ashes: I would eat libraries down to their last books, I would listen to music so long and so loudly that it unrolled lush roots in through my ears and twined blooming around my brain, until my ideas vibrated like analytic guitar strings and my feelings rode violins up and down spirals. I would buy a forest hut somewhere far from winter and take walks that consumed several days and nights, till the lush flora shuddered ecstatically and the tropical sun turned into a keyhole and I finally knew exactly what to say. I would have slow, kind, smiling and attentive sex rampages with any number of enthusiastically consenting partners. I want to learn until my head opens like a sunflower, I want to stuff art into myself until I cough up entire movements, and I want to indulge in as much fun and bliss and easy mutual kindness and care as possible, for these last few years before the climate apocalypse, in this cursed yet charmed half-time when no one even cares about the icecaps anymore because they’re just the tip of the garbage mountain that is the anthropic disaster, in this all-too-common era when our leaders are hand puppets on snakes, our pockets are full of electric eyes and ears, and the primitive forerunners of real AI are calculating how to drain every last cent into the military-industrial complex. If I were free of work, I could hike to an abandoned temple, dose myself with ayahuasca, and negotiate with eldritch megafauna to bring about the good apocalypse, the one we need so desperately. Yes, I could paint myself the seven anti-colors of the secret rainbow and alone in the desert commit unspeakabilities in the name of demons no one has ever heard about—in other words, I could find myself. I could be strumming a maze-stringed guitar to this polluted sunset. I could be writing every story that has ever been and will ever be written. I could create all day every day. I could make countries, worlds, universes. I could invent my own laws and philosophies, deities and rituals, mathematics and historical cycles—and every moment that I am not hatching one of these ornate and sinister plans is a waste of my life that I will never recuperate.
So here we are, at last gingerly approaching my real explanation of the deal. I’ll tell you my side first: I’m going to give up mostly everything I just rhapsodized about, perhaps for years. Yup, that’s right: no more books, movies, music, no side characters, no wanderlustful walks through my beloved city, no romance or sex, no sun or moon. Instead, I will get a part-time job with night shifts, use the night bonus to drop to three days a week, and then on every free night I will do just one thing from when I wake up to when I go to bed: I will perch in front of my chipped laptop, ignoring the flamboyant beauty of the dying evenings and young mornings, and I will write and write and write. I will give up my wider life, I will abstain from the world—and all in order to create a bizarre and splashy amusement park of word-worlds for you, a serpentine rollercoaster of syntax that swerves under hundreds of skies, past thousands of high-definition screens heaving with vivid imagery. I’ll make a book that’s a splattery, joyful, funny, sad, orgasmic smorgasbord of ideas, scenes, and personalities, ornamented with grace notes and crowned with rococo inflorescences. I’ll write a jangling, spangling, happy war-pony of a memoir, tinkling and chuckling and dangling into battle with its topics, exploding spontaneously at unexpected moments. You: you get your mind lit up like it’s been plugged in for the first time in years, you cry, you exult, you throw the book in the air and realize you need to free yourself of everything and everybody you felt you had to be, you clutch the book to your face and thank God or Satan or Luck that you exist and were born at this precise point in history and with exactly the right brain to salivate over these shining words, you theme your wedding after the book, you name your beautiful child after the stunning and charismatic and brilliant protagonist—but first (and this is key) you buy this book, you tell all your friends and acquaintances to buy it, and then possibly you send me some more money, since that would be funny and cool and sexy and very nice.
See, if you all pitch in a few dollars, then I can move closer to the equator, establish a bohemian micro-commune with my best friends and best lovers in a verdant paradise, and settle down into a good-hard life of sunlit creativity, intellectual exploration, affable companionship, and not-so-mild hedonism. In return, I’ll craft so much art for you that when I die from an infected papercut and several famous anatomists dissect my brain to find out what made it so wonderful, they’ll discover that my neurons are incurled bouquets of roses, and the sectors of my brain that handle language will be as swollen, veiny, and tattooed as the biceps of a gymrat on next-gen steroids. And yes, I am aware that you are most likely trapped in your own wage serfdorm; for that I am deeply sorry and would like to suggest that if you happen to someday seize the means of production, I can play a supporting role as war bard or insult archer. But for now, seeing as how we’re prisoners tied up in a planet-sized china shop full of bulls and bears on speed, then well, for just a few of your sweat-, blood-, tear- or sperm-stained bucks, I’ll provide you with something to soothe the pain. What’s more, I vow to you that your time with me will be so enchanting and magical that your tears of bliss have a one in hundred chance of congealing into precious jewels, which theoretically you can sell for many times the original price of this book—a wise investment in these self-interested times, my dear, dear, dear dear dear dear dear dear dear friend.
But wait, you’ll protest. Whinging away, you’ll inform me that great books don’t just come to people. I can’t just decide to write something that will make readers exult and shed expensive tears, hear in tongues, sacrifice their firstborns, donate vast subtropical properties to me, or build churchlike libraries to house copies of the first pressing. And sure fine okay I admit that you maybe might have a point. Yes, I suppose all these gleeful and galloping and glittering goals are also gross and grotesquely grandiose, eh? By now you’re probably backing away from me slowly. “Wait just a hot minute,” you mumble to yourself. “While this absurd and foppish poète manqué was puffing out his floral shirt and expelling all that stifling air about his rambunctious rainbow rock’n’rollercoaster of a memoir, he titillated my interest and inspired my purchase—yet, upon closer inspection, he has been soft-soaping me, dousing me with hogwash, blowing glitter in my eyes, lighting a spray of perfume on fire and referring to it as an inferno. How in the hell could he ever deliver? Just what kind of person is this megalomaniacal scribe? Is he a madman, a verbal entrepreneur running a syntactical pyramid scheme, a logodaedelic variation on the type of incel who claims to have mastered the blade?”
Hm. Okay. You’re being rude and a tad pretentious, but maybe in your light shoes I would also leap to conclusions—then pratfall into error. The truth is (you critic! you clown!) that I have been endowed with a story both exalted and earthy, a monkey-like, cackling trickster narrative that floats like a thundercloud and stings like an orbital plasma cannon, oh yes: this story is a remorseless, brain-tickling humdinger so profound and human and moving and real that I can barely believe it has slammed like a meteor through my head and into my lap. It is crammed with tragedies, jokes, madness, buried truths, sudden reversals, hallucinations which swirl together into a blackly comedic opera-cartoon that accelerates until it’s barreling like a verbal ambulance straight down avenues seething with transfigurations and karmageddons. And it says almost everything there is to say about one human being, it orbits around that person and radiates lurid and howling images, it shoots fireworks into your eyes that explode in your head, machinegunning you with memorable scenes and faces and thoughts even as the narrator’s internal life stretches up to all sides in a raving phantasmagoria, a panoramic fountain of otherworldly and heavenly imagery splashing down and spattering the red bricks and mud and pencils and punch-clocks of reality. This story is a billionaire of impossibilities. It breaks time, snaps space, does the splits, wiggles its ears, and plays the piano with its eyebrows—and yet it is all true (almost). Yes sirree, I have the opal goose by the gullet and I intend to cluck into its mad crystal eye until it produces iridescent eggs. I have the perfect story.
I am speaking, of course, about my life—my ridiculous, gorgeous, catastrophic, transcendent, stupid, bad and deeply stunted life, that bizarre bazaar of unlikelihoods and candy-coated visions of oblivion. So come in, I’ll brew us some tea then chaperone you past the thousand windows of my mansion, revealing with a flourish many faces and cities and universes. And please remember (my precious reader! my dear, eager audience!) that every last sentence and phrase has been poured, cast, and planished, every period hammered into place, just for you, and I mean you, and nobody other than you you you personally, a feat which is possible because after all you are nothing more than a character I’ve invented, just a story I’m telling to myself, just a mirage of eyes floating on the electric waters of a well sparkling deep inside my mind—and now, when I turn off these words, sigh, stand up and dress for work, you will stop existing.
2 – MEET THE MONSTER
Already, at the beginning, stepping into my first memory, we find ourselves in odd and forbidding narrative territory, buckling on our swords and shields to confront an uncanny dawn in terra incognita.
But before we venture into that radioactive Ultima Thule, let me ask you a question. Dear reader: what’s your first memory? Perhaps the sunny chuckle of a rattle, the squashed visage of a cartoon duck, a warm hand on your back as you pedaled a tricycle? Or maybe you aren’t sure what’s real, maybe your memory’s most remote outposts have crumbled into ruins that glimmer and glitch in barest outline, grainy images flickering over fogbound and fading continents that you feel you’ve somehow never visited—at least, not as yourself. Seeking your source, you grope back through that thick haze without knowing which way to go or how to decipher the signs, and soon enough your outstretched fingertips crumple against an invisible wall: you have run up against the foreignness of your baby mind, and can go no further. Past that point, the language of reality changes, its code no longer readable by your adult brain, and you are never sure whether each mist-enfolded landscape, glimpsed from a distance of decades, is real or merely a hallucination invented by your probing mind, which detects those decayed outlines of past events only via a sort of mental echolocation. Hesitating, you check once more your map of yourself: in this place it reads HERE BE… and the next word is indecipherable. There and here, behind you and in front of you, on the tip of your tongue and in the depths of your brain, lies the mystery that enfolds all the answers you so badly need but cannot decrypt. Finally you turn away from yourself, full of disquiet, and, trying to re-enter your everyday reality, you open a bag of chips and turn on the telly. It takes some time for your laughter to return to your eyes, and that night you fall asleep on the couch. Well—that may be you, my poor lost friend, but it is certainly not me: my first memory is not of being a child. Moreover, this memory is as sharply detailed and megapixelled as a dive into cold water, with all the gut-mangling, screaming grandiosity of a datura-induced nightmare song cycle composed by Dante, Wagner, Orwell, Galas & Rabelais.
My first memory is of hell.
You think I’m exaggerating, I know. Your lips and eyes have thinned into slits: you look like a tightly locked caricature of suspicion. “Hell?” you squeak. “Surely your first memory is not as bad as eternal damnation.” To which I say: au contraire! I assure you that my hell was not just genuinely awful but a grimly carnivalesque multiplex with three concentric and revolving rings of torture on a scale from inhuman to insane to infinite. My first memory is of waking up alone in a dark, dank, sour, hot, flooded, humid, airless, doorless, windowless, suffocating and raucously noisy room. Uh-huh: pipes hissed and shuddered in the walls, somewhere a television was gurgling, and a woman was talking indistinctly, talking and talking and talking, while several rooms down a colossal machine jumped and hammered with incredible vehemence—a rhythmic behemoth slamming over and over with such power (BANG! BANG! BANG!) that every sonic impact vibrated my skeleton and set my frail bones humming like ivory guitar strings. This diabolic and high-decibel slow techno never, ever stopped, not once in the long days, weeks, and months of my imprisonment.
Yet all that ambient torture was just the first and outermost ring of my prison-hell. The next and deeper and more infernally burning ring was… my very own body. Had you imagined me pacing, flailing against the prison walls, chomping rats to survive? Oh no, no no no no: I could not move. I couldn’t even open my eyes! I had woken up hugging my knees against a padded surface, and I stayed in that position in that spot in that demonic cell for the entirety of my incarceration, my flesh as stiff and alien and numb as if my body were a glove I’d been shoved into. My own meat felt like a cage so tight it was strangling me. Only with spine-ripping effort could I shift my torso a few centimeters—and when I did, I sensed the flex of a tube fixed into my stomach. I shuddered internally. I wanted to scream but couldn’t take a proper breath. I felt like a bomb trembling on the edge of going off, forever about to explode and forever unable.
Caught there, in the misty midst of that darkest depth, in that spiring pinnacle of panic and pleuritic self-pity, I tried to console myself with the idea—or rather, delusion—that my imprisonment could not possibly deepen. Seal-barking fool that I was, I had flopped clean through the third and final and most harrowing hoop of my prison-hell: I had left the most important truth untouched. I had overlooked a fact that would sneak up and bite me only after the tides of agitation had receded, after I’d stopped thrashing, after I’d let myself sink into the horizonless white of my upper mind, drifting on circular currents through its chalky void… Only then, as I contemplated the 20,000 leagues of my vast and echoing skull, did I almost absently try to remember something, anything, about myself. Slowly at first, then swiftly as a rock skipping, I splashed across my empty head in search of a single fact about my life. All history from Stone Age to synth pop danced through my mind—rock’n’roll kings, scapegoat rituals, obscure nautical battles, and an encyclopedic knowledge of coprolites, reams of information on these very special fossils—but about my personal life nothing remained: not a detail. Not even fog. I had no idea who I was, how I’d gotten there, what I’d done to deserve that punishment, or even what my name might once have been before that cacophonous captivity, parietal paralysis, and obscure oblivion. Where my personality used to be, there was only a lucid emptiness, as if my mind had been wiped and restored to factory settings. I was a matrix of zeroes. A blanked slate. A cipher.
The final ring of my prison-hell was my very own self.
So yeah, I feel totally justified claiming that my earliest memory is of an authentically fiendish ultra-hell—but stop! If you’re shedding a tear for my sake, then I beg you to suck that tear back into your eye, because I have great news! This part of my life story is actually an inspiring tale, an upwardly mobile redemption narrative in which PERDITION ITSELF is spiritually overcome!
Buuuut okay yes… admittedly in those first few hours after my awakening, I may have feebly gnashed my gums, cursed my exiled existence, and prayed to the kind reaper to release me from that umbral limbo. Wouldn’t you have done the same? However, as the hours stuttered into days, I found I had no distraction, no way out, no rest, and finally no choice but to learn an important lesson: I had to surrender to what I couldn’t amend. I had to yield to paralysis, mugginess, near hypoxia, thunderous machine-noise, and the howling abyss of my head. Of course, I needed many straining attempts and much frustration and mute internal shrieking, but at long last I released my death-grip on myself, subsided and became motionless, withdrew the antenna of my thoughts into the translucent shell of my ego, faded out and let my self ebb away and drip down like Kirlian raindrops falling through Freudian smoke rings into my unconscious. The vile flotation device of my fear, which had kept me bobbing and suffocating in vacuum, dissolved, and I sank slowly down through the warmer climes of my imagination, to the softest and deepest stratum of my consciousness, where my mind cleared, opened up, and unfolded into its own sky.
Seen from that coign of vantage, the emptiness manifested another aspect: it turned, by a series of slow gradings, into raw potential, into unwritten pages. After all, if I didn’t have a world, then I was free to create and decorate my own universe. If I didn’t have a name, I was free to invent my own. I had been asking who I was, without realizing that I could decide who I would become. At last I had discovered the only freedom that could never be rescinded. Blasted & blinded & broken & bound & blank—nevertheless, I triumphed as soon as I discovered that I could chalk linguistic spells on my blanked slate.
Now my mind loomed like a lighthouse over a shaggy continent. Toward its rotating beam scurried waves of axioms and deductions, principles and propositions, inferences and theories that tumbled over one another, new truths that struggled atop the distotalized corpses of bumped-off assumptions and eviscerated faiths, metanarratives that multiplied and mutated into ever complexer systems of hypotheses vying mightily and mercilessly in the battle for fittest belief. Soon the titanic novelty lightbulb of my consciousness was shooting light in all directions plus one, sweeping back the boundaries of math, of psychology, of philosophy, dissolving the sweet darkness of those mysteries with the lucid water of its light. And my nous only grew. Lying there immobile and impotent in Tartarean dark, sustained by vitamin liquids pumped in through a feeding tube, I constructed great psychic siege-fortresses of logic, lemma and conjecture, majestic war cathedrals of ratiocination that choired one after another in endless fluted chains of graceful contradictions spiraling in a ponderous sophophilic waltz around the bombilating conundrums of the human condition: belief and non-belief, self and other, life and death.
And I figured out the answers. All the answers. I woulda saved everybody, if I coulda reached them—but I couldn’t, and accordingly my glittering, spinning, radiant mind, outfitted with ever greater lightpower, most often orbited around the supermassive enigma of my confinement. Was I a prisoner? A coma victim? The subject of an experiment? Was I the demiurge between creations? How long would I be trapped in this nonplace? And, most importantly, could I somehow think my way out? Well… even if I couldn’t, even if my immurement was terminal, then at least I had my untouchable sovereign mind—the neuron-starred emperor of its delicately curlicued territory, the Electrified Creator of the Universe, swaddled in a phonemic chainmail of letters, singing at all spacetime from the universe’s-eye view. Yes: In the middle of mega hell, locked in the triple prison of box, body, and blankness, I had become enlightened.
You’re smirking, I know. I can predict your reaction. Let me see: so far you’ve distinguished yourself by scoffing, doubting, treating me as if I were a peddler flogging fake sneakers… and now yet another queasy qualm is fatly flapping like a meaty moth around your leprous lips. But you don’t need to squirt a single rotten word. Instead, I implore you to cast your mind back over your adolescence and childhood. Please summon into your imagination’s sprawling panorama those sunny and stormy days of yore, then tell me: who hurt you? Whence the elongated sneer-face? Hmmm? Dear reader, have you considered that your cynicism might be self-fulfilling? Why must you continually hold me back and impede the progress of this story? I invite you to look slow and soft into a mirror, at the motley conglomeration of ruddy knobs and bulbous tubercles that makes up your sour and scowling mien. I might suggest that the ugliness you perceive is merely a reflection—and while you pick at the glass knot of that statement, I will concede that sure, yes, my story of imprisonment seems to suffer from a fatal fracture in its verisimilitude: namely, that I am not the genius of that chamber. Far from enlightened, I’m clearly a nervous, feisty, overcaffeinated little fella with my dukes up, bobbing and weaving against your blows, throwing sinistral hooks to save my life. A bedeviled little devil: that’s me. And you’re right! The fact is, I had to pay for my escape with my brains. While trying to break free, I destroyed myself forever.
