Done.

21.


—I’m thinking seriously about going back to performing — with swords and parrots this time…?

—I’m reading “To Liberty Through Love” by Charles Fourier…?

—Let’s suppose the operation is successful, let’s contemplate the wonder: plaster casing flying and me walking again…?

—He talks about how to placate the pussy with cunt music of banged cello and heavy percussion…?

—Me appearing, an August, pale, beyond porch and portal, no fuss, no announcer, just silence, crowned with calm…

—He sees the unsexed bodies as purposeless cenotaphs, carapaces with nothing as merchants’ avaricious claws…?

—From the chicken coops, who emerges by the pale cotton candy colored parrots…? A flock of holy spirits, like chaff in the wind, dispersed…?

—He says whatever creams your pants is gotta be fine, the food of the gods for your spirit…?

—In the background, cavernous, Patsy Cline singing that she falls to pieces…?

—He says, Gather yourself, enjoy what’s left, always what’s left…

—…pieces of china all over the floor, all those broken plates, the crowd thinking meanwhile I’m such a klutzy prestigiator…?

—Find a patch of clear in the plenilune…?

—Pedicure…? Anyway, everybody assuming I’ve got bum elbows, ok?

—Open the cellophaned package…? Don’t be abashed, you are klug genug, clever enough to know that the only eyes that matter are those of your soul, and your soul is always smiling on you…?

—Then I make believe them believe that I’m not only a wretched klutz but I’m pestered by blasts of cough and sticky phlegms of chronic catarrh…?

—Take the dildoes out, no need to concoct complicated plots like you are another silly choirboy with a Hitlerian cowlick…?

—I’m playing to the crowd, I’m pawing de carpet, like I’m looking for my truncheon, the one I’ve been using trying to balance the plates that invariable crashed and broke…?

—Pull no punches, ok? He says, And don’t worry about anything at all, if your breath reeks, if your body groans with arthritic pains, if your soul’s fagged out…, if you’ve been declared void since long ago by all your neighbors and acquaintances, if nobody’s been paying any attention to you for ages…

—Here come the parrots… At the periphery of the crowd the flock awakes, they are gray carnivorous parrots, for their weight, the more intelligent beings on earth… They clutch captive close to their puffed up chests a beating flat plastic heart that intermittently lights and fades… They are in love.

—Prime yourself like a troll, liberate your cowered outer wrappings… Shout to the moon through the clearing, become a witch, nothing healthier for ruefully encaged individual…

—The clumsy truncheon has become an elegant narrow flexible saber… The enamored parrots come to me, the parted flock of twenty, ten at every ear of me, like they are bombs I’m bombarded with…

—Fourier says, Never mind amending the classics… Toss them to the big pyre… All is church shit, inquisitorial inventions to shackle the future generations…

—Four flights of the saber, as four swats of the whizzing twig withy, two at each side, and the twenty eager parrots are decapitated on the floor, blood all over the pieces of shiny white china…

—He says, It only matters what the now obtains, what obtains the now… And Wittgenstein said the same before…? Ask the caveman if your fucking progress means to him anything but added garbage…? Bloody grating complication to a life otherwise up till now in unison with compassionate nature…?

—…the blood itself coming from the flat pouches, the fake hearts…? The pretended heads separated from the bodies the empty little bags turned inside out, looking perfectly from a distance like recently severed parrot heads…? A trim of drying blood as a necklace that slowly dissolves…?

—Don’t do another slipshod job of your single-shot life…

—Darkness overflows, suddenly following… A trill of chatty drums… Light’s back, brighter than ever, and the twenty are parrots alive and crowning me with a nimbus loaded with spiritual significance…? Touring my glorious head like I’m again the chosen figure…?

—The catalyst…

—The catalyst, you’ve got that right.

—…that changes your life, brings it back to nature, from where it had been kidnapped by the evil forces of merchant civilization…?

—In my wake, the plaudits, the applauses, probably too overwhelming to ignore… For what it’s worth, Johnny Latrina, the officiating barker, is of the opinion that it would pay to have the great Saber-Wielding Illusionist Contortionist back into stage again…

—Be unique, he says, in escaping hostility. Hostility is built in. Everybody who is born in the plagued baleful baneful rotten cage of civilization, where only the greed of the merchants matters, is burned in and for life in hostility… For hostility’s sake you are brought to the shit-pile, the merdier…?, and the more hostile the more you obey the strictures of your slave-masters…

—Yeah… But what do you think about the new act…?

—Huh…? Did you hear what I told you about the return to the cave… No holding back… Nature invading, and you part of it…?

—Yeah… But…

—No, your act is excellent, but the more it touches the freedom of the old ages, when the grotesque advent of merchant class had not happened… Probably a monstrous mutation, you know…? Listen, I’ve seen there is a contest in the big mall by the river…? All the stores getting together and offering awards to the best paintings exposed up and down the aisles…?

—Have you taken up painting now…?

—I’m becoming a fellow artist. Are you feeling threatened…? My intention is to paint fire… Just anthropomorphic images of flames… The forest consumed by the fire and the specters of all the natural people emerging, ascending… Blacks and reds…

—I’m thinking myself blacks and reds for my new uniform…? And the parrots of course such a contrasting gray…?

The “dialogue” was interrupted. Simultaneously, something or somebody (ubiquitous…?) was knocking on their very own doors… “Somebody at the door,” said both of them at the same time. “Call me!” “I’ll call you!”

Maximine was at Coralline’s door. At Chuck’s Thai, the Suze. (Have I got it wrong…?)


22.


No, I’ve got it right. In this “Epilogue of Decollation and Fire” my purpose, I purport, is to finish them all off.

Maximine in the good graces of Coralline again, Chuck humping the Suze. Willie the jackal escaping with the help of his buddies in the system, of course…

Dick, Marietska, Nina, the detective Howard… Who else…?

Ah, yes, a short moment ago, jabbering about spark plugs, the guy in the garage, giving a rose-colored fig for Maximine’s Jag. As who wouldn’t, the guy such a dedicated bloke…?

He was turning some screws and all at once reading on the sly a superior reprint of one of Bobby’s ethnic furtive mysteries — a homosexual fantasy called “Those Were the Ticks that Tickled his Fanny,” signed with a Chinese-sounding pseudonym (the Chinese being after all the folks he respects above all others…) — where a rabid Bengalese has both his goose cooked and welcomes a divine celluloidal apparition of sorts at the bottom of a ravine…, when, as the storm hit harder, the current gave up, in unison the garage’s lights went all off, and only the tinier, more concentrated glare in his spelunker’s helmet held firm…

The mechanic, whose name was Whitecheck, was told by the boss he could go home also… Whitecheck here replying that he wanted to wash a bit before, the boss, in return, before scrambling away, answering that, as he himself had locked the office, Whitecheck should make certain that he closed tight the shop also…

Meanwhile, let’s not lose sight of the suffering fellow, the smashed Bengali at the bottom of the ravine… Who, as a consequence to the many bones cracked and the accompanying fever, was heavily hallucinating…

Under the steady headlight, tittered and tottered the sweet delayed orgasm of the mechanic as his hero tonight, the Bengali shepherd, in his dry, yet searing wit, tried in his delirium to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, and the hairs in his nose, accordingly to the writer, not dissimilar to those surrounding his fragrant asshole, were tiny vibrating strings of energy… His auburn eyes saw in their fever from nine to eighteen dimensions, and myriad parallel universes were bluntly added as he lodged his complaints in frantic undercuts against the cruel faggotty face of the glowing goggly moon.

The point about who the winner of the bout would be being moot from slide or photogram number one.

Hidden behind the door, there were Whitecheck’s cloaks and daggers, and in the pocket of one of his cloaks, all alike in their shiny blackness, there was, carefully concealed, a baloney sandwich… He blithely overran a few big tanks of exhausted oil. “Big oil,” he thought, “murderous concerns creating economical models whose irresponsible expenditures exhaust the earth itself. We as humans all sullied, all dishonored as keepers or stewards of ship earth. We’ve put death before values, we’ve replaced profit motives for the reliance on the clean pristine bounties of nature… Everything has been turned into big gobs of shit, the whiff of capitalistic state terrorism…”

Before exiting from his narrow closet with his baloney sandwich, Whitecheck turned off the lantern on the brow of his helmet… Then, on the rough surface of the garage, he skillfully avoided the implements, the cans, the machines and mechanisms, the cars themselves…; tiger-like, he approached the gate… He stood on his toes, he furled back the veiling curtain; cautiously, as if afraid of a sniper, he peered through the transom… The earth in front, buffeted and tormented by the scambling dirling storm, seemed to cry in agony… The rain, tears of pain… Today the earth is raped by big oil and big cars and big planes and big armored trucks and big bombs and big shits commanding the ubiquitous rape… Quis cras ipsum volebit? — Who shall want it in the future…? It shall be discarded as a dried up, burned up, used up jalopy… Another worthless planet carbonized, not even good as scrap metal, too polluted, contaminated…

No mangy gift dog of a messiah seeing fit to unturf its eyelashes and resurrect… Probably died long ago of earth-poisoning, as a tyro, untried grub, before he could transmogrify properly even priming itself for next phase, the one that made it earthwormy enough that could allow it to climb to the fiery radioactive petrol-soaked surface…

He drew out the curtains, he went inside Maximine’s Jag, he lit his light, he unwrapped his sandwich, he opened his book, faintly reeking of spilled, spoiled kerosene, he resumed reading it (the stinking spool of a buckled book) — scrolling diligently its suffusing pastoral bliss — parsimoniously getting to the climax through steps of delicious antsy titillation — saplings of hope erupting always, or almost always, on the way, abruptly sending you back perhaps to a paradisiacal bosquet, in a persnickety onslaught on the disencumbered senses — no more cricks and inflexibilities — you are lithe as a contortionist, not groggy and scroggy and hampered by the onus of incrusted guilt — you are furthermore a-swim in a generous superfluity of seminiferous text — graciously served by that otherwise blatantly ignored great writer, the prodigiously non-notorious (how strange!) Bobby Chung Ching…

This beautiful literature rehabilitates my spirit. The scheming chemistry never slackening its grip… Paradigms of sublimation thrown tumultuously, obscene abductions of the soul, brought to welkins of unbalance above the void… Something like that, at the very least. Different paradigms making you inhabit different worlds, for sure, quite, quite…


He threw unquiet glances all around. Finally he squatted, eased the way to his cock, unfastened his fly, drilled in with his free hand… In a jiffy, sandwich and narcotics had been properly sucked up… His eyelashes, such a sissy geometry of hairs, drew closer by degrees…

The handsome Bengali shepherd’s shaky hand reached for his baggage… Down from his girdle hung a purse full of frills… Ah, but with what dismay Whitecheck read that the shepherd, whose name was Circussized (though, through some understandable shortcut of the imagination plus the careless fast spelling, Whitecheck read it as Circumcised the whole of the while,) took out from the bag a sharp shepherd’s knife.

He feared for Circumcised’s life, or else his balls…?

He was full of fervor, and ecstatic, enraptured enough, while praying mentally to the author of the scripture he held in his less active hand, that he promised that if he (the writer, or the personage, whoever held at the instant the strongest will,) if he would stay his own hand, if he’d not cross the taw line and (the writer) didn’t evict the handsome boy from the novel, and the boy wished or chose to linger, he (the reader) would stay his own also, if at least for a while, delaying longer still the agonizing orgasm…

A line of tis (palm-like trees from over there, remarked the author in a semi-learned aside) held the line against the rumble of the earthquake which had thrown the handsome shepherd down the fatal ravine… The tis flailed in the breeze like they were accoutered also with the arms of hammy actresses…

He, Circussized, had been wooing a wether, and not even the bell-wether, but a particularly fat and well fleeced wether nonetheless — not altogether unprepossessing then — when he heard the first crack of the whip ushering ominous from a crack on the angry surface of the earth itself — where every human already dead is but the amount of a little bicker of yellow dirt — and every live one but the potential little urn of ineluctably yellowing ashes — so that when the final burning comes… Whitecheck peered at the jerky hands of his wristwatch. It was getting late. He had to skip the fillers…

The wethers were all tainted, destined for meat, and meet for death, but who wasn’t… (…) A shepherd has always need of a bell-wether, and he himself occasionally has to carry the bell or the wether or both… (…) And one may indeed lie down with greasy hoggets as with wool wethers, and yet long for the smoother skin of a man — if a resurrected one still much better, imagine his maggoty skin. (Yeah, do!)

The writer hyped the whines the hard-bitten handsome mountain semi-god couldn’t stifle in his excruciating pain. With his knife, the shepherd, in his feverish delirium thinking of himself maybe as one of his dearest bucks being primed for a most famous roast, was slowly skinning himself… Chinese torture indeed… The mechanic was pumping like mad…

Old clips of dead cinema stars were crossing his mind… The old dead stars were advertising now new wares — only the words had changed — the scenes were the same — smug scenes, prescient scenes, perjured scenes…

Most of the stars were women chatting away… Center stage. (The faggy crews lost in the foggages…) One held the rudder of a yacht and blabbered about tins of fish being so good for your health… Another dead beautiful star, very contrivedly, and outrageously made up, totally incredible in her stupid role, held a bulrush fish-basket and was romping among the marooned barks… She was advertising cold-cream…

A dead magnificent very titty star had climbed over an elephant, she was under a circus tent indeed… And Circussized saw the elephant’s cock lengthen to lengths extremes, while the wooden actress announced how good and wholesome was certain brand of extremely fat condensed milk…

A highly-disliked twit of a homosexual actor (all over the world, all through the ethnicities, asked the author, have you ever seen an artist not homosexual…?) was ordered to scram by a princess in an orange and bejeweled robe a mile wide. While the twit was disappearing through one of the wings, mincingly winking to the public, the princess from her throne saw fit (out of the blue) to order also a succulent sandwich, the pride of some stinking chain of one force-feeding restaurants or other…

Rickety cynosure of the moribund Bengali, next came a-shining a bevy of laughing mute actresses whose superimposed voices acquired the whirring sizzle of another chunk of skin being slowly pulled away from his mangled body. They were sunk in a trench of the fictional first World War… It had never happened, it all (the studio-produced fabulous shebang) had belonged to a ballet in an American Musical — no first World War, nor second, nothing… The world turning silkily around… Anyway, everybody knows is common practice among women to reinvent the world when they chat away, and now they were recommending the dresses sold by a chain of dress-making barons…

As Circussized squinted at the cinema legends never quitting, eternal in the advertising of new and newer wonders, and Whitecheck squinted at the Christ-like figure torturing himself after the earth had tortured him — torture after torture after torture — as one finally snuffed it, the other finally — ah, finally, finally — came.

20th... Faltering, steam wanting, my... legs...

20.


As Bobby the writer was busy dying, tiny Bobby Dick was busy getting born.

As Chuck attended Bobby’s funeral and memorial service, Coralline at the same time was present at the pseudo-christening of the big new brat.

Later they talked by phone and commented about the two episodes as respectively witnessed by each. Their observations were somewhat biased, but, by Jingo, whose aren’t.

As it happened, the afterimages were still powerful. The fire engulfing Bobby’s casket. The cow-elephant pissing an intercrural yellow torrent that sparkled in the fiery Sun.

At Bobby’s sending off, some of his exes were there — the frigging frigate bird was there, pompously in front — as were a couple of his three or four estranged children. A chap of thirty-odd, student of philosophy, said a few words taken, or allegedly taken, from senator Boethius… Something about “The sweet poison of letters… When sniffed a few doses every day, being a healthier anodyne than laudanum or heroine…, and then that, by avoiding foul shitty smells, and instead smelling little pouches of fine herbs, health also improving a lot… Providence giving you already such weapons, as a big nose, that, if you had not messed them through ugly vices, you would have been indefinitely preserved from disease and smelly agony… Pagan witches being always in the right, compared to the stupid preachers and canons of the religions of today, who stress foreknowing, when foreknowing of course makes any action worthless, as diet itself would if you’d knew that it would really work out a hundred per cent of the time, but you know that it doesn’t, for still everywhere you see all those fat fuckers who wasted their money and time and are still such eyesores and nose-smacker for the rest. And in fact this, in fine, that predestination all in all is such a shit…”

Nobody paying him any attention but for the fat mothers around, readying their umbrellas to trip him or wallop his balls if he happened to pass nearby…

Anyway, later all these maxims the moronic Maximine would gainsay in her garbled exposition of credulities. She’s another not too persuasive Mormon. Those clueless Mormons never persuasive enough, the pack of heavenly garbage they try to swindle you with, unswallowable even by the most obnoxiously limited. Door to door they bang, stinking of cowpats and peasant stupidity, and try to convince you that they got something in there that makes any frigging sense even to despaired depressive lifer housewives with no prospects of ever shedding their chains of drudgery or even their tremendously crushing weight.

“In pristine hindsight,” she also said, more or less, “the spook for whom the dirges of love and unmerited favor so graciously showered by Jesus upon him are being sung falsetto and softly enough in the background, wasn’t (the spook) so unleavened as the unleavened bread nor so sour as the grape juice (our savior’s attributes transmogrified) that we will shortly serve… He was a so-so guy with a mania for bottomry. All his hired help had wide bottoms indeed, plus he betted on the bottomry of his loaded shelves — he put all his money or all his vain illusions, let’s say, on the successful completion of his literary ship’s journey — and the accruing freight of a volume added monthly — with interests (above the ongoing rate) of vast glory posthumous…, and yet, alas, wholesale obsolescence crept up on him before he had bad (or bidden or bid) (or had beat it) adieu to his shabby cloak of a earthly body…”

Outside, on the village square, a few youths were goofing away… They were poleaxing a squirrel, whose cries of anxious woe improved on the shitty choir’s shitty songs — Chuck being half Chinese, pronounced, very appropriately here indeed, shitty as shiti (shiti meaning corpse in Chinese) — the shitty hymns sounding on the beam ends. Managing as a surplus to put everybody’s nerves on edge.

Finally, Maximine, following perhaps their quaint perverse Mormon practices, stuck to the shipping metaphors, and…

“In Viking fashion, him who so appreciated the ethnic angle of everything, now that his ship has reached final port — and fully loaded, indeed! I must say — dammit, when taken from clew to earing, the hapless dear bastard, at least two gross of self-published books he would be sticking us with… Except that, of course, very charitably we’ve included them in the same act of holy cremation, for though we all enjoyed them so much when freshly out of the presses, though nobody ever acknowledged reading one or even a page of one, now nobody either has bid (bad, bad boys? bidden?) a single cent for any of them, and we, as always, need the room… It’s quite understandable moreover that he’d prefer having them in fumous fashion, as himself, up there — up yours, with you, to the very end, how poetical, each book calling after him — up there, yes, at the right hand or world-clad claw of him whose whim it was to credit him with so-called life…”

Thus, whatever, but the whole collection, the two gross plus of monthly volumes, overly titled “The Secrets and Mysteries of the Ethnics,” now were serving as mere kindling to the same fire that burned him and his casket…

Chuck was irritated by everything. The tackiness of vile Mormonism, the gullible middlebrow turd-sucking dyed-in-the-wool Americans, (smelling of the hideous dyeing process too,) their stinking songs, their stinking perfumes and dresses and hats, and paunches and medals and crucifixes, and rosaries and all the idolaters’ disgusting knickknacks, plus, alas, his own diapers brimming… How he longed to leave that chair, and walk and dance around the village square, square on his hands, his pants kicked away, his balls a-bouncing, the nasty youths applauding, the squirrel singing his own protracted procrastinating dirge…

“And thus, with a bottle of cheap champagne, Viking fashion, ‘tis my honor — my honor ‘tis — to launch into the everlasting fire his final ship!”

Percipient now, her wits suddenly honed after Bobby’s death — what with her introduction to women’s power and the (more invigorating still) empowering of lesbianism meanwhile — Marietska, keen on her toes, aware of her renewed chores, keyed up the music to the max for a suitably apocalyptic finale. The revulsive choir came louder than hell. Chuck wheeled himself out of the building and into the waiting bus…

He had been before the service at Maximine’s, where the bitch and her favorite maid had put to the higher bidder everything unwanted — all of Bobby’s belongings, up to his last tape and notebook — both of which sets of items were later burned, as there were no takers whatever… And a rich mama’s boy of thirty-eight (one of the sons of one of the exes) who as it happened was always looking for bargains snatched from Maximine Bobby’s whole collection of vintage first-edition LP records (the sleeves intact, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, in their shiniest…) for 25 cents each, when Chuck, who knew the market, would have been ready to pay 5 dollars each… Only that he is not family (he is never family) and had access to the goodies too late. Chuck managing to buy but unlucky Bobby’s kraut pistol, with which he (the naive writer) had intended to commit a beautifully dignified suicide…

Coralline had been present both at tiny Bobby Dick’s (Suze’s son) birth and later at his christening — his christening of sorts, the mother belonging to that outlandish sect with the heinous elephant as totemic god and so on.

Bobby Dick was delivered off her mother the same night Bobby the writer gave up the ghost. Slightly heavier than his mother, though not taller than her by an inch or two, Bobby Dick made his exit from the too narrow and dire straits internment inside his prehistoric Venus of a mom’s bodily cage breaking tissues pell-mell. (In regard to the issue as to the weight and measures of each, who delivered or got delivered of whom was a question never posed aloud, but now Chuck and Coralline, through the line, gaggingly embroidered on it…)

The Thai boys were playing at marbles… Silent and serious in their seemingly deadly enterprise… A few strangers were murderously looking in, their teeth denuded…

During the length of the proceedings, the little monstrous squealer was smelling in his cradle, the little monstrous smeller was squealing in his cot (and the kot-leckers hypocritical in their praises, as always.)

A bit nauseated, Coralline waited nonetheless for what should come next. She’d scatter tidbits to the birds that came to peck at the cow-elephant’s splattered cowpats. Most of Suze’s buddies were irrevocable dimwits. The mom herself, completely patched up after the ordeal, looked defeated, overwrought, her vixen’s thick tawny hairs like widow’s weeds over her humpty trunk.

Then their flibbertigibbet of a rabbi — another disgusting rabbi of sorts for another disgusting obscure sect — came in, reciting some mantras and what have you. (Not a kikey thing, really, but almost, all but.) First he went to pay his outrageously opprobrious respects to the idol. He prostrated himself as long (or rather as short) as he was under the gruesome totem, a grotesque pagan-clumsy effigy of the pachyderm… Next he pumped up and down its trunk-like tale, the while making believe he was smelling the sacrosanct effluvia emerging from the its siphonal fulcrum…

Dick looking richly like a sack of bletted garbage, lost in a corner, trying to become surely an escaping wisp of smoke if at all possible less foul than everything everyone was aspersing everything else with... Otherwise, everybody else, the lot of them second-rowish wogs, at attention, as if deserving the fast retribution of an impromptu neck-shortening by having to swallow an embodied kris, from the sleeve of one of the service attendants, to the jeweled hilt.

The rabbi took now a spongy towelette and went to soak it in the piss of the cow-elephant…

The words were next understandable… Instead, the maddened screams of the elephantine baby much more clear… Clearly meaning that the whole operation couldn’t almost be viler, and swearing already atrocious revenges…

Coralline was happy that Dick was stuck for the rest of his natural walk to his particular calvary with that huge pagoda-sized barnacle of a fucking parasite on his back… Chuck agreed from the other end of the line. Such apt desserts all round the way…

They sent each other warm kisses and promised to gather more gossip to spread… For each other’s ears only. Such companionship developing. Another miracle of human warmth, and yen for healthy contact…


21.

19th... Ough.

19.



Bobby awoke sweating. Needles coursing his veins. His chest shilling for a grinding machine. The carnage behind the cage of his bruised ribs, dead confused meat. He thought, Probably another heart attack…



Propping himself with the walls, he reached the window. He looked through a panel of stirring fog. Outside, no lichened shark of lodestar loomed — no starved companion winked, no shriveled necromancer crone hurling astonishing appeasements — also some untoward liabilities of a stilted wreckage, from the bottom of the cold abysm… I used to be a drawing professor, he mused. And often I drew on the blackboard, with colored pieces of chalk, olden muses sourcing up among the disparaged chasms like a bleak skerry, atolls of them, a chorus of witches forewarning of imminent doom… Behind tall stelae of smoke they predicted that I could do worse than stay safely ensconced on the loggias behind the huge lit panels where the scores were showed…

I was eighteen, before I went into business and bought all those abandoned stadiums which when the sport craze came, with the advent of color television, resold at a profit of millions…



Gravelly vulvas, he thought, while from the next bedroom Maximine’s savage snores reached his ears… He swallowed his explosive pill. His face bore an expression of bland despair. His eyes seeing nothing still but some dirty stationary cloud in front of them, or inside. He heard a dribble down the corridor. Marietska pissing…?



Nothing more to extract from those niggers, he thought. He heard a sob. A sob…? His own. Some privacy, he said. Extended his hand, found a thick woolen jersey. Seized it with a claw for a hand and he covered his face with it… In case another erratic sob chose to rise to the surface…



Diaspora, he thought. A sob with an attitude plops up from the dark stirrings of an unknown being living inside my skeleton… Would it switch on the amorous switch… No time enough. It’s already dead, just a bubble, ephemeral.