3 – SENTENCED TO LIFE
From one moment to the next, the situation shifted under my feet. See, I’d been sunken in thought supreme for months, so ataraxic and distracted that I’d forgotten my corporeal reality. Then, on one fine and unfine day, having sensed that my cortex had convoluted again, I was taken by an old fancy—but this time the fancy was an inspired hunch, an emerald thrust of intuition: I thought to attempt telekinesis. Skeptical? Well, so was I. Chuckling affably at my own hubris, I marshalled my mental powers into columns, inspected their shining, invisible ranks—then swelled up my chest and ordered them to march down and open by force my stubby, stubborn fist. At first, my faculties heaved, tugged and struggled at my fingers to no avail, so I regrouped them and shifted their angle of attack… and the hand quivered! Grabbed! Slowly blossomed open like a flabby bladder-flower of flesh! Electrified, I dreamed of a future where my paralysis would be compensated by full-body telekinesis, as I piloted myself like a flying muscle-puppet into the post-apocalyptic skies above my prison, in a mad, heroic, and most likely fruitless bid for freedom that would end with a sniper’s bullet barging its way snarling into my palatial cranium.
Alas, this vision of glorious liberty-chasing bravery would not come to pass, for my telekinesis was only the everyday variety, the mundane psychic power wherein mind manipulates motor nerves. Yep, you heard me: my paralysis was lifting. I could neither open my eyes nor sit up, yet with strained concentration I could send my foot probing, questing for something other than the softly giving surface I’d been cushioned against since memory began. But here (as so often) reality wound up and punched me in the paunch—for my toes traveled only a few centimeters before they rammed into another padded wall.
All that subterranean time I’d conceptualized myself in a jailcell, but in truth I’d been interred within a humid rat-hole barely bigger than my curled-up body. At this thought, my throat slammed shut and my pores spurted icy sweat, and a disaster-scale panic attack sent fear blasting like jets through the sound barrier of my nirvanic serenity. Flailing, unable even to cry, I lashed out in slo-mo with my feet—but the soft walls just flexed and rebounded and seemed to tighten, wrapping around me like warm beefy bat-wings.
Yet I had only imagined the walls tightening, and soon I relaxed, reassumed the passivity and calm of an Easter Island head, and returned to thinking every possible thought at once, my head a planet overrun with life. Ah yes—I remember now with thirsty yearning that brief return to my internal Eden, that last halcyon float through the teeming ecumenopolis of my super-consciousness, during which I began to sense still another mystery. Deep within my brain, buried under a sediment of thoughts and sensations, there quivered something alive. Something vaguely pink and warm, running out tiny ectoplasmic tentacles. It was not quite a part of me. I contemplated it, drowsing as I bathed in the subtle light of its muffled flicker, its healing glow beckoning me inward.
This state of blissful distraction lasted but a week, before other thoughts invaded. Claustrophobia this time. I seemed to have ever less room to move… but at first I pushed these suspicions away. It’s just my phobia, I said to myself. I’m just yellow. Then another minor era passed, over which my chin was gradually forced down to my knees, pushing me facefirst into a confrontation with the truth: that the walls were trundling inward micron by micron, as if I were trapped inside the world’s slowest trash compactor. Toward the end of my internment, in a most cruel irony, I had regained full control over my limbs but could not budge, shift or inhale, and in my panic I’d somehow wrapped the feeding tube around my neck and was suffering through the extravagantly protracted agonies of death by boa constriction. In those final moments, as the light faded from my mind, as my tongue thrashed like a beheaded purple eel, I poured the dregs of my strength into one last herculean struggle: I kicked and dug in my feet, I pummeled the maddeningly gentle walls, I clawed like a bald cat in a bag—and as I did, my prison pod wobbled, and the throbbing hell-pump sped up so insanely that it nearly hammered me to pieces. Spending my last reserves, I exploded in a fury of shoves and blows against my vile confine, until suddenly—suddenly! A BREEZE! An exit had valved open!
But wait! Do not celebrate for me! My spurious exaltation was doomed to celerious expiration, for in fact I had not won my freedom. Indeed, that whole sequence of discomforts had been scripted into the original masterplan… You see, before I could scrape together my wits, before I could move one millimeter for myself, the walls, the damned eternal hissing and pumping walls, the walls closed in tight tight tight TIGHT around me, unbearably hot and strong and strangling, and squeezed me out as if I were an oblong bolus of digested matter. Convulsing, my face contorted in fear and agony, and with the feeding tube constricting ever tighter around my neck, I slid headfirst down a skin-tight corridor, forced inexorably toward the frigid outer world. Already a hostile wind was trailing its chill frills over my bald crown. Fuck that! I spread out my extremities and dug into the surrounding material. I would NEVER surrender, NEVER let my unseen captors control me, I told myself—even smothered, even smushed, dizzy, stupefied, coated in bloody slime, mocked by gods and devils alike. Through tears I swore to resist, to GIVE! MY! LIFE! Let them bash out my brains! Let them pulp me: I would die in order to be free, I decided, bracing against the walls' contractions and steeling my nerves for the appearance of the guards, in whatever form they might take. Every monster lay ahead.
Then the Unspeakable happened. The event that cleaved my life in twain, that forever rived Before from After, terminating my spectacular reign as scintillant savior-genius and inaugurating my cursed incumbency as Imbecile Supreme and King Idiot, the anti-ruler who would not just wage a civil war against himself but also sell arms and legs to both sides. But first there I was, jammed like a seal in that soft duct, arf-arfing purply as the feeding tube throttled me, and pulverized by merciless waves of peristalsis—yet despite everything I had mastered my soul, was rejoicing tragically in my heroic resistance, glowing incandescent with the intensity of life that’s only found near the border to death, grinning as the sweetly bitter liberty of asphyxiation whited in over my fading sight. But then—gosh, I can barely say, I don’t want to the summon the image, the fell memory looms like a crackling nightmare of silver lightning—then a pair of steel clamps closed around my skull. These brutal tongs pinched my cranium as if it were a boiled potato, and in just the same softly steaming way, my brain split. Oh… yes. Yes yes yes yes, this crux of cruel carnage is the disaster of which I so darkly murmured! As those implacable pincers yanked me out into the pitiless wider world, they mashed my pink thinker with such savagery that my intellect burst and leaked out like blood-veined yolk. All my rotating universes, spiral histories and multiplexed theories dominoed down into the dusty duh-duh-duh of a destroyed mind, through which only tumbleweeds blew. The world had been robbed of the genius who had finished math and solved philosophy, of the messiah who had completed morality.
Now hard white killer lights burned my newly stupid eyes. Now everything was freezing in an ultimate winter, as the fluttering silk serpent of the universe unfurled around me with flamboyant savagery. Shears descended: the tube was sliced from my neck, a nugatory mercy before a medical-masked giant dangled me by the foot and smacked my ass. BLAMMO! I yowled. Stinks invaded my nostrils. Borne aloft in the latex talons of my abuser, buck-naked, bluely bloody, bruised and brain-butchered, I was displayed like a grisly trophy for the admiration of an ominous roomful of masked personnel uniformed in teal, their small hard durable eyes glittering like arctic minerals. The air was polar, the room dingy, the equipment old, old, and no one wanted to be there but they would perform their duties anyway, these conformists who all dressed the same and obeyed their leader rigidly, these motherfucking fascist tealshirts experimenting on me in their unhygienic chamber of horrors.
I hope you’ll forgive me my bile: I had just graduated to the next level of the Great Prison, and thanks to the brawny tonger, I would face its challenges as a drooling, incontinent, and lachrymose moron.
Still stinging, emitting dorsal stars from ground zero of that colossal spank, I was delivered twitching and tenderized into the custody of the gory ogre whose impregnable body I’d been locked inside. I didn’t have the strength to struggle as she re-incarcerated me, this time in her mighty embrace. Her mothership-sized face descended: a heaving, nearly sky-wide creature purling with sweat bombs, blowing great boiling jets of noisome exhaust, emitting a florid heat that swamped and nearly drowned me in its fetid humidity. Reader, I’d like you to meet my mom. In that moment she could not have frightened me more. I pulled away as deeply as I could, barely able to work my wee fingers, but her superstructure kept approaching, her loose delirium of dangling facial meat unified and intentionalized by two gargantuan eyeballs—two steaming and thermobaric emotion-bombs—two white-hot and ultraviolet beasts—two roaring nuclear reactors fueled by pain & panic & rapture, so searing that I would have been blinded had I not looked away.
Yet there’d been a tug of recognition, some plunging pluck of connection far below the surface of that flushed monster face or my own, a subtly brutal yank that threatened to overturn the turtle of my past-pitted mind. Astonished, I lolled my stupidified gaze away from the steaming pink leviathan invading the void—and, to my everlasting chagrin, lolled my skull toward the unholy, cosmically horrifying visage of another alien behemoth from beyond the stars: the fathership. In my delirium, his face took a while to turn human. First it appeared as a gleaming titanium dreadnought gliding through beige outer space, his features both humanoid and metallic, all facets and razor arrises, his nose a flanged bowsprit, his cheeks bristling with cannon and rifles, each eye a domed glass command-center in which an admiral gave orders to himself in an empty room. Next, this cut-jawed metal destroyer mammalized in a gradual shiver, morphing into a skin-covered skull made of stubbled cliffs and rugged plateaus, its ears circled by barbed-wire clouds, its smooth shining armor-of-meat pate thrusting out hundreds of minute hairs in a hedgehog of glittering spears. In this form he was the Platonic hunter, the killer outcome of four billion years of cutthroat evolution toward sleek sharp smooth vigor—but soon this razorous top-o’-the-food-chain aspect, this aerodynamic physiognomy with its cobra sweep of a champion racecar, softened still further, melted, amorphized, quivered, and surrendered, for I had directed my dumb gaze into his chiliahedral eyes. As I stared, his war staggered into a ceasefire, he dropped his spears and pistols, a network of thin tan cracks crevassed across his embattled face, and through those cracks beamed a childlike happiness, a soft tremulous golden smile, a silent drizzle of tears which prismed twin rainbows in radiant ogee curves down over the desolated stumps of his mustache, bracketing the chipped enamel gates of his gritted teeth.
By now my dad was jowl-by-jowl with my mom, and their monstrous and constantly mutating heads were damp planets that filled the entire heavens, their colossal eyes staring down at me as feverishly as if I were an infant god.
I started crying.
Without a trial, without even knowing what I’d done wrong, I had been sentenced to spend the next eighteen years with my family.
4 – DEEP-SPACE DRIFTER IN CINDERS
So? As Caesar said to the lions: are you not amused? Has the grand tragedy of my birth made you groan, guffaw, ooze a tear? Have I done the confessional bit well? Was I moooooooving? Buddy, I have eviscerated my viscera for you, I have hiked through murky realms of splanchnic misery, I have thrown myself thrashing on the ground and begged you to appreciate my disease—and still! you! laugh! But ok ok. I know you aren’t just cynical. I know I am partially to blame. I taught you to expect parody from me, as I lavished you with the salesman lilt of a jesting raconteur who cannot be trusted. Now you think I ironize and exaggerate to distance myself from Truth, to suspend your belief in my belief so that I’m free to lie, that is, to outfit my mostly drab life with bewitched bells and firework whistles, hoping thereby to charm and impress you, and also to get you to subscribe to my—but right you’re a pretty sharp customer, I know, and I can’t fool you. So just to prove my flexibility and responsiveness to your needs, I will set foot on the next leg of this juggler’s journey with a hieratic solemnity, with the calamitous aspect and moralizing finger of the sort of memoirist who gets taken seriously by the middlebrow litterateurs, the waiting-room cognoscenti, and the chattering newspaper nomenklatura, those bespectacled packs of backslapping apes and vocabularious Procrusteans.
So: once upon a time, it was a plushly dark and stormy night outside that rain-runneled hospital prison, and I, poor fated enfant terrible, would not be placed in a basket and sent downstream to a no-holds-barred showdown with the Creator—not yet. Instead I’d be remanded to the custody of two weirdos who had nothing in common with me, each other, or themselves. But more immediately alarming, I had made my grand entrance rather prematurely, or so the medical posse claimed, in a haste which left me small as a tall rat, wrinkled as a wet nut, and jaundiced as a decadent lemon. Still, citrus-infant syndrome is common enough in premies, so no one would have worried unduly if not for another, far more pressing and enigmatic problem. This fresh mystery, this mystical obliquity revealed itself after my cheek, subjected to a stroke attack from my father, pinked, crumpled, then flushed lobster-red—positively rutilant—and stayed that way for minutes. The medical thugs exclaimed with diagnostical joy. As they swiftly established, every prod and yank of my rubbery skin made my capillaries collapse and sigh blood. What a scenario! This operatic surgical imbroglio had christened itself with the crunch of tongs, but now it was carnally climaxing into a howling aria of pure idiot torment: as one thousand violins screamed, as discordant hand-chimes filled stadiums with hollow sound, the tealshirts jabbed and forked me, my mother’s breaths seared like the acrid blasts of a dyspeptic volcano, and the epicenter of my smacked ass glowed like the radioactive crater of a meteor impact—but I’d been so reduced that I couldn’t detach myself, didn’t know pain from relief, just knew:
BAD. BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD.
Somewhere across the arctic reaches of that desolate hospital room, the medical chief, a suave elder martinette lecturing her tealshirts nonstop, claimed that only twice in her career in Experimental Obstetrics had she witnessed this curious erythematic idiopathy in which human contact stung and even injured an atomically inflamed baby, a child who had become a sort of living landmine that exploded repeatedly but could only hurt itself, for the moment.
“In such cases,” she said, “we posit that an already hyper-sensitive brain has become overheated and now responds to any stimulus with a shot of mitochondrial fire. Every sneeze of the breeze, every strange sight glimpsed from a high window, every widdle word dropped into the ruddy-tipped ears of this Lucifer-touched cherub will generate a teeming metropolis of reactions and microreactions. Every molehill will swell into a planet. Every smile a bomb. Although at best he may grow up to be a neurasthenic dandy posing as an artist, more likely he’ll be a sad dipsomaniac tippling to dull the pain. Or perhaps… both!” Here my father yelled and sprang up from the bedside, but the silver-haired doc continued with the silken disregard of a born oligarch. “There is no cure except death. The only treatment is ten days in the isolation tank.” She snapped her fingers at two tealshirts. “Look smart!”
The two women stiffened, then snatched me from my stinking, clinging mother, who reached out sluggishly through the fog of sedation, clutching after me and whimpering as the captain’s cyan cronies bore me out and through a nest of corridors, to a mountainous metal machine with a clear dome that resembled the cockpit of a spaceship. I was strapped into the seat, then the glass lid hissed shut just out of reach. Something hummed: a hot plate. Something tinkled: benign yet carcinogenic piano muzak. I stopped crying, but only because my horror had temporarily overwhelmed the fear and pain and misery… I’m sure you know the feeling.
So! Buckled in like museum display of a womb-space navigator, I lay there glowing the garish colors of ketchup and mustard, stewing in heat so intense I might have suspected the frost giants were slow-roasting me for supper, had I the brains to theorize. Instead I smacked my lips dumbly and drooled, clenching my tiny fists while frivolous piano etudes pounced and flounced in lacy waves through the bombed dust in my skull. Days floated past like wreckage... Crying, burping, gargling or hiccupping, wearing a beard of barf or ensconced on a throne of turds, I, who had held multiverses within the palm of my mind, goggled with orange-crusted eyes out at a defunct potlight which eventually faded from view as my sweat and breath oiled the glass. This window, an unbreakable yet (at first) unseeable barrier between me and the world, would over those ten days burn itself into my perspective, searing its clear brand into my perceptual apparatus, so that even long after, once I could stroll on vigorous legs down thronged avenues, once I could roam continents balanced on the tops of clouds, or mix into another person’s body and rub red electric fields, this thin glass would still separate me from the world, dividing seer from seen, hearer from heard, feeler from feeling, doer from deed, being from be.
Yet I knew nothing, I was but a red and yellow baby, half-raw and half-cooked, a particularly ugly mashed bratwurst unshriveling from raging red to bitter beige, with two tenebrous eyes fixed on a glass pane on which misty arabesques of grime were slowly shading into letters, fusing into paragraphs written with filth. This nonsense script’s slow materialization, which so preoccupied me in my second nonage, was interrupted every two hours by bustling all-business women in winter white—janitors of my body—and just once by the slappy imperious matrician, that peremptory suzerain of the hospital Reich, whose return was accompanied by the racket of hoofs and the blazing jolt of a lightning bolt. However, this benevolent tyrant Asclepiana appeared to approve, murmuring only, as she took his leave, “It’s such a shame, such a shame…” Ever since she’d appeared I had been sobbing like a stubbed toe if toes could sob, but after the glass lid swished shut, I let go, I gradually self-soothed, and I returned to my waking dream. Doc had been correct to put me in the tank, for that glass had a second function, the flipside of the first: in sealing itself over my vision, it built into me the shield that I desperately needed in order to cope.
By day six I had achieved indifference. Now the window’s swashing and spasmodic displays neither terrified nor amused me, neither confused nor enlightened. Let the world lie dormant for hours, or let it spasm into a frenetic nursescape of Picassoesque fractured abstraction, shivering and pinwheeling with anthropoid forms who tossed me around and ripped off my diaper—let it boil, it was but dumb sound and calm fury, a mad masterless mechanism following its own unfathomable rules with an ineffable fixity of nonsignificance. To my blasted eyes, there was no connection, no cause and no effect, no laws and no luck, no self and no other. There was no difference. There was just the bland pandemonial Totality, a globe self-contained as a glass apple before the bite, a translucent limbo soundtracked by trite etudes, bullshit sonatas, and fatigued fugues reiterating in characterless staircases all the way to the beige lazarettos of purgatory. It was all right, I guess. As good as anything else.
That calm lasted for eleven days, until one morning the primal mud parted and from its sulfurous depths emerged my so-called mom. Her blasted aspect had receded, her wan puffiness subsided, and she no longer looked quite so ogrish and evil; now she appeared to be an innocently rosy-skinned and thick-red-lipped German girl, nineteen with a blonde bowlcut and horn-rimmed aviators over a flangy nose. Dressed in denim overalls and loose t-shirt, that well-concealed demon chattered amiably in her dense accent, commenting on everything in the incubating room, even the colors of tanks, poked at me and visibly clamped her crimson lips and listened and nodded a lot and radiated sunshine, full of the will to do right and become friends for the moment.
Fairly friendly-looking she was, for a plodding and talking prison—but even in my reduced condition, I was still too clever to buy her ingénue shtick, and I can’t say I was terribly surprised when perfidy manifested: when, with no warning, a nurse handed me to my malicious ma, who snatched me to her chest and, before I could properly express my fear and fury, smuggled me out through a series of unfolding white spaces: rooms, hallways, elevator and lobby collapsing behind us, swallowed in time, history, nothingness, the oligo-senatorial doctor and her aseptic henchwomen swirling down and shattering into stars and winking out as my kidnapper bore me past the reception and out the automatic doors. I heard air open, the world roared into my ears, a truck yelled, a child honked, the ceiling slid off like a lid and revealed the sky! which seemed like a much higher roof, one big enough to contain the world, an airy limit glowing with a strange bright mystical color nothing like teal, not even like its paler relative in my mother’s eyes, a color pure, and astringent, and harsh, and soft, and piercing, and charged with power: blue! I grimaced, I wanted my boredom back, I couldn’t breathe, I was being bombarded by blue, that barbed pinnacle of the rainbow, most cutting of all colors, I was flabbergasted, terrified, worshipful, impressed and invaded, I was in rapture that felt like agony, I was in love with blue, I hated blue, and I burst into tears and started screaming, venting my rage, my alarm, my horror—only to shut up abruptly as a fuzzy felt-lined roof swooped in overhead. We’d climbed into my dad’s van.
I had about three seconds to recover while my mother clucked and rocked. Then my father ignited the engine, it neighed like a mechanical hell-horse rattling in its death agonies, and we powered out and ripped roaring past more world than could possibly exist, infinities blurring past my mother’s shoulder. My life had begun, and from now on I would be cannonaded by one experience after another, by scene atop scene and image within image, thrust out into a blasted battlefield of noise and light and tone and emotion. My tattered half-thoughts, my shattered anger whirled behind me in the wind, and I could not stop the motion, I could not resist the onslaught, would never have a moment to think; now second after second, minute after minute, hour after day after decade would flicker by underneath me like numbers on a highway to an abyss which had been staring into me all along.
5 – THE FLAMES OF EARTHLY DAMNATION
Then the van stopped, my mother heaved out and swayed upstairs to an attic apartment whose inner hall smelled made from my parents. She carried me through a dim wilderness of furniture, past spirals, globes, and crosses in the murk, through into a bedroom that doubled as my mother’s studio, a polyhedron muraled with indigo sky and clouds, in one of whose six corners stood an unpainted crib smelling of scraped wood. Somewhere a ring of keys splashed. She planted me in the crib, and as she straightened up my father embraced her from behind and they stood interlocked and staring down, his chin on her shoulder, his hands woven into her hands, two humans clasping next to the sunstruck holiness of their creation, this omnipotential creature that they could have made only with each other and no other.
Ogling giants synclined over me, their silo-sized voices knitting my thoughts into a ringmail of perplexities. Thudding with a self-concussion, I was surrounded not by the soft haze of babydom, by the goos and gahs and foos and fogs of a typically idiot infant, but by an ultra-sharp vision and soundscape, every sight, sound, and taste striking me like asteroids thudding into the moon. Apoplectic, permanently poleaxed, I gaped up at my parents, my eyes rotting jellyfish, red and melted, my mouth an unclean wound silvered with saliva, set into sweaty flesh so cooked by inflammation that the softly separating meat was about to drop steaming from the shining bone. I felt like and resembled a tiny, corpulent alien shuddering with exogenous dementia, a senile xeno-blob being eroded on a microscopic level by the rusty fox-bites of oxygen and other hungry angry tangy chemicals. That air was too airy, that room too roomy, and that doom too soon, too blue, and too, too true. Fuck.
“I think he looks fine,” my mom announced, nodding along with herself, her cheek rubbing against my father’s temple. At the sound of her own words, she grew visibly braver and more determined. “Everything… will be okay.”
My father cleared his throat curtly, inhaled, and said nothing, just narrowed his eyes, sending the attack helicopter of his mind to swoop down and fire logical missiles at the tricky problem of what he ought to say to his worried young bride: how to strike a nimble balance between honesty and soothery, to find not a white lie but a bleached truth. His reply had to be a bullseye.
His silence left a vacuum into which her imagination rushed, splashing up a cavalcade of darkly cloaked possibilities that galloped the gamut from alarming to catastrophic, from the horsemen of rashes, insomnia, and tantrums, to those of difficulties, disorders, disabilities, diabetes and sudden infant death syndrome. Skulls poured mocking down over the walls and the sky boiled with red smoke and somewhere distant but close the devil guffawed. My mom grayed and pinkened as if stricken by strychnine. Even her aviator glasses inched up her nose, crawling into her face, impressing themselves into the skin. They reflected a view of the room on fire and underwater at the same time. She hesitated on the verge of a gasp. “You aren’t worried… right?”
My father did not answer. He was deliberating, choosing his words as carefully as a supreme-court judge who knows that the law thereafter will conform to his asseverations. Everything hung upon his next action—but he had to act now, before her eyes began to ring like bells, so at last he straightened up and delivered himself smartly of the following polished apothegm:
“A little sensitivity is not the end of the world.”
Then he tacked on a short sharp pithy Yes, thereby adding to his statement the stamp of his personal belief in its quality and authenticity.
She glanced in his direction. Sensitivity? Who cared about sensitivity? But my dad’s cadences, spaced firmly and evenly throughout his answer, formed a ladder for her, a dangling rope to which she clung, letting it pull her out of the dark waters of her head. He wasn’t worried! Now her real surroundings gradually melted back into place: the sun rose behind clouds, a warm wind blew away the ashes, rain scrawled a fluid novella on the windows, and spring arrived again with gusto, bounding back in with a fresh exultation of wet leaves. With every second that my mom stared at me, I looked more normal and acceptable, growing toward and then usurping the Platonic image of all normal babies everywhere, who, after my example, were always red, purple, rugose, crumpled, glazed, wizened and hideous and besnotted flesh anemones with eerily empty eyes, eyes like tombstones without inscriptions. Gaining momentum, my mom said, “And he’s not so so so red. More like… pink!”
At which my dad’s lip twitched. To him I looked like a cinnamon amoeba dying on a Proterozoic beach. I looked like a hammered red rat, brother. He pondered his next move. Regardless of my true health or strength or viability, he had to steer her boat away from the reefs of despair and anxiety. Her extreme youth was showing, and it was up to him to deploy his thirteen additional years of experience. Yes. My birth crisis had called him to his highest and most difficult performance; so far, he had been meeting that challenge with set teeth and self-control and steady, rarely erring strength. At 32, called to the role of a guardian, my father had reached his peak, was the most alert and conscious and masterful he would ever be, with a five-taloned mind like the claw from a claw game that was no longer a game but dead serious.
And now, riding analytic thermals high above theoretical kingdoms of rationale and justification, he spoored, tracked, eyeballed, and finally dived in and snatched an answer so wise and seemingly feasible that he ended up convincing himself. “Listen: what matters is how we raise him. Sensitivity can be an asset, if he’s strong. And smart.”
“But do you really think he will be?”
My dad laughed. “He’s my son, so naturally… he’s gonna be both.” Then he leaned down and barraged me with hearty babytalk, allowing his joke to serve in place of an answer. All the same, his lightheartedness had become real. Now that he’d tidied away the question of my character, he could relax: another puzzle solved. Another course of action locked into place.
Once more he had landed cat-light on his feet.
Cheered by his real hope, my mom also adjusted her attitude one last bit, pushed it scraping into place, and finally managed to believe everything they’d just said. She relaxed too, and they stared at me with open wonder, and all was well, well, well.
With them, anyway. I felt bullied and besieged, cramped and hot, glazed and catatonic, trapped within a vast invisible microwave slowly heating to unbearable temperatures. Soon enough I would cook through, but for the moment, exhausted and emptied and entirely willing to die, I bore my suffering with a most unbabyish stoicism, appearing so calm that my parents fell into other conversations, alternately left my side, then transferred my cradle to the kitchen and began to cook and live their evening. Meanwhile my sensations were inexorably sharpening, stealing over me like cold quick spiders of adrenalin. Every sight, smell, sound, taste, and feeling crawled with sickly cold significance, giving off a vomitous light. Time slowed until seconds marched over my face, the minutes melting and oozing one into the next. The entire room—a sycamore-shadowed bedroom overlooking a garden—seemed to spin on a wobbly plate, all its colors raging beyond their boundaries. I broke into heavy sweat. Infused with prickly nausea, a fever was rolling in like a surf of lava.
And it was about to get much, much worse than they could have imagined. May I remind you of my injury? Those forceps, twisting and crunching my brain, had pushed the linguistic against the visual, they had mashed together pleasure and pain, revulsion and attraction, and now every febrile spark of emotion or sense-data sent fire racing through the pink custard of my formerly majestic and many-turreted lobes. Now, perturbed by my intense emotions, both fevered and in flames, my brain bubbled and chortled, moiled and boiled, exploded and evaporated into a veiny mushroom cloud, a dendritic fog roiling in its own swollen hemispheres. Up onto its foggy shores marched the troops of delirium, carrying rifles filled with facts and images from my last life. Tattered memories trampled up from my head’s depths and out through my eyes into the room, filling the world till its planes and angles became naught but screens on which my pyretic mind projected lurid colors, profane interpretations, abstruse extensions of reality, mutilated meanings and metaphors swirling up incomprehensibly, far beyond the meager parcel of understanding that was mine. From my lips tiny bubbles bobbled up and burst. In my mouth a red frogleg twitched. The ceiling fan transformed constantly: one moment it was a spinning, skinny daisy; the next, faint outlines from Cold War scenes appeared in the blur of its blade; then it descended, extending a serpentine neck, its vanes folding over at their tops and reaching down toward me, their edges studded with rows of tiny, shining triangles.
At this monster I lost control, tried to scream but choked on spit which hardened into a fist clenching my throat from the inside. Gakking, I purpled into a gurgling burgundy about to pop. The end was nigh, and I was ready to die.
6 – THE MOST PROFOUND SHADOW
Then the spit cleared, and I howled—and wow! Right into the procession of bad dreams, bursting through their cortège effortlessly, rode a bespectacled spirit riding a turtle, a fey emancipator accompanied by cherubs playing harps and sparrows carrying ribbons in their beaks. This mysterious savioress was the one sanctuary amid that overwhelming and polyphonous night of hallucinations, that noisy abyss with its stubble-frost of stars and metallic scythe-moon and its yakking red demons being fed through the arctic machines of mean divinities—in that cramped universe clenched in the hyperdimensional fist of a petty and querulous higher being, where wraiths and tumuli flew out of the top of my skull. All those shadows fled as my enigmatic manumitter’s kind face expanded into a soft celestial metropolis of its own: here was the Distaff Archon of Healing, with the air that nothing mattered except urgently ministering to my every need and crotchet. And her infinite good will did help, for a mini-minute, before her face flattened into a television screen upon which various black-and-white minor actresses were aging swiftly, and so was I, until I wizened into a liver-spotted old-man-baby being burped by a skeleton and everything was grey and falling apart, everything was white, and then the white was torn apart by motorcycles roaring past me honking their horns and celebrating the end of a war. There were gunshots in the street, the yawns of planes, the clinks of a liquor cabinet as its elegant habitants shifted uneasily, the rattles of a medicine tray, the clatters of a hospital bed. There was a beeping that stopped. I shivered, I hollowed out, and just before I froze into a skeleton forever I cried out, and once more the fleshily red-lipped angel emerged again from the fog, unable to do anything but apply the bellows to the blast furnace of her love. Again, she brought me to a better place: confetti filled the skies, tiny biplanes did immelmanns, and around her lovely head twelve malachite moons revolved, each eclipsing a sun. Then the fever rekindled. In and out, in and out I pendulumed from madness to my magic nurse, who was holding me and pacing, talking softly, two hundred years old and nothing more than a bug husk of tree bark, with wooden eyelids that trundled up and down noisily, a slash-nosed specter who returned in full vigor every time I summoned yet another raging cry, a cry not at the dying of the light but all its awful pep and vigor. To save myself from its empire of radiant necessity, I transmuted the nightmare into a physical sound pushed from my throat, a bawl that waxed and waned like the siren of a mobile hospital lost in a disintegrating city of dying images, while in the background a bald Roman centurion paced and swore, demanded to hold me, handed me back when his efforts failed, and finally resorted to proposing suggestions, medications, rescue plans, philosophies, and fatal flaws to be purged from the corrupt, money-hungry, and know-nothing medical establishment; then, when neither mother nor child heeded him, he sighed and disappeared to smoke a long and lingering cigarette, his beard a swarm of carpenter ants building wiry hills of hair.
Yet even constantly mutating horror grows stale, and eventually my babyfied mind grew jaded to the horde of delusions. Aided by the rocking of my guardianness, I slowly gave up resisting, I unscrewed my face and let the horrors flow through me—at which point they grew less horrible though much stronger. Now I slipped with a dazzling and golden splash into the hot oil-springs of true delirium, where the final fragments of my old minds deep-fried in fever, and I was seared with visions, aurisions, and osmions, scalded by faces and facets and tints and stinks. The walls opened gridwise, sprouted hallways that splayed through six dimensions. Three hundred soldiers with tall furry hats dyed lavender marched backward through a diorama of the room I was inside. I morphed into the mutated face of a baby hippo, grew crocuses in the damp earth in my ears, broke up into scissor flocks of cicadas flapping and cawing under a hot orangeblue sun. I smelled anise, plastic burning, a wet book, someone’s papaya-smelling hair. I suffocated in an ocean of flesh, with anticlastic cracks fissuring my stomach, dark sparks beating in my skull as my amygdala spun faster and faster then sawed into my hippocampus. My pruny baby-face split down the middle and from it poured a blistering tangle of flies, shrimp, fiddleheads, poinsettias and streetlamps, translucent bees and royal-purple wolves, Stonehenge houses, involuted fire libraries, and dog orchestras in smoke-stained bars, a crystal solar system a god had spun from his heavenly belly-lint, and a wingborne fleet of Early Baroque, Rococo, and Churrigueresque churches. Then there poured out of me an Augean stable of fictional characters from books, cartoons, movies and politics, an ensemble cast of tens of thousands piling on and self-promulgating and preposterously pullulating.
I was horrified, aghast, dazed, haunted, adrift, drowning, and too stupefied to qualify as confused, gawking as my last memories flapped drained down into a heap on the sandy and twitching bottom of my mind’s floor. If only I hadn’t been so damaged, so panicked, so unable to contain or retain! Really I should have shut my eyes, detached from my emotions, and withdrawn to observe the civilizations collapsing in my monumental internal universe—for within that splintering, interplanetary chaos of colors and contours and crannies, within that sweeping anti-space tinseled with the sparkling nebulae of deteriorating treatises, there flickered myriad remnants of my past lives, mysterious and transient, suggestive enough to have changed everything, these memories from the lost time, from the selves before I had awoken in prison, the tip of the rump of my mind dipping into a flickering current of moribund memories, steeping in flavors untasteable, smells unsmellable, sights fuzzy and fractured and unreconstructable… but no, I was too imbecilic to introspectate.
After the last secondhand sensations folded down I lay there gaping for a moment, covered in sweat, poleaxed, way too young for this shit, with the face of a premature pensioner who has just woken up after a night of drinking and is craving a cigarette, except I was merely burned out, blank, tired of the world without understanding tiredness or the world. The room faded back in: cradled by my unseen female ministrant, who had fallen asleep sitting up in bed, I could see the ceiling fan—it stayed still, thank God—and a wedge of skylight, except this skylight was flickering like a television. In it I saw ten thousand of my past selves talking and gesturing, then I saw one hundred billion humans all at once, in every detail and every pain, and all of them were meeting my eye and saying the most important thing they knew, and I understood nothing.
Then they disappeared, and the wedge of skylight turned into a series of mirrors in which I saw my most recent life, the mind I’d had just before this one, now outside of me: the bespectacled, professorial coprologist smoking a pipe and studying himself. In each mirror he was ever older, but always in the same wrinkled suit with bow tie, shrinking, decaying, the books behind him yellowing from smoke, the ultramarine wall fading. Finally, in the last mirror, senile and geezer-chinned he wandered up to his image, squinted, raised his hand and said, “Hello?” Then he waited confused, growing frightened. Without moving his eyes, he called out over his shoulder, “Evie!” No one answered. He tried again: “EVIE?” But no reply came, and soon, not breaking eye contact with himself, he sidled away in a daze, out of the mirror, and out of my brain.