Inside the muddy well of his past, past each one of those new scary islands, some graphics still lived — Mironian, expanded into more orthodox landscapes, Watteaunian… His voice commanded, piercingly: “On, on…”



On for the very daggers of the scurrilous limbo of whom I must have been… Who knows. Is there a native soil of the soul…? Where you are yourself planted, as if having crashed in…? Before, bubble-like or thereabouts, also then the little plant that’s you starts to wither, in a hammering never-quite-made-out allegro (the piss, the Pisa, the pies, the pious…?) of booming, big chorale words…? No, you can’t decide which one to affix to you as the last fig leaf that holds together, albeit so fragilely, the dignity of your identity.



While woodenly unflinching (not yet so long ago) in front of a moaning apogee of prolific binges — binges of hemorrhagic choreography — which brought — with oh what galvanizing hermetism — sundry acquainted avatars off — off to changing frames of licketicut, licketicut — licketicut inter-sabotaging blobness…



How ticklingly they germinate, from cavernous guffaws too, four other severed fingers which hold, with rubber rings, medals made with cancelled money: epitome, your pate, of crazy uselessness — five or four senseless organs, eternally condemned, are throbbing sillily in a pool of tripe…



He fell, his right leg went totally numb, and failed.



“Bobby, are you all right? Are you crying, love?”



Maximine awake. Marietska deflowering him, or pumping his chest.



After that, they had lain back onto some irritated levers. Their reeling eyes had closed. All was fixed but the objective. What a joke, was it not…? At least for us: a sent projectile.



He smelled some fiercely burned stuff. He thought: look at the broads, bumping into mazes of piffling private koans…



Soon everything shall be over. By then — tomorrow, the day after…? — none of them could care less… He…? Ah, he was left behind. Homelessly oozing in the lurch.



“Be laid,” he curses, in his mind. You are my business no longer, either of you. Want to die in peace... Thus, following the fumous specimen of his mind’s fire, frightening the pants off his neighbors with the flaming unheard shout of: “Make way then; so that I go at once in a Heroic Course…!”



He strode toward a mere gunwale, no, much higher, a brick wall, mad to turn with it, about, away, gone, fairly reattributed himself with attributes of ethereality, when...



“Remember, Bobby?”



“Yes, oh, and how!”



Soaked smithereens of lurid, macabre taffetas of engrossing nauseousness… Our bilious, quarrelsome pairs of eyes were now, I should guess, totally devoid anymore of barren loyalty, and brimmed, brimmed-brimmed, with pugnacious animadversion, again absolutely unwilling to, to-to, to let any new pseudo-magician get, get-get, get emptily away with, with-with, with any boringly soupy, soupy-soupy, soupy customary routine of hers — of idle (criminal even) legerdemain, legerdemain-legerdemain, legerdemain for officinal control of our cracking skeleton, yeah, and other divers ukasic prolixities…



They stroke upon his bell. Stroke-stroke, stroke.



Angrily, taunted… “What did we do wrong?” “Are you asleep yet?” They tautened. “Bobby, are you there, Bobby?”



Bobby, remember all those niggers shilled for you — so you always bragged — always the fictional action going on elsewhere — yonder, on the pitches, past the tainted glasses of the loggias — while the real action went on inside you…? All those provincial citizens paying courtesy to the king embosomed behind the scrim, the screen, the screams, the terrifying images imagined on the reflecting glasses…



Bobby, Bobby, it must be a surfeit. Too much booze, too much blood pudding, too much calabash…?



Bobby, jilt us again, your inertia, you know how it thrills us... It shows you at your best. Dismiss us. We are done. The month’s over. The book too…



“Time to do up!” — they shouted — cryptic children, hopping with flying bows — hoping, with flying brows… But their expectations were crushed as he immediately let go, he fell demurely into eternal silence. Immured, no contact with the pounding exterior.



That — which, again, could had been interpreted through a broad spectrum of quite contradictory reactions — had, therefore, the wrong virtue of further confounding the floundering crew — those numbers, those niggers of fictional action always at the ready for his disposal…? Crossed gazes all around, good and vainly trying to decipher perchance what…? Reciprocal proddings, mimetic shadowings — of a colloidal nature alright, of a frothy soapiness which stuck to your brains, thus thickening them further out…



Then they piped, still, and his photographic ears grew by beats, like bats’s. “There is no all, no other…” — they faltered, leaning despondently against the collapsing metal of his melting heart — meaning: “…remedy…?”



No reaction. And their spirits were rusting fast. One of them, possessed by some slothsome slumberous faucet of wit, poured: “Up, up, you fucker, up indeed, up an expanding scree of leftover urchins… Plenty of oomph left in thee! Nigerians to do, Thais, Guatemalans, Gabonese…”



Urchins whose time-lapse levitations flatter your trite senses into, into-into, into acknowledging that, okay, okay-okay, okay, all right, that there’s virgin territory to… Unlimited constellations to map out, that’s what. With what, what-what, what, with sporadical exhortations, yeah, of cozening instruction, of… Where’s the harangue…?



Go on, rebyata, ahead, ahoy, hurrah! The unregretted instant has elapsed! Exult, you guys! The sublime repeated to exhaustion, wow! The mob spiraling, head over toes, higgledy-piggledy, like a massive turd flushed down…



Chinese shadows… Camera obscura… All those cut-outs, little caricatures, black puppets, count ‘em, all those niggers that shilled for you…? Niggers? Persons? Persians, no doubt. Getting on on the action, a piece of, and of your wives’ asses…



The ashen spies back, smoldering now with their lurid tidings… Maenads nine, all perfidious. They (them the roughnecks) shilled for you even in their fucking them (the wives) instead…? Yes, sir, plenty of grounds for divorce, mister Bobby, sir.



Your wives, the exotics… The Texan, toxic bitch, a tocologist’s specimen… The New Englander, later with a croup like a frigate’s..? The Vermonter, homely as a Vermeer…?



Did they ever leave in a huff, the roughnecks, the niggers…? What, who gives a damn…? They were dismissed, having worn out, exhausted their welcome. Mostly. Marooned someplace along the way. Atolls, skerries… Along the path… Did they croak there? Definitely…? Doubtful. Plus, for them, yourself the step up the ladder — the what? — the ladder, the ladder. Nasty prickles to an fro from my crazy own stapling cephalalgiae, faugh...! Let instead the dead moon prevail… Let it publish unawares which horrendous, sidereal coughing does it take to bestow the fruits of fleeting existence on — one-two..., one-two... — on, on-on, on… But now: the fatigue, the fatigue…, one-two..., the fatigue — my adorable, petty petit-mals... Let them approach and be mauled, yes? Yes? — yes?-yes? — yes…? One-two, and ah, how clear and perfect her twentieth, no, her twenty-fourth shape finally appeared to my misty eyes…



“Bobby, listen! Do you not…?”



She was not ruined — I remember brightly thinking. A virginal young girl. Such a vestal for the temple of my ecstatic chastity…!



Her great and wide-flaunted troubles — just as much as those deep and high-flown wishes of mine — once fixed, what do they become…? Bah, totally vulgar little concerns of one more poor devil going pigheadedly about his moronic business…



The spleen sets, invariably, the ennui… Whom would he stick this time with his palsied finger (bang!) in the bloody eye…?



While they were trying to fix the ring in his ears, fey time flew — fie, fell.



They thought they could be satisfied remedying, mending stuff, over what they guessed… Subdue if only, at least, his quiet thorns — as we are gazing at his shaky frame through soggy zigzagging gauzes — all these new soft thorns of flesh, blobs erupting — rejoice somehow, for it also may mean rebirth…



Suddenly, they (the blobs) throve and accrued in a sheer exercise of bizarre might… Then, of course, we must all have been really spurred… I believe we were exhilarated by and with that dizzy, dizzying expectation... What a scene: a painting by Brueghel: a kermis, peasants that dance… Behind the loggia’s grim scrim… All those niggers flailing, kicking… Bye and bye, though, the glut of their crude exuberance, by itself, came to betray an exhaustion gone wild… Frame after frame, a fanatic squandering of the last resources…



“He is vomiting…” “…or a heart attack.” “A sly possession, a furtive rattling satanic unseizure, disownment, a wide-opened anxiety allowed to rot into a gangrene…” “…a gangrene-gangrene, a gangrene of the spirit, of the melting tegument that sustains his assumptive presence…”



Hammers of the heart, the bantering throbs, illusorily wreaking murder, with the rest of the universe — its heart also giving franticly up…? In the frenzied, blundering suicide of the totally in-wound, engrossedly ingrown solipsist…?



The purr that poisoned itself — too long under our cloak, and we are showing signs of shellshock. Better look elsewhere… The women at the mirror, harpies.



The sniveling idiot at the window arrogated the blasts, monopolized the howls, and, regardless, via the undulating electromagnetic potentialities of the air, his bigoted, much-strained sermon went unheard. This side of that powered turbulence, the drones were entirely in command of themselves, in the dry.



“There is no love like home-love, and, while supplies for it last, why, there is the active thrust of that willed engine which can move a person to survive herself in spite of the most shattering contrarieties…”



“Safe, Marietska, after the good end of all, across the more bedraggling penumbrae of emotional metamorphoses…”



Are they talking like a silly dying writer would make them talk…?



“As for your frantic roars of raving reversion, Maximine, your shameful inducement of involutionary conversion, your deviate’s dextrogyrate pronouncements… Why, that sacrificial, dilapidating abandonment of yourself — so akin to the defeated fascist’s abject puling in his wake — which now has left so mangled — mayhap forever — your addictive dignity of which so much was always made by all of us, before you became that gagging insect rapt in holy fervor to attain, obtain the total blank, black snow of forgetfulness... Why, I say, Maximine, it is only natural in one’s mourning… It shall pass in two bits of a lambkin’s tail.”



They console each other already. Soft and damp, rags of moist flesh intermingled. Women, so resourceful…, isn’t it? But how better to check successfully that sweat that reeks already with the anti-therapeutic stench of the defeatist’s backwash…?

Mister Perfect dying so imperfectly. Vomiting, they said…?



From where I remained, vilely and trying — in painful dispersion — to beguile their diehard hard-set foolhardihood toward a belated understanding of its cruciferous nefariousness...



The worthlessness of it all. Efforts for naught, ridiculous.



Stop the undignified shenanigans, bitches to the end.



I did not sense any kind, albeit weak — as were the broken-in shackles of the repressed yearnings at my neck to enlist, to enlist… — and breathe, breathe…!



No acknowledgement, albeit faint, no, to my entreaties; no answer then to my placating cyclic search, but then again…, who else was there likely to meet me half way, if, until they themselves gave the proper orders, nobody could budge each from her own nailed childhood of dim reasoning, her own awkwardly starched infancy of movement, without, alas, turning for the worse, without, yes, calling — with her arduous act — all into an all around mutiny of unstoppable serialization…?



“His cells giving up one after the other, and the next, and the next… Until nothing obtains… A clear emptiness, so clean, at last.”



The drawings so meaningful… Mironian, Watteaunian, a conflation of sorts, amazing the pants off the young experts… But then the phosphorous, napalm, white Pete, the fuel burning slowly but down to the very marrow…



Taking sides, fast. For the winners. At the very least with the gorged pits of genocide — then with that glass-replicated providential summoning — over the deadening din of the meaningless, ubiquitous graphs on the analogous charts gone by all symptoms repugnantly autonomous… Above all, my salutary, orchestral clear call…



“Bobby the writer, rich!”



His wives, his girls, niggers of another hue. And they all wanted safe passage home. “After all, Bobby, you know, do you not, we each were but a link of limited spontaneity.”



“Has he...?” “Bobby…?”



They were distorted ice lumps bumping in lye, almost fed up of groping in the dark, blindly inveighing shadows that fleshed up.



“Ough, I am shilly-shallying, for sooth… Where’s my head…? Instead of cognac, I’m giving him to swallow what…?” “Is that lye, a bizarre perfume…?” “Something outlandish no doubt. He’s been gathering odd shits all of his life.” Both half asked-down into trashy lamentation.



Instead of brashly urged to my — by now well deserved, but who’s counting — sundry accomplishments — two hundred plus novels… A marvel of enigmatic research, and skilful pasting up… Seeing which, the piled volumes, one certainly must — dear mother — surrender this his impatient conviction without further reticences…



Know (and know tough: for a fate of a fact) that tomorrow — when jarring rhapsodies of flayed genomes will monotonously come to tear asunder the membranous, teratologically homeotic bubbles of your fluctuating body, to wreak a good devil of a havoc among the murky eidola that blatantly used to make up — oh, trivial atrophy! — the very bulk of your true followers… You, you — you-you, you repeated to exhaustion… That tomorrow the last frame must be —a must — a triumph of decay.



No exasperated stamina — no apt coalescence of the thirteenth hour — will then suffice to slough off the synergistic general gelatinization…



Vomiting indeed.