In the space he’d left was another mind not my own, woven deep into me and palpitating gently in uncovered glory.
Of that mind I shall speak later.
Finally I drifted off to sleep, my long slow cry fading through fog, flowing with the blood tides of fever through malarial dreams patterned with carnivorous flowers. I was still hallucinating, but these sibilating visions were too insinuant to make out, blurry serrations writhing through chasms of shadow.
Sometime amid this whirling slither of absurd images crowned with mocking carousels of defaced faces, the Roman centurion rolled out of bed muttering and picked his way out of the room, moved through purple gloom with its half-formed objects scattered dumbly, made coffee. I was slumped limply with my mouth open in my mother’s arms as she stood in the kitchen doorway and watched my father tying on his boots, reminding him to be careful on the highway. He kissed her goodbye, chucked my chin and growled something fuzzy, then left, his toolbelt jangling down the stairs, his hard sharp bristly smell fragmenting and rolling back in white-caps through the apartment and dissolving into the oxygen soup. He slammed the car door, the engine whickered like a resuscitated metal equine, and he warped away in a blast of sound, all while I faded in and out of a churning electric Milky Way of empty dreams, prismatic gases billowing across the sixty light-years between my ears, the stars speaking to one another in flashes of celestial light whose patterns encoded the future.
Then something miraculous happened: the sun rose. It rose and bloomed, twisting open. Colors blushed slow, voices floated up from the street, a breeze stirred the curtains, transparent snakes of air wended their way from one side of the room to another. Dumb and dumbstruck, I gaped as the abundance surrounding me became apparent, the constant stream of novelty, of shapes, colors, sound. From the depths of the nightmare I had been delivered onto the beaches of paradise. And then… then I looked up at my wonderful faerie nurse.
Yet she was no nurse, for nurses’ eyes were empty of all but hired care. To them I had been a number, a matrix of statistics, just another seed to be manipulated into whatever bonsai shape society chose for me in its blind and impersonal forcinghouse. But this woman’s eyes were alive, delighted and hyperreactive, widening at my every movement, now round and luminous, now wet and hectic, astounded by all I did and even how I breathed. As I stared, her pupils expanded into black lakes that shone with bottomless longing, beyond her all space drenched with heavenly light, and multi-symphonic choirs sang of perfect bliss. And only finally then, in my fever-cooked weakness, did I soften and welcome her ultraviolet blaze. Consider that I’d been deprived of myself, my mind excised as if by a holepuncher, left with a zero to fill—and this woman cradling my baby body needed me in a similar way. My mom… My Mom! Before long she would become my home, the fixed reference point by which all future maps would be drawn, her narrow pink face the compass rose.
Far from my first alien vision of her, she had turned into a tropical island whose warm beach I never wanted to leave. She was the benevolent incarnation of summer sun, with a beatific nimbus of light glowing around her heavenly head, and it seemed to me that someday soon we would escape this dungeon together and sojourn to some paradise where we could exist eternally in each other’s company, bound by boundless mutual sweetness, perpetually delighted and impressed with each other, in a hardwood Pandora’s corner from which all the horrors had escaped and left behind only the light.
Of course, in real life it’s the ray of hope that casts the most profound shadow.
7 – BLUE WING OF MORNING, BLACK WING OF DEATH
IN-CA-PA-CI-TA-TED! Rollercoastered! Skewered and rotated over an internal FLAME! Locked in a simultaneous series of matryoshka prisons: Mind! Body! Family! Society! World! LIFE! DEEEATH! Oh, my life was not beginning well! Forget autonomy, dignity and rights—ha ha! Forget memory, wit, imagination, or agency—no way! I was a baby, a blank-wiped and blazing slate, a powdered surface imprinted by every hand and shadow of a hand, a squirming, self-soiling, bluntly tentacled, dandiprat mass of crying, puking and screaming clay awaiting its shaper. I would never be myself again. Now, faced with the challenges of my environment, I would be forced to re-assemble one by one by one the crude blocks of my experiences into the conceptual dwellings of my perspectives, building up over decades the intermetropolitan zigguratville of an adult mind, amid a visual and audio blizzard of noise, eyes, lips!
So how could I have preserved some untouched pristine self, some individual, autarchic and self-sustaining speck? I would become not just what I ate, but what I saw, heard, felt and thought. I would become the spaces I passed through. The sums I added. The walls that enclosed me. The people whose lives I witnessed. Supremely moldable, ductile, ungrounded, mercurial and feverish, lazy and zealous, I—a bewildered and gullible know-it-all, a slack-jawed fustianist, a fissionable and fusionable and fashionably anti-fashionable conforming nonconformist and mirror struggling to reflect only itself—would be nevertheless and neverthemore be carved by every little squeaking chisel of cold wind, would be fertilized by the warm breath of light and made to blossom by the plummeting darkness. Every minute would pose a puzzle whose answers I had to find, answers which determined who I was or could become and whose real truths would only ever become visible, if at all, in hindsight.
Yup: I’d been subjugated into a consequence tumbling down the piano keys of causality and would nevermore be anything but an equation unraveling.
A result. An outcome. An end.
And so hey, come here: I want you to look closely into my world. Please just squint through the smeared window of these words: peer in at everything I have not said yet, at the nonsensical and numb darkness of what remains undescribed. Again you’ll see me, lying in my crib a few hours after the end of the last chapter: there I was: a melted red marshmallow, a senile pseudo-infant resembling an allegorical freak out of Breughel—a pygmy scapegoat sent from Hell as a parody of the human condition. But if you can rip your eyes from this pathetic image, you’ll notice something else, something chillingly portentous. You’ll spot the silhouette hanging above me. This silhouette suggested every horror story, every nightmare, every tragedy. It blocked out the sun, drowning me in a deepening pool of fuzzed-out darkness. And then it became human.
As I lay twitching and yerking, the hidden entity stepped forward, into the loose golden heart of the light. A blade of sunshine slid up across the silhouette, coloring in the shadow with brilliant hues. First the incisive beam of light revealed a purple velvet dress shirt, long-lapelled and flowing. This luxuriant shirt’s plush collar parted around a soft, pale neck encircled by a thin copper necklace. The necklace sagged toward two triangle pendants dangling triangly. They jangled like a tiny magic telephone ringing both deafeningly loud and soundbreakingly silent. At the peak of this jarring tingle, the copper cord snapped, the triangles slid into a lush velvet fold, and the light sprang upward over the former silhouette, who was nobody other than my very own mother.
In my primordial, post-delirious way, I saw her in two overlapping aspects, each complementing and contradicting the other. The most primary, though not the most whelming, was the cosmic level: as I stared up into her blinding glory, my mom seemed past human, past being even a discrete object, she was a corporeal supernova of love, authoress of the world and all that was good, the tender creatrix in all her sublimity. She was the pearlescent apogee of animal, human, and spirit, as heraldically emblematic as a marble bust carved two millennia prior by a prophet who had foreseen her sunlit, haloed, and rosy-cheeked golden personage of total beatific mommitude. Horns announced her every smile and a host of angels constructed filamental skyscrapers in her floating hair. Even the chair that supported her was transformed into an altar, and beyond her head triumphant doves flooded the blue-raspberry sky.
I was not equipped to interpret any of this imagery, however, and merely giggled with delight. What really fascinated me was her simpler and punchier face, the human underneath the vision—but thereby also another type of vision, one disclosing not the heaven of immortality but the floating world of transience. I am speaking of the animal underneath the gold, of the soft-skinned, aviator-glassed and narrow-featured girl with a blonde bowlcut and acervate red lips and a flangy nose that leaped out wherever she looked, a nose always on the verge of springing off her birdish face; I mean the German Mädchen at nineteen, now wearing huge headphones attached to a cassette desk, nodding her head and watching over me, primrose-eyed, wearing the sweetest, best, and most curvilinearly expressive smile (so gentle!) that any sculptor god could have invented. From this überlovely mammalian face—so fluid and extravagantly descriptive, always vividly illustrating whatever series of ideas was cantering in triple time across her imaginarium—from this mommal visage streamed all the warmly glowing imagery… but so too she often emitted darkness, such as was now starting to appear, as her sweet face, suddenly distracted from mine and staring off into the distance, began to cool off, to harden, to decay, her smile slowly melting off and pouring down her chin, revealing behind itself a slightly more ambiguous smile, which melted down in turn, one smile pouring down over the next, each harder and tenser than the last, the total asymptoting toward a frown. Her lips disappeared, she crimsoned, steam curled from her nostrils and the seraphic effluvia in her hair boiled away as the distant sky filled with fire and every car alarm in ten blocks began to squawk.
In our paradise she had discovered the terror. She’d been listening to her favorite song, cradling her fresh baby in a universal springtime of everything, when her eye was drawn to a strange scribbling movement on the middle wall, a liquidity that shouldn’t have been there, a hand-sized blob of reddish fluid crawling in place. She stared with a bemused smile, then with growing unease. Gripping me, she lurched up and padded over to peer at this mutating ruby liquid. It resolved into a reflection of smoky light. Slowly she turned to the loud window, where the city roared incomprehensibly. Several streets over, a heaving plume of dark smoke ankled and kneed into the heavens. Around its dimly glowing base, where entire storm systems roiled within solemn clouds, there clustered tiny firemen who might have been trying to placate a volcano god. She let her headphones fall. Already, one minute ago seemed years distant: back then she’d been rejoicing to ecstatic synth pop, reclining in her sunny hexagonal Eden with her new-hatched chick peeping and gurgling in her arms; now she was standing next to an inferno and watching smoke eat the sky, tiny mortals flailing water around the base of the red beast and calming it with aquatic caresses and insinuations of foam, soothing the angry griffin until it retreated into the restaurant it’d hatched from, into a blackened hull drenched in rotating light. The scene was awful—yet she could not look away. Till now, she’d always doubted the part of herself that was afraid. A part of her had held back even when she shrieked at imaginary footsteps or flicked on lights to make sure that the coats hanging on the walls weren’t cadaverous spectators. In the iron voice of her mother, she had always lectured herself that she was too anxious, that she imagined dangers, that the world was not really so scary.
Au contraire, said the smoke to the sky. Out there moiled a flaming salmagundi of mighty dangers both natural and unnatural, as well as a trash tsunami of peril from the menacing and merciless urban population, from the hurtling highways, from the predators on land and in water and in churches and schools and homes. “No! No! No!” she incanted, swaying with me between fake clouds and real clouds, crossing from the sirens of the loud window to the rustling of the quiet window, where there was nothing but an erumpent, triumphant, banner-flapping oak fighting its serene war for life, a majestic green column that many surrounding back windows looked upon, so that the houses were just like people: their faces turned to the crowds, while over their shoulders nature made her prerogative known in endless overturnings. This pastoral stub of a scene calmed my mom for a few seconds, before everything started melting and aging before her flickering eyes, running down greyly toward its ultimate zero. In a flurry of frozen movement, the oak gushed out leaves and threw them down, sprayed them out and threw them down, and the sun swung, and youth in its all its freshness turned to death.
My young mother was—to put it lightly—a thinkomaniac. She was a nonstop, overflowing, restless fountain of imagery, belief, fear and conviction, with a mind that swifted around on over-greased wheels and didn’t ever roll to a full stop. Ruddy rough fantasies charged at her like a posse of thugs taking turns at a beating. Leaving me, she moved to the door and checked all three locks. They were closed, like sacred knots of protection tied over the door. She came back and checked my face: I gurgled up at her, and for a second, slapped with happiness, she forgot about all the minatory curiosities that had been rampaging through her head. But then she smelled the first burnt odors of the fire, Cthuluish tentacles of reek writhing in though her window, and she remembered that even in here, even in this supposed sanctuary, our continued existence was just a shaky and arbitrary fact reliant on factors and contingencies and complex mechanisms beyond our mastery: the fragile lungs inflating in our chests, our hearts that could not stop working even for a second, our tender brains drinking constant streams of fresh blood, the drill-sergeant-tight cooperation and synchronous coordination of all our body parts functioning harmoniously, and the luck that kept those corporal parts together, the luck that had so far kept her clear of home invaders, drunk drivers, incompetent pilots, trigger-happy cops, murderous rapists, crude soldiers and many-medaled generals punching big red buttons. Luck that could any second change and render us victim to invisible chaos, to an asymmetrical spiral of events that could not be predicted or controlled, a Rube Goldberg sequence of accidents and disasters, or even to the nemesis that had sought us out, selected and followed us over years. Our own personal reaper could be sitting at the café outside, watching the window for her head and counting the number of times she crossed the room. Or it could be a nodule in her breast, or a fire creeping through wires, or a spider bearing the red sigil of time and weaving its steel net under the newly built and carved crib. This world was an arena of nonstop and overwhelming slaughter, and even the calmest and most bounteous spring day hosted distant tableaux of malevolent perversion and gloomy meaningless gore. Mother and child were hopping atop a precipice, and time was nudging her on, on, onward.
As for me, well, I was busy being tasered (so to speak) by the ever-phasing laser of the present. Imagine feeling startled as many times per second as an alternating current, for hour after hour after hour, like a continually forced ugly orgasm of perception. I was so convulsed by each succeeding event that I was absolutely still, the outer shell of my body serving as my petrified sarcophagus, as my mother, squeezing me into a beetle-ish paste, crossed back over to the loud window, which revealed that the the café’s chairs were occupied by young couples and art-school kids and not a single obvious stalker or gunman. Nor was anyone watching her that she could see—but just to be safe she ran over and crouched behind an empty bookcase with fractally cusping openwork.
Thus my mom hyperventilated in a dusty corner where nobody could see her, where she could hold her son who seemed to be growing from minute to minute, threatening to become a youth, an adult, an old man dying in her arms as she crouched on the floor. She knew she was being absurd—but—but oh god, time was insane. Time was a f***ing killer. Almost twenty already and with a baby and barely finished being a baby herself, everything still steaming in her memory, alight and unwilted from her Christening to her Communion, to the swimming pool where she broke her finger, to the dance where she’d sat in the back and refused the boy whom she’d so hoped would ask, to the breakfast of black bread where she broke down and begged to take a year off university, to her first lonely six months here before my father signed up for the German course she taught. So much had happened in her short and hurried life, and it continued to happen at this ruthless, breakneck, hurtling, onward-rushing, all-destroying tempo, and no amount of catching onto doorframes would prevent her from being bodily carried from one hour to the next. There would be no break, no pause, no moment to catch one’s breath and really assess, and no way to succeed except through trial and error and error and error, many of these errors final and any of them potentially crippling or deadly.
Twilight lasted for hours. She rocked us in a faux-rococo rocking chair and cooed and sang little quavering prayers, stopping every time she heard a noise. On her side-table lay a butcher knife. She didn’t dare look outside; everything outdoors had gone insane. The stinking sky was crowded with fires, bats, locusts, whirlwinds, rockets, rogue stars, viruses frozen in sleet, and the deadly ultrafast quills of gamma-ray tantrums aimed at her precise spot long before she was ever born. Across our roof trampled perverts, burglars, and madmen, congregating above the dormer windows, coordinating their assault. The stairs started creaking out of order, squeaking to the scattered rhythm of an impossible walk, as if an abstraction were climbing a Cubist dream of stairs. Then a key scraped in our lock. Her voice spangled like a jangled mandolin: “Ma-a-arty?” The door slithered open. My mom whimpered. All the room’s shadows were screaming at the top of their ashen lungs. Over the threshold a boot appeared. It hung there frozen in the half light, silent, the boot’s toe shiny and brown but its treads caked with excelsior. This lone boot impacted the floor with an apocatastic thump. Light blasted. She faced a face.
8 – HEAVEN HURTS THE MOST
By the way, I could see what my mom saw, feel what my Mutter felt, because in fact she possessed the other mind whose commerce with mine had been limited by the presence of the coprologist; now that he’d been wiped from my slate, she and I enjoyed an uninterrupted telepathic connection.
According to her, this psychic hotline had preceded even my birth, powering up shortly after my (re)conception, way back in her boarding house on a lonely night when the other foreign girls had fluttered out to a cocktail bar and my father was slaving away on his latest ‘n’ greatest project. Having set herself up with snacks and a sketchpad, my mom turned the television on to a most mysterious and aharmonically plangent image: a sort of wobbly flesh-colored snowflake that was little more than a few ghostly contours, visual whispers as light and translucent as wind. A profoundly British voiceover, all plummy priss, prunes and prisms, scrabbled against my mom’s ears like a sophisticated gibberish riff—but soon she understood anyway, with a shock of awe and beastly foreboding. On the screen, the snowy wavering lo-fi geometry shimmered and developed waves, straights and discs, domes and pads and flanges and stumps, joining up into a pinkly flippered and bulbed abstraction, a humanoid vagueness squirming ever closer to the likeness of a baby. My mom sat hypnotized and horrified, hands clasped over her stomach, frowning so hard that sharp black curves pushed down on her glabella. Where, in all this free-floating self-gathering of totipotent amoebas, was there room for the soul? The unlidded camera eye seemed deceitful, and science something cruel, tyrannical, monstrously restrictive. Toppling down into herself, as if retreating in the only direction that made sense, she closed her eyes, fell asleep instantly and was sucked into a weirdly solid dream where an aristocratic narrator informed her that another mind was snowflaking in her body. She looked down and saw that her stomach’s veins had as many deep tributaries as a continental river, that great diluvial torrents of blood were thundering down toward her navel, which was connected to a smoothly whorled red umbilical cord that looked almost like cherry licorice. This licorice cord extended up into the sky. Only the sky wasn’t the sky, it was the curved bulbosity of an enormous baby which she was floating inside. The candy-red blood-cord rippled all the way to the golden garden that was the baby’s mind. She gasped. She groaned with pure happiness. Not once looking away, she wrung her hands and felt humble and grateful and blessed and didn’t know whom to thank. Her eyes burst into a song of tears that fell up her face and hung in the air glinting like honey crystal jewels. Far above her but getting closer, the baby’s golden-garden brain bloomed into an Elysian village that gave off the sounds of street musicians, rare-fruit merchants hawking their wares, and marketplace philosophers bellowing at each other over fine details of avant-garde ontology far beyond her untutored ken. The courtly narrator intoned dryly, “She sends the baby her compliments.” A brilliant idea! Focusing her modest soul’s modicum of power, my mom sent a transmission of 100% pure and extra-strong love up the yummy umbilical cord to the auriferous universe of her baby’s brain. The love came thrumming back trebled and tore through her with a gilded yelp, howling a sound she heard with her skin. This sound was my name, so loud and clear she woke in tears.
Or so she says, in slightly different words. But um—take this all with a few spoonfuls of salt, cuz I don’t remember any of this and my mom is an ickle-bit eccentric and duper-superstitious. Whatever. What’s true is that in this stage of my nonage I had front-row seats to the cinemas of her eyes.
And so okay anyway, the person I saw through her eyes, as in our entry hall the oversized workboot clomped on the floorboards, was, of course, my father in fullest fatherly glory, handsome & heroic & sledgehammer-chinned as a laconic lead in an action flick. The light jumped and the ravening night, so infested with abattoirs and oubliettes, onslaughts and offslaughts, herpetofauna and amphibiflora, retreated with a harpy’s shout over the horizon, as if the sky had popped and raveled up and revealed behind it a firmer and more powerfully real reality. On our roof, the noxious gang of do-no-gooders scattered hissing when they saw just who they were up against: not a patchy pink panicky girl all alone, but a hard dense and lissome former corporal who was a living Swiss army knife of lethal maneuvers, and who didn’t even tense when bursting through the villains’ vile universe, at most looking a bit bewildered at her fear as with one step forward into the light he erased the entire parallel dimension that had so be-demoned his petrified and semi-demented young bride.
Now the bloody baritone of the twilight modulated into the softer tenor of the evening while he comforted her, interrogating her gently, trying to reason her out of the Grand Guignol she’d summoned. Feeling taken aback but masterful, he cushioned her in his muscles and patted her neck as if she were a frightened horse, tutting and cooing, enjoying the benevolent exercise of his superior knowledge and self-control: leaders gonna lead. He was the grown-up here, the one who knew how to win battles. The man of the house. When she calmed down, he assumed that his bantering masterwork of logic had proven that there was no need to be afraid, and soon he slid his patter to his day at work, running a resin-streaked hand over his blue jaw-bristle as he carped about his uppity boss’s barnacle-encrusted concepts. Peeling off sawdusty socks, he gestured with one hand and enthused over his own newest design, a breakfront highboy with deeply fluted gadroons that he was carving afterhours for the provincial fair. Naturally, he would gladly tackle the fair without her, he added, if she were still under the post-partal weather.
She snuggled sideways into him. My cheek was embedded in the soft paradise of her neck; I hushed along with her and made burbling broke-brained noises of contentment. Just my dad’s banal talk, this homey stream of everydayness and common ambition, was enough to bear us down to a smoother stretch of the blackwater rapids of time. Our temerarious rescue captain was a restless one-man vaudeville show, his voice as whiskery as his face and as sharp and nimble as his tools of trade, a man who approached topics as if he had challenged them to duels: after a few deft slices, each duel ended in his favor, and the question lay resolved in pieces behind him. Each of his well-chiseled ideas, filtered through the telepathic topographies from my mother, revolved like a spinning top of pine on the palm of my mind, essenced with his heavy odors of smoke, wood, and varnish. Except for him, the night had become silent, and empty, and our house squatted all alone on a grassy plain slathered with a gruel of stars. My da—looking, smelling, and thinking like a torch—burned in our warm little cave, his wolfish concepts loping over the polygonal walls until we knew nothing anymore but the playful leaps of the shadows he cast.
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The next day there was no fire and my mom stayed calm as clams. She did pretty well the next day too, and the one afterward. But she stopped going out—that was the secret to her pyrrhic success—and my father had to schlep their goods alone to the regional fair, where he sold plenty of her painted vases but none of his far pricier carved-from-scratch one-of-a-kind deluxe masterpiece furniture. Luckily for their bank book, my mom could paint her vases at home, even saddled with an intensely red newborn who required constant attention for nothing other than the sake of the attention itself, a bounceless baby boy always coming to a boil as soon as she dared turn away her gaze. Yet she rarely turned away. For the next half year, she did not leave the apartment without my father, though that most determined dude worked six days a week deep into every evening. Meaning she and I were nigh on always alone. Which ruled.
My thaumaturgical mum had performed her greatest miracle yet: she had made time stop. Now every new day turned into a perfection identical to the last. The telephone never rang. The radio nattered to itself quietly. While our minds interlaced into a glowing present-bow of self-tying bliss, the summer air shouldered through our environs, transparent feathered serpents of breeze wending between windows, the city blowing in on a tidal symphony of car horns, bus hisses, snatches and grabs of music, flutters of laughter and spires of expostulation, a fanning-out menagerie of language frothing from a flotilla of faces. Out there, noise spread rampant, crowds seethed tangling and broke up on the edge of curbs, trucks ricocheted down scabby streets. Truly, it was no country for babies. Why risk it when we could sit there smiling at each other in neverending and tireless mutual appreciation, absorbing each other’s many-dimensional love through a direct mind-to-mind circuit?
So we stayed inside and, grounded on my mom’s habits and limits, our world was controllable, measurable, equable, equilibrious and expialidocious, it was serene and constant, and summer lasted hundreds of days, as if time had been tamed, safely caged in the reassuring reciprocation of the clock’s sixty-tipped tick, as if nothing would or could alter, as if everything were simple, a matter of routine, of cleanliness, of fun, of eating and drinking, of letting the sunshine ladle its warm bright gravy over my smooth brow, on which my mother often planted a quick kiss. Rocking my cradle with one foot, she prinked vases with rainbow splendor while flocks of hummingbirds bobbed up to say hello, or as our fat-faced orange tabby sleepily followed sunbeams through their oblique tangrams, judging us with narrowed eyes from atop an empty bookcase carved with ornate volutes and equine ornamentations—but even our Dreadful Feline Majesty condescended to purr. Back then, life was an elemental mélange of melody & milk & talc & rain & fruit & fur & skin & dust & air & eye & warm & light & dark, a primordial potpourri of basic pleasures that occupied and fulfilled me in that time when no thought existed, no laws, morals, rationales, nuances, no distinctions except good or bad, while my mom shielded me, bottomlessly eager to comfort, always right there, and living for me alone. It was the best, my friend. It was complete and did not need to be changed.
True, my father hung around also, a doting and soft-voiced apex-predator, sometimes riding in on a wave of joy and carrying me off on a trip around the room, cuddling his scratchy cheek to mine, breathing mint and ash. As he sang a jig, his dieselly voice modulated down into the purr of a parent tiger. Or he spoke in discrete chunks to me, bricklaying syllables with quick and natural precision, demonstrating language and then celebrating triumphantly when I gurgled. Beaming, chanting “dada,” he shuffled in a circle, pausing at the open window to point out a blue jay. While I looked at his finger—a colossal hairy pillar with a blackened horn of nail—my mom spooked, yelled at him to be careful, darted over and took me with a murderous glare. He held up his palms all friendly. “Hey now lady, I’m not that dumb,” he said, winked at me and chuckled, eying me as if he expected me to laugh. Yet I’d already forgotten him, for my mother’s eyes and mine had locked like electromagnets. She stuck out her tongue, and I numbly let my chubby chops fall open and my stubby tongue flop out, which so enraptured, dizzied, and impressed her that she burst into tears and called me a pet name in German. My father asked for a translation. “It means little angel,” she breathed without lifting her gaze, stroking me with one finger—an act that by now left only the faintest of red trails. Still, only she had a free pass to caress me, even if I was slowly warming to my father too.
Night after night my father excitedly detailed his plans to us, new techniques he’d learned, a tool of which he was dreaming, or talked about everything he would buy us when his own business took off—but he was never just talk. He was a paroxysm of action, all movement, his energy even in the evening barely containable by our six walls. Sometimes he’d put on disco and dance with her; she knew the moves, but he invented his own anew every time, diddle-hopping and sandy-tripping and breakfalling. Or he’d jab a punching bag hung in our living room piled with stacks of furniture. He also liked to do pushups that apexed with a clap, and his straining face and clap made me goggle—that perfect execution of primal power at the summit of the exertion! He seemed to do pushups with the entire weight of the universe sitting on his back; he was a cross between Atlas, Hercules and Zeus, in the body of Hermes. He had grown a curly rough beard and walked upright and dignified and lithe, a master encircled by his creations; best of all his creations was me, of course, but he had also built the crib, bed, tables and cabinets, fashioning them from strange wood with a deep rich glow like cheery rootbeer, enchanted mirror-wood in which my eyes swam like fishes independent of my face. Everything he made was beautiful, as he said, and most beautiful of all was our halcyonic world.
But no idyll lasts. And memories of heaven hurt the most. Almost imperceptible were the first faint nauseous unnatural ripples of trouble, like venomous electric eels with the beaks of toucans undulating through fleshy weeds deep in the sky. Nothing wavered in our exterior world except for an adjustment in the aura of my post-adolescent matron. Still in the messy heart of our blessed fortress of anti-distress, which would have been just another prison without her sunny and nourishing presence, she gave into a certain shifty restlessness. She may have distracted herself however she could, exhausting me with games or zoning out to glittering synth tunes while her paintbrush dripped basic colors, but even my numbdumb skull sensed that the dense flow of time was developing eddies and rapid white curls, that something big was coming, an upsetting event and even a great peril, perhaps a life-gnarling, paradise-destroying disaster—and worst of all, in the form of other humans. Of visitors, who had called her several times on the telephone, and whose visit she announced with labored happiness. To my diminished mind, these coming intruders were pelagic shapes, aquatic behemoths shuddering through primordial darkness, not insubstantial like my mom’s imaginary ensemble of drunk devils and chthonic thugs, but terribly tangible, and factual, and heavy, dolphin-kicking toward us with the unstoppable power of monstrous apocalyptic Olympians.
9 – ADORATION OF THE PLASTIC MAGI
The dread day touched down. All that miasmic morning my tumultuous mama rushed around cleaning, putting on lipstick that she kept rubbing off, chopping her hair in stages back toward her old blonde bob. It looked uneven but she brushed and sprayed it impatiently and wondered whether she was still young enough to pull off looking a little messy. She was still young, right? Yet she felt old, and she was a mom now, and moms were different than not-moms. How? Well… While she was mulling the implications of this merciless metaphysics, she heard the telephone ring, stuck her head out of the bathroom, heard nothing, and drew back cursing her nervousness. Meanwhile me, I was strapped into a baby chair and busy holding forth with both arms spread, inventing nonstop nonsense orations which she kept congratulating me for, as if I were making profound points with electrifying locution. But anywhy I was also saving her from thinking too much of the coming intruders, whose sickle-toothed silhouettes circled her mind insistently like a cleaving flock of spectral piranhas, so that she twisted and writhed to keep herself whole in the moment, focusing through the turbulence to beam on me the little portion of sunlight that she could save from the chum-churn of her deeper waters.
Yet the sickly stench of creature fear pervaded the cinnamon-perfumed room-reek. Autumn had shivered in viciously: the formerly victorious oak was decked with crumpled brown pages, its story already written, read and discarded; and I had not known that the world could be so cold, that the breeze could have fangs. Invisible wind-wolves howled and tore invisible chunks from our wasteland skin, while in the air outside, holy white angel-spiders glided on tram-wire networks of webs and bound all the houses within their terrible and most final net. I babbled to keep the bad spirits back, but my mother’s celebrations of me were becoming ever hollower and more distrait, for she had noticed her nose: always big, it seemed to have unfurled further, as if it were pulling her whole face down into its vortex, as if she were morphing into a cantilever-nosed crone. She peeled her eyes off the mirror, picked me up after a cursory glance, deposited me in my chair on the kitchen counter and began wetly clattering her way through the sink’s dish wilderness, glancing up sometimes at the window and seeing her dolled-up, swing-earringed reflection and then tearing her gaze down, though not to me but elsewhere.
Ignored in my strappy plastic prison, I abandoned my language baubles and glowered, sullenly giving her the silent treatment, as if her fear were her fault and I could take back control by rejecting her. See, my wayward will to pointless power was already raging strong—but to no end, for my mom had fallen entirely into herself; her face bent inwards until her nose inverted into an incision and her two eyes stared directly at each other, her badly chopped hair closing like flaxen curtains pulled shut over a maiming implosion. She disappeared in place and then, with a sigh, popped back into existence. Passing by the kitchen table, she stopped mid-lurch and gazed down at the fruit basket, where an orange had gone moldy. It was green and white, just like her. When she went to throw it away, she spotted a wadded-up loaf of bleach-white bread that had developed its own corrupt turquoise fuzz, whose color matched a sort of lichen that seemed to be crawling up a side window’s fanlight, a lichen she had never noticed before and which resembled a vertical swamp, bubbly and microcosmic, saprogenic and squirming. Everything everything everything was rotten, infested, poisonous, grey and decaying and brittle and scratchy with retch-fetching thistly gristle. She slumped down at the table and thrust her face into her hands—but then jumped up and ran to me anxiously. I grimaced at her in sympathetic hypoxia, which brought her up short. Clearly she needed to catch hold of herself, for my sake. In her panic she had decomposed out of her borders, erupted billowing toward the ceiling, but now she stuffed herself into a normal human mom shape. There followed a brief sweet respite as she sat splay-legged on her studio floor and made funny faces for me and sang. She’d put her headphones on and was gasping aghast at how terrible her favorite songs sounded, when the doorbell rang and she jumped up and sent her tape player clattering over the floor, vomiting ribbons of giddy music.
Through the front door swept a three-headed tan hydra, shrieking and gabbling as it swirled exploding into our formerly safe space.
However, this satanic beast of chaos—splitting into three autonomous traumatizers—soon revealed itself as nothing scarier than the other foreign girls from her old boarding house, a scarfed trio of merry, light, pink-cheeked sylphs fluttering in on lush gusts of attar, bearing gifts of perfume and incense and chocolate in gold leaf, hugging my mom, gushing compliments, cooing at me with winsome vim. They were her former roommates and fellow language-school teachers from the antebellum era before her cataclysmic insemination. They were her friends. So what was my mom’s problem?
Nothing untoward happened at first. My mom showed off my pop’s exuberant, gnarling furniture, which’d been crammed into the apartment until its passages clogged like arterial canyons; then she nervously herded the girls toward the bedroom studio, our airy, hexahedral, many-windowed attic, where she’d tidied up for the first time in months, equipping it with pillows and tiny pretzels and chopped fruit and bottles of wine. She fussed with my rocker’s straps as her gorgeous guests shed their purses and adopted pillows and goblets, one Italian girl eeking as her hairband split and her feathered blonde hair flapped down with a flounce, while her nigh-identical also-Italian best friend rifled through her white-leather purse and retrieved several plastic-wrapped cassettes, the last of which by general acclaim was selected for the stereo. Synths and snares formed gleaming Twister-mats of fluorescent sound while the four young women did nothing more threatening than chatter and laugh, crunch pretzels, tease each other, or solicit new opinions on their own new opinions. My mom, who rarely drank, started sipping every time that she didn’t know what to say. For a while the others, especially the more restrained Czech girl, peppered her with inquiries into motherhood and what it was like, listening with apprehensive fascination, and she unlimbered a little, unlocking and uncorking, certain of their interest. But soon enough the others turned back to girl-talk, boy-talk, and university woes—at which my mom, having dropped out when I popped up, glanced into my eyes and transmitted a magenta bolt of love and reassurance, which I cackled and sent crackling right back even though I was not entirely satisfied with the meager amount of attention I was gleaning. She air-kissed me twice, her eyes squeezed into happy slits.
Really, despite the rapidly falling level of her Merlot, she was doing fine—but I, I could not remember ever seeing so many people. I had forgotten that such huge numbers existed. I stared soulfully at my far-removed matron. Just what in the goody gumdrops was going on? Why was she so tense? Would they attack us? Would I have to box them, to plead with them to leave?
Yet I wasn’t just incapable of action; I couldn’t even phrase these thoughts.
Soon the three glowing girls ran out of gossip and complaints, and, as our orange tabby smirked with amused contempt from atop the bookcase, the two Italian near-twins shot each other subtle looks and moved to install their regime. They pulled out a music rag and began rating the charms of male singers; however, being not just two glasses deep but also intoxicated on reciprocal affection, finding themselves and each other to be educated, sophisticated, and spritely wits, they embarked upon the sort of virtuosic language game particular to articulate young girls when I recapitulate the spirit of their conversation.
Broken Hairband—a high-born leader and future plum-job-winning valedictorian—sparked the game by gesturing at a sandy-haired beach-hippie and saying, “Mm: hints of Pacific, sandalwood and arugula. Sometimes a lingering aftertaste of cannabis, but overall a pleasantly mellow mouth-feel.”
Her voice sounded like a youngish man piping shrilly, cuz I’m not very good at impressions so leave me alone okay?