Vile and cornered, awry, driven berserk, immediately overcome by the common gushing output of many woggy somebodys turned a dirtier inescapable mass — under the bland hammering chorus of the stereotyped: it coheres, it coheres... — no instigatrice (dilutedly basking in the vitiating purgative hymn) will be able but to exorcismally up this last sorrowful ante, and (next, next!) permit — sort of garishly soiled: the soaring smokescreen of rocket-foil stabbing blindly — the sealing, the welding, the excruciatingly painful searing upon each pale arrival till, converted into another kind of wrecked ape, your previous face that at a slow pace grimaced the anthem, is now a chafing scratch that, to seasonally greet the marchers tries to speak louder and louder…



From my mouth — from their mouths (the replicas’) — only maggots.



Their voices and mine, immortalized on burning paper…



But sure thing, they (the exotics left to finally melt into definitive grayness) shall be too ass-tightly flabbergasted then to recapture and still release, in all its mystagogically rich transpositions, at a pinch even the least one among the amazing articulator’s marvelously labored old harangues — of such a painstakingly synchronized eloquence, too, as to make them plenty worth to be told and retold — many a dead time, what the fuck, no question about that — except that they (the owners, a foreign body called your present wife and her attorneys) had had them burn — making place for the new. She selling the house… Nobody, none of the nigger girls, demanding one of them packets of lies, not even aware of their own, so faithfully recorded, but who ever gave a shit…?



Though forbiddingly tough up till now, the notables today were shaken, so quaveringly near the crux of the action — a wrong nod, and seen forever in the villainous side of heroism — wow again! — but not a single one of his productions worth a try at the presses…?



“Bobby? Bobby?”



Fine, I am searching. He hoists himself for a last barfing and a last mewling. Back to you now…



What…?



Bobby. Bobby the writer. Dead.





20.

18th... Soon there...

18.


Coralline, double-crossed, cried. Everyone awed, making such a great fuss about the tiny Thai’s elephantine pregnancy.

The trees out the window themselves also expectant. Tilting their necks to peer inside. And the dumbfounded beasts of the wild climbing the trees to the bloody tops to be able to greet the great barely disguised new messiah with the ample tasteless skirts and the enormous bulge ahead…

Avaunt, ye klutzy pachyderm, avaunt… Avast, how could she! The shamelessness! A-wasting her fucking waist, what a waste of expectancy… Nothing to wait for but apocalyptic death… The devil reborn, the devil to pay… A-born for its millionth time in the millionth shape — a gook’s, and a gook’s, and a gook’s — with no end in sight other than the end to end it all, an immovable surfeit of gooks from end to end — with no room for a single other gook — ah, then, the horror of the exploded gook-ery! — big bang of the gooks — a gook head every dismembered gook — a gooky head: a planet careening to the infinite infinity, entering another doomed womb, a tomb… A tomb tumbling without rhythm nor rhyme — damned devils, you’ve killed even the illusion that the spheres ever danced, and that there was some music sublime — with you around, messing stridently around, how could it…?

Pish, Coralline! Forget the damned spooks. Disentangle yourself from their heart-piercing talons…, with their wily, subtler Oriental arts, they prey on you, wickedly, ruthless, no compassion. Ignore the backstabbing bastards. You recall, when suffering the last bout before this one, when you forbad yourself the company of beggars, so bad for morale…? Portents of what’s coming too fast…? And how charity begins at home…? All that, and how true…? Altruism being another word for giving up…?

Reinforce your ego, remember the shrinks of yore. Push your mind out of those rats gnawing at the rat-nest inside your cranium. No. You’d do much better watching, through the tears, while mourning the future of disaster and tortuous extinction which is in perfidious store, willy-nilly, for all of us…, the throbbing tides of the moon, yeah, the matachini of the bats, so pretty, the devil’s laugh with his starry teeth shining on the night sky…, he is handsome in his hideousness, some sparsely sown cirri for mustaches, some sailing spy planes exploding his zits — galaxies of bloody pus, blackholes of his many assholes…

She was blowing her nose. Alone, desolated, in the dark, having turned the lights off, looking out the window from an upstairs bathroom window.

She, Coralline, who that same morning had gone expressly walking for miles through sinister, stairs-ridden streets just to find the especially browned narrow baguettes Maximine so craved. And now this… Way-worn rover most egregiously jilted… The slap of the Thai present and blossoming. And the slap of all the other ugly fatheads fawning over the swollen skink…, and the slap of her ex-friends laughing each joke with such shrillness and forcefulness, grating her nerves, making her puke.

Beguiling the balls off everyone’s faces and crotches, damned pollywog who’d swallowed a hippopotamus… The spectacular wonder, shitty cheap circus, worse, disgusting carnival act with a couple of gagging freaks — one swallows the other, the other swallows the one, they vomit themselves mutually reciprocally all at once… Insufferable.

A woman withal who knew what she wanted — she and hers, incrusted and growing, a tumor with many heads, metastasizing fast, jumping like gymnasts, huge locusts, a plague, occupying every house, strangling the rightful owners of the land, crowding out the fair… Installing the dark devilish malignant imps. All her family here, all of the half a million of them, packed into treacherous Maximine’s doomed abode, like into another damned mosque full of farting ass-elevating shit-lickers of the infectious ground…

Her dung-spangled skirts leaping with the kicks of the disease-ridden monster inside, apoplectic already, schizophrenic, epileptic, a devil to tie, yeah, it better be born spancelled already, or you’ll have your work cut out for you just to hunt it down and kill it afterwards… That provided that first you yourself don’t perish during the effort. And the beast escapes… Egad! America down the drains, swimming down the prosperous sewers, drowning in an inundation of foreign bigoted slave-minded dirty-colored filth…

A hiccup. A recounting, maybe…? She was of two minds. I’m being unfair…? How much of the rage spite…? A verse. How apropos… “Odi et amo… Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris… Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.” Hating and loving — ask me why — the fuck if I know — but it hurts me, excruciatingly, ferociously…

Presages of floods where all is shit and cadavers… The Egyptians had it already pat… Didn’t they… Waiting for the Duad. Saw it coming, and now’s here, much nearer of course, 5,ooo years in the offing, concocting, machinating — time to burst, the river, the Duad, a torrent of corpses and turds…

The feted lummox downstairs a bigger turd, the floater that broke the commode’s back — first shot for the all-around revolution — start overflowing, all the toilets of the world…

She pulled the chain. Washed her face. Came out of hiding.

Still… The soul-rending chuckles and guffaws downstairs. The humorless clowns. She unmissed, totally ignored. Could as well get back home…? Or rather, what, get drunk…?

He heard somebody climbing up… Sobbing…

—Suze…!

—Coralline…!

—What’s the matter…? Is it aching…?

—No. It’s not that…

An awkward moment… Each asking herself of the other: Who is she, really…? Pivoting between centers of reference, lost at the unsettling peripheries, their personas off-the-mark, gone awol… No watchmaker of the vastnesses to guide their steps up the Tao of it. No heads nor tails along the baffling itineraries spanning the globe… So easy at home, but here…? Each, before, a referee of the spheres, maybe celestially musical, their cool conductor — a woman of parts, always at the center of the compass — the pinprick — all revolving around her — with inexhaustible energy, with the vision of a lynx, the snappiness of a crocodile’s mouth, and so on… But now, in front of the other… The other, again, as hell incarnate…?

—Come, I’ll show you a place where one is let be, unperturbed… An old bathroom for a dead maid…

Coralline helped Suze to the same concealed spot where she’d just had her cleansing cry. She shut the door. Suze gratefully eased herself over the commode. She pissed, a long pregnant jet which splashed for a while. Such an easy ability for comfort so easily acquired. So well together… Cupid’s warm arrow at work. The two women sudden friends… It was night-time, time for confidences. The shallow beach not much in yonder made of fine mud, the mud of tiny particles, millions upon millions of beings without qualities, their shells, their quasi-human skeletons…

“Are you craving for any food in particular…? I could go and fetch it in a jiffy. Mussels, oysters…? I know a path to the kitchen, unblazed.”

“Don’t leave me alone.”

They embraced. Enveloped in intimacy. The nice smell of both of their excrements lingering…, always the beautiful smell of the love-one’s feces…

Coralline kissed Suze’s tears. Salted, delicious, beginning to dry. Suze kissed Coralline’s mouth. Ripe taste of quinces slightly cooked.

“What happened…?”

“That awful Chink!”

“Chuck…?”

“Chuck, yeah, whatever, the mean malicious cripple.”

“He’s not the proudest proof of civilization, that we can be sure of. And after his accident, his malignity and deviousness increased, by a thousand fold at least. Chin in chest, cackling… Flocculent, costive, bleating, flatulent, scratching his crotch, cheering at the worst moment, checking the feel of your underwear even in front of strangers, no fear of scandal…, he says, Crinoline…? Popeline…? Silk…? Aerogel…? Nanocarbon…? Elephant hide…? His lax morals emerging like lymphs and pusses with the suppurant wounds at his useless legs.”

“It’s true, he came crawling with his monstrous chair just to squeeze my cardigan… And then he asked, Had I been fucked by an elephant or what… And started ranting against the heavenly dignified pachyderms… The heresies!”

“I know, he’s so offensive! A fascist, always glibly bickering beyond the pale with would-be partners of his. Of course, with his injury he feels safe, unattackable, he deems.”

“What do they feed you, you dwarfish cow…? — he wanted to know, and I never had seen him till tonight. Such barefacedness! Do you chew the cod with meadow fescue…? Farty to hell, not a fact…? Fucking elephants, the stink! (He says.)”

“So vicious!”

“I took a stance… I said, Let’s not veer into the abominable, my boy, let’s no be so shabby… He said, What’s the matter, can’t take another’s theologumena…? I said, The hell’s that…? Is that Chinese…? He said, One’s opinions about the gods…? I said, What have the gods to do with it…? He said, You obviously one of those idolaters, a worshipper of Ganesha, that’s why you let yourself be poked by an elephant…, were you tight that night…? (He joked.)”

—So cheap, always so cheap!

—Damned Chinese, not a funny bone in them; so unfunny!

—Oh, Suze, I know where they hide a plint, you know, a table for massage…? It would sooth you so! The porters and chambermaids of this house use it, I know, I surprised them once in an orgy of sorts. All ugly people, of course…

—But the uglies have to have some fun too… I know what you mean. But don’t leave me alone, please, Coralline.

They were mixed in a single unity of emotion and affection for each other, and compatibility. All so elegant, though. No turbidity, no turpitude of the imbecilic trumpeter announcing to sundry and all his wares of misery. Both the women plumpish, fleshy, a slight surplus of fat under the skin, cushiony, a delight to bump into in a slight pumping rhythm…

As often those last days, penumbrae of pain from Suze’s tummy. A crimson parallelogram which Coralline primly clutched, massaged. “My sweet poteen, you my putty, me your Pygmalion…”, undefiled, clenching each other. Both their clamped together bodies shedding in-between their mucous seeds…

They dried up. Their recrementitious, superfluous secretions transferred to the spongy towels. And now they sat up over the thick slightly pissed carpet.

—Man, all that twisted gnarled yarn of nasty remarks against them… Why does he hate so much the stately noble animals…?

—The Chink…? He had his legs crushed by one of them, a she-elephant crazy for love. It was his predestination.

—We, the Bellvitges, our family animal is the elephant. Prominent on our family crest.

—Family crest…? Are you royalty…? Of course, I knew Thailand’s is a kingdom, but I didn’t suspect…

—We are nobility, yes.

—Wow! How fun it all must be!

—Well, there are some inconveniences, how do you call them, hassles, botherations… A few heads lopped off with every palace rebellion… Down along the paths of history, the slain, the slaughtered… Uncountable… The ship of state floundering… But then all is stabilized. Some general pawls the capstan… The ship is back in business… Gliding smoothly, swollen veils in the zephyr… The palace balls flourishing again… Pert brazen demoiselles in their viridian dresses and sparkling diamonds…

—How envious am I of all the glitter and brilliancy of it…!

—Then there are the fires… Cyclical, epochal… Like the cyclonic rains… What a silly excuse to intrude…! Here they come, the commoners, the fucking firemen, with their big-big hoses, and thick-thick dicks, sallow, infirm, never erect… And so noisome, and noisy. And useless, gaily proud, uniformed turd-sausages in the shitty tin-can trucks... The fire meanwhile catching in the notches of bygone eras, carved in every hidden place of the many vintage pieces of archaic furniture by princes and princesses enamored…

—How romantic, eh?

—You don’t know the half of it… Listen, the clammy slubberdegullions climbing to the chambers of us young things, we daintily trying to keep afloat with so much water thrown in… You would think the rude minions would turn tail with a craven apology… None of it. They tear past the curtains and the canopies… They shred out flimsy garments… They rape you outright, without attempting even a rapid-fire pantomime of courtship… They contaminate you with every sort of coarse distemper, vd’s galore, the crabs, the claptraps, the clap… And not a word of condolence, or of good-bye, the selfish brutes, now shriveled, shrunken, their braguettes full of flies, their flies, yes, oozing with the sweet spent liquors… And the fires collapsing the roofs…

—You must invite me to the palace some time…

—Next summer you are coming with us! Well, you know, your dear company, it shall be such a relief. Dick’s such a an unsophisticated drip!

—Isn’t he though! Such a wondrous nobody, and no clue as to what a woman needs…!

Adrift in their charmingly pungent ship upstairs, they seamlessly navigated the opposite fluxes crossing and re-crossing the stillness of the night… They had almost fallen asleep, when up to their slender lair the shouts of the harbingers of annoyance reached their recollected ears…

People were shouting all over corridors and stairs: “—Suze! Suze!”

“We’ll have to appear, regretfully…” Coralline came aground, the pawl touching bitter reality, their ship sadly stranded.

“…let me go first…” Suze the Thai, the dear honey who had driven Coralline to such heights of bliss, lazily said. Gasping and panting. Efforts of incorporation, with the big weight weighing her down.

Sacrificial almost, she gave herself up, emerged to the storm of the stupid guests, old Argonaut with all the thrills left behind. “You-whoo…! I’m here. Just resting a bit. Too tired, with the baby and all.”

Coralline waited, vaguely dreaming maybe of heroic firemen who drove their pawls home, catching the notches indeed, surpassing them by far, into the fathomless recesses of sensation… With Dick’s paltry dick no match at all… Not figuring even as an item to include in the figuring of who’s the best explorer… No badge for him whatsoever. A prick of a dick, Dick.

Then she also realized nobody had called after her, nobody, it seemed, missing her share of comparted humanity — it used not to be so before — how unimportant she’s becoming — the illness, her depression discarding her already from the world of the living… A mere individual in the flock now felled by the claws of the hawk — no matter, a new neighbor replacing her in the mind of those used to be conscious of her existence as of somebody else — Nina maybe flirting with Marietska — Bobby courting a young inexpert Thai, trying to hire her for a month of accelerated learning — Maximine busy catering, and betraying who else…? — everyone’s forgotten the old sputnik, as if she never had been there, flying with the rest, caroming about, in flight, involute, evolute, volute…, acrobatic as the best of them…

But it must be alright. Life like this. You are counted when you count. Absent, you’re miscounted, discounted, and everyone gone somewhere else, to something else…

And yet hope renascent, nifty, self-propelled… A flier with helicopter wings, whose verticality amazes even herself… Extricating herself from the mud. Uprooted, aloft… For now she has a nicely pliable accomplice inside the very venter of the beast. Promises in abundance. A new love a-booming too.


19.

Seventeenth...

17.



Back from the brink, Chuck awoke. I’m crashing, I’m crashing…, he thought, still aloft. We are being poured down. A sea rimmed with a jagged range. Hiatal, ourselves, a funnel spiraling to the abyss. Rhapsodies of clunky noise, and then on a plate of metal, offered, uncooked.

A whale from Damascus, a dolphin called Damocles. Abyssal fishes for the candle-lit dinner. “Double serving for thy friendly costumer the shark, please.” He’s willing, he’s rutting, he’s a crotch-happy-slick guy with hunger and transgression in his mind. How suitable. His teeth like phosphenes of a fireworks-ridden night. And in a tense wait… Who’ll devour the rest of my choice bits…? Who must, on musth with mustard, and in competitive thrust, like slavering hyenas, or else on a first arrived first served leisurely plan…? Who’ll recover (lovely expression, my pets) the carrion, who’ll wrap himself and run with it, who’ll adhere (good word too, soft soothing “willingness” is there somewhere folded in it as well) them odd morsels to the frothy lining of his womb…? Who’ll finally digest and integrate…? In whom shall definitely steep and to better vistas be witness my blanched bones, my unequivocal wrist, my still warm beliefs, my enhanced links, my virginal cockatrice…? Am I due now, transmogrified, metempsychotic of sorts, at the real shrine of the faithful, the just…? Buddha, with Buddha’s navel blinking at the fore, satisfyingly at court, presiding, smiling his devious smile… With a devious smile erasing the eyes, only the neighs being allowed to be left. Mellifluent, he parts the waters: “—The ay-sayers at my left, the nay-sayers at my right…” The horses saved, the elephant-crushed Chinese up for reloading: failed shot, fell short, try again, do better next time…

How symptomatic, he thought, eh. For a Chinese to dream dreams so Chinky flavored. Buddha-boudin, decreeing the shape of things coming. How quaint. Archetypal, maybe. From every somatic opening, my spiritual culture juicing away like mucus from a snail when broiled, edged finally that far off side of life… Yeah, jump in to the populously clogged sewer of the ages, vile gastropod… Crashing, ah, euphoria, where’s my hatchet that I my add to god’s act…? Crashing… How easy with a shell so friable, my friend.

He heard a mocking snort above his back. He was coiled, folded inside himself, boiling with terror, pretending he was mending the heel of one of his boots…?

He glowered at the image of himself in the mirror. Shrilly he insulted his double, a rude racial epithet. He got up, stood on his hands, with his arms for legs he strode up to the low terrarium where the critters were squirming. Looking at them, upside down, with the leaves of lettuce the canopy of their sky…, he remembered. Ah, yes. His second dream had been much more pleasant.

A quasi paradise. The spiders big and colorful as birds, only their pincers and stings ominous… You could pick them up by the scruff of their necks. The parrots on the other hand were small as butterflies; and then smaller: as ladybirds; and smaller still, and a lot flatter, like seeds, like samaras, though still colorful, still alive, still beaky, still talkative, in tiny, not disagreeable little voices… What were they saying…? “Pick yourself up by the scruff of your neck.”

Also, the women, so free, naked and shaved, their nipples perking out, their fallocryptic clitties so prone to putrescibility when in the polluted cage of lowly planet Earth, so jollily protruding here instead, and healthy looking and even garrulous, also parroty…? Clits claiming to be able to plead for their good taste at and in and of and with everything…? Giving tongue at being given tongue…? Come and have a taste. The thrill of it all.

But the men, aggressive as always, hating anyone’s success, coveting the neighbors’ sundry shriveled possessions, is that it, exactly like at home…? No, not in the least. You are totally wrong here. Men are all regular Joes, good-humored, and sensitive, and altruistic. They go to all kinds of lengths to make life most enjoyable for everyone concerned. At a pinch, they are only envious (healthily emulating, arch-praising admirers) of the others’ WebPages and the exuberant poems in there posted by each and everyone, for, yes, you bet, every guy’s a dedicated poet and artist indeed.

—But, hey, who works…?

—The drones do.

—The riches, the leisure, the electricity… Where does it all come…?

—Just as now, the drones at it all day, hidden, synergastic, all together now, producing the goodies non-stop. Nice problem-less beings without none of your foreshortened proclivities, like aiming to improve, or to catch up, or die in the intent… No, provided only with long-term purposes of accomplishment for the task at hand… Successfully neutered from all out-of-the-way ambitions… How convenient, don’t you think…?

—But let’s say, one of them had scuffed his toe at the foot of a heavy cutting machine… It bled…? Were they also neutered out of blood…? No bloodstained rags? No sickening unhygienic pouring of ugly infectious substances…? No cobwebbed slivers of bone protruding form the truculent breaks…? No whirling and squawking in pain…?

—Not at all, not at all.

—What about food…?

—Arrows.

—Arrows…?

—For duck hunting, rabbit hunting, mushroom hunting, snail hunting, and such. Ah, and the women are so fetching. And their spit is curative. And we commoners are allowed to stall and lollygag for as long as it so pleases us… No pining, no repining, all little bosquets of pines… With birdies in them, parrots, butterflies, spiders… Eden again, but improved a great deal. No misgivings, no lightning storms, only good sandwiches and cold frothy stout…

The phone rang.

Chuck lithely walked on his hands up to the kitchen table where the phone rested, feverish, shivering. Maximine wanted to know was he endorsing or not his attendance at tonight’s feast. She assured him that the night when her Jag broke down and she had to spend it in his bed, he had sworn to his obese gods to keep doing right and now she was suspecting him of meaning wrong, and thus she was recriminating upon him that he had not only not RSVPed but not even bothered to maybe unvirgin the nicely wrought envelope? Wouldn’t he otherwise have phoned her, risibly commenting on the ludicrous new chapter of Bobby’s published work?

He said: “Count me on, dear, and sorry. Too busy traveling exotic. I’ll tell you all about it. As to what concerns the party forthcoming, I can only guess and hope that it’ll be a doozy and a whammy and whopper, though surely withal not up to my dreams.”

Maximine assured him: “It shall without a doubt be much better, you silly boy. Considerably, even sidereally, past your wildest. Poor Coralline will be there. Wait for the shock of her life. It’s got to be fantastic. She thinks the Thai’s in prison. In fact she’s with child. Huge…! She looks like a skeeter knocked up by an elephant.”

“Oi-weh, bitchy-witchy. Though it’s true it promises to be grand. I’ll be there. I’m just selecting my wheelchair de luxe…”


18.

16th chapter...

16.



Maximine came with the uplifting news. “Do you know that Suze the Thai tried to stab her aesthetician…! Actually, she did more than trying, it seems. She’s been arrested and all. Dick says he regrets but they won’t be able to attend our silver anniversary party. Well, good-riddance…! She pretended to be extensively invited. She intended to bring her extended family in. Imagine. All those little monkey-like young people behaving like pigs, blundering their way away, pigging up the food — and destined to die so young…”

“But why…?” Asked Nina, very interested.

“Well, it seems the aesthetician found she was too slim…”

“Too slim!” Incredulous, Coralline.

“No, I mean, why are they doomed to die young, the youngsters in Dick’s wife’s family…? Is it a genetic bane…?” Nina, pounced, seemingly very worried now. “I so hate seeing young people die. Don’t mind so much the old croaking, of course. Law of life, lay of the land. But I’m pretty young now myself… And… And all those poor young simians…? Soldiers sent to war… To fight the radioactivity, to shower the white phosphorous about… Like varmint-killing vaporizers, flitting the human flies…?” She encouraged.

Maximine had to think that one out. At length she answered: “Well, yeah, it seems that they are mighty jinxed, hexed; their mojo blet, bletted, unsound; grim grainy symptoms indeed, all of them wall-eyed. Suze the only fit to be seen of the lot. Barely. Very barely. A stick of a girl with limp tiny tits and a lip curled, such a nasty mien, with superfluous ears and engorged cheeks. And a perfume that lingers as lingers a lingering fart.”

“Must be one of these Oriental shits with cinnamon and cardamom and mummified carrion… Like this soy bean sauce done with rotten fishes, you know?” Vindictive Coralline pointed out.

“A sister of her, I’m told, escaped with her life by a hair. They were visiting a military compound in Alabama, she wandered out into the secret territory, the keep-off, we-shoot-to-kill area, the broad barely capable to read — of course, wall-eyed and all, you tell me how — and the loudspeakers shouting her name, and saying: ‘Fuck off, Lilygold (the hell if I know her real name), you are so fucking dead, Lilygold…!’ She almost died of fright. And then came the dogs, and mauled her pretty much… Then a cousin of her, the daughter of her aunt, had a friend at her side at the theater that suddenly died, in the dark, in the middle of a movie… They had gone to watch a horror flick, both of them girls were around twelve or so, and from the upper rows a waiter gone mad threw down a caldron of boiling oil — are you being served…? — a fried friend for you…”

“Wow, how terrible. They are really doomed.” Nina agreed.

“But wait,” Maximine poured on, “when they were in Arizona, you know they toured the States before Suze meeting Dick, a party went to explore the virgin bush… They encountered an eerie scary shack — a depot of some sort — there in the middle of the brush… Two foolish boys, nephews of her, Suze, dared go inside. Those Thais are real idiots. What are you seeing…? — those left outside would ask, shouting. The two boys said: There is a rear or end wall that’s all pockmarked with bullets — they shoot people in here, execution style — military, gangster, all the same — they line them up — they machinegun them by the twenties… And then they heard machinegun reports, the Thais outside… And the two boys were never seen again. Neither in the shack, when the coroners arrived and checked every inch of the terrain which they said had not been used since the military had secret prisoners there, nor outside, along the rough desert… Only cactuses, and vague skeletons and scorpions and rattlesnakes left… The two boys eaten who knows by what…”

“I’d worry if I were to marry into such a weird family…”

“You don’t know the half of it, Coralline. They have in their garden an idol knoll — a monticule full of niches from whence the malignant idols, comfily ensconced therein, with their big paunches and gaping navels, leer and peer out from the shadows… Gloomy garden of disgraces and sorrowful mysteries…”

“Booo…hhh…” Nina’s voice trembled, adding in jest some atmospheric creepiness.