After Hairband’s nimble frontflip of insider wit, next Purse Girl, both soignée and gnostic, turned the page to a brawny steak-fed peccy hunk in a cowboy hat. She swished her coral lips, making sommelier-at-work sounds. “This vintage produces on the tongue a husky barnyard tang. It will suit those who enjoy the rugged pleasures of sunny pastures. The upsides: simple-hearted and easily pleased, with the attributes of a bull. Downsides: same.”
The third girl, a stoic Czech quasi-goth whose hairdo was a black pineapple-top, tittered politely, avoiding their game by bending over me and swiggling her fingers at my amazed eyes. I totally ignored those swiggling rosy ogives in favor of her acutely cut facial architecture, which was as sharp and creased as exquisitely folded paper, with symmetrical fans of black ink around the marble domes of her eyes. She, O blessed bony angel of dark light, radiating calm apartness, saved me from the many, by drawing me back to the one.
Yet the end had begun for my mother, my claret-cheeked, chap-lipped, skin-flapped, and gold-rimmed-aviator-wearing mee-ma, who was turning her ranunculaceous face from one brilliant minx to the other to a floppy photo of a denim-jacketed and mulleted stud with an acoustic guitar slung over his supple shoulder. Wilting, my mom sank toward him, unable to produce a single shitty witticism, expending all her energy just on keeping her expression neutral. Having come from several rungs lower down the social ladder, raised by workers who had pulled themselves up to the middle class too late in life to internalize middle-class ways and mores, she had not adsorbed the register of alcoholic gustation, nor had she honed the fishhooks of her irony.
To buy time, she sipped some more crimson potion.
10 – A BABOON-FACED MOTH, SCREAMING
These silvery maidens were utterly other than my mother: fit to be figureheads on luxury cars and schooners, they blended seamlessly into their styles, as compact as compacts, complete and posed as the mag’s photos, whereas my mirific but most mammalian mamama looked positively disguised in makeup and blouse both inherited from her own mother’s era. Unlike these girls, she could not bear to look at herself much, even brushed her teeth with eyes down, and never attempted to design herself, aspiring instead to a utilitarian blankness, a non-fashion that communicated nothing except (lately) momness. Rather than trying to win admiration, she preferred to admire others, to blink dazzled at these wing-haired faeries who sparkled and blew around and perused the world of men and careers as if looking through menus. As always, but especially around them, she hated nothing more than feeling seen.
And she felt oh so terribly seen right now, rotating a mouthful of sour red fluid and gazing at the music mag’s denim-minded strummer, in this malicious lull, this stagnant air with the two sphinxlike glitterati glinting expectantly. She had to say something, she thought—and indeed talk would always be my mom’s preferred method of defense: to hurtle into trouble and flail about with language in a vigorous but clumsy attempt to save herself and restore the status quo ante, spitting out anything at all to clobber those sinister silences into which all her worries rushed. Yet this time, no matter how long she stared, her paralysis only became more absolute. Her tongue dried up and fell off. Perhaps five seconds had passed—but oh how she’d aged, an old woman at twenty!
Suddenly, soaked with corrupted fruit, her perspective buckled under its roseate weight and flopped belly up. Fresh redness rose through her nape, flushing her with hot resentment against these girlies and their stupid games. Why couldn’t they say something real? Why always show off? Leaning back, she groped under her bed for an album on whose cover a gauzy and theatrical pixie tongued a golden key. “The first night… after I came home from the hospital,” she said quietly, “when Stefsie was still in the incubator… this music saved me. It’s like… pure happiness, some of the songs. Just magical,” she choked out, embarrassed as if she’d confessed a sin, yet resolute about challenging the mood, intent on displaying who she was and how she felt and what she liked, so that if they rejected her, their rejection could arise only from the weird hostile rottenness of their own snobbery. At least she’d be real—or so she said to herself, amid an increasingly lush garden of regrets.
Moi, well, I was absorbing this banal carnage and anabolizing it into a babyfied philosophy of the Other—but also and consequently I was ever more entranced by the frond-haired Czech, who kept cupping her plaster face and then revealing its splendor, a show that I thought was the best goddamned art on the planet: an alabaster sunrise every few seconds, the resurrected glory of a darkly Athenic face unlike either my messy mom or the glossy glass gigglers. And this sight was a vision of nothing less than earthly salvation, for one could see the beatitude in her composure: she truly didn’t need the others. This unsung sang-froid rescued everything on an existential level, made all obtrusion and obloquy bearable. Ahhh—the secret was to stop caring, to detach yourself from your desires, as exhibited so gracefully in this restrained young archetype of fine, lightly held discipline, both warm and cold, close and distant, face thin as the Queen of Spades and austere with the tautly reined self-steering of a person who bestrode herself with the noblesse’s finesse of professional dressage.
But even this sublime minimalist, this ascetic specter of spiritualized beauty focused on me with blissful closeness, could not distract me totally from the telepathized plight of my mother, who in the end would be my real teacher, the continual translator of the world’s wild semaphore. Dyed by wine to be red as me, carmine as the lipstick of the staring girls, she swashed on through her soppy attempt to express herself, her wine-fed sense of self-righteousness having long since deteriorated into the ancient fear of being judged. Unlike these polished future bosses, she had never developed layers, defenses, or indirectness; her coarser features showed happiness at acceptance, sadness at rejection, hope in tentative proposals, empathy as others complained, all her emotions playing and promenading as naturally as animals that had never known cages. One could always see what she wanted, in part because she always wanted the same thing—to be liked—but also because her every expression was an announcement, even and especially when she had no idea how much she was revealing. That revelation was, currently, of ever more obvious panic, as she babbled about the record, progressing toward being too upset to listen to herself anymore. “It’s when she sings, ‘I want it all,’ like that feeling you know?” my mom squeaked, drifting off inside and dreaming of screaming.
The twinnish signorinas stared at her nonplussed, then smiled uneasily in unison. “Oh wow,” said Hairband. Purse chirped, “Put it on!” They did not exchange looks, not yet. But actually, in their heart-shaped hearts they felt nothing except warm worried pity for this mummed Mädchen who’d been ripped from the midst of her thriving girlhood and deposited into a furniture-crammed crib with a shrimpy, sick and malcontent infant that looked like the big red malevolent larva of some horrifying baboon-faced moth. In fact, these girls—who, in their home countries, without the bait of fellow foreignness, would never have spent much time with anyone in our social class—had visited my mom out of the goody-goodness of their own blue-blooded hearty hearts, out of the genuinely warm and charitable attitudes that would elevate them so far later in their sparkling careers, aloft beyond all possible criticism, fit to judge the universe. Today, bearing the gifts of their very presences, they had come to visit their former housemate who might as well have lost all her limbs.
Yet they preserved their reserve, watchful and sharp from inside the glass heart of their laughter, willing to gesture but not to touch, and my mom detected this elite distance—with its subtle insinuations of future gossip—as rejection. She froze ring-mouthed, eyes tocking. Hairband hiccoughed; Purse inspected her fingers. What even was happening with poor be-babied Anke?
I would have been the wrong person to ask. Instead of saving my mother, or at least essaying to save her, I foamed and bubbled at the anorexic Czech, adrift in demential daydreams that ceaselessly re-interpreted her marble mien. As I gurgled in glee, the visage of that abstemious angel of Prague shifted through impossible delights: a carousel with real horses revolved bobbing around the Parthenon pillar of her neck, pastel clowns did headsprings over the temple-stairs of her bare shoulders, a caped skier slalomed down her retroussé nose and lofted up and burst into snowy fireworks. Truly, she was magnifique, carnivalasmic, her face a factory of joy, her angled cheeks parterres, her chin the bowsprit of a boat sailing down over her skull, with ten thousand pirates all singing sea paeans to the logical goddess they were circumnavigating.
Meanwhile my maw, gripping the drained cranium of her wine-glass, hadn’t yet slid the record from its sleeve, convinced not only that they would hate it, but that it was stupid music she was stupid for liking. Receding behind her mangled bob, peeping out like a fearful child in a faraway window with ragged tawny curtains, she still couldn’t bear to give up, to accept her own alienation and inferiority. Sensing that she was weathering an air strike on her very soul, she began semi-randomly repeating lines she thought wonderful, sing-saying them and chasing each with a pained snicker. With every second she felt more excluded, couldn’t speak without wincing and yet couldn’t stop speaking, conjunctions and subjoinders tumbling from her mouth while the girls responded ever less, because well there was hardly anything to respond to—and yes definitely she could see how dumb and clumsy she was, it was scrawled all over her face and theirs, she thought, their mean sneers so unfair and so pretentious, why had they even come to visit her if they loathed her so much? This visit should never have happened, had in fact happened only under pressure from my father, who had first suggested and then insisted that she had to resume seeing others. Some idea: here she was, getting judged a mile a minute, in a tsunamic crescendo of painstakingly stippled humiliation—even though she knew something that these girls didn’t, knew the real heaviness of life, which they’d never grasp until they had babies too, until another existence depended on theirs and they had found a newer and more fragile center of gravity.
But now the chain reaction leading to life-liming calamity was snapping along like a domino dragon. She of the chick-yellow peroxide feathers had been illuminated by the light of the brainwave that would break this deadlock. Evidently, their poor former roommate had lost too much time in this dirty & cramped apartment, and was in dire need of an airlift into a glitterier world.
Yes, this gracile lass was about to commit an act of targeted kindness which would doubtless help my mother clamber out of her post-puerperal rut.
It was my last chance, the final instant I could have interrupted the unfolding fiasco—but I was caught in characteristic akrasia, watching the Czech’s nose lengthen and thicken and develop blue-and-red stripes, as her eyes became two zeroes and between them, like on a slot machine, another zero rode into place to form the triple negation of her gaze. The lips opened and paid out hot snow, sparkly and oily syllables luscious as soft she-shells. This jackpot heaven was the last I ever got, for of course (of course!) I never saw her again, though the semi-remembered and voluble sight of her apparent answers to it all would cling tingling to me and murmur subauditory promises of serenity during my most mawkish and hawk-hunted moments of monumental despair.
With a frisky hand flip that startled my mom, the Italian lilted, “Honey, why don’t you come along on Friday? Martin could watch the baby, for once.”
The other Italian chimed in and even the Czech tinkled her crystal approval. My mom’s eyes went wide and white as sliced onions, and she grimaced in blow-by-blow slow motion, my attention snapping elastically to her as she recognized with a visceral lurch that despite wanting more than anything not to go out, she could not bear to disappoint them nor seem frightened or boring, and so would cave and come. By now it was too late for her, the mistake would be made and tomorrow she’d pay a price she couldn’t foretell—but I, I, I was about to make it worse, to add my own ruinous contribution despite trying only to help, to do what I could to deliver us from this pernicious intrusion.
What I did was—I screamed.
I screamed with such violence that even the Czech twitched a downy eyebrow. I screamed so loudly I steamed, my skin bulging out taut as a drum and humming. I howled until all the starlings deserted their oaken citadel, not in one great startle but in groups, out of sheer irritation. I yowled so the two tormentors of my mom would be blasted into the floor, annihilated by the atomic brisance of my nonstop sonic onslaught. I bawled to shatter the universe so that everything would break and fall away except me and my mother floating in a cosmic egg, the original sodalitous duo immersed in omni-melodic ylem.
Instead something vicious and invidious eventuated. An event previously inconceivable. My caterwaul: it failed. Nobody evanesced; nobody even seemed challenged, except my motheaten mother as she hurtled with me to the bathroom, her face full of holes. Once alone with her, I calmed instantly and gloggled gluggily, expecting a kiss trophy, proud of what I’d done, of how I’d saved us from the space invaders… However and alas, I am sorry to report that, far from realizing her mistake and banishing the hoydens posthaste, she glared at me, slashing her eyebrows like swords, in her vinously inspired anger and shame reddening all the way to my own signature shade of scarlet, channeling all her chagrin at my crumbled head, not for long but long enough to stamp her dismay and disapproval deep into my bunched-up brainmeat—though I should say she did partly hold back, knowing on the deepest plane that I was just an injured and neuralgic nebbish, a squashed sweet potato so sensitive I couldn’t even pass an hour around her girlfriends, so jealous, she felt then, that I would always drag her away from the rest of existence, adhere to her like a remora bigger than its shark, demand her for myself noon and moon. In the long term, she could not have been more wrong, but right then I shrank back from that scowl offended, appalled and perturbed. Under my yawning fontanelle, the three chipped gears I had for neurons rattled and clunked, and something ponderous and oh so heavy heaved within me, as my perspective capsized. Now I saw anew: Life was not only about my feelings, wishes and demands, crotchets and hysterias. No, what also mattered was her emotions and their fastidious stewardship—in particular, how she felt about me. Which, like, was not very good, in that keystone moment. Hardly her fault. But still. Yikes.
11 – RAFT OF SUNBEAMS
Obviously that mater-slave reversal was an iconoclastic disaster—but I must confess that this titillating contretemps was not the magical tragedy that my breadcrumb trail of ominous portents was wending toward. Darling reader, I hope you’ll allow my apology; I know you’re still here due only to the fulsome largesse of your spacious four-bedroom penthouse heart, plus your explicable pity for this pink-lemonade manlet curtseying and doing somersaults and wintersaults and gesticulating ridiculously, immortalizing his every papercut as a Marinara Trench, spiring a pyromanic finger at the sun and accusing it of being a bomb, or babbling whatever other innumerable dubitable absurdities.
So ahem. The next stage of our fall into relentless irrevocable ruination occurred against a vesperal backdrop of fractured bats, after my father flapped like a weary mythical beast dusty and shabby back to our violated nest, showered, preened, came out shavenheaded and cleanly Hellene, tuberous shoulders sloping, pine spine upstanding, mood lustrally purified of the crusted spite at his wage-chained obligation to labor for another and lesser mind. My mom, languid on the couch as if being pulled down into pilled sleep, flopped herself around him, buried her face like a squirrel in the trunk of his neck and kept it there as she grudgingly answered his playful inquiries into the friend date. In a monotone she said of course basically everything went okay—except well she’d bumbled into a friendship trap and somehow committed herself to going dancing. It probably wouldn’t be much fun, she said into his ribs as he caressed her hip. It would be just so much nicer here with the baby—and him.
The fact of the girls’ night out flew like an ingenuous grouse above my deadly dad, who was only pretending to rest. Tail lashing, he’d been awaiting precisely such a bursting rustle from the linguistic grass, and now he tensed for his one perfect leap, for his impact arc toward the soft prey. Yet this surface-to-air strike was aimed against his blushy blonde bride, the meek mother of his child, so his maneuver would be gentle and light: today no punctures would be made. Instead he slipped into the nonchalant and avuncular jokester mode that appeared whenever he believed himself to be pouncing very slyly indeed.
He basically said gee whiz but he was really proud of her, and oh man oh boy was it ever good she was finally gonna get out—since after all the world was not so very scary, right? Only the encephalon stocked it with shadows, only anxiety stuffed the wings with assassins. Many folks wasted their lives avoiding risks. Wanting to be safe always, they did nothing at all, and so their world got smaller and smaller until they migrated into a cupboard and only peered out through the keyhole at sunlight a few minutes a week, fearing they’d sear their retinas. Hoping to preserve their lives, they cut out the heart of life and everything that made living worthwhile. Then, weakened, they became easy quarries. Every schemer or panjandrum rolled over them, not even slowing down while steamrolling the crushed person, who had already squeezed herself out and become hollow and baggy, sinking and stinking, still nominally though not actually alive. As squashed elderly spuds, such people would see brightness flashing across meadows and the brisk sprint of a runner tackling the morning, and they would bewail the lives they’d avoided, the shiver they’d lived. “Anyway,” he said—blithely unaware that he was prodding her toward a confrontation even more transformative than her mommification—"Now that you’re going out again, maybe… you could pick up the groceries, tomorrow.”
Like a beast of ravin lying half-flayed, so bled she could clash her teeth only when the predator lurked too near, my mother cried out, protesting eloquently without finishing any word—yet my dee-da was an implacable expert at pumping the crank of her bad conscience. It wasn’t fair, he reminded her, that he toiled 60+ hours a week, swinging his pick in the furniture mines, and nonetheless was still beholden to gather the groceries. Since the Stone Age, men had been the hunters and women the gatherers, he need not remind her, he said, sternness firming his jocular self-projection. But forgettaboud him: in order for her to become a functioning and nonfearful adult, fetching the groceries was nothing less significant than the necessary first step to recovery! Warming to his theme, full of feck and gorm, he was about to ratchet up his polemic another notch when she emitted a wispy plaintive yeek as if coughing out her own ghost and abruptly collapsed across his lap, a surrender which signaled to him his eventual victory and thereby gifted him a syrupy sip of the sweet, sweet regret that afflicts certain victors who’ve won against the weak.
But haply he’d prepared for precisely this happenstance. “Baby, cheer up! I got a present for you!” She slumped back against the couch’s high spiral arm, her neck at a 90° angle to her skull, and turned on him the unalloyed oomph of her smooth vivid young face spreadeagled by agony, her long slim nose jutting out like a finger pointed at him in an accusation she could not articulate even to herself. There was no hope anywhere nor ever again: it had all dissolved into chewed food. Nothing was good except her baby, and tomorrow she’d venture out with that very breakable bub, that shatterable son into the frigging meatgrinder of the metropolis, and God knew what would happen… but if she tried to resist, then Marty might think she was too afraid or immature or stupid, and might finally fall out of love with her, as she’d been expecting for years. Mein Gott. Through her padlocked jaws she couldn’t even bring herself to spew words—yet in a few seconds that dam would have burst impressively had my father not winked, disentangled himself from her legs and cat-footed over to his oiled leather jacket, from whose tarry depths he fished a tiny cedar coffret embossed with his monogram: MW, the two letters mirroring and reversing each other yin-yangishly. A slow cool smile broke through the wilderness of sharp bristle around his cragged lips. “Was saving these for our anniversary, but ah guess ah’ll jus’ hafta getcha sumpin else, babycorncakes,” he drawled. Inside the cedar case lay two redwood earrings, handcarved ogee girandoles with finely defined vine-and-laurel vignettes, plus tiny dangling quartzes.