“The family was outside, the occasion was the celebration of one of their barbarous holydays. Refreshments were being served. A guy was sketching, another photographing, some of the children were playing tiddledywinks at the foot of the baleful knoll… One of the boys, the littlest, the one who was keeping score, was aggressed by a bully, who accused him of cheating. The little accounting fellow complained: ‘But it tallies…!,’ and his head struck one of these lucky stones they put for luck as an offering at the foot of the knoll of the idols. He tallied the stone indeed, notched it deep, with four rents of red. He died on the spot. Everyone went livid — a trick they manage I don’t know how, for the wogs are darkish indeed. The big kahuna among them, the head of the family went leisurely inside, solemnly donned daunting trimmings and trappings, came out looking like a tops samurai or an emperor of the wall-eyed East… He said, more or less, in their lingo: ‘As I’m the guy that cuts the mustard in this bloody family, I say that the little boy wasn’t pushed by any of us — and less of all by the oldest son of my oldest one, you bet — but that the boys were scarfing away there nutritious food and little Jimmy here choked on a bone or something — the case: that, trying to dislodge it, at length he went wacky, and amok, lost it, lost his foot too, and badadang! He banged his melon on the offered lucky stone. Split pomegranate indeed. End of story!’ Everybody agreed, except that this night, once the cops and coroners were gone, all the family with terrible pangs in their stomachs… Ptomaine poisoning, it was. Thirty-two of them died. Only the bullies survived. Vigor counting for something, of course. And the grandmothers, too fed up with the cloying shit they serve each year during the festivities. And abstaining. They too made it.”

“Good for the grannies… They’ve seen it all…”

“How must Dick be regretting that ill-advised marriage…!” Coralline interjected.

“I should think so…! With his last drop of leukemic blood… Poor guy, how he must yearn for his life with you…!” Maximine barefacedly lied.

“And, moreover, to add injury to the gobbledygook insult, now with Suze in prison…!” Stoked Nina.

“Well, she’s liable to get out soon, alas. Just being arraigned for the trial… The beautician, it seems, not dead yet. She had a hairpin pushed into her left temple, her brain attained till about ‘midships… Going crazier by the minute… Who knows if she’ll be able to testify… And if she testifies, what drivel will she spout…”

“Balmy, is she…?”

“Both of them now, the devil Thai to this unnatural nature born, the beautician by the pin thus chilled, higgledy-piggledy distressed… ‘—Where the fuck am I? Who the dickens am I…?’ Her head in a spin, roofs strolling overhead, weathercocks crowing at the wrong cues, plus hearing unsolvable oracles in her skull, and excruciatingly boring pundits underneath the wisps of her perm… They kill each other with such ease, don’t they, those barbaric pagans of the devious East…? Always holding tight to the sanguinary tenets of their shibboleths, while the sparkling scaffoldings where they must hang shine enticingly before their insane eyes (that disappear with a smile, thence their terrifying eeriness.) Suze the ugliest of them all. Ugly duckling hanging by the neck until it snaps, and breaks as the blobs of a rosary recounting the steps down to hell…”

“Is she much contorted while in this awkward proceedings…?” Nina prodded.

“You bet,” Maximine complied. “Her temper flaring, her taint turned a frightening cobalt, and the other day she blew her top, really, some churchman was extolling the pious and she trying to strangulate herself with her scarf, she fainted before dying, such a nuisance of a girl all told…”

“Whom are we talking, the hairdresser or the nasty new wife…” Coralline, somewhat lost.

“Why, both! She was also a Thai, a member of the family, the aesthetician, you know. They are so secretive and disgusting, and buddy-buddy, are they not…?”

“Christ, they fucking are!” Asserted Nina, most firmly.

“Avaricious, and stingy, and astringent.”

“You’ve got them pat, Maximine, you do!” Nina’s enthusiasm was catching. Coralline felt bloody better already.

“And she’s such a cheap vamp, Suze, foolish overpainted monkey; shameless, showing her scrawny dinguses to the laborers even. Sometimes Dick has to beat the hell out of her. ’Will you behave…?’ He says. And she nagging: ’My family will do you in, if only as far as you dare touch a hair of mine…!’ Crazy bitch. I went visiting the other day. All these tales I know from his mouth. I said, ‘Dick, what’s with your knuckles, they are all smeared with raspberry jam.’ He says, ‘Phooey, must be blood from the bitch.’ He had a glint in his eyes…”

“Is he going crazy too…?” Full of hope, Coralline asked.

“Like a loon. I said, ‘With all your mazuma, richer than Montezuma, and now complicit to a band of lousy wogs who conk out easier than flies under flit…’ He answered: ‘No matter, for the breed like cockroaches… The more of them die off the more appear. And I so want a heir to my house!’”

Nina approved: “A wacky-wacky line of reasoning, indeed. The guy is going under alright. Like a sitting duck. And his head shot off.”

“I told him, ‘Take off your blinders. You are being played for a flaking decoy. She’s not going to give you an heir. She’s going to be the death of you, they’ll shoot out of the water, they’ll inherit the lot; the lot of them rich as Croesus, bringing America down. America doomed, by hoodooed association. Don’t you see everyone belonging to this devil-sheltering clan gets burned a mark of desolation on the folds of his soul…? And your bastard going down too…, mark of the devil. Misshapen to begin with, the product of a sewer seep, of miscegenation with the beast, slurping liquefied rubber, not milk, flawed down to his magnetic core, yearning for hell, home.’ And he said, ‘Get thee to a loony bin yourself, Maxicrabby. Fuck yourself. Her tribe lifts the spirits — when the flock lifts up as a man of many capes, as a flying tree of many winged leaves, the elegance, the sweep, the swoop…’ He’s crazy indeed.”

“But for her, it seems…” Dejected, Coralline.

Nina reproached Maximine with fiery eyes. Said: “But wait, Coralline. The story’s not finished. First, Dick beats the bejeezuses out of her. Second, he agrees that he’s dying of a sickness unto the soul. Third, he only said that last phrase in apparent praise of his torturers to show how far gone he is in his head… That’s how I see it, Maximine…?”

“And indeed you see it in the most orthodox way, my pet. Yes, he is going pazzo, and she is a devilish brute, and everything is shits between them… I need a slug of something…”

Nina brought huge servings of cognac.

“He passed out after he’d faintly praised her. It was punishment from on high, or from his own conscience, enemy of himself. The thread between body and spirit blazing with the gleam of hell about to burst forth… What a distaste in my mouth only of being in his presence, and the fart perfume of the murderous bitch lingering in the background, I felt like vomiting, ruined house of rotten ghosts, I loathed the whole package, the while I had been there I had reneged on all my most precious values; what a terrible influence. I had to get out of there. The decaying house was haunted by the Thai bad luck. Nags appeared from behind every curtain. They all say: ‘Bush!’ to frighten me. I was wrangling with my own legs; abreast of me, they wanted to flee the farther, the sooner, the faster, the straighter the better. All that toil and zeal from all this awful women, her aunts, her mothers, her cousins, her ancestors, and the pestiferous boys, and wrongly attired old men, their trousers upside down, so witchy and stupid are they, I couldn’t get the hell faster enough out of that house of doom…”

The rant went on for an hour. With a smile, Coralline had fallen asleep on the couch.

Nina accompanied Maximine outside. Thanked her heartily. Their friend was so near collapse. Earlier that day, Nina had phoned Maximine. “Coralline is approaching a break down, she’s cracking up… We’ve got to do something to fetch her up to level sanity…”

It had all been an act of vast charity, all this wild slandering of Suze and hers… Now Maximine, all warm inside, was saying good-bye from the window of her beautiful new Lamborghini. She was feeling most surely blessed. Such a nice woman as herself, and deservedly, you bet.

14th and 15th chapters

14.





With Bobby sedulously taping her words away with his tiny tape recorder, Marietska, comfily ensconced in an armchair, was recounting some canard of hers…



—My uncle Jaroslaw pledged never to relent as a church’s sycophant… One more, the umpteenth… He would get into a terrible lather, take out his fists, ludicrously bellicose, if any body for instance would take out its middle finger and point to the heavens with it, saying some heretical thing, sacrilegious and so on, as with this sing lies your salvations, in hoc signo salus… He drove it low, the first thing he’d do, serving a kick to the shins of the offender, if at reach at all… Oftener than not, my uncle Jaroslaw would fall on his ass…



—Of course, this is the uncle to whose house you went to live after your parents died in this arson-prone edifice, and now, an orphan, everybody in your uncle’s family raping you at their heart’s content, and Jaroslaw the first and most assiduous. And now insisting that you do the streets in order to bring in some dough…



—Exactly. Only that then one day he was angry against some swearing boys and he had an apoplectic fit. Since then he had a…, how you call it, a sickness of the psyche… He was unable to communicate even with relations… The body so frail, unmasterable… With electronic gadgets, he was always in dire conflict — they, the objects, always threatening to go haywire, to explode, to electrocute him, soon as he dared touch them… With the kitchen garden also, the dirt itself tilting, barren, unproductive, losing all the topsoil… With books, the missal, the gospels, contrary to his approach, refusing to yield, himself unable to read them, too tired and nauseous, incapable of opening the covers, needing a burglar’s iron to pry them, and then of course unable to turn a page… Ah, and to get up, so painful, the pain in the legs, insufferable… The plants around the house, even the vegetables coming from the grocer, they wither and die as soon as they smell him — the dirt itself rots and dries, dead cinders, if he as much as walks on it, much worse if he rummages in it… Incapable of playing at any game, everything confused, don’t know where anything, any pebble or piece or männchen or figure or spark or dice belongs in or at or with or against… Or…



—Shit, poor man!



—Now he swears in German. “Unsre blöde existenz,” and so on and so forth. Did you know that the “bloody” the English make use of so much is just the word “blöde,” meaning stupid, not bloody, of course, but the contrary, bloodless, discolored, flat, disgusting, without taste nor stamina…?



—Somebody must have told me that already. In some Germanic novel must I have it, I’m sure. Limit yourself to the Polack garbage. The German one I’ve already covered.



—Ok, just trying to be helpful.



—You’ve forgotten about poor depressed Jaroslaw, the bigoted rapist?



—He became the fall guy..



—The fall guy for whom, for the scams of the church…?



—No, he would fall continuously, and continually. Every step, bang. Down the stairs, topsy-turvy. Badading, badadang. Falling all over the house.



—How nice!



—Then the bishop, fed up with missing the dough my uncle would give the church, sent a posse of bullies, a choir of young priests bent on making him soft… I saw them getting up the stairs. They were blöde angry. “Fucking scamp, fucking bootleg, fucking squirrel,” they were cursing.



—Blackleg…?



—Whatever. Awful insults. And “I shit on his mother’s head,” and so on. One of them, he seem just the caporal of the punishing squad was looking at me, taking out his tongue, saying I want to lick you little snatchie up… The lieutenant very stern, in front. His head collided on a wooden beam, he cursed, he shat on the divinity, our house not the richest in the world, the lieutenant, enraged, took the rotten, insect-eaten beam and took it apart, bam! Pieces of ceiling falling on all of them. And little critters, millions of them… Falling like squirming rain on their heads… The young caporal going bonkers, thinking a very poisonous spider has taken hold in the hollow of his head, at the center of his pate, and gnawing away at his brains already… He runs down, taking some of the soldier-priest in his fall. Everybody falling helter-skelter, pell-mell, the horror, and me laughing, and uncle Jaroslaw, closed in the hermetically closed closet, shivering and sitting himself with fright. The apocalypse arrived. The lieutenant shouting: “A tornado, a tornado!” A tornado of what…? Nobody knows which kind of tornado he is talking about. He meant a tornado of swarms… For swarms of deadly little beasts are turning around his head… He has been fingered by the devil. His ideas have become in his brain crazy bugs who eat at his cranium… He fucks off from the house pledging never to return and pledging at the same time to resign from the devilish church…



—Excellent episode!



Bobby handed her five bucks. Marietska curtsied ever so faintly. Then she went on.



—The uncle in his little closet… With the conniption from the commotion, he went completely bonkers… He had to be committed into an asylum. The bishop asked for me to go to public assistance. Actually, when he saw me, he decided to hire me himself… He made me a maid of honor…



—Did he rape you too…?



—You bet.



—How odd. The happenstance of it. First example I hear about. I always thought most bishops went for boys…



—Polish bishops, that characterizes them above all others — they mostly go for girls…



—Well, I’ll be… You learn a new one every day!



—At Krstrnska’s airport…



—How do you spell it…?



—I don’t, we’ll have to research into an atlas.