My mom’s eyes traveled from the sinuous earrings up his neck’s stubbly cliff, lingered on his still-moving mouth, and then, with one bound, speared him through the pupils. As he hung transfixed, she straightened, dropped her shoulders and hauled up her chin. She’d finally found her self-respect and was about to fling it into his self-satisfied face. Across the gulf of thirteen years of age she soared up and humbled him. “Maybe it’s not good for me that I’ve been staying inside,” she said as clearly as cold spring water. “And probably I do have to be braver. But you shouldn’t try to manipulate me. That’s not right.”
Just kidding! My dad’s tactic totally worked. The yurt of her hurt was hurricaned away as this new proof of his continuing love sunrose over her sensorium, drenching her pleasure centers with the emotional equivalent of cumuli and terns and sea-light, vast latitudes opening out as confining walls collapsed. Ten years younger than a minute ago, eyes and mouth spreading round and childlike, she clasped her hands and launched off the couch, lifting from their rift and squealing straight for him, lacing her arms around his nape and closing her circuit with him as he chortled and said things like, hey now, whoa nelly. When she’d cooled, he added, “Took me a buncha hours last week. Remember that mean ol’ cut on my finger?” She did! That cut had been for her? Tearing up, she painted his face with kisses, he tanned in the light of her adulation and his triumph, and for a mingled intermission, both of them forgot about the eternally terrifying phenomenon known as Tomorrow.
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That night the sky squeaked like a floorboard and all the stars trembled with the repetitive impacts of something enormous and invisible. Fighter jets incised in the sky the lines and rungs and curves of scrolling majuscules too big to read. Earthquakes hit the bed repeatedly and the world outside wobbled as if hanging on a string, my mother’s eyes swinging from side to side. My father was the one unmoving element, a hairy hyphen hinging one day to the next, as beside him she bubbled like water. For his sake she kept herself quiet all night, smiled and bustled in the morning; but as the door closed so did her face.
During our months at home, her face had been an open diary constantly writing itself but mostly just noting over and over her love for me—before that infelicitous fiasco with her so-called friends, she had rarely frowned or clucked at me despite the smudged weariness of her nights sound-tracked by the air-raid klaxons of my feverish shrieks—but that forenoon, as she fed me, got dressed and slowly assembled what we would need for our trek, she hardened into a foreign body, a husk who seemed to have little attention left over for such an insignificance as myself. One by one the entrances into her soul slid closed, and she nailed up planks over the insides of her face, which rigor-mortised into a plague mask of stifled fear. I felt abandoned and spellbound, shut out from the light of her pink sun. I was the Damned. Drawn ever tighter to her, I optically suckled at the tainted sustenance of the telepathic cinema that bound our eyes. Our horror movie had begun.
But like many other cult movies, it opened with a gossamer dream of stupendous peace. Before we departed, my mom played the album on whose cover a fey, blast-haired woman tongued a golden key to her lover’s chains. Soon this histrionic songstress, whose terpsichorean tunes were basically one-woman play-ballets, was pirouetting for our pleasure, and crowding the chill air with hazy-sharp romances in which that sparky, mordant and virtuosic ballerina-mime robbed stores, chased high knowledge, swirled her veils around a difficult chap, begged forgiveness and let weirdness in. Enshawled by her influence, our six-faceted bedroom studio—painted with my mom’s rudimentary cloudwork, its two windows hanging like paintings of light—effloresced into a many-mossed rainforest melodied with mist and chorused with the womanly cries of birds and insects and donkeys all singing their contributions to a single song. For one last time we seemed to spin above the material world, floating on a raft of sunbeams through a fluttering of flowers and a flapping of breezes.
Ya see, with all due respect to me mam’s impregnator, he was wrongily wrongy WRONGO when he implicitly compared her life to jarred parsnips pickling away inside the pantry that was our charmed apartment. Not everyone has to be a rolling polar explorer! C’mawn, you want just one monotone type, or a profusion of figures? My mawm at twenty could not flourish in the lanceolate light of a wider society; thrust outside she’d crumple under the weight of eyes, but within our kindly walls, within the borders she so adored, she had planted and nourished a thriving internal life. This life greyed and slipped back from the presence of others—but only because others made her think about herself. When she was alone, she could vanish into everything surrounding her, that dulcet invisibility releasing her into the Absolute Now.
All her best dreams were of disappearance. Her friends may have modeled themselves on their favorite women, but my mom had no fantasies of being a model or even of becoming the artistress who was decking the halls of our ears with swallows and sirens and scarves of musical fantasy. No, what my young mom loved was to love, with a rapt and untiring appreciation of everything kind and soft and alluring and sweetly fierce. In her better moods she brimmed over with mild teary tremulous thankfulness for the world, candling a frail but profound sense of the essential goodness of Nature, of Love, of Baby and Cat and Husband and their future together, all under the distant providence of a loving Lord who’d never ever let anyone suffer in Hell forever.
She was ready to love on and on: her adoration would never slacken: she just wanted the same people, foods, albums, and afternoons forever and ever—and for now this prospect of rhyming repetition still seemed as if it might come true, changing only to accrue to itself yet more splendor as her husband’s worth was recognized, as their money struggles were solved, as her son matured into a doting and delightful and deeply sensitive young hero.
While my mom rocked me to the hexed swing of the spunky-fairy music, she sensed quivering all the possibilities of existence, all the magnificence of what might come—the lush pull of Someday.
12 – JOURNEY INTO THE WASTELAND
But the record ended, winding down like the universe to crackling black. She sighed, buckled me into a chest harness, and, after one last distracted glance at me, gingerly unbarred our front portal. Foreign smells rushed inward while she stood alisten and alooking down as if on the edge of a too-high diving board. She was wearing a pastel-pink turtleneck; its pilly fuzzlets dandled. Suddenly she scuffled out, pulled the door shut and locked it all in one shudder. Palming my occiput, she went down a few stairs, stopped, came back and checked the lock. She had started counting to herself, counting nothing. Whispering numb and meaningless numbers she bustled downstairs, greeted our neighbor without slowing down and barreled with me past the café’s gruff menagerie of hardbitten local criminals, whose acquisitive eyes flattened at they assessed her personal wealth against the trouble she would make. Today they decided to stay sipping their espressos, probably because her demeanor was clenched hard and determined as a fist, her sentry eyes roving from strangers to road to dog to me to me to me, passive old-young me—a scrunched baby hull with the bleary world-weary scowl of a balding double divorcé deep in the bowels of a hangover, sneering at the totemic rigidity of her birdlike cheekbones, the overhang of her jaw from below. Multifarious city sonicalia whirled and wheeled into my cochlea, in a vacuous vortex of whoosh and crunch and beep and hard syllables bright and flavorful as jellybeans, fingers of sound that hotdogged wild ragas on the gaptoothed piano of my mind.
Luckily I was too insipid to see the future, and I consented to be soothed by the warm well-meant ministrations of my marvelous mother, surrendered and settled and let her scent flow blooming and vining over my face, while my hollow bones oscillated in tune with her footfalls, picking up every swivel of shoulder, the rushing paths we pushed through air, my backwards fall through time.
Protected by her, I discovered the inertia in motion. But my mother well—not so much. She tried, she really did, to decelerate her heart, observe the street and blend into the big happening. Hugging me, she threaded her way past the homeless and the street performers, crossed to avoid malevolent malingerers outside a mall—and but then, having made it this far with nary a crack in her shell, hesitated before descending to the next gauntlet: the shadowlands of the highway underpass. On its far side lay the bargain grocery store, but first she had to ford this haunted river of cleft silhouettes, this cavernous, echoing, and graffitied chasm which was menacingly dark even at noon, a shelter for those who wished to be unseen, sundry unpredictable and gungy no-gooders drinking beer and worse in the godforsaken recesses of a polluted underworld, all while metal fleets of vehicles zoomed overhead, their psychopathic drivers tossing out wrappers, lit cigarettes, half-eaten chicken nuggets, and once, as someone had related to her, a blood-mapped queen-sized mattress which had splashed down like an unhilarious riff on the toon trope of a dropped piano and smashed the cervical vertebrae of an ill-starred single mom.
After a long becalmed dawdle, she indulged in a deep sigh then plunged us into industrial darkness. At first she kept herself at a measured pace, counting her steps and focusing on the halcyonic patch of sunlight all the way on the other side of the shadow of the valley of death. Each footstep echoed. Cars whispered above and trucks rumbled. Somewhere a machine emanated a low menacing buzz, droning deep as if a giant steel wasp were watching from the under-realm and purring with terminatorial evil. Her breathing sounded as if she were trying to inflate something. Every time we passed through light she burst into flames, and every time we passed into darkness she was dunked in cool shadow. About halfway through, footsteps sounded behind her. She sped up a bit and did not dare look. These footfalls were hostile, aggressive, absurdly expressive. They told whole stories, in their grim variety of morse code, about dark dreams and malice prepense, and were also boomingly loud and gunnishly intense, as if the presence overtaking her were two meters, three meters, four meters tall! a hairy and moldering and steel-wool-bearded giant thundering down toward her drawn-bow shoulders, my mom inhaling and inhaling and never exhaling until the presence clipped past and dwindled into a gangly teenager swaggering like he’d just overthrown the Empire of Dumbassery, wearing bulky-as-fuck headphones and throwing signs over the beat as if he were the rapper spouting that righteous protest against the world.
But just as the rap child swung through the next viscus of darkness, a molting figure power-shambled past him and toward her, a jarring stranger whose face was far too sharply defined and detailed, like brand-new special FX inserted into an ancient and pixelated image. However, this attention to artistic detail had not been lavished on an object of grace or beauty or kindness. Far from it: this vulgar avatar’s sordid designer had focused all his inventive energy on crafting rage and bulging ugliness, crunch-bearded and spittle-rilled and shrubby eyebrowed insanity. Verily, a bestraught and floccose mud Beelzebub was bearing down through the infraworld, charging at her with all the cormorant verve of a being that has crawled through fifty thousand lakes of fire and not been allowed to die nor to slake its thirst for blood. This vomit-slimed and mephitic agent of super-evil looked not into her eyes but just past them, pushing up a message from the bottom of his bowels to be extruded like black beery paste from his lips. Just as he gibbered, there was a beating of wings, then a flock of tumorous pigeons flew past, their beaks rotting off and feathers blackening to the tip. She yelled and startled into a run, clutching me, heaving and huffing till she reached the saving light of the Other Side of the Underpass. I, flabbergasted, watched the clouds whorl over the chalky precipice of her face as she checked behind us and saw nothing but the aftermath of a wasteland of shadows hissing and seething down into the sidewalk’s putrid crevices, those secret gardens which hosted whole subcities of teeming underlife.
My mom found a bench beneath a sycamore and rested sweating in its red-leafed shade, whispering words meant to comfort us. Hmm. I stared up chopfallen and dumbfounded, my squashy goblin face skewed into a baby version of extreme skepticism. I may have been jellified in the Parmenidean allness of early infancy and could not truly have told her from myself or a meow from a cat, but, well, despite her counterpoised consolations I could not help picking up a few dicey indicia about the extreme contingency of all organic life. Watching her drip saltwater and tick her head around, I divined the tenuous tenacity of our existence—and because I had dowsed it out of her brain in that molassesesque time before I could be consoled by language, the ruthless truth of being human was not leavened for me by the yeast of the absurd, not by humor burlesque nor wit opalescent, nor sugared by the hard white lies added when baking a serviceable or at least obedient citizen into shape. Without intent, my mom had again shown me the most fundamental rule: the animal condition: the fickle delicacy of life and the horror of Death, the D-word never spoken in polite company yet so loud and resounding in her cramped head, in this clarity after our harrowing brush with the hideous avatar of absolute evil.
But, unbelievably enough, we had escaped, and nothing would go wrong ever again. You may shut this page and skip off happily, knowing that we had a happy ending and I grew into a healthy humble humane adult.
Yay!
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Of course, he was gonna come back. You knew. I knew.
But first, as her adrenalin subsided, it occurred to her that actually nothing had happened except the sputtering of unheard nonsense by a poor homeless gentleman—that monster swiftly declining into a chickadee. Oh gawd, she really had overreacted ridiculously. Marty had been right, as usual, and the hardest thing to happen today would be her sheepish acceptance of his I-told-ya-so. Exhaling, she relented in a near-death grip on me that was tighter than she’d been aware, owie; and now, freed from her Nemesis, with the good old goodness slowly returning to our hold, we tranquillized, softened, were laved by the warm honey tides of knowing we’d survived. In a burgeoning lurch the summer swiveled back into place, the new old sun a tangle of yellow crayon, the shrubs splotches of spiky green. Sparrows struck up a jubilant babble, ivy raved over the ironwork bench, our bower was showered with lofty foliage, and orchid-shadows made a penumbral tiara in my mom’s shorn tow hair as she saw me, really saw me for the first time in a while, awoke to me and smiled so damn wide, till 99 love balloons bobbled out of her nose and each of her silky villi broke into a golden cheer at the beauty of being alive, while the greenery around her waxed outrageous in its muscular prime, cotyledons erupted from the soil’s soul and helixed nutating toward their hot meal in the sky, oh my, all words rhyming amid this jostling soundscape of leaves that had been going on for four thousand years, in the Greater Garden beyond the advent of the Male.
Yet there he was, hissing through the grasses of distant lawns and lawnettes: a four-legged snake slithering upright toward us, pigpennish in psoriatic jeans and with an amber bottle of cider. Here, in the vitrifying light of Sol, the interloper looked much closer to barely human, though rosaceaic, badly sunburned, with a moppy horseshoe of brushy hair and a scraggly beard-mustache that enveloped his lips in coarseness. In that briar bed hung spider nests of hardened drool and glistening half-digested houseflies. Okay, he wasn’t so human, more of a nauseated gremlin, a disgusted gargoyle in a fright wig, hispid and welted and leprous and impossibly hostile, radiating intent not just to hurt but to defile. My mom copped to his approach too late, alerted only by the rolling brown miasma that was his unremitting vanguard. His contaminated eyes, steaming toward hers, smashed like poison trains into her brain. In her mouth a scream miscarried; she tried to leap up but could not move, trapped in sleepish paralysis, for the vomit Moloch had jammed both her voice and her premotor cortex. For his part he’d stopped cold, caught in hot indecision. Rubbing a bloody elbow, he stared at her wildly, looking awed and frightened as if he’d clambered up a mountain to duel the seraphic incarnation at the climax of his story, in the showdown that would determine his ending.
Closing his filthy fist, he seemed to resolve to be brave. It was now or never, rave or grave, bestest or shittest. Quaking, he squared himself vis-à-vis my mother, then put his grubby mitt to his burgundy-stained u-shirt and delivered a ponderous yet sprightly proclamation, an eloquent and reasonable-sounding oratory performed in the peachy and sumptuous cadences of the aristocratic narrator from the fetus documentary, as if that actor had been retained for another and significantly less attractive role. “My dear,” he stentored, “I do beg your pardon, but I must request that you surrender your diamonds immediately. To a trinketed princess such as your Highness, those miserable gems are mere tiddlywinks and babybaubles, but to a rueful roué such as I—ah, those plump crystal cabochons could salvage my lost and oft-misplaced life, do you see? With that translucent cash I could fund the saving of myself! So I beg you: make no racket, nor fiddle up any fuss; and I would be ever so deeply in your debt if you could spare us both the melodrama of any tearstreaked display of sentiment... Well? What, so agog? Tsk! Here now with the jewels, chip chop!”
My malisoned mum checked my flubbery muzzle as if I might be the gems in question. Then the absurdity of this mugging struck her. What the fluck? How could she ever satisfy this savage noble’s stupid demand? Her rage uncaged a crack of her voice: “What diamonds???” she shrilled like steam in the stadium of air above me, her facial contortions recalling those of the debilitated ogre broken by my birth, who could barely hold her fragments together in the semblance of a personality, drained and profaned and semi-disassembled.
The sun-cooked, puke-streaked vagrant paused, perturbed. He slotted his bleary eyes and scrutinized the air beside her quivering face; then abruptly his cunning perverted anchor-nosed features twisted with revulsion, as if she’d told an intolerably tasteless joke. “What on God’s green earth do you mean what diamonds?” He shuffled his moldy sneakers—which looked like forgotten pastrami sandwiches—another step closer, thrusting her into range of a still more intense smell-nimbus of cadaverine odor, a fumarole perfume like rancid eggs sizzling over a piss fire on the poached grey belly of a corpse. His voice grew husky, sulfur-hexafluoridated. He had lost his aristocratic edge. “Tell you what. I think, that you think, that I’m not very dangerous, and a bona fide idiot to boot, heh?” Her head shook like a whanged tuning fork, clanging with a moan, but it was too late: the crooning lunar hobo was transforming in his rage into an ever-truer vision of his concealed nature, into a fragmented and crosscontradictious bodyscape of broken hell visions, his urchinous armpits complicating into Tartarus and Dis, his city-dump eyes flaring with trash furnaces in which various all-star saints writhed in rending agony, his cirrhotic paunch flobbling as inside its acid walls dissolved the spastically clattering skeleton of Jonah. His nose swelled like a dysplastic internal organ, becoming an enormous fake multi-warted Halloween schnozz; in his left nostril’s cave, lions feasted on Daniel, and in his right nostril Jerusalem fell and fell and fell. Each lower tooth was a gory altar on which children were sacrificed, while each upper tooth hosted a crucified Jesus with no eyes. On his tongue, sobbing grids of blemished martyrs were smote by demons on their fungiform heads, their cranial fountains of lifeblood refreshing and prolonging his buzz. When the Tyrant of Flies spoke again, his cajoling tone had gone up in flames, replaced by the gliding howl of billions of souls being immolated in one great deflagration of incinerating sound. Oppressive with magmatic reverb and earthquaking delay, he yerked his head and boomed out a down-pitched ultimatum in a third voice, one both Satanic and campy. “Cookie, I loathe that you’re making me scooch down to the brass tacks, but hand me your ear for a minute, I mean give it to me. If you don’t smarten up and tender me those diamonds without any more of this filibuster, then I’m gonna…” The apocalyptic shit Yeti wavered, confused. Finally his grimy eyeballs darked onto me, and he startled and then brightened frighteningly. “…then I’m gonna dish some info about your boo’ful little baby boy that you would really rather not know—trust me!”