—Okey-dokey. Proceed.



—At Krsnamrta’s airport, we the select, the church’s elect, had nonetheless to share our first class space… We were going to a bishops’ congress…? A council. A concilium.



—Quite.



—Me disguised, as always, as a choir boy, an altar boy, a tyro beacon, canon, deacon… The skirts and flounces fitting me, you bet. Soon, I was already claustrophobically hot. The scent of steel… You know airplanes. I was glued no longer to the bull’s-eye glass, outside of which the spectacle only got gaggingly worse… I was afraid, first time flying, making ca-ca in my knickers… And then incensed, but for real, longing to shoot holes all around, dreaming of sudden spray on decks and leeways… And, lo! — that high profile charred-neck-like representative made his entrance. I said, aiming my fury at the faggot: “Thank the double odium the idea of him provides,” much relieved, somehow, for then I knew exactly who was the Turk’s head of my unease.



—The Turk’s head of my unease. How classic sounding. Here’s five smackeroos more.



—“Some tribes of natives are nothing but a bunch of soulless criminal cretins, swarms of insect-people much underneath the nobility of higher animals!” The faggot said. Next he checked himself, pivoted his chameleon eyes so that he might unexpectedly control every possible side concurrently, and, no doubt convinced that with his carelessness he had not flustered up after all any pigeon better left unruffled, now much sobered up, he evenly continued: "—Oh, I know, I should maybe display a greater understanding, considering my enviable position as a privileged spokesman for the greatest of beings, allay my rabid coyote of a righteous rage perhaps with an ounce of a toad’s alleviating spit, but, no matter, charity is stretchable only to a certain limit… After that crucial point it’s gotta break, of sheer necessity; that’s fortunately dogmatic, otherwise we might as well be somberly knelling any other night, what, in honor of whose suicide…? God’s only wife, verily, no less, worth more than a whistle, if you ask me, knock on wood.”



—Was that the bishop…?



—No, he was a Lithuanian. One of those orthodox creeps, a blackmail bishop, a pope…



—A pope? A dervish…?



—One of those, yes. He weren’t Polish, so he was rather interested in boys. And he thought I were one… So I answered, coquettish: “Talking of which, your marvelousness, if I’d be so bold — would you allow me a dearest confession…?” In order to further deviate his attention from my flounderings in such a dangerous position as the present then, where somehow I felt I had put my four hoofs in, oops, I jumped above the sticking mud instead, and trillingly flew… He took a shot at me with his tongue and got me. Thank his heavens, how glad I was when I saw he had bitten, gobbled really, hooked.



—For deep down you wanted to surprise him, him the shock of his life. Looking for boy treasure and finding the snake’s pit of your womanish sex…



—Something like that.



—Where was your holy protector, the Polack bishop.



—I learned afterwards he was sick in the plane’s loo, vomiting his guts, plane-sick with the movement.



—And now the Lithuanian dervish said…



—“Follow your blessed soul’s nose, sonny,” he cooed, “only scorpions ignore the lifting of the conscience’s strict curfews — they behave like cannibals not only in company, of course, but when in their veritable solitude too, gone loopy-loop-loop in solitary, nobody to clear for them what are regrets and what remorses… Muddled heads, stinging their own shadow, devouring it whole, leaving none for the savior, a mess!”



—I said: “Well, your tempered explications sure took their toll on the two factions of my warring inclinations, male-female, right-left, unique-dichotomous, straight-schizo, you know, many and none, one and the other, reality, mirage, solipsism, objectivity, self, the universe, the inter and the outer egg, truth and shameless propaganda... What I mean, your graciousness, I feel so pure only by the sheer proximity of your odorous sanctity, yep-yep, my father. You’ve managed to kill in my inner battlefield so many of those darting bluebottle flies keen on laying their eggs on the rottenness of the flesh of the ideas that just conceived have died already…, that, in verity, I’m resuscitating almost.”



—He must have been impressed.



—Seduced. I said: “Clear-headed and valiant, then, I will, yes, I will deposit in your motherly lap the egg complete of my most cherished doubt for you to crack and expose to the air vivifying — born at last like a little personal messiah…?”



—Messiah…? He weren’t a Lithuanian kike on top of it!



—Well, listen, he had a big nose for starters, ok? I might have savior, who knows? Messiah seems now more appropriately suitable, or moot.



—Hmmm!



—“Talk, talk, my neglected, negligee-ed fetus!” With a genuine knot in his throat, the pope parlayed. Unless, of course, he was playing the game, or the fool’s role, for later attacking at all fronts.



—Negligee-ed because you had on pajamas provided by the company for the first class costumers…?



—Why not?



—And fetus, because you were so curled…?



—Right on the nail again.



—And you answered…?



—I said, coyly: “Well, you see, the mystical case is — I always wanted, even since I was two and half or so, always desired more than toys or rubbish like that, you know what, to get famous, extremely famous. At any price, in whatever legitimate category, get famous. Mother and dad incessantly fighting: “There is god, you whore! No, there’s none of it either, you priest-buggering buckethead!” The both of them all day like this. You’ll excuse me the harsh sincerity, no? For the sake of the document and its future epistemological value, we owe it to ourselves too, when our sanity’s last stand needs all the ammunition possible, no buzzing bumblebees of false prejudices distracting…, am I right? And least of all in a loaded confession.” “I’m all with you, my pet. How must you have suffered. Fear of dying, is that it…?” “In a way. Yes. The point was to get famous, of course. Get invited by the pope, I mean, the archimandrite, of course.” "Ah, the archimandrite, ever so lavish. Splendid choice, my boy!” “In his awing presence, representative, most true and only true one, with all the papers cleared from on high, of god his father, father… When I’ve kissed his ring, I get readily up, try to hit him edgewise with a question I’ve got prepared in my chest since I’ve been aware I’ve got a conscience to take care of too… So, without warning, there’s my fling, I batter away, I smatter: “Archie, say, do you really believe in god…?” “The gall, my little dear, you must have really ached. The agony, I imagine.”



—De Gaulle? De gueule degueulasse…? Is that the big-nosed didonk general…?



—What…?



—You said, let me rewind… Here, when the archimandrite…



—He is not the archimandrite, the archimandrite’s his boss.



—Well, he says: De Gaulle, my child, how harrowing, and so on…



—He means: the balls you have of asking the fucking pope of the popes such a stupid question, does he believe in god.



—Yeah, heavy-loaded. He must have been abashed.



—His regard was fixed at my crotch, trying to see the impossible — my little pee-pee boning up…? A quandary or a mystery to solve deeper than the existence of the gods… A girl sporting a bona fide boner.



—What happened next? How thrilling!



—I said, demurely: “Alas, at my age, eight and half, there’s practically no chance already I’ll ever reach the secret goal of my life; too late indeed — bar the odd miracle, of course. No, I don’t despair, but I sure oughtn’t let pass this opportunity. I guess you are the next best thing to the archimandrite, saving the distances, I know… Providential, really. Here, unbelievable luck, I’m telling myself, from the moment you deigned sit at my humble side… I being nobody, god only knows when another possibility like this will present itself again… A learned pope! Zero prospects, I’d bet, really. Small wonder if... So, anyway, I ask the same of you, please, your vicariousness… — should I amend myself…? — your surrogateness…? Your saintliness…?” “Whatever,” he said, red in the face, his hands nearer and nearer to the blank point between my thighs, “but I will answer you with outright truthfulness and clarity, and I will dispel all of these silly girlish qualms unworthy of such a sturdy little boy as you, I’ll respond and truthfully, like I’m your goody-goody witch, done…? Are you ready…?” I heard… The long tirade… Futile timber falling alone bothers not sounding the tiniest of alarms — I know, he knows, wrong clue… Everything is god-willed, -sent, -juggled… The movie director almighty, greatest authority, unflinchable, unavoidable, unjiltable, impossible to discuss the scene with… — hell, paradise, purgatory, limbo, a deadly VD, a plane crash… — the all-obeying fatalists get the best parts, the favorites they are, Pascal, saint Ignatius… It is his movie (god’s,) forget it not; moves the tables (timetables, tabulae rasae, geological, astronomical, medium’s, media’s, mathematical, ask me if I know,) moves them at will, every time his own belch tells him — divine whims — we, nothing but his listeners, his watchers, his claque… Don’t you feel him fumbling even in the intimacy of your body — it’s called soul, conscience — robots, preprogrammed… Plus even the more worthless natives adore, even the animals higher, the plants aspiring, nature, the universe, you can’t explain something from nothing, the contrary neither, I know you are afraid of dying, yes…? Meanwhile, in the best of the typical style scholastic, he indoctrinates the pupil, feeds him the usual pap, boring for him and for you, but — ah, delicacies! — he caresses meanwhile the obedient pupil’s inner thighs, softly milks his cock, appraises, delicate tennis man, the pupil’s couple of irregular balls… All so predictable, though, alas, a tree of knowledge stunted since the stoned age. No surprise shoot, oops, unexpectedly branching off with an amusing pirouette, no climbing mooning starbound pretty callipygian Sally of a boutade of the healthy sort would’ve created havoc in the nicely molested boy’s spirit, long ago, in his tender mint condition stick-it-to-him face pincushion of a credulous age. No. Well, no heathenish overtones, no atheistic fun poked at the resistible incumbent… “God, my son…? A chest of jokes, a barrel of laughs; philosophically speaking, the delirious flare of a tumbling dog too fond of the dust of its mongrel arrears of a genealogy; historically (but anybody knows that,) the crude excuse for all the crimes the huge ever incurred in, of all the tantrums the middlemen threw in (into the social bargain, and — let the understatements roll — to paltry national tyrannicide they counter with a state genocide; a man-god, a king is worth many an ant hill with millions of people small…, ricochet to nebulae the cruel reprisals…,) last and least, the overly repulsive revenges the microscopic underdogs were ever able to muster up during the lulls, after the poking and the probing of their little bug communities, after the extremely annoying in-roads and the sticks of dynamite…? As for the hopeful behind, his Manichean twin, his name, what, Ahriman Satan, whoever, the nasty-fellah principle, bad cop of the other’s good one, I only wish I could tell you that is him I serve in reality. Point of fact, though, my son, that’d be but the complement of the same lie. Whom do I recognize as master, then…? Necessity, ambition, a career… You see, go at it, fuck, arrive somewhere, a ledge fine enough up the climb to old age, and now sleep in tranquility, leave my life dormant, on its own, rolling along, latent and purring… A dream… The alternative is nix... I’m a kid again, the chosen almost among the protégé’s of my Jesuitical philosophy teacher. His finger teasingly circumvolutes around my sphincter… While I repeat the lesson with a dutiful mien, somewhat bashful, blushing sweetly as a tulip about to bloom, I am panting for the real adherence, the proof of his appreciation true. Finally — ah, what pleasure, what a reward! — he reams his rascally finger up my rectum. Down over there, on the common folks’ stalls, that side of the ex-cathedra platform, the rest of the boys of my class envy my luck… See my flawless expression of bliss… Know I’ve earned myself for sure an optimal note again… Most of them, the lumpen bag, what, grab in spite, under their particular desks, their mean penises… Wish they got them longer, fonder of games, much more responsive, malleable, fun to play with…, two rosary nuggets for balls, the thrilling soft skin of a fawn’s beautiful ass, and so forth on that exciting bouquet of a line…, but their kits, what, by comparison they are each a blunt unhandleable fraud of an invalid’s morbid excrescence…, nothing to boast about…, so, while I’m being publicly selected on account of my superior gifts, and, better yet, privately pampered and loved, future-propelled, I feel sorry for them, secretly administering that torture, that uncouth castigation to the future insurers of their matrimonial peace… I mean their testicles, only asset we are provided the rest of a body to protect… For what’s life but the passing of the genes…? Same ass for a dog than for a chicken than for a monkey than for a lizard than for a human. An asshole near a cunt or a prick, as the case might be, but all the wherewithal only there in order to keep very temporarily, fleetingly safe the eggs… The eggs only, the eggs… The top egg, the archimandrite, no more than an egg-carrier than the littlest, meanest egg-carrier among the worse sinners… Egg-carriers all… And the rest of the song, added garbage… Oh, but I know what you are thinking across this balderdash; skipping the lines, are you, the in-betweens even, eh…? Naughty boys. You are telling yourself: Get up, relay the cops, rely on swift justice, ride the cobbled roads to the ambassador, interrupt the pilot, the pastor rouse, the mayor interpellate, tell on him fast, and so on… Shun the wedding spiel now, don’t be a fool, leave it for later… A few perturbed children, their minds defiled by a criminally idiotic ideology, so, what’s new…, they spun out their phalli, nervous, wretched wrecks, until they got ’em looking like those of pigs’, twisting to the winds… They’re all ignorant farmers now, the villains of the stories…, become ‘the other’ each one of them, the fall guy indeed, a fallen prawn, pawn, in the mass uncounted…, villains in vile tales…, and all the rest of the boring lie-riddled stories in the romantic world of history, novel and romance… What a bore! But here you’ve got already the denounceable attempter on your life, why go on… Contact the guy, he is the culprit. The fellow is the link of the ‘Secret of Life’ on this country, Lithuania, Poland, Italy, maybe, secret society, cabal of shit-licking priests to Mammon, me, him, one of the ‘Secret-of-Lifers’ principal chiefs himself on his repellent episcopal flesh, thus disguised… My boy, life’s so sad… I must do penance, let me cry above your lap…”



—Good copy, by gingo! All this of the plight of priests… Let me amend, of priests and writers… We’ve all been messed at, with, as infants… I liked my messing masseurs too, fond memories of being wanted… But, what then…? Did he then discover your little twat…?