13 – CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE 666TH KIND
Phew! We’re almost there, almost at the Vile Event, the Torrid Trauma separating one volume from the next: the monster at the end of this book!
Picture a fighting game’s loading screen where the agonists face off, frisking in place—there, to the right: a glowering tower of evil devil, a hairy oily soiler making his play for pecuniary salvation. Flamelets squirting from his vulval ears, this B.O. demogorgon sculpts with his sarcophagal fingers a roiling sphere of magic plasma. To the left: a curvirostral young mom in overalls and pastel-pink turtleneck with appliqué tulips, hefting a chest harness supporting her melted-looking spawn, whose skull she grips like a ruined grapefruit. Her lips crawl up and down like two rubber worms, and her eyes keep crossing till they fuse into one white atom about to split by a concentrated blast of terror.
But not quite yet. First I interfered, albeit without intending to be a hero. Ear-to-ear with her slamming heart, dazed by a blazing inundation of her fearomones, I—like an ice cone being crushed of the last residue of juice—eeped out a feeble protest, an agitated bibbly-gibble from which I knew better than to expect wonders… yet that glubble-gleep hit her like the world’s smallest bucket of liquid nitrogen, waking up couriers of nervous energy that galloped to every far outpost of her body, rang all her cellular bells, cleared her bronchial and arterial passages, and poured glucose into her mitochondrial furnaces. A great surge of fearsome mom power leapt up to her brain and guillotined her superego, cutting off all her whirling wants and counterwhirling concerns, all her flocks and contra-flocks of divebombing pros and cons, yesses and nopes; and in that new mental darkness opened the orange eyes of her primal animal self, a wildcat that charged out of her weakness.
With a cheetah’s self-yeet she launched from the bench and screamed, aurally lashing the Baron of Barf, shoving her flaming shriek into the waxy chambers of his ears till he stumbled back and fell ass-first onto tarmac, contributing his own yelp which cut out abruptly as the back of his head hit the pavement. All at once his infernal aura winked out, his eyes shutting down as if he’d been deactivated. A few milliseconds earlier, his cider’s bottom hit the sidewalk; now it spewed a sour fountain of fermented apple into my mother’s face and mine. She barely broke stride. Whipping the putrid fluid from her eyes and lips, she embraced me and sped past her attacker—but even adrenalin couldn’t make her an athlete, and soon she was chuffing and puffing, squeezing and heaving, her fur and claws blowing away and falling off until she was just a scared soft pink girl in dirty sneakers slapping through the underpass, arms wrapped around what looked like a mondo wad of deeply offended chewing gum, our expressions such eloquent and impactful emblems of cosmic alarm that some bystanders shouted upon seeing us, and a perhaps well-meaning drill-sergeant-type tried to step in front of her only to be rewarded with a growl as she lolloped past. Too weary to sprint but too worried to slow down, my mom hyperventilated like a steam train all the twelve blocks home, where she bounded up the stairs, jerked open the door, then shoulder-tackled it shut and threw the bolt, all while I was paralyzed by the sour cider coating my face.
Keeping her hands up to ward off the walls, she ricocheted to the studio and collapsed backward onto the bed, where she released me, flopped her arms out and still heaving stared up into wheeling wheels of wheels. Her mind felt like a superheated bubble of shrinking air caught underneath a capsized boat in shark country. Strapped against her soaked shirt, I was slow-broiling in a cider-scented sauna but dared not move or even squeeble, fossilized in shock, caught in some atavistic reflex to make myself invisible to predators, gone static as a textbook baby illustrating existential fear.
Suddenly my mom jolted upright, hurriedly unloaded me into my cradle, then leapt up and checked the louder window, trembling and pasty-faced scanned the street, expecting to see cop cars hunting for a murderess. But no. She returned to my cradleside, plopped down breathing way too hard, shaking her hands as if they were wet—I don’t know why. She had stopped making sense, and despite hundreds of reviews of my eidetic tapes I have not been able to discern what she thought, for her mental transmission had misformed into a knife blur of static, a corrugated swamp sawing itself to pieces. Without preamble she reeled off the bed, stopped mid-air with mouth open, cocked her head and waited. What did she think she was running from? In her skull I sensed a strange deep digging pressure as a certain compressed vein, thinner than a flywing, palpitated violently from all the blood sluicing through its chickenneck. ShShSh SHSHSHSH. Hhhhhhhhh. Swallowing, rosaried with sweat, my mom peeled off her aviators and touched her forehead strangely, as if probing for something under the skin. She found it. She jabbed.
POP!
Ink coursed through her mind, a great shattering flood of blackness that made everything its own color. Her fingers loosed the aviators, and oh so slowly she slumped on her side, gaping, lids nictating, eyes white and frozen and smeary red like ice-beds on which slain fish had lain: icy and bloody, bloody and icy, icy and icy and icy.
The telepathic feed cut off. My brain’s splitscreen halved; suddenly I was alone in the squalid dungeon of my iron-chained and polluted head. The Garden had ended. Never again would I glubble into my warm maternal curly-cord mindphone. No more secondhand nightmares, no more crankling streams of contradictory imagery, no ten-dimensional love running like soul milk into my purring neurons. Henceforward and in perpetuum there would hang that unbreakable barrier between me and all else, a lucite pain that would keep me on the outside no matter where I went, peeping out from my head’s two soft jelly domes, scurrying like a trenchcoated mote through the loneliness of cosmic solitude where everything is Other—and yeah yeah I know that technically the Other is the shadow of the Self; as a subjectivity I am bound to all that surrounds me, my consciousness continuously woven into all that impinges upon it, for everything that happens to me I can experience only within the kludged simulation that my brain maintains, and thus everything I see is a reflected shade of myself and not truly outside me—but being one with everything is nevertheless a lonely state if you can remember an era when just your mind and your favorite other formed a Moebius loop tied into an infinitely flowing ribbon bow of purified emotion, when you were half of all existence and mirrored by the other half, in a mortal symmetry since gone astray.
In that first nasty moment of isolation, I must have looked like a baby Kabuki with knots of darkness whorling from my eyes and mouth and nose, black snailshells of smoke from the cremation of my maternal bliss. I felt enucleated and atomized, divided by two and amputated. Impaled, I gaped like a chick for a motherbird that would not return, as pain draped its crimson scrim over my segregated vision. All was red and I was floating downstream in a skull cradle under throbbing skies of molten tears, past an archipelago of pulsing islands of materialized pain, toward waiting hands that wished me no wellness, while from the briny, spiny deep, the colossal jaws of a pitch-black anglerfish of despair rose toward the clammy crumb of my forgotten flesh. Swallowed, I melted in the acids of agony until I forgot what was causing my distress, grew bewildered, with stubby fingerlets wiped the fluid from my lashes, and finally emerged from my trance half-delirious, having suppressed what’d happened. My vision shimmered, and I saw what I had not yet truly seen: the lifeless body of my ma, eyes white and mindless and desouled. She had been the force of good that animated the universe, that put the clouds on the walls and the color on the vases, the juice in the cup and the joy in the leaf; now she was puddled meat, the eyes aspic, the lips wilted lettuce. The outflung bratwurst-hand hung with middle and index fingers crooked as if around an invisible trigger, as if she, while I’d blinked, had shot herself with a gun visible to no one other than herself, and turned herself from a convexity to a concavity, to a heavy hole that was not an absence but a negative presence that transformed our six-sided studio—still the site of much silver sunshine—into a crow-haunted necropolis host to a baroque disquisition on Death. Flies were buzzing in happy-meal parabolas over her bubbling corpse, her skin already dropping and wrinkling, sagging and dangling from what used to be her darling face. Red hooks sliced under her eyes and dragged down as her blue-irised orbs dissolved into sludge and were consumed by muggy swarms of maggots and worms. Brown-and-green stinks invaded my button nose while her cheek melted into a viscous lake inextricable from the sheet, her mouth gaping wider and wider as the flesh retracted and her disintegrating face became a chasm. Around us the studio’s bent and faceted walls twirled open like the six wooden petals of an enormous clockwork orchid, the outside world whipping me with lashes of cold wind, bombarding me with daggers of light and cannonballs of darkness, peppering me with small hard insects pilgrimaging to the olid bounty that had been my mom. While clouds barked and howled, martial squadrons of vultures descended into her rolling landscapes, fanned out and snipped away at tiny gobbets of her rotting flesh. In the distance—boots. Yells. Gunfire. Artillery. Planes. The final war had begun. It did not last long before the first nuclear blow blew, followed within seconds by another. Big bombs knocked with such regularity that they formed a chaotic and obliterating beat. My mom had been right about everything. Her fears all prophecies. Even the Earth itself was sick with a terrible headache, pressure building under its sorest cratons; prompted by the nuclear pounding, its anguish and agony erupted into mega-volcanoes that pumped the air full of ash and dust and killed everybody except for the people who had taken shelter in the chasm that had once been my mother, for through the bottom of her canyon a tiny magic hot spring flowed, carving out the rocky sides, purifying as it sank and leaving in its water-washed wake the hamlets of the deformed survivors of humanity, fishermen mutants scraping by in a post-technological theocracy. Their deity was the maternal landscape that sheltered them from the radioactive wastelands—the goddess whose burrowing hot spring cleaned them inside and out. Grateful but afraid, they dedicated their lives to the propitiation of this earthen Mother, and, after discovering records of her behavior as a human, they instituted a moral code based on her ethics of forgiveness, preaching kindness and mutual protection and mellified harmony and a universal amnesty for all those who were in pain. Every year at festivals, ballerina-mimes danced a visual hymn of love and appreciation, and the citizens—acromegalic, hydrocephalic, harlequin, brachygnathous, hyperkinetically ticcing—made with their shaky hands many bird-nosed masks representing their invisible Mother; while at mass funerals the overalled priests commended the dead to her arms, she who swaddled every soul and sang it sweet lullabies through the troubled and nightmarish slumber of eternity. Loved as never in life, regardless she was not there to experience it, nor were there prophets to keep alive her Word—and so this Cult of the Mother was also a Cult of Death, reigning over gully tribes who were not just inbreeding but mutating further from the ambient radiation. Having seen their doom coming from many generations away, the crevasse society decided on one last act of devotion: to restore their rock matrix into the form of the deity who was unbirthing them, the Mother who would finally contain once more all potential in her womb. Despite the degenerating mutants’ arthritic claws, kyphotic spines, and tick-tocking clonic spasms, they hewed down the flourishing forests and pared back the cliffs, chiseling and dyeing, laboring day and night till the soft sweeps of my mother’s face emerged, the blonde bobcut rising from the landscape, the gonfalon nose, the slim huddled posture of fragility assailed. A few last mewling cyclopean spawn of humanity managed, holding brushes in their hyperplasic lips, to daub the pinkness back into her hands, as I floated into place beside her, time circling around back to the seconds after she had blacked out, the process starting all over again.
But no, the parabolic hallucination faded, and anyhoo in the spectral purlieus of my memento-mori-adorned dreamatorium, nuclear war and other teratogenic apocalypses are a dime a decimeter, and none taken on its own has the force to pierce me. Nah brah, what happened next was far grodier than any oneiric delusion: it was the re-unveiling of irrevocable reality: it was the brutal datum of my mom’s posed corpse flung sideways on the bed, nothing but yesterday’s cut rose, a limp frame upon which the brightest banners of life had so recently been hung. Hours would pass before my father returned, the dry & wry voices of November birds bouncing off the windows. The silence like sirens. The light like darkness. The cold the truth. I stwuggled to enunciate her name but could not yet command my lips to purse for the M. If I could just say, “Ma,” she would respond and return. She would come back to me.
Ensnared in magical thinking, I didn’t mark at first when her corpse began to steam. Squiggles of vapor spiraled up from her torso and face, pale compact tornadoes drifting from her pastel-pink turtleneck’s neck, as if she were leaking from her vessel, her essence lifting like incense in silken waves. This steam gushed into the shapes of foggy cylinders and spheres, gusted into intricate salients and reentrants, gummed up into eyes and faces and shoulders and arms, until my mom’s ghost was sitting in the middle of her abandoned meat, holding a translucent hand over her translucent eyes and craning her bluish head to look far above. I, punctured, shot my first word: “MAAAAA!”
But she didn’t even look at me. I could not believe it—and then I believed it, and the desolation of abandonment broke over me in a wave of magmatic choler. My fat fingers fused into fists. My forehead’s doorbulb crankled with rage veins. My eyebrows dived into a quivering chevron pointed down toward the hell to which I would condemn her. What—disdain me even in her return? SPURN me when I needed her more than I ever had? NO! No no no NO! There was NO making this up to me, NO going back! I’d NEVER forgive her!
In fact, she was listening raptly to someone who towered over her. As this massive entity orated, she shrank back in total rodential terror, bafflement remodeling her ghost body into a landslide. Her eyes dropped like fumbled yo-yos, her faded blue lips moved hesitantly as she muttered something she evidently did not want to say. She stopped and seemed to listen. A few seconds later, she pointed a serrated finger at her well-fenestrated ghostflesh and mouthed, “Me?”—then something obscure.
More words were exchanged, then she abruptly broke down. Trepidation maimed her into a Munch painting trickling ghostly blue tears. Puzzle pieces of flesh sank into her cheekskin, then her head squared into 3x3 grids and started spinning its segments like a blue Rubik’s cube realigning mangled and decontextualized squares of head parts. Before my eyes, my mother’s identity disintegrated, her skin edging itself with foggy fiddleheads, feathery slashlets of protoplasmic blue specter blood spotting the patchwork quilt.
Then she flinched back into her perfect form, instantly restored to a sweet phantom semblance of my mom, overalled even in death—but sagging on one side, where it seemed something heavy had landed on her shoulder, precipitating her reassembly. Now, her ectoplasmic eyes echoing, she followed what seemed to be an invisible hand pointing behind her, at her flesh body, so that she twisted around and for the first time gazed into her body’s humoral eyes.
Comber upon comber of foaming horror washed over my mother’s wraith and broke her up into a great swarm of starlings that diffused out and away but then whirled back cheeping into the likeness of her dear beaky features. Once more her bulbous ghost ocelli peered into flabby corpse eyes like expired cocktail onions. She fingered the fishy grooves of her lips. Uncertain—as if she would have liked to ask permission—she stroked her own cheek, gazing into her face in intensest communion. Soon that pale blue eidolon, the last spectral aftereffects of my mom, softened, melting into a high-eyebrowed expression of pity—deep, sad, loving and affectionate understanding she had never felt for herself alive. Sapphire tears stepped down the stairs of her ghostface as finally, after twenty long years of much suffering, my mom forgave herself. As this forgiveness grew, she got brighter and brighter, both smiling and grieving, infused with a grave joy that knew no bounds, a sober and serene acceptance of the peeling waterfall of the All. At peace, her blonde hairs sheened into the irenic strings of an undulant harp, while atop her head a ziggurat of haloes appeared, and on each halo there flourished a separate utopia. The last locks in her were opening, the bat-flocks of answers fluttering out and leaving only the light. Fingers sigiling, she blessed herself and turned to go.
But paused—for her eyes had alighted upon her sinuous earrings.
Earrings whose quartzes dangled like—like—!
ZAPPO!
An electric bolt of mortification—purified and weaponized shame at her own stupidity—jolted through her with such voltage that it leapt down into her corpse and jump-started its heart; her ghost facepalmed, shaking its head even as it slumped into its shed skin, unsloughing its exuvia, her irises wriggling back toward the front of her skull as she inhaled like a slapped baby.
֍֍֍
She returned. The telepathy didn’t. I was left not with a ghost limb but a ghost mind. My penny of willpower spent, I started weeping and did not stop.
֍֍֍
When my father flung himself home, Zeusishly thundersome after a lightning-lit combat with his boss, my mom interrupted his high dudgeon with the clear and pat laying down of a single sentence, a simple straight line fired like a bullet, a trio of syllables whose final word would echo through my life and hers without ever dying away fully, the echo getting ever louder, blasting down doors, blowing through libraries, incinerating citadels—a word that started in the desert, reverberated over fictile seas, raised sun banners above hill dwellers and promised ascensions that never commenced—a word loaded down with rubies of rhetoric and lapidations of logic, hymned and bribed and feared—a word that had accumulated much richness and respect, many books and paintings and swords and guns, blooded with the sacrifice of generations, with the neutering of men and the pyrolization of women—a word aflame and arain and asnow, this word—the Word—bearing down and gathering steam as it charged with horns lowered straight at the baby boy in her arms.
She said, “I met God.”
Volume 2: GIGANTOMACHIA