—What…? Listen, wasn’t that a mouthful, though…? I’m done for now. I’m going to get some tea, want some…?



—One more thing, Marietska, my pet.



—Later.



—Please… It will be worth twenty bucks… But no nonsense, no rigmarole, no strings of words with neither reason nor rhyme, and then I’m left holding the candle of shame…, so abstain, ok?



—I’m thirsty…!



—It’s about the invitation I’ve got to write. For the 25th anniversary…? Look, I’ve some experience… More than twenty years, a girl a month… I recognize most of your tricks by now. I don’t mean you. But most of those girls, all so profane, and repulsive… Some of them pretty scurrilous bitches… So, don’t imagine I don’t know you girls; you girls are very canny…



—Come on, come on!



—So no fibs, no obscenities, no scatological whammies that time, ok? I’ll check it in a dictionary, I warn you.



—I’m dying…



—I just want you to write me, in a nice Polish way, the following: “25 years of happiness are 25 year of bliss in your wallet…” We’ll pass it as an old Polack peasant ditty or hoary hallowed adage… Agreed…?



—Pass the twenty. I’ll write it in the kitchen.







15.







Coralline had been crying over the old photos. As Nina entered the apartment, she immediately realized what had happened. The red eyes on her friend’ and boss’ gaunt pallid bulbous splotchy face…



On the table, landslide-like tumblings of mountains of old photos — those old photos in the old shoe boxes, the sole bequest Coralline got after Chuckeline’s passing…



A mock grin now on Coralline’s suddenly aged face. Plus a bogus yawn. Faking sleepiness… Stretching a bit, pretending extreme fatigue…



—Poor Coralline… Thinking about old times… The sleight-of-hand of the pitiless hours… Disappearing wholesale before even leaving a mark.



—A mark or two they leave… Ha! Look at my goggly eyes, at the arthritic claws that used to be hands…



—You are plugging yourself with a rap not even the bad egg of the bad-egg—good-egg routine of the two turdy cops would plug you with. You are in good company here. Let’s hear about it… What ails you so deeply… Is the passing of everything so fast, isn’t it? Old photos kill with lethal little pills of sorrow… Millions commit every second suicide in front of shitty piles of shitty old photos… You want me to burn them…? Little impish murderers in mufti… Well-disguised little nasty creeps…



—No, you are so funny…! But it is true, I’m in there, depicted, myself, in the some of the most recent ones, a few years back only… It is me, and yet how different…! How much of another, an unknown, a nobody that never existed…! I was thinking: Who were I then, who have I ever been…? Just a figment. Even now, while I speak, just a figment speaking…



—I’m fixing you a strong grog, eh?



—Look…, here, enhanced, is Dick’s sister, dead at thirteen.



—At thirteen, poor thing!



—She was murdered. They found her corpse, headless, on a bench on a public park.



—Headless! How did they know it was her then…? They could’ve dressed the young dead broad with the clothes of Dick’s sister and take the sister to Turkey, to be another crappy Caucasian whore there; very appreciated, you know.



—Well, the cops’ doctors must have had the tools to ascertain if…



—Wait! DNA, duh!



—Yeah, but was it already invented…? I don’t think. The murder happened fifty years ago or so. Of course, when I say invented, I mean, discovered, made apparent, made to be… For it was already existing, it was there hidden, a mystery to be unveiled, DNA, I mean…



—Have a swig of that.



—Good. Thanks. You know, many things are but don’t exist… Like god — a concept, a word, a belief, but nobody there — no existence, zilch… It is, but just a fiction — like a teeming emptiness, a black whiteness, an elephant-sized flea…, any oxymoron you care to name. By naming it, it is, but still this doesn’t make it exist, in fact it can’t, for it is an impossibility.



—Isn’t it good? You want a little bit more?



—On the other hand, can you ever exist without being…? Yes, for being is only the awareness of presence — for instance, DNA — there it was, existing by itself, but without being recognized, without the status of being at all, because its presence wasn’t acknowledged by anything, a word, a concept, a hunch, an intimation, a belief… Nothing. So it existed, but as if didn’t, nobody the wiser as to its existence, in reality then not being… If you are not there, you go uncounted. Remember the party for Chuckeline’s good-bye…?



—Poor Chuckeline, and the girl, so young also, poor thing! But enough of depressive thoughts, that’s what brought you down to begin with…



— We were all there, anybody could count us… Thirteen, fourteen bitches all told. Now, there’s only two — you and I. Same room, same locality, but the existences severely curtailed… And, as you say, if we should invite the same party-goers, there at least would be two of them missing altogether. And the rest altered, maybe in subtle ways, maybe in awfully crippling ways, but all altered all the same by the passing of the space between the then and the now… The two missing still would be, for they are in our memories, but they would not exist, for they are dead, I mean, my mother-in-law, and that poor mousy girl, Naveline, her stupid father killed them both…



—He could have died falling down the stairs, the enormous sack-of-shit, our friends would still be alive.



—…they would be missing, but by being missed, they’d be, even when non-existent any longer.



—Yeah, very deep.



—Wow, and how many “things” then there must be that exist without being, without anyone of us, or anybody else, being conscious of them…! Well, let’s count, let’s count nonentities…! There are all the mysteries, all the undiscovered recipes for definition… Who knows what there is in store for the “forscherungists,” the progressive investigators…? What if there are other beings with better definitions of the quandaries and formulae of being…? They are there, perhaps, but they don’t exist, for us, because we’ve never seen them. A contrario, we’ve seen, in films and in cartoons, plenty of odd-looking others inhabiting the planets of far-flung stars. They are, for we’ve seen them in picture, we can picture them, they are; if you want, they even exist in our fancies, but there’s a safe bet that they don’t really exist anywhere else; they are godlike in this aspect — existing or rather being but only in the barren wildernesses of our minds… There is maybe an infinitude of items existing, but not being, for us, in regard to what we can catalogue as extant — they are not there, because as yet unconceived — and, because we don’t have an inkling of them, they are unnominated, unnamed, unfathomed — they exist, if they do, in their unrecognized aloneness only, but they are not on the ledgers of what’s know, what is. Not in anybody’s mind… Like what, for instance…? Well, here’s the rub. As soon as you name them, they start existing, even if non-existing, they become — and, if they become, they are…



—Wow indeed. Nasty philosophers, the garbage they come up with; damn them, all this useless pedantry…! No wonder sometimes you can’t sleep at nights… If instead of all that heavy stirring and peppering of the already hot enough and boiling and overcrowding broth in the brain, you’d be reading about Nero Wolfe or Donald Lam…! Perfect anodynes… The prose so luminous, the action so tame… You finish the page, shut your eyes with a smile, such worthless shenanigans the smoothies in the page go through… Wallow in the anticipation of what they will come up with next page or chapter… Some silly twist or other, leisurely told, to slow exhaustion… Yeah… Tomorrow a little spoon more of them as a nice sleep-inducing dose…



—Donald, Nero, a dog’s name, a duck’s… Names for the children I never had… And now’s too late…



—Com on, no regrets now; that’s the hormones, some deprivation of the blood; with it, every word associates itself with sadness…



—Consolation, yeah, that I need so much of… Thanks for you friendship, Nina. You are a true friend. Always there in my hours of need. I only hope I can be so nice to you if ever the situation arises where…



—The hell is that…! Is that Norwegian…? No, it ain’t. I don’t understand a word of it…



—It’s Maximine’s. Their 25th anniversary celebration invitation, written by that awful disgusting slug, Bobby…



—It’s all in gibberish!



—Except by the end, where he says, “by the grace of god, be there.”



—Too weird! Let’s talk about that hapless driveling imbecile, Bobby. Otherwise I’m afraid tonight I’ll be haunted by that headless girl…



—He was always spying through holes… When caught in flagrant violation of the most basic norms of conduct, he’d sneer, and he constrained the discoverer of his heinous crime, even when armed with a rifle or a shotgun, threatening to explode his fucking spying head, he’d oblige them to see his wounds — horrendous holes where his stomach and bowels and balls and prick should have been — he’d swallowed a live hand grenade in Korea…



—I didn’t know Maximine’s husband had ever been anywhere…



—I’m talking about Dick’s sister’s murderer.



—Ah!



—His face was angelical, it seems. He’d spy just to rake his brains with undefined, unqualified remorses… Thronging, throbbing… With desires unrealizable… He’d go to the parks…, he had the ability to pluck any girl he fancied, even from the arms of her lover. The girl would grow immediately disgusted with the other fellow. She, as mesmerized, would follow the angel home.



—He could do that? A magician, an arch-druid, a warlock.



—His piss was deadly. He’d piss with a canula. A little reedy spout down there… You know how human piss — and also Dalmatians’ piss — not the piss of other dogs or cats, or what have you, which is harmful — but human piss is so good for plants, such healthy nourishment…



—So is shit, I’ve heard. The best salads growing on human shit.



—Yeah, well, that fellow, the sister’s beheader, before each murder, he’d make a point about pissing on the base of a stately oak or beech or sequoia or whatever in the park. The bigger the tree the better. Well, the big tree would be killed outright…



—Spooky, a devil of a devil if there was one. Imagine killing a millenarian tree with a single jet of piss! If could do this, he was an angel indeed!



—At length, this is how the stupid cops knew when the murderer would behead another divinely enticed, angelically allured girl. By seeing, from one day to another, another enormous tree dead overnight by the killer’s piss. They, the cops, killed a great many number of them tree bole pissers before they caught the bloke…



—Don’t piss behind trees. Too suspicious, my friend. Be frank and open-faced. Piss only in the middle of the meadow.



—At last they raided the phantom’s lair…



—It was under the opera house?



—What? No, nothing to do. It was a little rambler house not unlike the one Chuck owns… Eyewitnesses reported — all this I know because Chuckeline once told me — that when the cops came, destroying everything they encountered, he had already died… Died and buried himself with girls’ head, a million or two…



—That many!



—Over that macabre tomb, a marble flagstone, with this classical caption etched on top: “Sta, Viator — Heroem Calcas” — “Fuck off, walker, for you are standing on a hero” — still remembering, to the bitter end, his life in the military…



—The high point of his wretched magic-blessed life.



—There were romantic sentimental spectacular photos of fjords on the walls…



—Fjords, how creepy indeed!



—He had been ruthless, that bilge pump of a Peeping Tom with no guts nor glory of even a minuscule cock… He thought he had been toast that day in Korea when he had swallowed the live grenade as a stupid military dare… And yet he’d survived all those many decades…



—Many decades?



—Well, one and a half.



—The bitch, nonetheless.



—To ingratiate himself with his A-grade gods, to whom he had many little temples set up all about, on every corner, around the chambers of his house…



—Was he a Jap, a Chink, a Buddhist…?



—So I’m told, one of those, an idol worshipper, a pagan.



—A pagan, a barbarian, still!



—Once three burglars had entered his house, when he was abroad, killing, seducing with his killer smile... Once inside, they didn’t know what the fuck to rob… There were only temples and the offering, in front of the grotesque figurines, of heads and heads of little girls… The three burglars panicked. Raised a ruckus just trying to scamper, too terrified… The angel had a pack of vicious starved dogs… They couldn’t eat the heads, the heads had been dipped in a varnish which repelled the big beasts…



—The burglars were eaten…



—You bet, not a bone left. Just the prying iron bars, the bunch of old rusted keys, the jute sacks full of nothingness… There was a tattoo on his chest — the angel’s, learned witnesses reported, some of those fellows that caught him spying into their warm family lives and he then horribly exposed himself to them, revealing the true nature of the beautiful angel he, once again dressed in whites and shiny grays, was… It quoted Horace (I think): “Olim truncus eram ficulnus,” “I used to be the bole of a fig-tree…” And underneath another verse, though in a tiny type, “Now I’m just an itchy fig.”



—Hmm. How sexist, the male-chauvinist prig.



—Don’t you think…? Boy, my thought precisely when I learned about him!







16.